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Places Where the World's Tech Pools, Despite the Internet
Slatterz writes "A decade ago people were talking about the death of distance, and how the internet would make physical geography irrelevant. This has not come to pass; there are still places around the world that are hubs of technology just as there are for air travel, product manufacturing or natural resource exploitation. This list of the ten best IT centres of excellence includes some interesting trivia about Station X during the Second World War, why Romania is teeming with software developers, Silicon Valley, Fort Meade Maryland, and Zhongguancun in China, where Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters."
That was inspiring! Lets all hold hands and sing Kumbaya!
And they all happen to be male.
it is the kind of place that inspires people with money to take a punt at a seemingly dumb idea.
Remember that: inspire people with money.
I find it quite silly to compare countries to cities, or a valley in one case. A few points:
* There are many places in Finland with no tech, because there's no anything.
* Boston itself is tiny and Cambridge certainly outclasses it for tech. This should really be the region bounded by I-495.
* Japan, Taiwan and Romania are quite large compared to those other places.
This list is just silly. I mean Japan?! Come on. Japan is the size of the entire east coast of the US. How much sense would it make to put "The entire east coast" as one of the top 10 "places" where Tech is pooling. None. This list is nonsense.
They're for sure missing the "telecom corridor" in the DFW area (hello, TI, inventor of the silicon transistor!) and "research triangle" in North Carolina.
I am d3matt
It's funny how it breaks down the Bay Area into San Francisco and Silicon Valley while on the other hand it puts entire Japan (population 130 mil) as one entry.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Like in Singapore? Which libtard are you quoting, Friedman or Florida?
Yeah, this is hardly a definite list, it was just an off the top from two guys. In the tradition of "two points makes a trend line", we have Finland, b/c they are the (original) home of Linus Torvalds and also Nokia. What about Israel, Cambridge (UK), South Korea, Austin TX, New York City etc.
Enjoy, but take it with a barrel of salt.
Silicon Valley is special to me because of its cultural diversity. In one medium sized company you can work shoulder to shoulder with people from every major world ethnic group and every major world religion (including no religion). They work together, peacefully, to make better lives for themselves and their children. Look around the rest of the world. This place is unique and special. I see lots of other places around the world where folks insist on segregating themselves by ethnicity and/or religion. They must hate my home, Silicon Valley. Peace.
Hate to break it to you, but this happens in most of the United States. In my experience, a lot of the people in California just think they are special.
I used to live in California. They may not discriminate on ethnicity or religion, but go visit the Bay Area with an NRA teeshirt and a rifle to hunt some deer and see how nice everyone is to you.
Others note the relatively cheap real estate
Silicon Valley and “cheap real estate”? Compared to what? The moon? San Francisco?
Have a nice time.
It's like the old joke, "if you live in the desert, go where the water is". I think we as technology professionals should watch with interest the turmoil on Wall Street, another industry that saw people pooling together in set places. While I think that having Silicon Valleys IS a very important and critical starting place, I KNOW from firsthand experience that content creation happens all over for the people who do it. I code from maybe midnight to 7AM every day, like clockwork. I work this way because I like the quiet of working at night. I work alone more often than not, and I like that free design process. I USED to work in a cube in a technology center while I was learning to code, but I think that the future is in people getting out of the 'me too' Valley mentality, and into the self aware entrepenurial mentality. For me this is what it takes, but part of the process was moving to the mountains to avoid all the city life distractions.
Personally, I don't see how anything gets done in office buildings period. They're all so grey and structured. I think imagination is a prerequisite for invention, and that we stack the cards against ourselves by focusing on one or 2 holy grail areas for technology.
Remember, garages are everywhere (at least in America), and I think that this pooling effect is not only not necessarily a good thing, but it might be why computing breakthroughs are slowing down (despite the hype). The last real cycle of innovation ended in the late 90s, and I would say that I don't see much of it now either.
--chitlenz
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
Probably directly proportional to how nice you are to animals. In some places, they don't like it when you shoot animals for fun.
Thank you for proving my point.
I actually don't hunt myself, but I am of the opinion that animals need to die for humans to live and I would have no problem killing something that I needed to eat. If someone actually wants to go through with all the BS it takes to hunt nowdays (hunting permit/draw, gun permit, learning to shoot reliably under pressure, finding the animal, skinning the animal and packing it out), more power to them. It's a little piece of history that most of us don't appreciate about when we are in a hurry to buy our chicken and cow meat in the supermarket, on the way home to watch Survivor or get on the internet.
People were meant to kill animals and plants to eat them and use them as resources to live. Much in the same way that animals kill each other for life to continue. The key is to do it responsibly, like the other animals do.
Sometimes, humans even need to die for other humans to live.
Welcome to the real world, it's a messy place.
London, Hamburg, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Paris, Barcelona, Cape Town, heck, even Windhoek, etc.
And nowadays in big corporations everywhere you see the same thing. When I worked in Warsaw there were Indian, Chinese, English, German, Polish and of course yours truly (Mexican), in Kula Lumpur there were Malays (Muslim), Thai (Buddhist), Chinese, varied westerners, Iranians, Indian, all working happily without undue complications.
Your comment sounds terribly parochial to be frank, you guys in the US need to get out of your country a bit more.
Bar extremist regimes (Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea) where people are separated in purpose for religious, ethnic or ideological reasons, in most civilized places (normally democracies) you will see hot spots where peaceful coexistence is the norm.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The GP was refering to people that hunt for fun. He said nothing about people that hunt for need or that use the kill for their own consumption.
As for the NRA it may be a legal organization in the US, but they are seen as nutcases in many places, and for many good reasons (their extreme views about gun ownership are ayathollic and confrontational, so it should be no surprise if some people find them disagreeable).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, we call them H-1B's. In other news, our local unemployment rate is now above 10%.
Can you assure us that those unemployed can cover the unfilled positions? When I used to interview people (the UK, I know, not the same, but it seems to be in a similar situation) we could not fill positions (even entry level ones) because most students were going for soft option education in University (media studies, photography, film making, etc) instead of science and engineering, which is the exact opposite of what has happened in other countries.
Also kids from other countries have lots of experience under their belt: in the UK university is only 3 years, and very often kids take a gap year, that is all great and good, but people their same age elsewhere will have 4 or 5 years university under their belts and they don't take gap years but instead start working, so when you get both of them in front of you it is frankly a no contest.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
DARPA is in Arlington, Virginia, one of the most diverse and well-educated counties in the country. (And the smallest self-governing county in the country.) Arlington County is also a leader in smart growth, planning, sustainable growth (or whatever you call it), with places like Tyson's Corner, Virginia, openly pointing to it as the inspiration for what they want to become.
Virginia Square is a neighborhood and a Metro stop, not a town.