Some people seem to think that faster CPUs and bigger hard drives are not needed
One of these 16.7 MP images is what, 8 megs in JPEG? So a $100, 200-gig hard drive would only fit 25,000 photos on it? In RAW mode, at 24 bits-per-pixel (I'm making an assumption on that), they'd be about 48 megs, so you'd be down to a measly 4,000 photos.
And, of course, keep in mind that you're talking about storing 25,000 photos from a $9,000 camera on a $100 hard drive. Chances are that the few people who buy a $9,000 camera can afford a bigger drive. And by the time a 16.7MP camera is affordable by most folks, hard drives will still be a lot bigger.
Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that the 25,000 images themselves would be worth far more to you than the hard drive and the camera combined. So, figure that if you spent a meager 6.6% of the cost of the camera on hard drives, you could not only store 75,000 images, but you could have an entire mirror of the data as well.
Of course, there are ways in which "regular" photography is still better. But there are ways in which it isn't. It's like ethernet: Do you want it wired or wireless? The "best" choice depends on the circumstances.
Are you taking a wedding/bridal photo that will be blown up to 16x20, and hang on someone's wall as a priceless memento? Bring your medium- or large- format camera.
Need to shoot a sporting event, and have the pictures in the paper or on the news within hours? Leave the film at home...and doesn't require batteries, or a backpack full of a notebook-WiFi, and so on.
No, it just takes a backpack full of film! If you need to take a lot of pictures, I'd rather have a notebook with a 120-gig drive than have 400 rolls of film. But, how often do you need to take over 14,000 images? Like I said, it depends on your situation.
The problem with "real life" is that you don't have equal resolution over your entire field of vision. In fact, you only get good detail from a pretty small portion of your vision.
Here's a test. Look at some text on the screen. Now look just 1 to 2 inches away, and try and read the text without looking at it again. Not very easy, is it?
I have an HP laser printer that can "do" 1200 dpi, which looks smooth to my eye, where 600 dpi doesn't. So, to print a 16 MB image at 1200 dpi, the result would be on the order of 3 inches by four.
Any "enlargement" above this would mean either using "interpolation" (which reduces resolution, or texture), or adding noise and/or distortion/pixelation.
This is not professional or commercial 35-mm quality yet.
For someone with such extensive photographical expertise, you're making a very amateur mistake. You're comparing the method of photo production (laser printer vs. projection), not the method of photo aquisition.
In other words, just because your laser printer doesn't compare to film doesn't mean that the digital image doesn't compare to film. I've only used a few color lasers, but I've never seen one that did a very decent job of photos.
Even though your 1200-DPI laser doesn't cut it, I've seen photos from a 400-DPI dye-sub which take extremely close examination to tell if they're film or not. By "extremely close", I mean that you have to either (a) have significantly better than 20/20 vision and be able to focus very closely, or (b) have a magnifying glass. And at a 400-DPI resolution, this camera would be producing prints larger than 8"x12" without any interpolation whatsoever.
What I don't understand is why anyone needs a wifi access point in their desktop.
I've heard of some of those crazy, long-bearded types that use desktops as routers. I think they use those two weird operating systems, "Linux" and "BSD"...
Who would ask for WIFI to be put into the chipset of a computer?
Look back five or eight years. Who would have asked for any network card to be built into the chipset of a computer? (I remember listening to people whine that the IDE controllers were being integrated into the chipsets.) And yet NVidia's integrated NIC is a top-notch performer, and it's tough to find a motherboard without integrated network these days. And as more people move from ethernet to wireless networking, moving from embedded ethernet to embedded wireless is a natural shift - and I believe that we will, in the future, see more motherboards with integrated wireless networking.
Who would like an Access Point feature placed into the chipset?
Anyone who wants to use the computer as a router. You know, like all of those people who use PCs with that one OS as routers. What was it called? Oh yeah, "Linux"....
There is, of course, no denying that Microsoft does some pretty underhanded and monopolistic things. But, there's also no denying that these things (done correctly) can be a great convenience to a lot of people.
I've got a wireless mouse that has absolutely no lag under Windows - but try playing a DirectX game, and it's got tons of lag. Because I rarely game on that machine, I haven't taken the time to figure it out - but if I plug a regular USB mouse into it, it works just fine.
Well, put your idea to the test: Have your friend fart in a room while he's walking around. Go in there with your mouth open, so the airborn smells are hitting the receptors in your mouth and nose. Try and figure out which path he walked in the room. If you can't do it, my dog wins! : )
Actually, dogs still have a much, much better sense of smell than we do. They have (depending on the breed), around 20 times more receptors than we do, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
In tests where a person lightly touched an object, dogs were able to pick up the smell after the object had been left outside as long as two weeks.
Of course, no animal is equally receptive to every single smell imaginable. Just like some smells are much stronger to us than others, the same is true of dogs - but you're going to be hard-pressed to find more than a rare handful of cases where a dog's sense of smell isn't going to beat a human's by quite as much.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a room by myself, and cracked a fart. I got up, walked around the room,and sat somewhere else. About a half of a minute later, one of my dogs walked in, and the smell hit him. His eyes closed almost entirely off, his nose started wiggling, and he followed it over to exactly where I was sitting, then followed the exact path I had walked, and ended up with his nose to my butt. And it hadn't even really been a "stinky" fart.
Now a human might have recognized that one area of the room smelled stronger than the other, but my dog was able to detect the difference in odor across an inch of air.
That's really not that uncommon, if someone has passed by on a trail and a search dog comes by some time later, they can tell by the minute smell gradient which direction the person was travelling in. Dogs are just freaking amazing.
What's interesting about this is not just that it's faster than the older generation.
First, the 6800 GT/Ultra gave twice the performance of the previous, similarly-priced generation. That's a lot larger jump than we've seen in quite some time.
Now, add on the fact that these $200 cards are very nearly as fast as the 6800's. That means that comparing these to even the cream-of-the-crop, $400 cards of the last generation, you're getting far more performance at only half of the price.
This really is the largest jump in the performance:cost ratio that we've seen in a long time.
I'm sorry any video card at $400 is not a great deal.
Really? What if I sold you a video card guaranteed to play all popular games for the next thirty years for $400. Still a bad deal? You're confusing a "good deal" with simple cost. The two aren't the same.
Why when every other part of a computer has gotten cheaper over the years do video cards get more expensive?
I remember when a 486/33 with 64 megs of memory, a 1-gig hard drive, and a 1-gig tape backup had a price tag of $10,000. Now I can build a 3-GHz PC with a 6800GT for a thousand bucks. You're telling me that a price drop of a full order of magnitude isn't significant?
The 6800 GT/Ultra chips have three times the transistor count of a regular Pentium 4. They also come with 256 megs of very fast memory.
I'm not sure if you've looked into the price of 1.6 ns or 2.0 ns memory lately, but just the 256 megs of memory isn't exactly cheap. Then you've got one seriously expensive chip to build.
And, of course, these are the "premium" line, the company does have higher margins on them than they do on the volume cards. Just like how the average profit on a Saturn is measured in hundreds of dollars, when the profit on even a fairly "regular" SUV is usually over $5,000 (the average SUV profit is around 25%. Do the math.)
Had you slightly overclocked your XP 2600 and bought a better video card, you'd probably have a better overall gaming experience. As an example, I had an AthlonXP 2500. I bought a GeForce 6800GT for $400. I'm guessing that you paid considerably more for your CPU/mobo/video upgrade, yet I'll bet that the overall experience in most any recent game would be better on my machine.
With the somewhat slower CPU I have, the FPS might be 45 instead of 60 - but that would be 45 FPS with far more visuals, higher resolution, antialiasing, and anisotropic filtering.
Of course, personal preferences will vary, but given the choice of "good" visuals at 60 FPS and "out of this world" visuals at 45, I'd take the latter.
Myself, I'm the opposite. Even when I was using my TNT2, most games on my PC looked far better than the games my friends would play on their consoles. And now that I have a 6800GT, well, there's absolutely no comparison. Besides, I like the greater control-customizations you can do on a PC.
The one area where I think that consoles do have a definite advantage is in gameplay. I played Crash Bandicoot Warped on a friend's playstation, and even though the graphics couldn't hold a candle to my PC, the gameplay was almost enough to make me buy a playstation just for that game.
Hmmm... come to think of it, I wonder how much a playstation 1 and Crash Bandicoot would cost me on ebay...
6800GTs, X800 XTs and 6800 Ultras are still constantly out of stock
If you can't find a 6800GT, then you must not be looking. Even at the height of the "out of stock" period when D3 was launched, I still called around town, and picked up a 6800GT at only about $15 more than I could have bought it for online.
The 6800 *ultra* cards, on the other hand, that's entirely a different story.
I think that the manufacturers were caught off-guard
You may be right, but they should have known that Doom 3 would sell the cards like hot-cakes. I actually imagine that it's more of a production/yield issue with the GPUs and the memory. Remember that a GF6800U has three times as many transistors as a regular Pentium-4, and the memory is much faster.
First, there are essentially no games out there that tax a high end card. Even games like Doom 3 run light lightning with a 128MB Radeon 9800
That's because you're running a completely different render path which is simply not able to do as much "fancy stuff" as you can on a newer card. The 6800 series has hardware features which (a) are used by Doom 3 if possible, and (b) simply don't exist on the 9800.
Also, if you think your 9800 pro is so hot, can you run D3 in "high quality" mode at 1280x1024 with 4x AA and 8x AF? I haven't tried it, but I doubt it.
Do you need to run in 1280? Maybe not. I, though, have a 21" monitor, and for years played games in 800x600, looking at very pixellate images, wishing I had something like the 6800GT that I have now - the same resolution that I use for my desktop, and AA/AF to make it look even better.
Second, a minority of PC owners run 3D games or otherwise need 3D acceleration
Every family I know with a PC has asked me how to get better 3D performance. They have kids, kids play games. Pretty much the only people I know who haven't asked for faster 3D performance are old, single people - and they're not the majority of PC users.
Is the 15% of the *gamer* market that owns X800s a viable target?
Evidently it is, or it wouldn't be profitable, and they wouldn't do it. This whole capitalistism thing doesn't usually reward people for losing money.
In a lot of ways, the whole PC video card market is thriving on a sizable group of people--though still a minority--who upgrade obsessively.
In the $300+ market, you're right. But in the $100 market, there are a sizeable amount that go into major manufacturer's PC's. You see, even the major manufacturers have realized that if the kids can't play their games, then the parents won't buy the computers...
"Back in the day" (roughly 5 years ago), I bought a TNT2 video card for - how much was it? - about $170, if I recall. I used it up until not very long ago, it would even work for WarCraft III. For getting 4 or 4.5 years out of it, I was pretty pleased.
So, recently, for Doom 3, Far Cry, and whatever else, I bought a GeForce 6800GT for $400, and I feel pretty good out of it - expecting that it will last me another three years or so.
As for the 6600 at half the price and nearly the performance, I still don't feel *too* bad - at higher resolutions with AF/AA turned on, the 6800GT is often still playable where the 6600GT is either iffy or non-playable.
I wonder - am I the only one who wants a tall screen more than a wide one anyway? I vaguely recall Apple(?) launching a portrait A4 screen back in the 80s
You're certainly not the only person. There are occasions when it would be nifty for me, too - just not very often. And people's natural tendency is to scan left and right, not up and down.
There was even a monitor marketted where you could simply reach up and rotate the monitor, and supposedly the video drivers would automatically switch the aspect ratio. Really nifty, but it was absurdly expensive.
Not many physicists? Compared to the demand, I'd imagine that there are plenty.
Now, I'm not a physicist by trade, but had much more than my share of physics in college, and it never seemed like there was any lack of grad students that couldn't find a job in the field of physics outside of helping with undergrad physics labs.
The people making $130,000 per year in Silicon Valley make those making $42,000 per year feel really bad - at least until you look at the cost of housing in Silicon Valley.
A good number of years ago, when I made $35,000 per year, I did some cost-of-living calculations to live an equivalent lifestyle around the nation. In some places, I would have needed to make $90,000 just to break even.
If they're really that skilled and still have to relocate to find an entry-level job, then they really should be re-examining either their skillset or location anyway.
Pretty much all of the "I have 20 years experience and still can't find a job" people I've met have had seriously outdated skillsets, serious interpersonal problems, or other major career flaws that are pretty obvious to outside observers.
Because for every actual biotech person who's doing anything useful, there are hundred or thousands of peons.
Getting a bachelor's in biology really doesn't qualify you for many (if any) lucrative jobs. Over 90% of all biology graduates are the pre-meds and the pre-med-wannabes.
Of those 90%, the great majority don't really make it into med school. The leftovers apply to dental school, and the leftovers from that apply to podiatry school. After that, if you don't find a foreign medical school to take you, you're kind of screwed.
When those who claim to be unemployed are asked "Are you actively looking for a job?" by anyone other than their unemployment assistant, the numbers who answer "no" are fairly high, those people are skewing the official tallies of the unemployed.
I worked for a startup for a couple of years waiting for the raises that had been promised upon my hiring. Finally, I interviewed for another job, went in to my employer, and said "You've been promising me raises for two years. I've got another job offer for $XX,000. How badly do you want me to stay?"
I'm still working for the same employer, making almost double what I started at, and life is good.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people seem to think that faster CPUs and bigger hard drives are not needed
One of these 16.7 MP images is what, 8 megs in JPEG? So a $100, 200-gig hard drive would only fit 25,000 photos on it? In RAW mode, at 24 bits-per-pixel (I'm making an assumption on that), they'd be about 48 megs, so you'd be down to a measly 4,000 photos.
And, of course, keep in mind that you're talking about storing 25,000 photos from a $9,000 camera on a $100 hard drive. Chances are that the few people who buy a $9,000 camera can afford a bigger drive. And by the time a 16.7MP camera is affordable by most folks, hard drives will still be a lot bigger.
Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that the 25,000 images themselves would be worth far more to you than the hard drive and the camera combined. So, figure that if you spent a meager 6.6% of the cost of the camera on hard drives, you could not only store 75,000 images, but you could have an entire mirror of the data as well.
steve
Of course, there are ways in which "regular" photography is still better. But there are ways in which it isn't. It's like ethernet: Do you want it wired or wireless? The "best" choice depends on the circumstances.
Are you taking a wedding/bridal photo that will be blown up to 16x20, and hang on someone's wall as a priceless memento? Bring your medium- or large- format camera.
Need to shoot a sporting event, and have the pictures in the paper or on the news within hours? Leave the film at home.
No, it just takes a backpack full of film! If you need to take a lot of pictures, I'd rather have a notebook with a 120-gig drive than have 400 rolls of film. But, how often do you need to take over 14,000 images? Like I said, it depends on your situation.
steve
The problem with "real life" is that you don't have equal resolution over your entire field of vision. In fact, you only get good detail from a pretty small portion of your vision.
Here's a test. Look at some text on the screen. Now look just 1 to 2 inches away, and try and read the text without looking at it again. Not very easy, is it?
steve
I have an HP laser printer that can "do" 1200 dpi, which looks smooth to my eye, where 600 dpi doesn't. So, to print a 16 MB image at 1200 dpi, the result would be on the order of 3 inches by four.
Any "enlargement" above this would mean either using "interpolation" (which reduces resolution, or texture), or adding noise and/or distortion/pixelation.
This is not professional or commercial 35-mm quality yet.
For someone with such extensive photographical expertise, you're making a very amateur mistake. You're comparing the method of photo production (laser printer vs. projection), not the method of photo aquisition.
In other words, just because your laser printer doesn't compare to film doesn't mean that the digital image doesn't compare to film. I've only used a few color lasers, but I've never seen one that did a very decent job of photos.
Even though your 1200-DPI laser doesn't cut it, I've seen photos from a 400-DPI dye-sub which take extremely close examination to tell if they're film or not. By "extremely close", I mean that you have to either (a) have significantly better than 20/20 vision and be able to focus very closely, or (b) have a magnifying glass. And at a 400-DPI resolution, this camera would be producing prints larger than 8"x12" without any interpolation whatsoever.
steve
All of these super-high capacity optical/holographical stuff is always "just a few years away".
Wake me up when one of them actually hits the market. Give me an extra shove if it's at a somewhat reasonable price.
steve
What I don't understand is why anyone needs a wifi access point in their desktop.
I've heard of some of those crazy, long-bearded types that use desktops as routers. I think they use those two weird operating systems, "Linux" and "BSD"...
steve
Who would ask for WIFI to be put into the chipset of a computer?
Look back five or eight years. Who would have asked for any network card to be built into the chipset of a computer? (I remember listening to people whine that the IDE controllers were being integrated into the chipsets.) And yet NVidia's integrated NIC is a top-notch performer, and it's tough to find a motherboard without integrated network these days. And as more people move from ethernet to wireless networking, moving from embedded ethernet to embedded wireless is a natural shift - and I believe that we will, in the future, see more motherboards with integrated wireless networking.
Who would like an Access Point feature placed into the chipset?
Anyone who wants to use the computer as a router. You know, like all of those people who use PCs with that one OS as routers. What was it called? Oh yeah, "Linux"....
There is, of course, no denying that Microsoft does some pretty underhanded and monopolistic things. But, there's also no denying that these things (done correctly) can be a great convenience to a lot of people.
steve
It's your mouse drivers.
I've got a wireless mouse that has absolutely no lag under Windows - but try playing a DirectX game, and it's got tons of lag. Because I rarely game on that machine, I haven't taken the time to figure it out - but if I plug a regular USB mouse into it, it works just fine.
steve
Well, put your idea to the test: Have your friend fart in a room while he's walking around. Go in there with your mouth open, so the airborn smells are hitting the receptors in your mouth and nose. Try and figure out which path he walked in the room. If you can't do it, my dog wins! : )
steve
Actually, dogs still have a much, much better sense of smell than we do. They have (depending on the breed), around 20 times more receptors than we do, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
In tests where a person lightly touched an object, dogs were able to pick up the smell after the object had been left outside as long as two weeks.
Of course, no animal is equally receptive to every single smell imaginable. Just like some smells are much stronger to us than others, the same is true of dogs - but you're going to be hard-pressed to find more than a rare handful of cases where a dog's sense of smell isn't going to beat a human's by quite as much.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a room by myself, and cracked a fart. I got up, walked around the room,and sat somewhere else. About a half of a minute later, one of my dogs walked in, and the smell hit him. His eyes closed almost entirely off, his nose started wiggling, and he followed it over to exactly where I was sitting, then followed the exact path I had walked, and ended up with his nose to my butt. And it hadn't even really been a "stinky" fart.
Now a human might have recognized that one area of the room smelled stronger than the other, but my dog was able to detect the difference in odor across an inch of air.
That's really not that uncommon, if someone has passed by on a trail and a search dog comes by some time later, they can tell by the minute smell gradient which direction the person was travelling in. Dogs are just freaking amazing.
steve
What's interesting about this is not just that it's faster than the older generation.
First, the 6800 GT/Ultra gave twice the performance of the previous, similarly-priced generation. That's a lot larger jump than we've seen in quite some time.
Now, add on the fact that these $200 cards are very nearly as fast as the 6800's. That means that comparing these to even the cream-of-the-crop, $400 cards of the last generation, you're getting far more performance at only half of the price.
This really is the largest jump in the performance:cost ratio that we've seen in a long time.
steve
I'm sorry any video card at $400 is not a great deal.
Really? What if I sold you a video card guaranteed to play all popular games for the next thirty years for $400. Still a bad deal? You're confusing a "good deal" with simple cost. The two aren't the same.
Why when every other part of a computer has gotten cheaper over the years do video cards get more expensive?
I remember when a 486/33 with 64 megs of memory, a 1-gig hard drive, and a 1-gig tape backup had a price tag of $10,000. Now I can build a 3-GHz PC with a 6800GT for a thousand bucks. You're telling me that a price drop of a full order of magnitude isn't significant?
steve
The 6800 GT/Ultra chips have three times the transistor count of a regular Pentium 4. They also come with 256 megs of very fast memory.
I'm not sure if you've looked into the price of 1.6 ns or 2.0 ns memory lately, but just the 256 megs of memory isn't exactly cheap. Then you've got one seriously expensive chip to build.
And, of course, these are the "premium" line, the company does have higher margins on them than they do on the volume cards. Just like how the average profit on a Saturn is measured in hundreds of dollars, when the profit on even a fairly "regular" SUV is usually over $5,000 (the average SUV profit is around 25%. Do the math.)
steve
Had you slightly overclocked your XP 2600 and bought a better video card, you'd probably have a better overall gaming experience. As an example, I had an AthlonXP 2500. I bought a GeForce 6800GT for $400. I'm guessing that you paid considerably more for your CPU/mobo/video upgrade, yet I'll bet that the overall experience in most any recent game would be better on my machine.
With the somewhat slower CPU I have, the FPS might be 45 instead of 60 - but that would be 45 FPS with far more visuals, higher resolution, antialiasing, and anisotropic filtering.
Of course, personal preferences will vary, but given the choice of "good" visuals at 60 FPS and "out of this world" visuals at 45, I'd take the latter.
steve
Myself, I'm the opposite. Even when I was using my TNT2, most games on my PC looked far better than the games my friends would play on their consoles. And now that I have a 6800GT, well, there's absolutely no comparison. Besides, I like the greater control-customizations you can do on a PC.
The one area where I think that consoles do have a definite advantage is in gameplay. I played Crash Bandicoot Warped on a friend's playstation, and even though the graphics couldn't hold a candle to my PC, the gameplay was almost enough to make me buy a playstation just for that game.
Hmmm... come to think of it, I wonder how much a playstation 1 and Crash Bandicoot would cost me on ebay...
steve
6800GTs, X800 XTs and 6800 Ultras are still constantly out of stock
If you can't find a 6800GT, then you must not be looking. Even at the height of the "out of stock" period when D3 was launched, I still called around town, and picked up a 6800GT at only about $15 more than I could have bought it for online.
The 6800 *ultra* cards, on the other hand, that's entirely a different story.
I think that the manufacturers were caught off-guard
You may be right, but they should have known that Doom 3 would sell the cards like hot-cakes. I actually imagine that it's more of a production/yield issue with the GPUs and the memory. Remember that a GF6800U has three times as many transistors as a regular Pentium-4, and the memory is much faster.
steve
First, there are essentially no games out there that tax a high end card. Even games like Doom 3 run light lightning with a 128MB Radeon 9800
That's because you're running a completely different render path which is simply not able to do as much "fancy stuff" as you can on a newer card. The 6800 series has hardware features which (a) are used by Doom 3 if possible, and (b) simply don't exist on the 9800.
Also, if you think your 9800 pro is so hot, can you run D3 in "high quality" mode at 1280x1024 with 4x AA and 8x AF? I haven't tried it, but I doubt it.
Do you need to run in 1280? Maybe not. I, though, have a 21" monitor, and for years played games in 800x600, looking at very pixellate images, wishing I had something like the 6800GT that I have now - the same resolution that I use for my desktop, and AA/AF to make it look even better.
Second, a minority of PC owners run 3D games or otherwise need 3D acceleration
Every family I know with a PC has asked me how to get better 3D performance. They have kids, kids play games. Pretty much the only people I know who haven't asked for faster 3D performance are old, single people - and they're not the majority of PC users.
Is the 15% of the *gamer* market that owns X800s a viable target?
Evidently it is, or it wouldn't be profitable, and they wouldn't do it. This whole capitalistism thing doesn't usually reward people for losing money.
In a lot of ways, the whole PC video card market is thriving on a sizable group of people--though still a minority--who upgrade obsessively.
In the $300+ market, you're right. But in the $100 market, there are a sizeable amount that go into major manufacturer's PC's. You see, even the major manufacturers have realized that if the kids can't play their games, then the parents won't buy the computers...
steve
"Back in the day" (roughly 5 years ago), I bought a TNT2 video card for - how much was it? - about $170, if I recall. I used it up until not very long ago, it would even work for WarCraft III. For getting 4 or 4.5 years out of it, I was pretty pleased.
So, recently, for Doom 3, Far Cry, and whatever else, I bought a GeForce 6800GT for $400, and I feel pretty good out of it - expecting that it will last me another three years or so.
As for the 6600 at half the price and nearly the performance, I still don't feel *too* bad - at higher resolutions with AF/AA turned on, the 6800GT is often still playable where the 6600GT is either iffy or non-playable.
steve
I wonder - am I the only one who wants a tall screen more than a wide one anyway? I vaguely recall Apple(?) launching a portrait A4 screen back in the 80s
You're certainly not the only person. There are occasions when it would be nifty for me, too - just not very often. And people's natural tendency is to scan left and right, not up and down.
There was even a monitor marketted where you could simply reach up and rotate the monitor, and supposedly the video drivers would automatically switch the aspect ratio. Really nifty, but it was absurdly expensive.
steve
Not many physicists? Compared to the demand, I'd imagine that there are plenty.
Now, I'm not a physicist by trade, but had much more than my share of physics in college, and it never seemed like there was any lack of grad students that couldn't find a job in the field of physics outside of helping with undergrad physics labs.
steve
The people making $130,000 per year in Silicon Valley make those making $42,000 per year feel really bad - at least until you look at the cost of housing in Silicon Valley.
A good number of years ago, when I made $35,000 per year, I did some cost-of-living calculations to live an equivalent lifestyle around the nation. In some places, I would have needed to make $90,000 just to break even.
steve
If they're really that skilled and still have to relocate to find an entry-level job, then they really should be re-examining either their skillset or location anyway.
Pretty much all of the "I have 20 years experience and still can't find a job" people I've met have had seriously outdated skillsets, serious interpersonal problems, or other major career flaws that are pretty obvious to outside observers.
steve
Because for every actual biotech person who's doing anything useful, there are hundred or thousands of peons.
Getting a bachelor's in biology really doesn't qualify you for many (if any) lucrative jobs. Over 90% of all biology graduates are the pre-meds and the pre-med-wannabes.
Of those 90%, the great majority don't really make it into med school. The leftovers apply to dental school, and the leftovers from that apply to podiatry school. After that, if you don't find a foreign medical school to take you, you're kind of screwed.
steve
Unemployment in the IT sector is up
When those who claim to be unemployed are asked "Are you actively looking for a job?" by anyone other than their unemployment assistant, the numbers who answer "no" are fairly high, those people are skewing the official tallies of the unemployed.
steve
Well, you should have been tougher.
I worked for a startup for a couple of years waiting for the raises that had been promised upon my hiring. Finally, I interviewed for another job, went in to my employer, and said "You've been promising me raises for two years. I've got another job offer for $XX,000. How badly do you want me to stay?"
I'm still working for the same employer, making almost double what I started at, and life is good.
steve