Slashdot Mirror
What Fruits Will Reduced R&D Bear For The U.S.?
lucabrasi999 writes "Here's an interesting
commentary from Mike Tarsala at CBS.Marketwatch.com regarding R&D spending by U.S. companies as it compares to overseas firms. It compares today's US tech firms to the Big Three Automakers of the 70's, while saying the overseas tech firms are similar to the Toyotas and Hondas of the 70's. In other words, US Tech firms are about to be taught a lesson in global capitalism. I think Mike is 100% correct. What do you think?"
And it's because the economy is in the crapper, not in spite of it.
If the economy was similar to what it was a few years ago, then sure, R&D dollars would be up a lot.
Am I the only one that sees this correlation?
Sent from your iPad.
GM only has the cadillac.. and you shouldn't have to go top end to get an innovative machine.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
Stem cell research.
Our puritanical (read: Conservative) stance not shared by other countries like India and the UK will definitely put us behind in this area.
Of course they will..
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
Private companies then exploit this and make money.
Also, due to the efficiency of the US capital market and the enormous US home market new technology is rapidly developed in the US but perfected elsewhere. But the same speed to start things also drives an outlook that is only quarterly at most US firms which kills quality after a while.
The perfect example is the car industry. The US just got big and for a long time the only US car innovations are the cupholder and the SUV. ABS, fuel injection, constant 4WD multiple valves and other improvements do not come from Detroit. Another is large jets.
Why should computing be any different ?
He draws some interesting parallels, but it would be nice to have some numbers to back up his statements. It is easy to talk doom and gloom, and everyone is quick to jump on that bandwagon, but lets see some hard data.
He may be right though, but would that be so bad? I am an American, and I love America, but I would like to see a world where there there is a little more balance of economic power. Would that be so bad for the average American?
I whole-heartedly disagree. We need more R+D effort...that way, I can get a raise!
I have a friend who is my economic guru and we talk about this quite a bit. Yes, because there is an administration that is not focused on the economy, everyone is holding on to their money. Thusly, no R&D. We've actually made the car comparison a quite a few times.
Another thing we talk about though, is the fact that as other countries 'catch up' technologically to us, there will be less and less reason for companies not to outsource all their tech needs. This already happens to a great extent in the manfacturing industry and China. For tech, we see a lot of farming out to India, especially since they're are lot of competent English speakers there.
How can U.S. firms compete with this? I don't think they can and ultimately, another industry will move more and more off shore. This doesn't mean, however, that the U.S. will not find other markets.
I think that if there are more and more highly skilled people in other countries around the world that can do the same tech work our skilled workers do here, then the next place is space. Unfortunately, we're not jumping on that and now we have a European agency headed to the moon and China talking about mining it. Welcome to the future of the transnats. Like hi-tech, the U.S. has the opportunity to drive this one for a while. The question is will they?
the west invented the car -- asia enhanced it. again, the computer revolution was invented in the west and asia will enhance it. now our nascent industries are nano-tech and bio-tech. many years from now asia will 'enhance it'
Mike just forgot to notice where. Why of course the government, we're about to spend hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars on learning how to make war on the offensive side of things..... *knock knock* wait a sec, I'll be right back, Tom Ridge wants to talk with me...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
but any innovation slowdown in the U.S., coupled with the economic realities of war and the eventual arrival of more overseas competition, will affect CEO jobs, tens of thousands of tech workers, and possibly the entire nation's standard of living.
R2! We're doomed! This is all your fault! Help, I think I'm melting!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
this tidbit:
"Instead of sending future tech wealth abroad, we need to open our doors to more top foreign scientists. We're sending H-1B visa holders home with pink slips and a basket of skills they learned from U.S. companies. We should be giving the brightest of them research fellowships working for the Department Homeland Security."
Gimme a break - there are plenty of highly qualified American citizens. Why exactly should we entrust national security to people who are not part of the shared American destiny? An H1-B is BY DEFINITION temporary. Personally, I think part of the solution here is to reduce the number of H1-B holders, not put them in charge of the candy store...
If the economy was similar to what it was a few years ago, then sure, R&D dollars would be up a lot.
I agree Em. I think the correlation between the current state of the economy and their spending is much more valid than any other explanation. I'm sure other factors are influencing their spending but those factors are most likely a result of the 'recent?' economic downturn.
imho
--Thei Antispamist A useless endevor that will cer
It says to me the US has learned nothing from the British. Get too content with being the global big dog and the next thing you know you're not number 1 anymore. Considering how many people india has, and how education is playing a bigger role each year, they could replace the US.
What get's me is US greed is handing them the spot too.
I see this as more a case of America going through growing pains.
As a sort-of new nation - lets say 'teen-ager', America is full of innovations and also full of free-market idealism - the American worker has a big say about thier working environment.
The individual can have some kind of say.
When compared to the east, with cultures that have been around for thousands of years, there's a very different work ethic where the individual is unimportant. So much so that bosses will take lunch with the lowest staff.
The free-maket idealism coupled with the individuals say costs american companies more.
The eastern work ethic coupled with the unimportance of the individual creates a very efficient working environment.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Um, HELLO, if someone is getting a pink slip doesn't that imply some sort of deficiency? This entire article hinges on "Foreign Students == Good"! Why is the author's solution for us to go over to India and China to grab talent when foreign companies are coming to the US? Isn't that playing into their hands? This part makes no sense.
But the improved R&D money thing is fine. Sure. But what has gotten the HPs and IBMs? Answer: undercut by Dell. If that is not a "lesson in global capitalism" I don't know what is. And as far as I know the Big Companies that DO have the money to do R&D... *gasp* do it.
What this author doesn't seem to realize is that many US firms are coming to grips with cost undercutting. Maybe proprietary HW meant something back in 1990 but not any more. So companies cut those groups and buy the same whitebox stock from Taiwan. The author seems to think that this is just some Anti-R&D attitude, when all it is is the proper reaction to a market reality
What is music when you despise all sound?
Patent litigation. Developing patents then sueing people for using them is going to be the next real business. Forget innovating, we can sue people and get quicker rests at much higher profit margins!
Someone will then patent a "patent trial" and then put an end to it all. (And not a good thing either - it'll be the end of innovation in America)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This same line of discussion has come up here many times before. One comment I have seen frequently runs along the lines of: "Well, buddy, don't be a pussy. It's all competition, and if you're good enough you'll still have a job".
Well, guess what, guys? Unless you're a genius - and I suspect most of us aren't (in fact, I'd suspect most of us are slightly above average to being very good at what we do, but we're not mostly very good) - we're going to lose our jobs. Because a decent Indian programmer making $5K a year looks a hell of a lot better than a great American programmer making $50K a year.
We have a window of less than ten years, I think, in which to react to the possible destruction of American IT. Because humans elsewhere are just as smart. Only thing is, they get paid like shit.
You think you can compete because you're better? Dream away, my son.
With that as an example, I think that it's a little shortsighted to look at dollars to dollars and say that the US is coming up short. Maybe it is, but the article doesn't provide the evidence. A better measure of the balance of R&D budgeting is more qualitative than quantitative. What is coming out of R&D? Are we developing products and ideas that have any kind of a chance at hitting the market and actually making a profit? Don't jeer at the search for profitability...where do you think the R&D bucks come from?
I can only speak from my experience at the high tech company where I work, but R&D expenditures are a significant amount of total revenues. Perhaps other companies have different views, but for us, even in a tough time, R&D is the lifeblood of what we do. It's just that when money is as tight as it is now, the spending becomes much more focused.
Using Huawei Technologies as an example of the threat to American tech dominance is certainly a red herring. If Tarsala counts blatent copying of product and documentation as a positive result of R&D spending, then his perception of R&D is simply wrong. Honda didn't copy the CVCC from Ford or General Motors...they created it on their own.
-h-
I've read so many economic fallacies that many /.'ers take as fact. "Government can offer stimulus to the economy" is one (fact: government only takes, rarely provides). "U.S. Businesses" are another -- many U.S. corporations are owned by off shore investors. How does any of this actually affect ME?
I'm a big fan of The Mises Institute which offers articles about the Austrian School of Economic Theory -- categorically disproving many of the myths about the economy today.
Mike Tarsala could learn a lot from these guys...
I thought the whole deal about patents was that there were supposed to encourage companies to invest in research because they could expect a payoff. And didn't I read somewhere recently that patent applications are up?
So which is it? Is real innovation down because of a screwed up patent system? Or because of a lack of money? Or just hubris on the part of US companies that think they know the one true way for everything?
Personally I do believe innovation is suffering right now. And I don't think the patent system is helping. Instead companies are pumping out patents on everything old under the sun while few are spending money on something truly new.
Why? The reality of innovation is that new things are almost always built on old foundations. When those foundations might have 2,000 different patents the incentive to try new combinations of things is reduced because you don't want the hassle of infringement. Or at least it seems that way to me. Your mileage may vary...
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Probably not enormous, mutant, cybernetically-enhanced mega-fruit that dominate the landscape and roam the earth as the megafauna of a new age.
Nope. Not without research dollars. Just plain old boring apples and oranges and crap.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
At only 500 test tubes per turn, we'll have to start stealing techs from the Psilons to keep pace.
What a newb.
I agree with him although I think R&D will be more affected by this country failed education system more than the lower funding. Last night, I spent time with my youngest son who is in 7th grade doing his homework. He has only just now gotten to porportions granted he is not in advanced math but still by the time I was in 7th grade we were doing pre-algebra and that was really review since I had learned a lot of in 5th grade along with others at my grade level (Special elementary school but still).
Even scarier, he is making a C in math and science and he is one of only 4 kids in those classes that is passing. Our education system is very broken in this country and will only get worse if Bush has his way. My son goes to Houston Independent School District home of the finest education system hence why we kicked Rod Paige up to Secretary of Education. After all HISD students pass the state test or conviently transfer to another school or not drop out code even if the principals have to lie.
Rabi Satter
If Honda can do for computers what it did for automobiles, in 10 years my PC will use .01 watts, be completely wireless, measure 4 cubic centimeters, have a holographic display and track my eye movement to move the cursor. (provided I have an X Sesion going. :)
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
So, I start working on this new project. It's of "great strategic importance" to our corporate overlords. "Key to the success" of several "initiatives".
Of course, there's no budget for it this year. So you'll just have to figure out how to do it without any hardware to run it on.
Sent my resume out the same day. Already had 3 interviews.
http://www.users.voicenet.com/~eric/dennis4.html I think this says it all.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"Instead of sending future tech wealth abroad, we need to open our doors to more top foreign scientists. We're sending H-1B visa holders home with pink slips and a basket of skills they learned from U.S. companies. We should be giving the brightest of them research fellowships working for the Department Homeland Security."
The good old USA just doesn't have bright scientists available in this downturn to award research fellowships in the Department of Homeland Security. So, let's bring in H-1B scientists, that will be employed at taxpayer expense. Americans can eat cake.
"In Soviet Russia, the reduced R&D bears fruits."
No, wait, let me try again.
"In Soviet Russia, born fruit reduces R&D"
Hmmm, not quite, one more time...
"In Soviet Russia, fruit bears reduced R&D"
Ahh, that sounds better.
Research has been getting the axe for the last thirty years anyway. Look at Lucent, the sad remnant of Ma Bell's labs. They have some 3,000 employees who must strugle to support 250,000 pensioned retirees. Tell me what kind of "research" the local Bells have to take it's place, please. IBM? Shuting down, at least in the US. It's pathetic. It's like these companies think they can just fund a few graduate level slaves or wait for hobbiests to come up with ideas to steal.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I think what is really killing American tech companies right now is the installation of managers who know nothing about what they are managing.
I used to work for Motorola, whose Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS) is currently dying a slow death. I saw a large number of talented engineers getting fed up and leaving in my relatively short tenure. They felt that they couldn't do their jobs any more because management had instituted enormous amounts of beauracray and general B.S. that tied their hands behind their backs.
I'm sure most engineers and scientsts in industry can relate, but the problem seems to be getting worse lately. Remember all those frat boys getting business degrees? They're managing our tech companies now. Scary.
It's interesting that he brought up the 70's auto market. He failed to follow through though with the fact that US corporations own controlling (or huge) interests in most of the overseas automakers. I don't think most corporations care where r&d is occuring as long as it adds to their bottom line.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I can definitely say that international students are draining our brain pool. In my graduate level Electrical Engineering classes the majority of the students are international. As an approximation I would say: 40% Indian/Other Middle Eastern, 40% Chinese/Korean and 20% American. Many of these people will not be allowed in the country once they are done with their education. Especially with the new immigration laws.
In a way this is getting a little out of hand. In a recent job fair at my university many of my friends could not speak to interviewers because there were lines and lines of International students. If they don't get a job here in the States they will likely end up back in their home country doing the same work.
Unlike the auto industry example given, we are now educating other countries and reducing our own tech work industry in the meantime.
Where the Music Matters
Totally right, these cheap bastards wouldnt know a pot of gold if it was right in front of them. Seems they are too busy trying to pay their morgages and attempting to recover from investing in corporations like AOL and web-crap that never had any revenues but the name just sounded so cool...
Been spending a few weeks out here in the valley and its a sad, sad scene... you got CEO's borrowing lunch money after finishing their double shift as receptionist for some dude who aint paying him anything more than miniumum wage - and even that check comes late.
Really sad, I'm think i'm moving to Europe where people are friendly, intelligent, and 90% of the population isnt over 250lbs
Consider that the US is primarily a service economy. Unless they buy up all the McDonalds' and close them down, the lion's share of economic benefit still goes to the US. The same goes with retail sales.
Either way you slice it, the US is head and sholders above the rest of the world when it comes to trained consumers and an open marketplace.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Quite a few American semiconductor companies are fabless. They contract out all manufacturing to Taiwan and China and concentrate on engineering. Nvidia is a great example. Other companies are opening R&D centers around the world as we speak. The list is long and includes Microsoft, Intel and Boeing. And our companies have a lot more global presence than 30 years ago and so are able to spot new trends from their competitors.
I was generalising based on Governments of said countries, not the individuals themselves.
I could have specified "bad" countries, sure - N Korea, Vietnam, China.
I could have left out "good" countries - Japan, S Korea.
(please note inverted commas.)
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
UK research in this area is conservative as well.
:)
If you want to talk about stem cells, cloning etc.. look at Italy. They'll do anything to give a granny another child
I think American companies will patent every obvious thing in existence preventing overseas companies from selling anything here without the American companies getting their cut (patent royalties).
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
how many companies have developed great things in their R&D labs only to have the parent go belly-up on them. The resulting tech is either swiped up by the company that buys their remains, or given away for free to the community at large, or lost and gone forever*.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Think about this, if the searches for pink bunnies goes up in the month of febuary your onto something. I'm sure the search list from ebay costs a lot of money.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Anyone hypocritical enough to vote against stem cell research, then take advantages of the fruits of the research, when it is done anyway, is morally forfeit.
I have been pondering over this for some time now. The US companies go to India looking for cheap labor. The typical reason given is that a company can hire 3-5 resources in India for the cost of 1 resource in US.
:-)
:-)
Check the assistantships paid to grad students in US Universities. Companies can hire 5 grad students for the cost of 1 employee in US as well. These grad students are pretty well versed in the latest technologies (having used them in Undergrad), and would be willing to work hard since the job pays for their education as well.
In addition, the 10+ hour lag which works very well for outsourcing to India will work well here too, because US grad students typically work the same time the Indian tech workers do
If your company decides to hire US grad students, I want a cut for the idea
charmer
The return on investment for sound R&D has been well established. Of course, there is a world of interpretation in that little qualifier "sound" but the fact remains that R&D investment is critical to continued, sustainable growth - particularly in the tech world. Unfortunately, the narrow-minded focus on the quarters earnings doesn't permit this kind of rationality that could speed economic recovery. It makes about as much sense as refusing to change the oil in your car because you're short on cash, but hey, that's business.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
You've got to love these arm-chair economists. Who is this "we" the article talks about? We should do this, we should do that. These vague generalities may make for an interesting article, but they're not good for much else. When a company is losing money certain actions must be taken for the survival of the company. Costs must be cut. Do you borrow money and invest in research and development and continue losing money in a down market? Of course not. The company would go out of business in no time. American companies are not stupid. When times are bad you scale back and when times are good you expand. R&D still goes on throughout this entire process, albeit at a slower rate.
I looked through the article (and some other articles linked in the sidebar) but couldn't find any hard numbers showing that other countries are actually spending more.
Now, while I don't have a large compendium of current statistical data at my disposal, I do have quite a bit of anecdotal evidence gleaned from my position as a manager of international sales, where I spend a lot of time visiting foreign companies talking to their executives. As far as I can tell R&D budgets worldwide are being cut in the last couple of years, especially in Asia where the economy has been hit harder than most other places. Let's face it: in tough times every company looks to increase their short-term profitability, and usually that comes at the expense of programs that don't have an immediate bottom line (say, over the next year) written in black. R&D programs are high on that list. While R&D might spark a product line or reduction in cost, companies won't usually start seeing profits from most successful R&D programs for several years.
Even in my small, agile company an investment in R&D dollars usually won't pay off for at least 1.5-2 years, and that's only because we already have a baseline product to structure our development and marketing around. When we were starting from scratch, it took about 3-4 years of development before we started breaking even on those R&D dollars we put in initially.
International competition helps keep prices low, but any innovation slowdown in the U.S., coupled with the economic realities of war and the eventual arrival of more overseas competition, will affect CEO jobs, tens of thousands of tech workers, and possibly the entire nation's standard of living.
CEO's jobs are not currently based on long term goals, they are based on short term growth. To get that short term growth, they are limiting any long term future. This has nothing to do with innovation and R&D spending, it has everything to do with pleasing the shareholder and cashing stock options.
We're sending H-1B visa holders home with pink slips and a basket of skills they learned from U.S. companies. We should be giving the brightest of them research fellowships working for the Department Homeland Security.
Sending them home is one thing, the fact that the program even exists at the level it does is another. I know this is another heated topic in itself but I believe the main reason this was even started was not to fill a knowledge void but to increase the supply of tech people which lowered the wages. This is directly tied to the CEO's short term growth plan I mentioned above. People born outside of the US were not genetically altered to be smarter, they may or may not have had a better K12 education. IMHO, the amount of difference is somewhat questionable and not does not reflect how you will perform with specialized training and concepts down the road.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Great article about the economic fallacies many so called "economic theorists" like to dictate -- especially talking heads such as the ones you find on the major news networks.
Economic Fallacies link
good god man - they normally get upwards of 200,000 miles without needing any serious repair work outside of a water pump, and maintenance items...
if you can limp 150,00 without a major system going in a US car, let me know.
... hi bingo
>>Whenever I hear people gripe about H1B workers, they are basically saying "I suck at my job so I need labor protectionism to get rid of my competition".
Not always true. Maybe "I cost more than an H1B, so I need labor protectionism to get rid of my competition" is a better description.
It's not about skill. It's about money.
Huh?
"Stem cell research."
Why? Are the UK and India paying women to have abortions so that they have more stem cells to work with? Because essentially that's the only limitation the White House has put on stem cell research. We still have fetal stem cell research (as well as research on stem cells from all other sources), and, IIRC, still have more strains of fetal stem cells to work with than any other country.
You might want to have that knee-jerk reaction of yours looked in to. It could be debilitating.
That's exactly what bothers me so much about America.
We trust people who tell us things like patents incourage R & D. But these statements never pan out and almost feel like flat out lies. Personally I feel like I am being lied to by every economist, capitalist and politician so they can benefit out of my confusion.
Its sad. And it can't be changed. Its like walking upstream against a raging river of ignorance and lies being echoed back to me a thousand fold louder than my own small weak voice. I'm gonna drown.
Its all about population. The US will someday have a larger population than both India and China combined. Both of those countries birth control policies are working. Meanwhile the US population continues to grow. Already we're creaping up on Western Europe and will surpass it in the next 40 years. Not only does the US continue to attract excess immigration, the native US population continues to reproduce at above replacement levels.
The country with the larger population will have the biggest market and thus the strongest economy.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
A number of years ago I when I was in college Lee Iaccoca (CEO of Chrysler at the time) gave a speech. He was asked why Chrysler does their engineering oversees. In a very obtuse way he basically answered "because they are better".
That, of course, really pissed me off. Not because he was wrong - he certainly wasn't. But the reason foriegn automotive engineers were better was his fault! For 20 years US auto makers did very little to push the envelope of auto engineering. They may not of needed to because of the market, but the real damage was that they lost a culture of skilled engineers.
Skilled engineering is not something you can just create on the turn of the dime. Experience means a lot in engineering. (And I don't simply mean the experience of individual people. I mean the experience of a group where there's always some continuity). If the US auto makers kept trying to innovate in the 60's and 70's, they would of had plenty of skilled engineers who would know how to make better cars, (even if the innovations weren't marketable). Instead, they had no engineers available and had to turn to foriegn companies for help.
Whether the same could happen in the IT industry, I don't know. At the moment the industry is still very competitive innovation-wise. So, it's not a matter of US industries sitting on their asses, like they did with cars. It's more a matter of them farming out to the lowest foriegn bidder. The net result could be same, though.
What Fruits Will Reduced R&D Bear For The U.S.?
Hopefully, super-intelligent bananas that peel themselves!
Go biotech go!
: )
You can't take the sky from me...
A 6.8% decline != sky falling. In fact, given the maturity of the innovation curve surrounding IP based technologies and given barriers to entry for silicon / software technologies, it may not be enough of a decline.
If you're in IT, think about it. What new technologies are going to be "really hot" over the next 24-48 months? Wireless? Databases? Operating Systems? Other than Security and maybe P2P, I can't think of any. And while Microsoft has sucked with their security offerings, I'd bet that the moment Groove or Ikimbo or whomever picks up steam there'll be a competing (albeit sucky) technology built into Windows.
None of the top index tech companies are going to be threatened by small or large overseas companies any time soon. I think it was Gerstner who said that "If someone else (like Microsoft) appears in the marketplace and threatens us, we'll simply buy them."
To that extent his automaker analogy is self-defeating
1.) Honda, Toyota, et. al, were all rumored to be on the ropes and acquisition targets by US automakers before the recent slump. While that's not likely to happen in the current economy, those Japanese companies aren't exactly shining examples of market longevity.
2.) US automakers bought a startling number of European companies when privatized. To compete in market spaces where they had poor market penetration, Jaguar, Volvo, Saab, Rover, and Lamborghini (I'm sure I'm missing someone) are for the most part more competitive than they were, and in many cases, helping their parent companies better compete in the luxury space.
To me, this just smacks of silly alarmist thinking - like someone needed a topic for the day.
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
The stem cell legislation passed in the US specifically bans the import of any product based on stem cell research. I think the goal was to prevent US companies from doing research in labs abroad and then selling the treatment here. What I think is going to end up happening is that people are going to have to fly to China to cure their Parkinsons Disease.
The above poster mentions India and the UK. I think that China is going to be the place were the real "wow" developments come from.
-B
There are some tinfoil hat qualities to your rant. For example I doubt that "every economist, capitalist and politician" is lying because no conspiracy with than many people in it could survive. As they say; two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.
But, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean no-one is out to get out. Personally I wonder just how much the system itself encourages people to make such claims even when the data doesn't support it. In other words the problem isn't conspiracy, but rather an emergent behavior engedered by the rules of the system.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
And it will have the processing power of a PII, and will only last about 6 months. The major selling point of it will be that it is cheap, and you can put a bunch of goofy looking mods on it to make it appear to have more processing power.
No thanks. Give me a German car any day. Solid engineering is where it is at, and I think THAT is also why many offshore companies are taking away tech business. They do good work. Look at the percentage of companies in India that are CMM level 2 or above, then look at American companies. While CMM level doesn't guarantee good software, it does indicate maturity. If you are strapped for cash, you'll go with not only what is cheaper but what gets you the most bang for your buck. Solid engineering is better in the long run.
The American job market was saturated with dime-a-dozen developers in the years leading up to the dot-com craze. So instead of having pools of good engineers at companies, there were a few good engineers and a bunch of snot-nosed coders. The flood of people trying to cash in on the tech market diluted the pool for everyone.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You cannot be serious. I realize this is Slashdot, home of the geek's corporate angst, but this is utter BS. This is Katz posting under a pen name. Has to be.
And you would be in line for the benefits of Hitler's "research" too? I think not.
The issue here is not "should we do R&D or not", it's about who is human. Benefits can be had from all kinds of things, the question is, are they ethical?
Whatever your view on human life and unborn babies, everone has to aknowledge it's a serious issue. Though obviously not as easy to evaluate, it has the same moral weight as if we were debating the "humanness" of all 8-year-olds. Whatever you decide, you're making a serious call.
For me the question is not what but who we're doing research on, and in the case of stem cell research, we've stepped over the line.
-Malloc___________________ I want to be free()!
Unfortunately, R&D in the USA isn't about innovation, but more about getting patents on all the up and comming technologies before they happen. That way you can lock out competitors and squeeze a ton of royalities out of industries that will require all the up and comming technologies. However there are some times where good things happened - IBM wrongly assumed that they would be able to controll all the interfaces on the IBM compatable PC. When they were wrong, it created an economic explosion of companies that creating plug-in cards and periphials.
Because of patnets, researchers working for companies are often forced to be greedy and secretive about things they discover. There is little in depth sharing of knowledge and collaberation until the lawyers and bean counters give the ok. One big side effect of this is that a large amount of innovation in US society has been shifted to the University sector, which has made it extremely important in US society. Unfortunately, now even many Universities are getting greedy with patent controlls killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
However, the really good news is free (as in freedom) software. Never in the history of human existence has there been such a sharing of knowledge, spread of basic tallent, application of standardized orgin, economic colaberation, and the likes. It is having a strong effect of shifting R&D from the university sector back to the private sector. If we lift the monopoly on patents, I think the same thing will happen in other technology areas.
Dieses ist ein Fehler, dort ist KEIN Problem mit amerikanischem Forschung Ausgang!
"It compares today's US tech firms to the Big Three Automakers of the 70's, while saying the overseas tech firms are similar to the Toyotas and Hondas of the 70's."
Of course,
- now the Big Three, Toyota, Honda and the rest all own each other
- a sizeable portion of the Hondas made in the world are assembled here
- the economy that spawned all those Toyotas and Hondas has been in the crapper for 15 years
- the economies that tried to 'out-Toyota Toyota' (Korea and the other little tigers) have been in the crapper for 5 years
Maybe their prospects aren't so great after all...
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
R&D helps to increase productivity, and improve services as we all know. But there is no incentive for an organization to invest dollars into the R&D machine.
Spending money to make a better product only works as long as your competition is not also doing the same. Said another way, R&D provodes no clear competitive advantage for companies unless the competition cannot afford to finance R&D spending.
Successful companies(like Microsoft) can afford R&D spending because they have no significant competition in thier dominated market(OS). Concurrently, most of thier R&D money is spent trying to take over other markets.
Programmers, engineers and scientists are (mostly) mercenaries who sell themselves to the highest bidder. This puts the best and brightest into the hands of the monopolists. The capitalistic basis of "fair competition" is becoming more and more scarce as a result.
The increasing efficiency of these organizations is also reducing the pool of independant competing companies. There are very real examples of how individual programs have replaced the function of entire companies. As our economy becomes dominated by fewer, and more powerful companies the competetive gap between companies within the same market segment will become so prohibitive, as to render "free market capitalism" a thing of the past.
The current rash of IP and patent sweeps being declared by established companies will only exacerbate the problem further, ensuring an almost dynastic future for key blue-chip american businesses.
Bottom line, R&D expenditure is a luxury like never before. Only the top companies can afford to make R&D expenditures, and the number of such companies is getting fewer and fewer. Programmers, engineers and scientists trying to sell the merits of research are going to be largely ignored.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
US firms all think short term since all the stockholders care about is quick bucks. In the short run, in this country, litigation to protect patents and stifle competitors is always cheaper than innovation, however in the long run, US firms are up to get clobberd if they dont learn look beyond next quarter
-- Insert wisdom here:
I'm not so sure that increased R&D spending due to economic is necessarily a Good Thing (tm). I've been in R&D for years and before the Dot.Bomb money infiltrated our devision our department was small, we worked hard for the progress we made and basically it was fun. When all the money started floating about upper level management started having delusions of grandeur, we got into technologies that were not our core compentices, we made dubious business deals to make devices that didn't really make sense in the market. We hired many programmers and consultants that our existing managers had no idea how to motivate. Suddenly the lab began to resemble the world according to Scot Adams. Now that the bubble burst, our original technology has been sold twice (in three years) and several of the projects I've worked on have been canceled. Most of the dead wood has been pruned away and what reamins are a couple of small groups that will wind up having to move to continue research. Hindsight being 20-20 I don't think we should let ourselves become distracted and concentrated on continuing real development in the areas we were working on to begin with. Bottom line: increased spending is not automaticaly a Good Thing, increased productivity is...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
... and then of course, the cost of doing any business in US will be so burdened by litigation that no companies will do business in the US and there will be no jobs left except for government jobs, food service jobs, and patent attorneys.
Government jobs are starting to sound pretty good.
Scorp1us' proposed US Economic Plan:
1) Patent Everything and sue everyone
2) ?
3) Economic Prosperity in the US
There was an article in Discovery or Scientific American (I forget which one, I believe it was during the summer) that refutes what you are saying.
They were interviewing some US stem cell researchers and they were saying that all but (if I recall) 4 strains were worthless and the waiting list to get even those was very, very long. Lots of researchers were leaving the country to do research abroad because of it.
Perhaps this is changed since then?
Look at the rumors surrounding SCO and the BSD-derived code in Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux that SCO thinks it "owns." A court ordered licensing fee would set back the free and open source software movements, even if replacement code is eventually written. Developing nations do not have these restrictions, and will benefit enormously. Without a change the U.S. will be come less relevant.
What the hell is a service industry, does anybody know? I think that the idea of a service industry is just some kind of pablum that we are feeding ourselves to placate our selves into thinking that there is some kind of hope that we can survive in the coming world economy.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Europe traditionally taxes engine displacement, hence all those little-bitty motors. Detroit traditionally didn't have that constraint, and "Detroit Iron", i.e. large displacement V-8 engines is a cheap way to get powerful, smooth-running, long-lasting engines. As far as fuel economy, there is nothing that says that you can't, within limits, gear a large displacement engine really tall to get comparable fuel economy to a much smaller displacement engine. Perhaps the smaller displacement engine weighs less and takes up somewhat less space, allowing for a lighter vehicle, and the reduced mass of the smaller engine may produce faster engine warmups. Also, fewer cylinders can produce some economy gain from friction and heat loss considerations. Also, these highly tuned small displacement engines have much peakier torque curves, so it is not clear how much the high horsepower contributes to having a quick, fun-to-drive car (unless listening to a tiny engine spool up is fun). So, I think the notion of high horsepower per cc is overblown.
That'd be megaflora, not fauna ;-)
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Can't be more sure without Researching and Developing a more educated opinion.
Well, duh. Its obviously not a conspiracy of this magnitude. It is human nature, plain and simple. When we put people in an environment that teaches them that money makes the world go around, teaches them how to make money by managing people, markets and resources like they are objects. Then we complain when they act acordingly. We're just being hypocritical. So then if we're all nothing but a bunch of hypocritical greedy professionals, what's the problem?
Now I'm confused. Are you saying patents do or do not encourage R&D? If they do all is fine. If they don't I'm saying there's too much inertia of greedy rich people who say they do to possibly make any changes to the system. Call it a conspiracy if you want, but it doesn't change the reality of the situation.
Being a developer for nearly 10 years, I will forever make the statement that coding is NOT like manufacturing.
:P
It is not like building a house; you are not limited by your physical abilities.
It is not like building a car; you are not limited by available manufacturing facilities, techniques, materials and the like.
It is a science and possibly more importantly, an art. You are limited only by your creativity, logic and problem-solving ability.
Having spent 3 months in India last year, they still have a long ways to go. Thousands upon thousands of development firms in a single city, yet out of the couple of dozen I visited, nearly half were asking--no, begging me to train and teach coding practices to their developers and managers alike.
Having worked with a few Indian firms, I can tell you that it is definitely no cake-walk/easy-out for companies looking to "reduce their overhead." A logistical nightmare, you need someone to collaborate with them daily (or nightly as it may be) -- as you slowly watch them piece together an application over the course of several months, wading through their relatively broken English, only for you to throw half of it out at the end, rewriting it yourself. What? You mean it's taken twice as long for them to do it than us? But wait- why didn't we just write it ourselves to begin with? Oh, right- we thought it would be cheaper this way.
To Corporate America: Most of you never needed dedicated development teams. If you really want to save money, you should be looking locally for development houses on contract. There's a very good chance it will not only be cheaper, but of higher quality than the total cost of doing business either internally or offshore.
Instead of worrying about what everyone else is doing while we cry over the thought that we may lose business to overseas developers, let's spend that energy on education and figuring out how to improve the *quality* of our developers.
Given the knowledge and skill, one developer CAN do the work of ten. No question. And this is how we, through the economies of scale, will remain a viable option for American industry.
Jason Fisher
The new interface for Windows Longhorn?
Oh, because, it goes without *saying* that no rational person could oppose stem cell research.
/.
Look, if you believe in a soul, stem cell research is, at *least*, problematic. If you don't believe in a soul, ask yourself why murder is wrong.
Materialist scientistic arrogance is such an ugly and prevalent thing here on
To hell with my karma,
prat
The majority of R&D has been done by the US government, not by corporations. Corporations then graciously take this research, patent it, and then make lots of money from it. But, overall, I do agree that the system is fucked for more reasons than just R&D.
You must have missed the last State of the Union address where Bush said he wanted $1.2 Billion put towards developing fuel cell technologies. I know, I know, it isn't the same as the military budget, but it shows that he isn't ignoring the alternatives, as you implied. See it here: link.
Boom Shanka
That's a far too simplistic analysis.
Myth 1) Population rules all, which is why China (#1 population) and India (#2 population) should have the most powerful economies in the world.
Reality) China's GDP ranks 7th, behind that of the US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, and Italy. India's is 12th.
Myth 2) The United States, because of all of those damned immigrants and teenage mothers, is increasing its population at a staggering rate.
Reality) The predicted population ranking in 2015 will still be in order of size: China, India, the United States. The annual population growth rates of these nations between 1995 and 2000 are .90%, 1.69%, and 1.05% respectively. Accurate predictions for, say 2040, are hamstrung by the repeated failures of earlier population forecasts, as this paper delineates.
Larger population does not equal strongest economy. Japan has the 9th largest population and 2nd largest economy. Enormous Russia has the 6th largest population and 15th largest economy.
Population densities, education, economic infrastructure, and a variety of other factors are far more imporant than simple comparisons of size.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Innovation is down because the innovators are too busy freaking out over how they will pay their mortgage. As soon as the general populace is no longer preoccupied by trying to survive, innovation will continue. However, it is a nasty catch-22.
:P
(For reference, please see the Dark Ages and the Renaissance.)
Jason Fisher
What does having a soul have to do with considering murder to be wrong?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
How much of current American properity is due to military dominance? If this dominance ceases to matter (or just plain fades) will we continue to be properous?
Consider..
The UK was once the world's economic and military powerhouse.
Its dominance was challenged in the late 19th century by Germany. The practical arts of manufacture and commerce were not valued in British society at the time - not the case in Germany. German advances in chemical engineering and aircraft made it a formidable adversary in WWI.
Growing military importance of aircraft dimished the importance of the British fleet in maintaining world domination - a technical advance passed by this great empire and removed its monopoly on military power.
Despite this, in 1950 UK was still a major exporter of durable goods, a surprising portion of autos and consumer goods were still made there. This soon vanished.
By the 1960's, the premier UK businesses were service oriented - advertising, finance, etc. They had lost all real edge in "goods" manufacture.
Sometime in the 1980's the former world power found its GDP surpassed by former defeated WWII opponent Italy.
Control over an empire may have masked deficiencies in how the UK innovated and marketed innovations. Once the empire dissolved in the 1950's a serious decline began.
Any lessons here?
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Damn human rights!
We should ravage life now to make it better for the future for those who were not tested on. It totally sucks that we have all these damn conservatives trying to protect the sanctity of human life. I mean, they are dead, who cares that what we do to their bodies now. Or maybe, they are retarded and don't enjoy life as much as we do, lets test on them.
Save the bunnies and rats, test on humans! Its inhuman to test on animals.
</sarcasm>
Sometimes the ends do not justify the means. Sometimes they do.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Well at least that seems to be the arrogant American answer.
I guess pride goeth before the fall, or is that pride causeth the fall.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
I strongly disagree on the idea of having people with visas working for our government agencies (Do we really want Osama Bin Laden to be the chief of Homeland Security?). Moreover, I think its time we close our borders to all foreign labor until we manage to get our economy straight. Why? Becuause there are tons of smart students who can become the future of our economy, yet they are not given a chance because my friend from _____ (insert India, China, Taiwan, etc.) is willing to work here for $5/year. Instead of exploring our potential, we like to educate people who are not even remotely interested in improving our economy. Most of them want to go back home after earning some money; then they come back for more. And then we have tons of talented youth without jobs. IT execs should take their heads out of their asses and start looking at what we have here and what we are able to achieve. May be there is a way to reduce production costs by reducing their salaries and premiums; then make technology available to a broader range of consumers.
If you were any good at your job, you would have no trouble competing with other tech workers, H1B or not.
Actually, no. After you strip your company down to save money, the only thing left is employee wages. Most companies wont hire contractors at the end of the year due to the budget. They will also move call centers to save money. (Sometimes over seas...)
And now with the whole enron/worldcom bookkeeping problems. Its illegal to carry over 4th quarter projections to the 1st quarter, expect to see a rise in layoffs and lower wages to make up the loss.
-
Thoughts about Bush
An interesting point to the work being outsourced is that eventually they (Chinese,Indians) have an opportunity to explore - "this doesn't have to be this way". At a certain point Honda realised that engines need not be big block Hemis to get power - variable valve technology was the result (V-TEC).
Big companies overlooking innovation is not a new thing. Before M$ there was IBM. Before Ford there was Diamler-Benz. The promise of America is the Wright Brothers. Infact the nation of America is a proof of success that resulted from "country doesn't have to be this way (monarchy, imperialist etc)".
So the question is not R&D budget though education certaily is. But - whether there is a healthy environment for backyard inventors to explore the "this doesn't have to be this way" opportunities. My faith is beginning to shake. Patents are suffocating, monopolies lobbying the congress to maintain status quo is quite discouraging, smart kids are being sent to jail instead of being mentored.
Asia is already a device/mobility haven. It is sad that I hear/read about these marvels as the British used to narrate their experiences of exotic lands. Unfortunately for America, there is no central point where cash an be infused to jumpstart "it". The hope is that USA will find a new frontier while IT/tech sector is commoditized.
What happens when most of the R&D in tech is taking place overseas (and it might be argued that most of the R&D going on right now is taking place outside of the USA) and they have these very strict IP laws in place? The IP laws were put in place to protect American interests (presumably) but what happens when they become a serious stumbling block to the US economy (well, in a more obvious way than it already is). Imagine if BT had been able to enforce their hyperlinking patent and had begun demanding licensing fees of every company in the US?
I think this is an ideal situation to slap congress around to the fact that IP laws need to be changed to a more reasonable framework. Reward the inventor, yes, but granting monopolies isn't going to help society or the economy in the long run.
Not just answers, the correct questions.
I call Goodwin's Law! You lose!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The RIAA is going crazy over MP3 sharers instead of understanding that digital encoding and mp3s are the wave of the future, not to mention the internet is a highly more effective distribution center than anything else out there.
.
Why do you suppose they are fighting the internet as a distribution method? Because it is more efficient than current methods. They don't want better efficiency, because profit is made in the friction of distribution.
Think about the areas of greatest profitability in the market today, and tell me where they are made. Meanwhile, let me say where I think it lies: with distribution. The Wal*Marts, the Amazons, the Sam Goodies of the world make a lot of money through distribution.
Microsoft still refuses to believe in any uses towards Open-source programming . .
The problem with Free/Open Source software is that it removes the friction of distribution. Microsoft has dominated the market by controlling the distribution chain from day one. At every point where another competitor has threatened to enter the distribution chain (say, DR-DOS), they have choked the distribution points (in the case of DR-DOS, by making per-processor licensing deals with each distributor).
The more friction you can create and maintain, the more money you can make. The advantage of a monopoly is that you are the only controller of the distribution chain.
For all information, the internet approaches frictionless distribution. This is what scares the MPAA, and Microsoft, and the broadcast television companies: in the future, they will be unable to extract Ceasar's share from the distribution chain. That is why they are fighting so hard to introduce friction in the form of legislation.
This is also why capitalism is butt-useless for information, as artificial friction must be introduced into the system (in the form of copyright and patent law). These laws worked when capitalism was based more on physical objects (books, records, films), but now that the information has become more important than the distribution method, capitalism in its current form fails miserably.
The technological push you mention as necessary for the American economy is much deeper than simply increasing innovation or R&D. We must embrace the social aspects of this technology as well, and not introduce unnecessary friction into the system resisting the technology.
I don't mean we must accept all new technology as good. But "Hurts Profits" != "Bad."
For an interesting take (and a surprising relevence) check out "The Third Wave," by Alvin Toffler. It's an older book, but his predictions have been frustratingly accurate.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Attitudes causing attitudes?
Were all 250,000 reasearchers or were all of Ma Bell's retirees dumped on Lucent so that the baby Bells could move on without liability while Lucent goes belly up? I'd call that getting the ax for both the researchers and the retirees. I think I was saying something about corporate hubris and lack of job security. What was it?
Oh yeah, it's like Dogbert said, "I can't tell you what I'm going to do with the assets of this company, but it rhymes with village." Except it's not funny when it really happens and research is one of the first things to go.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I don't think R&D issues are related to the patent system as much as they're related to the education system (or lack thereof)
I believe murder is wrong because I deem "human rights" to be something inherent in "human beings". I'm not going to go into cogito ergo sum and all that; I'm going to assert that sentience is the defining property of a human; it's what differentiates us greatly from the cow, and somewhat less-greatly from the octopus, whale, or chimpanzee.
Adult humans are clearly sentient. Infant humans are probably sentient, or have a very high probability of attaining sentience within a year or two. The (clinically, as opposed to the sense of having an MBA) brain-dead human is not sentient. Agglomerations of developing human cells are not sentient, and only have any potential for sentience with a large investment on the part of the host organism. Spammers are neither human nor sentient.
All cultures have strong taboos governing murder, and most cultures have equally strong taboos governing infanticide. The taboo against "pulling the plug" on the comatose is not universal, nor is the taboo against abortion. (In fact, both of those "taboos" are so non-universal that they are better considered social conventions.) And most of us would be ineligible to serve on a jury in the homicide trial of a man charged with the slaughter of a spammer; how could any user of email bring back a guilty verdict when no crime had been committed?
I agree with your point about education, but I have one additional reason for feeling that it isn't the answer. I was recently reading a nonfiction work (that will remain nameless because everyone's lawyer-happy these days) when I came upon a chapter in which the author described how, as someone trained entirely in mathematics with no computer science experience whatsoever, he managed to get a college in California to hire him as a comp. sci professor. He was then assigned, as his first class, *assembly language*! So, what he did was go to the morning assembly class, led by another professor, write down everything the professor said, and basically say that during his lecture. The next semester he had to teach something else, which he knew nothing about, and basically faked it, but justified it by saying something like "we all learned a lot and had a great time".
I told my friend about this, and he said, "the problem is that teachers have this idea that any good teacher can teach anything. Experience, or expert knowledge, isn't necessary."
Another interesting thing is that when I was in school, when they started a class in Unix system administration, the teacher taught himself the subject the summer before, and was still in the process of learning the material while we were in his class.
So, think about it: you go to college, you pay thousands of dollars in hopes of being taught useful arts by experts who actually know the material, and what do you get? You don't get experts; you might as well read the books yourself. It doesn't seem like a value proposition to me.
Instead of getting a Master's degree, I'll hang around Borders or Barnes and Noble and pick up books by someone with some industry experience. 40 bucks per subject is a whole lot cheaper than 600 bucks per course (and that's for a state school!).
Or am I getting too cynical?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
>>If we only wanted oil, we'd just stand up and tell Kuwait that they are now ours. What the Hell could they do to stop it?
Wow! This would be a great way to completely alienate all of our allies, infuriate already borderline countries like Russia and China and further inflame the psychotic passions of the fundamentalist Muslim community.
THAT is what stops us from simply taking over Kuwait. Remarkably enough, it's more or less the same reason that Saddam Hussein wasn't able to simply say "Kuwait is mine."
If it were about taking out a madman, we'd be fighting wars all over the place, starting with China and North Korea. If it were about democracy, we wouldn't be publicly selling out the Iraqi Kurds to the Turks.
Once we take over Iraq, oil companies are going to get very good deals on oil from the interim gov't there, some will even get lucarative contracts to rebuild the infrastructure we'll blow up during the invasion.
UK is also conservative. China, on the other hand, is spending billions setting up shiny new stem-cell, cloning, and other biotech labs. They're offering enough money to bring back many of the chinese scientists who came to the US for grad school... giving them funding and their own labs.
China is set to kick the US's butt in some areas of biotech research over the next 15 years.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
There are few things which should be illegal: fraud, theft, rape & murder just about sum it up. Ebryonic stem cell research is murder (as it involves the killing of a human being), and should be illegal.
Dude, have you owned a Honda (or Toyota) in the last 10 years? You can't beat them for reliability without spending double their price for a German car. Which seems to be the point you make in the rest of your post, about bang for your buck. My Honda won't beat your Mercedes in most categories, but you spend DOUBLE to get a 10% better car. Now if I said "Yugo" instead of Honda and "Low price is everything" instead of "I get one hell of a car for the price of an average car", then you would have a point.
But I didn't, so you don't. Instead, you made my point for me.
>>"If you are strapped for cash, you'll go with not only what is cheaper but what gets you the most bang for your buck."
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
So companies cut those groups and buy the same whitebox stock from Taiwan. The author seems to think that this is just some Anti-R&D attitude, when all it is is the proper reaction to a market reality.
Alright, let's take your "proper reaction" to its' logical conclusion, shall we?
Seriously. Why should I pay an extra $300 to get the same product from HP? If all you're competing on is price, then the foreign manufacturers will always kick your ass. Always. The only thing keeping Apple alive right now is fat margins supported by having *gasp* a unique product! R&D is what has enabled that, not competing in some silly price war. HP has forgotten how to do research, so they find themselves competing with Dell. Oops.
Dell is busy putting HP out of business, but what innovations has Dell developed? What will Dell fall back on when Samsung or LG makes a move and undercuts them? Commodity markets are a suckers game, and R&D is what keeps you out of them.
This
But the improved R&D money thing is fine. Sure. But what has gotten the HPs and IBMs? Answer: undercut by Dell.
Just because Dell sells more desktops does not make them a more successful company than HP or IBM.
IBM got out of a low-margin business where it couldn't compete with edge-cutters like Dell. HP's desktop unit became eclipsed because it couldn't compete with the likes of Dell.
BUT, both companies have HUGE other endeavours that a specialist like Dell doesn't. It will be a while before Dell's attempts at diversification push them to HP's level, and they will probably never be able to touch IBM without a core change in corporate strategy.
Last year, IBM was the 9th-highest earning company in the US, with $86 billion in income. All the higher-earners were Energy, Oil, or Automobile companies, except for one bank and Wal-Mart.
HP was 28th, with $45 billion.
Dell was 53rd, with $31 billion.
Here, see for yourself.
IBM's status as the highest-earning tech company in the world is, even today, untouched and probably will be for a while. In huge part, this is IMHO because IBM has better R&D labs, and more R&D expenditure, than any other tech corporation in the world. They discover or invent and patent a huge fraction of the technologies everyone else ends up using a few years down the line.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
bitter almonds.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
they are most certainly sentient before they are born. Thus our problem in drawing a clear line. How do you draw a hard line defining when someone becomes sentient and thus it is considered murder. Infants and young childern are certainly not nearly at intelligent as adults. Thus your definition of sentience is not legally enforcable. Also, does that mean that some mentally retarded people are not considered human, since they cannot comprehend certain things and/or concepts. It's just a question....
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
It probably costs close to a billion dollars a day to have them sit around at home. There's a trillion dollar defense budget each year. Divide by 365. That's several billion dollars per day no matter what they do.
My other first post is car post.
I'm a medical device consultant. My American clients want me to help them commercialize technology they have licensed. Most of it is from Europe and Australia.
My clients in China and India want to beat the EU and USA companies with better tech done cheaper. And they aren't counting on labor costs to get the cost reduction, they are counting on superior smarts.
And now I've got a company based in South Africa that wants to take a technology from Egypt and one from Cuba and develop a new surgical treatment that combines the two. Manufacturing will be in Vietnam. And I'm the only American on the team.
You don't need to read theoretical articles. Next time you download a printer driver, check out where the programming was done. American domination of the globe is a temporary abberation, soon to be remedied in the traditional manner.
"Don't expel your beverage through your nostrils when the really rich demand the impossible. There's a fortune there for
As a citizen of my country, I make a consiuos decision to abide by the collective morals of the society which surrounds me. This is what is referred to as ethics. I try to act ethical in my daily life. Is it ethical to murder, rape, pillage? No. Is it ethical to prosper at the expense of my fellow man? In this society, yes, as long as it is someone in another country, or someone who is at least two social classes below my own. I am not forced to abide by these laws. I can either leave, or become incarcerated for expressing my disdain for society. Those are my choices. I can attempt to change the laws, which are pretty much the ethics of the country which I live in, but until I have them changes, I still must abide by the acceptable code.
As a person working within the ethical boundaries of the country, I am highly likely to create a set of my own beliefs. These are my morals, and I should govern myself accordingly. I do not have the right to impose these morals on anyone else (unless I am paying that person), nor does someone have the right to impress their morals upon me (unless I am employed by them AND I agree to work within the confines of their morals, as set by my contract).
Finally, when some bible toting twerp (that's bible with a small b, not The Holy Bible) calling me Hitler, I'm either going to show him that I believe his morality is off base, or I'm going to change my morals right quick, and work outside of the confines of the country's ethical beliefs.
In closing, I wish to state that I am not necessarily an anarchist (although I respect their gumption), and that you should not confuse morals with ethics, as that may one day lead you into making some very poor choices throughout your life.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
This reminds me of a story I heard about CDC management in the late 70's early 80's. At that time, CDC owned the market for disk drives. In those days, the large multi-hundred megabyte disk drives were the the size of washing machines. A new executive arrived at CDC and questioned why they were spending $180 so much on R&D when they owned the market. He slashed it by 80%. The next year Fujitso came out with Winchester head technology reducing disk drives to the size of a toaster. CDC never recovered, and now they don't even exist.
Yes. Before I read sentence three, sentence two made my hackles rise. :D
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Your belief seems to be that purchasing power parity should be used as the primary indicator of an economy's relative power, when it is actually a component of GDP that is used to compare the purchasing power (the demand side of the economy) in nations. It ignores the suppy side altogether, which is why you never hear it used as the sole measure of overall economic strength.
Side note: All of my statistics are pulled from The Economist's Pocket World in Figures 2002 Edition.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
One of the more interesting topics I've seen in a while.
The idea of America losing it's technological edge to short-sighted management decisions as a repeat of how we lost our edge in manufacturing is a scenario that raises shudders.
There are a lot of large land-masses with neither technology nor manufacturing going for them. I think they're collectively referred to as, 'The Third World.'
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Actually, in my view, "yes" - if they have human DNA, but if they're nonsentient, they get the same rights as vegetables. An acephalitic fetus ends up shaped like a cute little human infant, but it has no brain. It is not deserving of the title "human being", because without a brain, it has no consciousness, no "being"; it's a life support system for an organ farm.
> It's just a question....
And a damn good one.
Personally, I'd have a hard time dealing with breeding a non-sentient human, especially since sentience isn't usually an on/off thing. Thankfully, I have no desire to breed, and am therefore spared having to make the wrenching decision between "worth raising to adulthood" or "spare parts" my values system would otherwise force me to make.
One decade on and Japan is still in a seemingly endless recession, yet companies are still spending about the _same_proportion_ of income on R&D. The thinking is different; you don't plant fewer seeds after a bad harvest.
Oh, here we go again...we need to train more scientists and engineers! Why? Where is the work...or should I say where is the work after 40? Get your accounting degrees and MBA's. I regret my University of CA engineering degree as well as my MSCS. What is it worth? Writing open source software for free? America needs none of these. We can get them cheap from India and China, make share value to enrich the CEO and continue our technical decline. That is the American way. Never look ahead. I should have been a lawyer - then I could sue my way to wealth.
This is exactly right! And add to that with the wages for technical careers being artificially low and by comparison the rewards/compensation for CEOs and execs being artificially higher here than in other parts of the world, where do you think kids going to school are going to invest themselves in terms of degrees. Not Computer Science or Engineering, but MBAs. This just perpetuates the "dime a dozen" MBA image and also the shortage of qualified candidates for tech jobs that leads to the perception that we need more H1B visa workers here to start with.
Corporate America needs to spend less money on its execs and more money in helping fund the educate the young people of tomorrow as an investment. H1B visa folks come, get lots of money and take their experience, etc. back out of the country where it doesn't do us any good. We need to invest in ourselves.
That's not to say that I don't appreciate the melting pot job market that happens in places like the Bay Area and other tech sectors. That's one reason why I really like this industry with its diversity of people and ideas. But let them come over and compete on an even keel, not as indentured servants that really helps noone in the long run.
This piece is not so much a refutation of the other piece, but it comes at R&D from the government angle rather than the corporate angle...= sa004&arti cleID=0005277B-64C2-1E5E-A98A809EC5880105
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID
In light of the corporate side, I'm not sure this guy's argument holds up. If corporations aren't investing in R&D then shouldn't government step in to fill the gap? I am not sure...
While it may be true to cite the American auto industry as a parallel case in point, the fact is that business just isn't run the way it was 30 years ago. Today one really can't point to a particular company and say that it is German or American or Japanese. (Look under the hood of your "American" car and see where the various parts are made).
The truth is that multi national companies spread R&D over all of their divisions worldwide and in turn spread the manufacture of those R&D concepts to a place with a better comparative advantage in terms of production. Is code being created in India for Microsoft software? Yes, but that is because coders get paid less over there. Are japanese cars any better than American? Maybe, but where do the vast majority of Japanese cars get manufactured - in the United States for the United States market.
The solutions of yesteryear no longer work now - especially when the types of innovations we are talking about now are more Int. Prop. based. No matter how wonderful the concept of a product is, the real thing to look for is where it will be easier to produce that product, not who innovates.
The article is just way to conclusory to really say anything worth while. Yes, money needs to be spent on innovation, but no matter what, production will always go to where it is cheaper, no matter what nationality the company is.
The potential benefits to basic research and R&D have nothing to do with Keynesian 'pump priming'.
Nice red herring though...
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
Personally, In my opinion if a company hires a foreigner for their R & D and they get shipped out 2 years later, they deserve what they get. What since is it to have someone write code and not have the person around any more.
Consultants are fine, but you better have someone around who has had their toes in the water or you are only asking for trouble down the road or worse yet stuck with $100/hr consultant fees for the next year.
Short Example:
My company had a project a couple of years ago which required a JAVA XML engine. We needed it fast and our Project Manager hired a consultant from a firm based out of India. Well the first morning the consulant came in and I had the displeasure of meeting him first. The guy didn't speak a lick of English. I had him sit down in the lobby(by pointing) and let my Project Manager get an earful from my boss. Needless to say the consultant didn't type a line of code and the Project Manager was let go. In the end we put our heads together and pressed on with the XML engine.
I have over 10 years in the industry as a coder and not once have I seen where a foreign programmer benefitted the project because of quality of code or cost benefit.
Maybe the big companies should invest some of their R & D in our schools and not some foreign country.... i.e. M$ in India
The blurb about our schools teaching math concepts late is all too true. I work in the math and engineering dept at a community college and you would be shocked how many people dont know how to add negative numbers, work with fractions/decimals or even divide. It is alarming and we as a country need to do something about it immediately.
Watsamatta fo you? Noone buys american anymore. North, Central, South, it's all American, yeah, that's it...
Funny how most of the "foreign" makes aren't foreign to our shores anymore, yet the "domestics" are not so domestic. Who cares anymore, in the next 10 years, it's all going to boil down to the real big one: Renault.
I'm buying ukranian next time.
-Yim
I think the big question is what fruits these bizarrely twisted metaphors will fertilize on Slashdot? Microsoft was "hoisting its own petard" not long ago: now we're asked "what fruits will reduced R&D bear?"
Ah well: I'd ask you to mod this up, but of course beggars can't be chosen...
The only thing that is bad is causing/allowing pain things to be felt. Killing does not *necessarily* cause pain. Stem cell research does involve killing (not of a human being), but might result in progress which will protect someone from feeling pain. It is therefore justified.
Murder is only unjustified killing. Please do not call it that (like meat is not murder, and paper is not murder - though you did kill for it).
Education is the start of all things needed by a society to function and it is the thing that makes or breaks a country. The incredibly bad standard of American education will and is coming back to haunt those who considered it unimportant.
Take a look at the average level of spelling here on slashdot. Then take a look at what those posters are saying and then take a look at a country with a president who has trouble communicating in grammatically correct sentences.
One of my fathers friends, bought his son a 70 Torino 429CJ. With the right driver, his car was faster, but I always beat him, since he sucked! ;)
The winning research formula of the Japanese is product development from international discoveries. Can you name more than one major Japanese scientific breakthrough. From a research perspective, they are perpetually 5-10 years behind as they are working on making the research useful. I dont know much about Europe.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Most of my systems parts come from europe (germany, hungary) and Taiwan, maybe also a little bit from china.
I cant think of even one piece of equipment coming from the states.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
If you read the UN charta you will learn that no unprovoked attack on another country is sanctioned by international law.
The UN security council itself likes to overlook this fact. Not like Bush will get another resoltion out of them to sanction his little war anyway.
Yep, two of them, both Hondas. Sure, they kept going, but they were rattletraps. Right now I own two 1988 BMWs. Rock solid cars. The 528e cost me $1800 last year, and even though it has some issues purely because of age, it is solid and runs great. The other one is an M3, so I did pay a little more for that one ($13,500 6 years ago). But the yee-ha factor is through the roof. It was my track car back when I had time to do that stuff. Both cars have 125,000+ miles on them, and don't show any signs of giving out any time soon.
If you buy a new BMW, then you are going to pay a lot. However, you can get a 4 year old BMW for the price of a new Pontiac. In 10 years, you'll still have the BMW. What kills me is people who are driving a $30,000 SUV give me crap about owning two BMWs that are collectively worth about half of their suburban sheep-mobile.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Just two cents about research overseas (particularly china, japan, and india, which you called out):
http://www.research.ibm.com/worldwide/
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
LOL. Hahahahah! I'm struggling with conflicting emoitions. Should I pity you as a retard or be disturbed by your stupidity? Oh well.
FYI, reader, embryonic stem cell research is carried out on what used to be embryos, before they were aborted (either by request or by requirement [medical etc.]). The use of stem cells taken from cadavers has no effect on the production of cadavers, and since the cadavers are being produced anyway it makes a huge amount of sense for them to have some samples taken from them for life-saving research before they're incinerated rather than simply being incinerated.
Pragmatism beats 4 religious aces.
I suppose the originial dimbulb is an anti-abortionist, and is therefore regards anything related to abortion as bad. Thankfully democracy keeps such fringe lunatics from power.
That would be cool, except I'm not sure how you would get any traction in the Ranchero. All that weight up front and nothing in the back.... ;)
Why sentience? Why don't viruses or germs have the same right not to be murdered as you? How about plants?
And if we're to base morality on popularity (e.g. "social conventions"), isn't that just mob rule?
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
bah. wake me up when you (or anybody else for that matter) can come up with a way to define and or measure sentience.
Until then you're still fishing around in the dark.
Either humans have a sacred, divine spark, and therefore should not be murdered, or humans are no more sacred than fungus. Pick one or the other.
Cultural taboo? Now your really stretching it. Not all cultures have a taboo against murder. Just the ones that survived. In which case, the only reason to not kill people is where that person's life benefits society as a whole. And where it does not? Ever see Logan's Run? Solyent Green?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes--and those embryos are no less human beings than are infants, children, adults or even teenagers. They were killed, and in the vast majority of cases they were murdered (obv. there are cases where it is necessary to abort). It is not right that they should be used for medical experimentation--who can rightly give permission? Certainly not their parents who murdered them.
Pragmatism beats 4 religious aces.
I'm not taking a religious stance (although I am, in fact, and Orthodox Christian)--I don't believe that it's proper to force one's morals or religion on others. I also--and I recognise that in this day and age it's quite unfashionable--don't believe that it is proper to kill innocents. The secular argument against abortion is quite compelling--see Libertarians for Life, which is founded and run by atheists.
I wish to run my life as I see fit and let you do the same--right up until you harm another. And abortion is by its very nature harming another human being (the embryo is not its mother; it is a distinct individual): it's killing, and is almost always murder. That is, abortion is acceptable in exactly those cases where killing is acceptable.