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How Everyday Things Are Made
OckNock writes "The Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford University in conjunction with Design4x has released online courses on design and manufacturing that include over 4 hours of streaming video (Flashplayer required). Some of the topics include airplanes, crayons, and waterjet cutting.
If only they had this when I had studied mechanical engineering - maybe I would have stayed awake in class more."
it seemed to me like a crappily edited tape that theyed show to middle schoolers before a field trip. i watched the 'transportation / automobiles' and it was HORRIBLE. no mention of tolerances, or part placement. well no, the narator did say, "up it goes" when they put the engine in. this is hardly up to teh quality of MIT's open courseware, but hey, if perty colors is your idea of an education, go for it, im sure your 'accredited' degree is in the mail.
I want 2D games back.
That was back when you did not need to sign a NDA or EULA to get a propriatory player to learn something. Mr. Rodgers came to you via published standard broadcasting signal. Now you gotta have a silly flash player, tomorrow you will have to have a DRM OS and dissapearing files for the distributed memory hole and universal censorship to work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Good luck. You are likely to be trampled by all the early retirement package, people from closed plants and layoffs who were hoping that this new fangled IT thing might make them useful again. People like me, who would be happy to have another job at a power plant. Manufacturing has been "contracting" in the US for the last 25 years. It's been moving to Mexico, Canada, East Europe and other places. Trade with China put that trend on th fast track. Big dumb companies have moved lots of IT offshore, engineering jobs took off with the factories and soon the consulting firms will have serious competition from them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I know in my own work place, and I can't stress this enough, I can look and identify a plethora of processes and issues that my team could help my site's employees become more productive at their jobs, but we don't because we're drowning in doing tech support for braindead software on buggy and security-deficient desktop software.
For example, our marketing department has employees who spend a few days taking a list of courses we offer and typing them into a page layout program to produce a brochure every month or so. Why not hack some code to pull that information out of our course database, format it, and produce the publication (or most of the grunt work of it) automatically, using some sort of style transformation. But I can't provide this service because my staff are too busy with the daily cost of supporting desktop PCs, despite my own efforts to streamline that. (And yes, I've bought it to management's attention that we spend most of our time chasing our own tails instead of working to improve employee productivity).
At some point, someone will have to "get it." Adapt or die.
Increasing productivity increases wealth. Unfortunately, some people don't get it. For example, if you force redistribution of wealth to balance things out and screw it up by removing incentives to increase productivity, you often descrease productivity and hence destroy wealth.
Imagine back about 150 years ago when most of our society was agrarian. More than half of all labor went into producing food. Not a lot of luxuries back then. When automated farm equipment came out, a lot of farm hands lost their jobs. Was this a bad thing? Of course not. Because food became cheaper, jobs shifted to manufacturing where goods were produced to make people's lives easier, etc, etc...
When jobs shift to other countries, some wealth shifts there too. But usually the productivity gains are more than enough to offset the loss in wealth because there's more of it to go around. It also helps the lives of other people in other countries to improve. Is that such a bad thing? Having a billion people in this world just sitting around and not being productive is a horrible waste of the world's potential. They should be out there making cheap toys for Happy Meals damn it!
Beyond the economic benefits there are also other benefits. As each country's economy becomes dependent on others, they are less likely to take hostile action against each other (although introduce religion into the mix and all logic and sense goes out the window).
As was posted by someone else above, there are still opportunities in IT to increase productivity in workers in your native country. As I look around my job site now, I see a tremendous amount of time spent in desktop support issues. I think the current design of software and OSes really suck. Lack of security, viruses, software that, when installed, can negatively affect other software on a PC, user's mucking with and destroying settings on PCs, etc, etc. Too much time in IT is spent with desktop support issues, fixing software issues, supporting users and not finding ways to improve the business process and hence increase productivity all around. There's also a horrible lack in adequate training. There are software tools out there to help, but employees don't know how to use it. How many in management know how to use software to plan things using a project-planning program for example?