Why do you take the posting of a Python Conference as an attempt to get you to switch?
Well, as you might recall, the original post of the story contained the following at the end:
I want to talk to some Perl and Ruby zealots^Wconverts^Wprogrammers.
So I was just obiging;-)
I suppose that sentence was a bit ambiguous as it could mean that he/she wants to talk to people who had converted* to Perl or Ruby from Python (or any other language), but I read it as he/she wanted to talk to people who had converted* from Perl or Ruby to Python. Given that it's a Python conference being held in DC, I highly doubt that anyone who had converted to Ruby would bother to show up for her/him to talk to as they would likely be attending Ruby conferences, therefore I suspect that the latter interpretation was the intended meaning. Given this, it was not too much of a stretch to think that the poster was looking for converts* from Ruby to Python, so I merely expressed my doubts about wanting (or needing) to make such a conversion*.
*NOTE: the useage of the words 'convert' or it's derivitives ('conversion', 'converts', etc) should be construed to mean that that the language in question (as in 'I am a Ruby convert') is the favorite programming language known and used by the person uttering (or typing) the phrase, however it should not be contrued to mean that the language in question is the only programming language known/used by the person uttering (or typing) the phrase.
If it's still not clear, I'll try it again with some indentation;-)
'Different strokes for different folks' as they say down at the retirement home
OK, maybe I'm not quite getting the concept here, but it doesn't seem to me that it would be impossible for the RIAA to track where something came from.
I read the MUTE blurb about the ants and the arrows in the forest. So I'm wondering, why couldn't the RIAA send their own 'ants' into the system to experimentally figure out which way the 'arrows' are pointing? Sure it would take a bit of work on their part, but it seems like it could be doable. If node X has built up a lot of information about where messages are being routed and to who (the 'arrows' pointing to paths to various recipients/senders) then those arrows could be followed, and while no node has the complete picture, running enough 'ants' through enough nodes would probably give them some idea. Early on there would be very little of this information, but after a while a lot of this information would exist in the nodes.
Sure there are a lot of similarities, but I prefer Ruby's purer OO model and I don't prefer Python's whitespace as syntax requirements and the need to type self everywhere (not to mention all those underscores). And where's the fun in there's only one way to write it?
Python definately has some advantages over Perl, but as a Rubyist, it doesn't offer me any advantages that would convince me to switch.
'Different strokes for different folks' as they say down at the retirement center
Moreover, it is found out that the Americans are shying away from the challenges of math and science. A recent National Science Foundation Study reveals a 5 per cent decline in the overall doctoral candidates in the US over the last five years.
One way to look at this is that we Americans are just lazy compared to Indians, Chinese, etc (and there is probably some truth to that). But from another perspective, why should we Americans bother to get advanced degrees in Math and Sciences when we're constantly bombarded with the message that we won't be doing the sorts of jobs here which require those degrees?
This gets me to my main point: we're not only witnessing the export of good paying jobs from the US to various 3rd world countries (and the associated economic effects), we're also witnessing a huge transfer of skills and knowlege out of the US.
As there are fewer tech jobs in the US it means that fewer engineers will be employed. When an engineer has no work for a year or two their skills will stagnate. Most engineers pick up new skills 'on the job' and without a job, they won't be picking up newer, in-demand skills.
Of course this has a ripple effect: your nephew Johnny who is in highschool wanted to follow in your footsteps and get into engineering, but now he sees that you've been out of work for a couple of years and you're considering a different field altogether. You sit down with him at Thanksgiving and tell him to go into dentistry or auto repair so that he can have a steady, decent-paying profession... Well, you get the picture. Whereas math and science education is already pretty poor in many parts of the US, this trend will not encourage it to get any better. No, we'll be offering pre-law classes in highschool instead of calculus soon.
2) Risk. If my gunslingers ran into a problem, I wouldn't have been able to "throw bodies" at it. My budget wouldn't have allowed for that.
Since when does throwing more bodies at a problem help? It's kind of like saying that you've got one month to make a baby so you go out and get 9 women pregnant in an attempt to meet the schedule.
All of you Overpaid twits that were worried that a Union would not help you because you made more money than the average joe, well some jerk in India has your job now, because you didn't want a Union.
Can you explain how forming a union would have saved our jobs from going to India? Seems to me that as soon as companies got any inkling that a union might form, they would immediately send the work offshore at an even faster pace.
No, a union isn't the solution (at least not for American programmers). A better solution would be to unionize Indian programmers so that their wages rise faster to meet our (admittedly) falling pay rates.
In the meantime (and yes, this sucks) as the article suggests, our pay rates will have to fall in order to equalize with rates in India and other 3rd world places. I had a C++ contract back in the summer of 2002 that paid $10 to $15/hour less than it would have the year before and now I've got another C++ contract that pays $5/hr less than I was making in the summer of 2002. But since I was out of work for over a year, I'm happy to have it.
The problem is, as our pay rates fall so that we can compete, all the things we have to pay for are either fixed in price (like mortgages) or are going up (like electricity, gas, etc.).
Varadarajan told the audience he would publish full documentation and release most of the code written for the machine. However, some of the software is subject to patent applications, he said, and he wasn't yet sure if it would be released under an open-source license.
What's up with that? Used to be that work like this done at a Univeristy was considered 'open' as in available to anyone to help advance the state-of-the-art. Not anymore...
I checked for pricing of the textbook needed for my current course on Amazon (very arcane title having to do with physical synthesis [chip layout]) and found it was selling for $130+. I then checked half.com and found a seller selling copies for $63. After I got the book, I noticed that it was printed in Taiwan (had an extra special little note under the copyright). It shipped directly from Taiwan (and only took about 3 days). Now I suspect that this book costs something like $20 in Taiwan. I've heard that they just copy American textbooks over there without paying attention to the copyright notice. So if you've got a direct connection with one of these Taiwanese 'publishers' you can probably get a much better deal than you could in England.
Let's see, in 1983 I had to wait several minutes for my programs/games/OS to load into my Sinclair ZX-80 (or my Ohio Scientific C2-4P) from cassette tape.
Now in 2003 I wait hours for the latest version of OpenOffice to download (OK, I've still got a dial-up connection, can't afford $50/mo for cable|DSL).
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
OK, it got your attention. Lots of people use that reply on threads like this - they just haven't lost their jobs yet.
Looking at this guy's resume really shows that 'updating your skills' isn't going to help much given the economic pressures (including outsourcing) we're under right now. We're witnessing an epic shift of knowledge, power and money away from the US and to various well-positioned third-world countries (primarily India and China right now). Perhaps this shift was inevitable, but it also looks like the current adiministration is trying to accelerate it. Perhaps different policies could have at least slowed it down so it would cause less hardship and destruction of the middle class, but again, the current administration doesn't really care as they sit in their finely appointed digs and lecture us on how outsourcing saves money and is in the longrun benefits the economy (while you're waiting for the benefits, there are still spaces under the freeway overpass and you can pick up a big cardboard box out behind the appliance store).
If you're 'updating your skills' in hope that doing so will get you a job in the near future then you're engagine in futility similar to trying to swim against a tidal wave... Unless you're 'updating your skills' in a different direction, like becoming a mortician - with the aging of the babyboomers that's probably one of the few industries that will grow over the next couple of decades (and it's tough to outsource).
To quote the article: Gartner Inc. (Stamford, Conn.), a market analyst firm, projects that 10 percent of the information technology positions will be displaced in the next 18 months as jobs go overseas.
That's a stunning figure. It's worse than we thought. I thought it was something like 10% over the next five years.
I suspect that, a year from now, people will be talking about the "Bush recovery," and whoever emerges from the Democratic primary is going to be scrambling for issues to run on.
For the last two years I've been telling myself that things would be better by this time next year. Now I really doubt it. With the Gartner Group saying that over the next 18 months 10% of the remaining IT jobs are heading overseas I really don't think it'll be any better next year at this time. With consumer confidence back down where it was just before the war started because so many people are afraid they'll lose their job, I really doubt things'll be much better next year. With us spending hundreds of Billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, I really doubt it. But maybe I'll be wrong again this year?
Nah, I doubt it. Bye, bye Bushie, looks like it'll be a democrat next time.
The opcodes may be openly available (though, aren't they copyrighted by Intel? And haven't Intel and AMD diverged by introducing new, incompatible opcodes?) but the implementation certainly isn't. Of course you've got to publish the opcodes for a processor (and the actions they cause the processor to take): people have to be able to program the darn thing. But just because the opcodes are published doesn't make the x86 architecture (or to be more specific, the 386,486,Pentium I,II,II,IV, etc.) an 'open standard' - I'm sure Intel would take issue with your assertion. Sure you can reverse engineer what has been published (as AMD and VIA[Cyrix] have done) to come up with your own architecture, but does that make it 'open'
Perhaps this is just devolving into hairsplitting, here... But it seems to me that Barret's claim of a standard (going back to the original article) is spurious, since the instruction set of a processor is pretty much irrelavant as long as it's reasonably full-featured and supports reasonable performance. If you have a widely used compiler (like gcc) that can emit object code for your processor _and_ if you've got the source for all of the applications you need then who cares if your competitor's opcodes (Intel's in this case) are widely known and used?
Or to put it another way: According to Barret's own claim, didn't Intel ignore a 'standard' when they came out with the Itanic? It's opcodes are not compatible with the x86 so-called-standard. So Intel itself did exactly what Barret is chastising China about.
The opcodes are known and well documented. Multiple companies besides Intel has created their own reimplementation of the "x86 standard". Dozens more individual programmers have duplicated it in software.
So? When was the last time you programmed directly in x86 opcodes? It's an instruction set - sure it's the most widely used instruction set in the world, but as long as you have a compiler that can target your processor (like gcc) it really doesn't matter especially when it comes to Open Source software which you can compile yourself. As long as we have an open source OS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc), office applications (OpenOffice, Abiword, Kword, etc), browsers (Mozilla, Konqueror, etc) what does it matter that that they get compiled to x86 or RedDragon opcodes?
The x86 opcodes are not a standard like a language standard (like the C/C++, or Java standards). Programming languages are standardized so we can use different compilers/development tools and get reasonably similar results (though the C++ standard seems to be interpreted rather broadly), but very few people program directly in ASM anymore so x86 opcodes can't be considered like a language standard.
He's talking about chinese plans to try to grow their own (non x86) chip market through protectionist policies, not about "don't try linux it will never work!!!111"
Last I heard, Intel's x86 family is proprietary - therefore Intel persues a protectionist policy to safeguard it's IP and it's market. You can't call the Pentium or Itanic open standards. In Intel's worldview they are standards by virtue of the fact that something like 90% of all computers sold have an x86 CPU, but they certainly aren't open. If another type of CPU gains a huge market (like the Red Dragon in China) then it will become the same kind of standard that the x86 used to be.
The CPU that China is working on will (from what I understand) be a much more open 'standard' than any of Intel's CPUs. The consortium will share the design freely with members (granted, it probably won't be free to join this consortium).
The reason Barrett is worried about Linux in this case is that Micro$oft isn't likely to port Windows to the Red Dragon CPU anytime soon, but it's trivial to create a gcc backend for a new CPU like the Red Dragon, and as soon as you've got a gcc for it you've got Linux running on it in a matter of days or hours. So Linux enables an easy change to a new CPU and this is worrisome to Intel since China, Japan and Korea represent a potential market that is probably 5X as big as the US market... And of course India might become involved as well which adds another billion people to the market.
Given that Intel is working hard to transfer lots of tech jobs to China and India (so the jobs will be 'closer to the markets' to quote Andy Grove), a lot of people here in the US soon won't have the cash to buy Intel products... Barrett is probably becoming aware of this and maybe now he's starting to say "Oh, shit!" How ironic: We export jobs to China and India to save money and thus decimate our own market and then China and India decide to save even more money by not buying Intel.
'such a strategy might protect local companies and markets in the short term, [but] it would make it more difficult for Asian companies to participate in world markets.'
OK, China has over a billion people. Add in other parts of Asia that would like to participate and you've got a market that is something like 4 to 5 times as big as the US market. And then consider that most of the European governments will probably be adopting Linux over the next five years... And then we'll see Barrett's quote being made by someone else in either Europe or Asia that goes something like:
'The strategey of sticking with Windows might protect local companies in the US (like Micro$oft) in the short term, but it would make it more difficult for American companies to participate in world markets.'
Actually, Barrett doesn't care much at all about Windows (he only cares as much as it promotes Intel CPUs) - he's most worried about China's own CPU (Red Dragon, or whatever it's called) improving to the point where it can be produced competitively with Intel's own CPUs. When that happens, Intel probably won't be selling too many units in China.
I like the horse race analogy. I really hope you're analysis is right as I am a fan of Ruby - it really is a great language that deserves a lot more attention.
In regard to the topic at hand, there is a Rubydotnet project in the works. From the RubyDotNet page: The Ruby/.NET bridge lets you use.NET and Ruby objects together in your programs. You can access.NET objects from Ruby and vice-versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you take the posting of a Python Conference as an attempt to get you to switch?
;-)
;-)
Well, as you might recall, the original post of the story contained the following at the end:
I want to talk to some Perl and Ruby zealots^Wconverts^Wprogrammers.
So I was just obiging
I suppose that sentence was a bit ambiguous as it could mean that he/she wants to talk to people who had converted* to Perl or Ruby from Python (or any other language), but I read it as he/she wanted to talk to people who had converted* from Perl or Ruby to Python. Given that it's a Python conference being held in DC, I highly doubt that anyone who had converted to Ruby would bother to show up for her/him to talk to as they would likely be attending Ruby conferences, therefore I suspect that the latter interpretation was the intended meaning. Given this, it was not too much of a stretch to think that the poster was looking for converts* from Ruby to Python, so I merely expressed my doubts about wanting (or needing) to make such a conversion*.
*NOTE: the useage of the words 'convert' or it's derivitives ('conversion', 'converts', etc) should be construed to mean that that the language in question (as in 'I am a Ruby convert') is the favorite programming language known and used by the person uttering (or typing) the phrase, however it should not be contrued to mean that the language in question is the only programming language known/used by the person uttering (or typing) the phrase.
If it's still not clear, I'll try it again with some indentation
'Different strokes for different folks' as they say down at the retirement home
OK, maybe I'm not quite getting the concept here, but it doesn't seem to me that it would be impossible for the RIAA to track where something came from.
I read the MUTE blurb about the ants and the arrows in the forest. So I'm wondering, why couldn't the RIAA send their own 'ants' into the system to experimentally figure out which way the 'arrows' are pointing? Sure it would take a bit of work on their part, but it seems like it could be doable. If node X has built up a lot of information about where messages are being routed and to who (the 'arrows' pointing to paths to various recipients/senders) then those arrows could be followed, and while no node has the complete picture, running enough 'ants' through enough nodes would probably give them some idea. Early on there would be very little of this information, but after a while a lot of this information would exist in the nodes.
Am I missing something?
Sure there are a lot of similarities, but I prefer Ruby's purer OO model and I don't prefer Python's whitespace as syntax requirements and the need to type self everywhere (not to mention all those underscores). And where's the fun in there's only one way to write it?
Python definately has some advantages over Perl, but as a Rubyist, it doesn't offer me any advantages that would convince me to switch.
'Different strokes for different folks' as they say down at the retirement center
Moreover, it is found out that the Americans are shying away from the challenges of math and science. A recent National Science Foundation Study reveals a 5 per cent decline in the overall doctoral candidates in the US over the last five years.
One way to look at this is that we Americans are just lazy compared to Indians, Chinese, etc (and there is probably some truth to that). But from another perspective, why should we Americans bother to get advanced degrees in Math and Sciences when we're constantly bombarded with the message that we won't be doing the sorts of jobs here which require those degrees?
This gets me to my main point: we're not only witnessing the export of good paying jobs from the US to various 3rd world countries (and the associated economic effects), we're also witnessing a huge transfer of skills and knowlege out of the US.
As there are fewer tech jobs in the US it means that fewer engineers will be employed. When an engineer has no work for a year or two their skills will stagnate. Most engineers pick up new skills 'on the job' and without a job, they won't be picking up newer, in-demand skills.
Of course this has a ripple effect: your nephew Johnny who is in highschool wanted to follow in your footsteps and get into engineering, but now he sees that you've been out of work for a couple of years and you're considering a different field altogether. You sit down with him at Thanksgiving and tell him to go into dentistry or auto repair so that he can have a steady, decent-paying profession... Well, you get the picture. Whereas math and science education is already pretty poor in many parts of the US, this trend will not encourage it to get any better. No, we'll be offering pre-law classes in highschool instead of calculus soon.
2) Risk. If my gunslingers ran into a problem, I wouldn't have been able to "throw bodies" at it. My budget wouldn't have allowed for that.
Since when does throwing more bodies at a problem help? It's kind of like saying that you've got one month to make a baby so you go out and get 9 women pregnant in an attempt to meet the schedule.
All of you Overpaid twits that were worried that a Union would not help you because you made more money than the average joe, well some jerk in India has your job now, because you didn't want a Union.
Can you explain how forming a union would have saved our jobs from going to India? Seems to me that as soon as companies got any inkling that a union might form, they would immediately send the work offshore at an even faster pace.
No, a union isn't the solution (at least not for American programmers). A better solution would be to unionize Indian programmers so that their wages rise faster to meet our (admittedly) falling pay rates.
In the meantime (and yes, this sucks) as the article suggests, our pay rates will have to fall in order to equalize with rates in India and other 3rd world places. I had a C++ contract back in the summer of 2002 that paid $10 to $15/hour less than it would have the year before and now I've got another C++ contract that pays $5/hr less than I was making in the summer of 2002. But since I was out of work for over a year, I'm happy to have it.
The problem is, as our pay rates fall so that we can compete, all the things we have to pay for are either fixed in price (like mortgages) or are going up (like electricity, gas, etc.).
Cool! Now Mac users are Republicans by default. I didn't know that. :)
So Al Gore has switched?
Is this a Halloween story?
The quote was an exact cut&paste from the wired article. Are you claiming that the wired article misquoted Varadarajan?
Varadarajan told the audience he would publish full documentation and release most of the code written for the machine. However, some of the software is subject to patent applications, he said, and he wasn't yet sure if it would be released under an open-source license.
What's up with that?
Used to be that work like this done at a Univeristy was considered 'open' as in available to anyone to help advance the state-of-the-art. Not anymore...
Manager: "But making less money and having more time is un-American!"
I fully agree with you, it would be great if there were more part-time tech jobs there would be more of them to go around.
Can you post some URLs?
I checked out this one:
http://www.firstandsecond.com/
of course the prices are in rupees - does this get automatically converted by the credit card co? (and what's the exchange rate for rupees?)
I checked for pricing of the textbook needed for my current course on Amazon (very arcane title having to do with physical synthesis [chip layout]) and found it was selling for $130+. I then checked half.com and found a seller selling copies for $63. After I got the book, I noticed that it was printed in Taiwan (had an extra special little note under the copyright). It shipped directly from Taiwan (and only took about 3 days). Now I suspect that this book costs something like $20 in Taiwan. I've heard that they just copy American textbooks over there without paying attention to the copyright notice. So if you've got a direct connection with one of these Taiwanese 'publishers' you can probably get a much better deal than you could in England.
Let's see, in 1983 I had to wait several minutes for my programs/games/OS to load into my Sinclair ZX-80 (or my Ohio Scientific C2-4P) from cassette tape.
Now in 2003 I wait hours for the latest version of OpenOffice to download (OK, I've still got a dial-up connection, can't afford $50/mo for cable|DSL).
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The gartner group also said that OS/2 would capture 35% of the market by 1994.
Yeah, you're right. Could be they're way low with that 10% estimate - maybe it's more like 20%.
OK, it got your attention. Lots of people use that reply on threads like this - they just haven't lost their jobs yet.
Looking at this guy's resume really shows that 'updating your skills' isn't going to help much given the economic pressures (including outsourcing) we're under right now. We're witnessing an epic shift of knowledge, power and money away from the US and to various well-positioned third-world countries (primarily India and China right now). Perhaps this shift was inevitable, but it also looks like the current adiministration is trying to accelerate it. Perhaps different policies could have at least slowed it down so it would cause less hardship and destruction of the middle class, but again, the current administration doesn't really care as they sit in their finely appointed digs and lecture us on how outsourcing saves money and is in the longrun benefits the economy (while you're waiting for the benefits, there are still spaces under the freeway overpass and you can pick up a big cardboard box out behind the appliance store).
If you're 'updating your skills' in hope that doing so will get you a job in the near future then you're engagine in futility similar to trying to swim against a tidal wave... Unless you're 'updating your skills' in a different direction, like becoming a mortician - with the aging of the babyboomers that's probably one of the few industries that will grow over the next couple of decades (and it's tough to outsource).
well that's what they're saying on eetimes.com
I got that Gartner statistic from EETimes.
In an article entitled Outsourcing Causes Jitters: Is my job next?
To quote the article:
Gartner Inc. (Stamford, Conn.), a market analyst firm, projects that 10 percent of the information technology positions will be displaced in the next 18 months as jobs go overseas.
That's a stunning figure. It's worse than we thought. I thought it was something like 10% over the next five years.
I suspect that, a year from now, people will be talking about the "Bush recovery," and whoever emerges from the Democratic primary is going to be scrambling for issues to run on.
For the last two years I've been telling myself that things would be better by this time next year. Now I really doubt it. With the Gartner Group saying that over the next 18 months 10% of the remaining IT jobs are heading overseas I really don't think it'll be any better next year at this time. With consumer confidence back down where it was just before the war started because so many people are afraid they'll lose their job, I really doubt things'll be much better next year. With us spending hundreds of Billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, I really doubt it. But maybe I'll be wrong again this year?
Nah, I doubt it. Bye, bye Bushie, looks like it'll be a democrat next time.
"Meaningless, Meaningless said the Teacher..."
The opcodes may be openly available (though, aren't they copyrighted by Intel? And haven't Intel and AMD diverged by introducing new, incompatible opcodes?) but the implementation certainly isn't.
Of course you've got to publish the opcodes for a processor (and the actions they cause the processor to take): people have to be able to program the darn thing. But just because the opcodes are published doesn't make the x86 architecture (or to be more specific, the 386,486,Pentium I,II,II,IV, etc.) an 'open standard' - I'm sure Intel would take issue with your assertion. Sure you can reverse engineer what has been published (as AMD and VIA[Cyrix] have done) to come up with your own architecture, but does that make it 'open'
Perhaps this is just devolving into hairsplitting, here... But it seems to me that Barret's claim of a standard (going back to the original article) is spurious, since the instruction set of a processor is pretty much irrelavant as long as it's reasonably full-featured and supports reasonable performance. If you have a widely used compiler (like gcc) that can emit object code for your processor _and_ if you've got the source for all of the applications you need then who cares if your competitor's opcodes (Intel's in this case) are widely known and used?
Or to put it another way: According to Barret's own claim, didn't Intel ignore a 'standard' when they came out with the Itanic? It's opcodes are not compatible with the x86 so-called-standard. So Intel itself did exactly what Barret is chastising China about.
The opcodes are known and well documented. Multiple companies besides Intel has created their own reimplementation of the "x86 standard". Dozens more individual programmers have duplicated it in software.
So? When was the last time you programmed directly in x86 opcodes? It's an instruction set - sure it's the most widely used instruction set in the world, but as long as you have a compiler that can target your processor (like gcc) it really doesn't matter especially when it comes to Open Source software which you can compile yourself. As long as we have an open source OS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc), office applications (OpenOffice, Abiword, Kword, etc), browsers (Mozilla, Konqueror, etc) what does it matter that
that they get compiled to x86 or RedDragon opcodes?
The x86 opcodes are not a standard like a language standard (like the C/C++, or Java standards). Programming languages are standardized so we can use different compilers/development tools and get reasonably similar results (though the C++ standard seems to be interpreted rather broadly), but very few people program directly in ASM anymore so x86 opcodes can't be considered like a language standard.
He's talking about chinese plans to try to grow their own (non x86) chip market through protectionist policies, not about "don't try linux it will never work!!!111"
Last I heard, Intel's x86 family is proprietary - therefore Intel persues a protectionist policy to safeguard it's IP and it's market. You can't call the Pentium or Itanic open standards. In Intel's worldview they are standards by virtue of the fact that something like 90% of all computers sold have an x86 CPU, but they certainly aren't open. If another type of CPU gains a huge market (like the Red Dragon in China) then it will become the same kind of standard that the x86 used to be.
The CPU that China is working on will (from what I understand) be a much more open 'standard' than any of Intel's CPUs. The consortium will share the design freely with members (granted, it probably won't be free to join this consortium).
The reason Barrett is worried about Linux in this case is that Micro$oft isn't likely to port Windows to the Red Dragon CPU anytime soon, but it's trivial to create a gcc backend for a new CPU like the Red Dragon, and as soon as you've got a gcc for it you've got Linux running on it in a matter of days or hours. So Linux enables an easy change to a new CPU and this is worrisome to Intel since China, Japan and Korea represent a potential market that is probably 5X as big as the US market... And of course India might become involved as well which adds another billion people to the market.
Given that Intel is working hard to transfer lots of tech jobs to China and India (so the jobs will be 'closer to the markets' to quote Andy Grove), a lot of people here in the US soon won't have the cash to buy Intel products... Barrett is probably becoming aware of this and maybe now he's starting to say "Oh, shit!" How ironic: We export jobs to China and India to save money and thus decimate our own market and then China and India decide to save even more money by not buying Intel.
'such a strategy might protect local companies and markets in the short term, [but] it would make it more difficult for Asian companies to participate in world markets.'
OK, China has over a billion people. Add in other parts of Asia that would like to participate and you've got a market that is something like 4 to 5 times as big as the US market. And then consider
that most of the European governments will probably be adopting Linux over the next five years... And then we'll see Barrett's quote being made by someone else in either Europe or Asia that goes something like:
'The strategey of sticking with Windows might protect local companies in the US (like Micro$oft) in the short term, but it would make it more difficult for American companies to participate in world markets.'
Actually, Barrett doesn't care much at all about Windows (he only cares as much as it promotes Intel CPUs) - he's most worried about China's own CPU (Red Dragon, or whatever it's called) improving to the point where it can be produced competitively with Intel's own CPUs. When that happens, Intel probably won't be selling too many units in China.
Well, I'm married so I was worried about other geeks out there....
And it was meant as a joke...
I have no idea what SWF means in the context of word processors, so when I read it I saw "Single White Female" and that seemed pretty funny.
the ability to export to PDF and SWF
First it was jobs, now it's women.
If we keep exporting all of the Single White Females, who will geeks date and marry?
I like the horse race analogy. I really hope you're analysis is right as I am a fan of Ruby - it really is a great language that deserves a lot more attention.
.NET and Ruby objects together in your programs. You can access .NET objects from Ruby and vice-versa.
In regard to the topic at hand, there is a Rubydotnet project in the works. From the RubyDotNet page:
The Ruby/.NET bridge lets you use