If the things you want to move around are files and the code you want to execute is in COM objects or in COM "Automation" then look up "Windows Scripting Host". Otherwise tell us what sort of things you will be managing.
If you want to run arbitary executables (like Adobe Photoshop and Winzip and some database frontend program) then there is a lot to choose from. There's a product called "WinBatch" that will run windows pretty well. If you need a GUI interface the obvious choice is Visual Basic 6 or 7 or even WinForms (for.NET). You can also run Perl/TK programs for less money than you can set up.NET. VB7 will do.NET and VB6 will not. But there is a new.NET scripting language called 'Monad' under development and depending on your schedule it might be ready on time.
Again, what objects are being scripted? Do you need a web interface for this puppy?
It doesn't suck. It just solves maybe 70 or 95% of the need at most. You'll still have real fire trucks and moving trucks and some delivery trucks.
Millions of people already live in apartments all over the world. This is for them. Don't worry about rats in a cage. Lots of suburban house-dwellers already drive to the train or bus station. Many US cities already have a "Park N Ride" or even a "Kiss N Ride" system.
Don't worry about population control. Most families can use these PRT's most of the time. One kid goes one one school, Dad goes to work, whatever. And Chinese-style population control is already in place in China. And they're a big user of petroleum.
If we really want to, we can make couches and carpets and air conditioners out of smaller pieces that bolt together on-site. But we don't have to. All the roads we've built will still be there, just as all the seaports we've built are still around.
Japanese small-house (made of paper) culture might fit the PRT's better, and US culture could follow along more slowly. It took us a hundred years to adapt ot the car, it will take another hundred to adapt to PRT's.
Enhanced safety, enhanced speed, and oil independence make a lot of sense for at least a billion people. Think Singapore, a well-behaved people.
For areas and cultures with a bum-in-the-car problem, video surveillance will come in handy. Some cultures already don't mind this. Think London.
There are many cities all over the world where the public rest rooms are in much better shape than in the big US cities. Cairo will do it differently than Portland.
It's an entirely different experience
Yes, it is. I can testify to that. You see connections you never would have seen. And a few years spent coding makes it much easier to get an A in a course. You can do things much more quickly. Any language, any computer, as long as you are writing code.
The vast majority of all unemployed CS majors and IT workers are this way simply because they don't know jack and are useless in a corporate environment.
By and large this is extremely difficult to prove, as you are confusing cause and effect, the word with it's definition. To simplify, if you had a good IQ test and aptitude test and knowledge test and personality test and could prove these tests really tested what they said they did, and you actually made all the working and non-working people take these tests you would probably find:
Most truly incompetent are among the unemployed. But, many people are unemployed for no reason to do with them.
You can simply define incompetence as being without work, of course, but your case reduces to a tautology. Otherwise your analysis is virtually unsupportable, although intuitive.
If there were 1000 geniuses at the Alan Turing level out there unemployed, and with CS degrees, how would we know?
In the late 1970's the Hughes Aircraft Corp in Los Angeles would put ads on the radio asking for programmers and engineers. They sent telegrams to my house on the weekend to get me to work for them. Do you think I was that much smarter then than now? Or was it a change in circumstances?
They would pay more and hire more.
And this quote from the article just makes me laugh:
After all, who doesn't think the IT folks in their office are the most valuable of the bunch?
Well, management doesn't think so! And everybody else things management is the most valuable.
The mass of lower-middle-class wannabees taking computer science courses reminds me of the fad of training people to be keypunch operators in the 1970's. It was popular by the time it was obsolete. So computer science isn't quite obsolete yet. But where keypunching became technically obsolete most programming jobs in the West are becoming economically obsoleted by the Third World.
Whether the undergrads are right to shy away from CS depends on what else they are doing. If they're smoking dope or studying Critical Theory or Gender Studies they'll be SOL (poop out of luck) in the job market.
Go find Norman Matloff's home page and read about the careers available for CS grads: lots of CS grads don't get jobs writing code. While searching for the reference I came across these two articles by Norman I also recommend: see this article or this one in rebuttal to an economist.
It only makes sense that if you lower the price paid for CS grads with H-1B visas and off-shoring, you are going to discourage knowledgable people (middle class college freshmen) from majoring in CS. That women and people of color are now being conned into working super-long hours for modest pay is just deja vu all over again.
To quote Norman Matloff:
the U.S. has more engineers per capita than any
other nation in the world except Israel....
Rather than recognizing these engineers, the industry is laying them
off, by the hundreds of thousands--but saying we need MORE of them!
If you're planning on becoming a researcher/academic, your plans make some sense.
But if you're planning on becoming a practitioner, think again. There is clearly an increasing world glut of software developers. To make decent money you'll need to start your own business. To do that you'll want some business education.
A business education without a technical background isn't good enough to go into business in computers (although Steve Ballmer did okay). But a purely technical background will likely leave you obsolete in 10 or 15 years. And that means unemployed. Graphics is hot right now, but the dot-com bubble was hot a few years ago and in the 1950's the carpet industry was hot (really). If you're going to be a techie you'll be competing with third-world developers for the next several decades.
There are some with purely technical education that did well in startups (Bill Joy) but the numbers are down in the thousands, worldwide.
Trends, of course, could reverse. The third world countries making software engineers in such large numbers just might start making chips by the billions. Would a world awash in CPU's increase the market demand for software and hence for developers? Or will they all be running the same code? Will half the world be employed writing code for the other half? Stay around and find out.
The German National Socialists (Nazi's) were NOT a group of people famous for being right, correct, or truthful. They were infamous for being wrong, evil, distorted, perverted, murderous, incorrect, racist and dishonest.
Those obsessed with correct spelling and grammar may be sometimes pedantic or even nanny-ish, but they are not, by any stretch, Nazi's...
There are, as yet, no concentration camps for misspellers, malapropists or illiterates.
The atom bomb was new -- the US could not have known what a big step it was taking. They'd already bombed the heck out of the Axis and the new bomb just made it cheaper and easier. No apparant moral difference could have been seen, then.
Japan was hard to understand, anyway, so better be safe than sorry (!). When you have more than one reason to make a choice it becomes impossible to sort out later which reasons were the most important.
Even if Stimson and Truman simply believed the Bomb saved lives, that doesn't guarantee they were right. And Eisenhower's demurral doesn't mean he was right, either.
If US programming jobs were protected, Boeing would have higher costs than Airbus, Intel higher than Siemans, IBM higher than NEC, Microsoft higher than SAP.
Eventually US jobs would be lost, as Europe and Japan outsourced to India and China but the US did not.
A rational US software engineer these days should be some sort of Luddite, smashing the fiber lines between the US and the rest of the world.
Any Europeans/Japanese in this discussion? How are you doing?
The computing community would have been better off if the developers of Free Pascal had built something more original and worked on a "Killer App" or two.
Where they afraid that Borland would end up with monopoly control of the software industry? That Delphi would overpower.NET? Was the cost of buying Delphi higher than the development costs of Free Pascal?
Compulsive coding and compulsive eating might just work together. You've fallen for the body-image cult promulgated by a conspiracy of Hollywood moguls and the Personal Trainers Cabal.
The moguls want us to watch their movies about thin people and the trainers want us to hire them to get trim. It's all a conspiracy.
It's interesting to compare the competive scare that Japan ran on the US in the 80's vs the Indian competition of the present day.
The Japanese workers were said to be more productive, and they may have been, but what Japan Inc. did was make their own products in their own companies, which earned the respect of the US citizens. Do the names Toyota or Sony ring a bell?
The Indians apparantly are unable or unwilling to form their own mega-corporations and so they export their workers electronically. They "Work at Home" so to speak. This may result from the more left-wing political and social structure in India than in Japan. If this changes, will an Indian software company be the thing that truly challenges Microsoft?
The Phillipinos are also paid a lot less than Westerners but do different work, so the entire national economy is built around physically exporting workers to the First World as mostly low-paid labor. You'd think they'd do the same thing as India but they don't have the same tradition of using English as the Indians. But I don't know why Phillipino corporations haven't dominated some sector or another.
The South Koreans have "Cheap Labor" but they went the Japanese route (Samsung etc). Likewise Singapore and the rest of the "Asian Tigers".
The traditions and characteristics of each nation do vary and this variation seems to dictate different paths to development and joining the industrial (Western) world.
One could argue that smart citizens of the West would demand that their governments suppress the development of the Third World countries in such disruptive ways, but the prevalent ideology and the interests of the elites are not compatible with that sort of mercantilism. Media consolidation is further ensuring that the prevalent ideology is transnational rather than local.
You can be sure that C and Java programmers, formerly seen as elitist yuppies, will be treated no better than obsoleted blue collar workers, most of which had a union.
There was a small effort to unionize software types in the eighties and nineties. If it had succeeded, it would no doubt be blamed for the outsourcing revolution. Since we can't blame the union movement for outsourcing, should unions be becoming more popular?
I may have given you more of a taxonomy than an analysis, but I hope it helps.
The Future
One trend to look for might be the accelerated number of microprocessors and microprocessor -driven devices increasing even more tremendously as a side effect of Moore's Law. So if the demand for software is a function of the number of computers, then there might be another "Programmer shortage" after the Indian wave has peaked. In world with two billion PC's and 5 billion embedded devices, say, most hardware cycles will be running standardized software written by a few programmers (i.e. Microsoft) but 90% of the software engineers may be employed writing the software that runs on 10% of the machine cycles.
The thirst for software may be insatiable. That is, I'd like to know how elastic the market is for software, and how much the world could absorb. At one time 99% of all humans worked the land. How many people could be employed writing programs and web pages?
Over the last few hundred years and in particular in the 1900s most islamic countries were occupied and humiliated by the western superpowers of the period. Since oil became the strategic commodity, Middle-East (where all the holiest sites of islam are located) has been under extreme manipulation by the US and UK in particular.
Try imagining god-fearing Americans experiencing such occupation, control and manipulation of the United States, its culture and resources, by some islamic superpower and you might find a few Americans starting to hate their new overlords. Some might even take up arms as a last resort.
Your themes are: Domination and Occupation exacerbated by Oil causes Terrorism.
Not exactly. You are ignoring the impact of wealth, of Islam, and the fall of the Caliphate.
The west has also poured billions of dollars (and pounds and lira...) into the Islamic societies of the mideast and this has caused great distortion. Saddam would only have been a tin-pot dictator had he not been able to buy weapons from the major powers. Saudi Arabia would not have been able to spread its message of Islamic Radicalism and hatred of the West had it remained a poor nation of pearl divers and camel drivers.
The populations of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Gulf states have become used to unearned wealth and often astonishing levels of sloth and luxury. This is not what is usually understood as "Imperialism". That the wealth is not more widely shared is the result of indigenous political processes, not Western intervention.
The Mideast, like the entire rest of the world, was a battleground in the Cold War between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, or, if you prefer, between the Soviet Union and the US. Yet global terrorism arose only in the Islamic Mideast. Colonialism was equally widespread and lasted longer elsewhere. Your formulation fails to take this into account.
In order for the West to become wealthy it had to change its medieval world view to a modern scientific world view. The Islamic Radicals are unwilling to do this and it is their swift empowerment by oil money that has made a crisis out of the situation.
Egypt was a colony for over a hundred years and terrorism is a great problem. Yet Saudi Arabia was never invaded and has spawned a lot of terrorism worldwide. Each country is different. What is common is the ideology of Islamic world domination, and the impact (even in poor Egypt) of Islamic oil money to get the whole jihad moving.
Even in the Palestinian areas they have had many opportunities for a Palestinian State and real peace, yet prefer endless war and bloodshed because the Israelis are a different religion. When Jordon and Egypt conquered the Palestinian areas there was no peep of protest because these were Islamic countries. Don't underestimate the importance of the Islamic ideology of domination.
If you doubt the power of Islamic religious intolerance take a look at the history of the Bahai faith, and the treatment of the Sufi at the hands of the mainstream Muslims. For that matter look at the way the Sunni treat the Shiite. See also this site for more information.
An important response of the Mideastern Islamic world to modernity was Nasserite Arab Nationalism. That idea competed with and complemented Islamic radicalism, which is now more powerful than Nationalism, because Nationalism was seen as a failure. Arab Nationalism favored traditional wars between nations as a means of domination. Islamic radicalism likes war but has also developed a taste for Kamikazi tactics.
The stage was set for all this instability by the fall of the Turkish-dominated Caliphate at the end of the First World War. Huge areas of the Mideast were without government, spawning wars of succession as the political vacuum was filled during the rise of Hitler and through the development of the Cold War. The 500 years of Calipha
So far there's only been jingoistic kneejerk reaction a la "let's kill every last one of 'em"
I guess you haven't been to the US since the 9/11 attacks. It's actually quite different from the way you say it. If the Americans had decided to kill every last one of somebody, then they would indeed all be dead by now. We didn't and they aren't.
Your point about nuclear proliferation in the next 5 or 6 decades is on point, however. Humanity may indeed kill itself off.
Software Development is probably unique among all human endeavors in that the experts are still arguing among themselves about how to think, how to organize their thoughts, what notations to use, and how to talk to experts in other fields.
When I was writing business systems in COBOL in the 1970's we had all the same problems and all the same arguments.
The one thing that seemed to work well was the polymath style of person who had coded for at least a few years in that industry and then been promoted to the level of "Business Analyst". Having line-of-business area specialists who also knew about programming and the personalities in the user base write the user-level specs permitted reasonably successful systems in a reasonable amount of time. These people are both "Suits" and "Techies", at least to a certain extent.
Nowadays there is more computer sophistication among the user base, but the problem is not eliminated.
One thing you need to reduce or eliminate is the raising of business questions in the middle of coding, where the progammer has to stop software development to go out and research more requirements. Half the time they discover they need to rebuild what they've already coded, as it isn't appropriate.
Area Specialists
In the 1970's I worked on an accounting software project where the very successful but bull-headed boss had canned all the accountants! Needless to say it didn't matter that the code worked brilliantly, from a technical point of view. I did learn how to code a table driven Binary Search in COBOL, however, it added no value to my user base.
When the corporate level evaluated the software and, of course, found it to be a complete waste of time, I was personally accused of stealing company resources by writing useless software. That's one meeting I will never forget.
I digress, but that was when I learned that there are some managers and "Business leaders" whose only management tool is to apply pressure to their staff, as they don't understand anything else. At all.
Years later I worked on an embedded data acquisition system where the hardware guys had to reverse engineer the data sources so we could extract the data. Massive chaos reigned until we found a retired engineer who actually understood the massively complex old hardware systems with which we were trying to interface.
Don't Build What You're Told
It doesn't take a software developer long to realize that the software customer base is rarely happy when you build exactly what they specify. Some of the more intelligent customers (aka "Users") have learned to deal with this by refusing to agree to a spec.
Successful business software developers learn early that you build what they need rather than what they say. Of course, then you have to sell it to them.
It is this disconnect between user requests and user happiness that gave rise to the collaborative techniques that involve the User in specifying "Use cases" and all that, so that they are emotionally and politically committed to a particular solution before coding. Of course, this method allows the user community to learn about IT/DP from experience.
Consider what wealth has done to Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. They have created a worldwide terrorist crisis based on a thousand-year old fantasy of world domination.
Are you sure you want to live under a world dominant India/China/OPEC axis? Do you think they will promulgate civil or human rights? Would they have done better in Kosovo or even Rwanda? Want to bet on women's rights? Think the UN is too corrupt now?
Are you aware that undergraduate applications for engineering and computer science has gone down because of the lower wages?
What happens to the US as it loses it's technological lead?
Would you tell a college freshman to major in engineering or computer science in college? What would you recommend?
Should unemployed American call center workers go to school to learn to be computer engineers?
Should unemployed American computer engineers go to school to learn to be radiologists?
Was your X-Ray (MRI, CAT scan) evaluated by a US board-certified radiologist? Do you think you might have a tumor? Do you think you might have one someday?
Do you think that writing the software running in US weapons and military systems should be outsourced to India or China?
How about the software running your bank or processing your medical insurance?
Doesn't the outsourcing of middle and upper class jobs reduce the potential for upward mobility?
The American Dream of the working class has been to send their children to college so that they can live a better life; What sort of better life can they now look forward to?
Do you think the bulk of the unemployed computer engineers in the silicon valley are under-educated or incompetent?
Do you think that India might have a different attitude toward Pakistan than the US?
Do you think Pakistan will continue to be an important ally in the war on terror?
Are multi-nationals that have many or most of their employees outside the US still "American" companies?
The costs and benefits of reliability are different
If you've got your real time system in rom inside a piece of equipment, or in thousands of pieces of equipment, you've got to be very careful with it.
Desktop system can be patched and upgraded, but ROMs have to be replaced or flashed. For example, you've got to bring the missle into the hanger/lab and hook up the reflashing unit or swap out the ROM chip. You've got to test the missle with the new chip. Out in the field, the soldiers have new ly upgraded missles (or tanks...) and would really like to know that it will work when they need it. You can field test a tank, but some missles are expensive, especially when all you want to do is prove you installed the right chip in the right way.
When a desktop or server software hiccups, the human user can work around it. Often this is not the case in communications and avionics.
Linux Advantages Don't Translate to Military Embedded Systems
Embedded systems are almost always memory-resident and have no disk for software storage. There are usually no user identities to manage, and the user interface is quite often absent or primitive.
Most of the advantages of Linux do not apply to an embedded, military situation: Licensing fees for software are usually a negligable part of a tank, missle or radar. Embedded RTOS systems are already quite reliable, and do not suffer from nearly as many buffer overruns, neither are they susceptible to hackers. Embedded military systems are almost never connected to the internet.
You could build a reliable, compact embedded software system from embedded Linux, but you'd want to write all your own drivers and you would have to port it to special hardware. This approximately the same amount of work that you would have to do if you were to use a proprietary RTOS.
The vast bulk of the problems users experience with proprietary OS's are 1) expensive to license, more expensive to license across many machines. 2) Security vulnerabilities resulting from using a system designed and built for stand-alone personal use in an internetworked environment. Neither of these problems matters much to embedded, military systems.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to run arbitary executables (like Adobe Photoshop and Winzip and some database frontend program) then there is a lot to choose from. There's a product called "WinBatch" that will run windows pretty well. If you need a GUI interface the obvious choice is Visual Basic 6 or 7 or even WinForms (for .NET). You can also run Perl/TK programs for less money than you can set up .NET. VB7 will do .NET and VB6 will not. But there is a new .NET scripting language called 'Monad' under development and depending on your schedule it might be ready on time.
Again, what objects are being scripted? Do you need a web interface for this puppy?
Millions of people already live in apartments all over the world. This is for them. Don't worry about rats in a cage. Lots of suburban house-dwellers already drive to the train or bus station. Many US cities already have a "Park N Ride" or even a "Kiss N Ride" system.
Don't worry about population control. Most families can use these PRT's most of the time. One kid goes one one school, Dad goes to work, whatever. And Chinese-style population control is already in place in China. And they're a big user of petroleum.
If we really want to, we can make couches and carpets and air conditioners out of smaller pieces that bolt together on-site. But we don't have to. All the roads we've built will still be there, just as all the seaports we've built are still around.
Japanese small-house (made of paper) culture might fit the PRT's better, and US culture could follow along more slowly. It took us a hundred years to adapt ot the car, it will take another hundred to adapt to PRT's.
Enhanced safety, enhanced speed, and oil independence make a lot of sense for at least a billion people. Think Singapore, a well-behaved people.
For areas and cultures with a bum-in-the-car problem, video surveillance will come in handy. Some cultures already don't mind this. Think London.
There are many cities all over the world where the public rest rooms are in much better shape than in the big US cities. Cairo will do it differently than Portland.
It's an entirely different experience
Yes, it is. I can testify to that. You see connections you never would have seen. And a few years spent coding makes it much easier to get an A in a course. You can do things much more quickly. Any language, any computer, as long as you are writing code.
By and large this is extremely difficult to prove, as you are confusing cause and effect, the word with it's definition. To simplify, if you had a good IQ test and aptitude test and knowledge test and personality test and could prove these tests really tested what they said they did, and you actually made all the working and non-working people take these tests you would probably find:
Most truly incompetent are among the unemployed. But, many people are unemployed for no reason to do with them.
You can simply define incompetence as being without work, of course, but your case reduces to a tautology. Otherwise your analysis is virtually unsupportable, although intuitive. If there were 1000 geniuses at the Alan Turing level out there unemployed, and with CS degrees, how would we know?
In the late 1970's the Hughes Aircraft Corp in Los Angeles would put ads on the radio asking for programmers and engineers. They sent telegrams to my house on the weekend to get me to work for them. Do you think I was that much smarter then than now? Or was it a change in circumstances?
Any particular language and database is going to be obsolete in a decade. What are you planning to upgrade to?
Do you find the cost structure (TCO) of LAMP to be persuasive over the MS solution, or is just an accident of history?
The mass of lower-middle-class wannabees taking computer science courses reminds me of the fad of training people to be keypunch operators in the 1970's. It was popular by the time it was obsolete. So computer science isn't quite obsolete yet. But where keypunching became technically obsolete most programming jobs in the West are becoming economically obsoleted by the Third World.
Whether the undergrads are right to shy away from CS depends on what else they are doing. If they're smoking dope or studying Critical Theory or Gender Studies they'll be SOL (poop out of luck) in the job market. Go find Norman Matloff's home page and read about the careers available for CS grads: lots of CS grads don't get jobs writing code. While searching for the reference I came across these two articles by Norman I also recommend: see this article or this one in rebuttal to an economist.
It only makes sense that if you lower the price paid for CS grads with H-1B visas and off-shoring, you are going to discourage knowledgable people (middle class college freshmen) from majoring in CS. That women and people of color are now being conned into working super-long hours for modest pay is just deja vu all over again.
To quote Norman Matloff:
That is a good argument for COBOL ;-)
But if you're planning on becoming a practitioner, think again. There is clearly an increasing world glut of software developers. To make decent money you'll need to start your own business. To do that you'll want some business education.
A business education without a technical background isn't good enough to go into business in computers (although Steve Ballmer did okay). But a purely technical background will likely leave you obsolete in 10 or 15 years. And that means unemployed. Graphics is hot right now, but the dot-com bubble was hot a few years ago and in the 1950's the carpet industry was hot (really). If you're going to be a techie you'll be competing with third-world developers for the next several decades.
There are some with purely technical education that did well in startups (Bill Joy) but the numbers are down in the thousands, worldwide.
Trends, of course, could reverse. The third world countries making software engineers in such large numbers just might start making chips by the billions. Would a world awash in CPU's increase the market demand for software and hence for developers? Or will they all be running the same code? Will half the world be employed writing code for the other half? Stay around and find out.
Those obsessed with correct spelling and grammar may be sometimes pedantic or even nanny-ish, but they are not, by any stretch, Nazi's...
There are, as yet, no concentration camps for misspellers, malapropists or illiterates.
Japan was hard to understand, anyway, so better be safe than sorry (!). When you have more than one reason to make a choice it becomes impossible to sort out later which reasons were the most important.
Even if Stimson and Truman simply believed the Bomb saved lives, that doesn't guarantee they were right. And Eisenhower's demurral doesn't mean he was right, either.
And you can't run history over again to check.
Eventually US jobs would be lost, as Europe and Japan outsourced to India and China but the US did not.
A rational US software engineer these days should be some sort of Luddite, smashing the fiber lines between the US and the rest of the world.
Any Europeans/Japanese in this discussion? How are you doing?
Where they afraid that Borland would end up with monopoly control of the software industry? That Delphi would overpower .NET? Was the cost of buying Delphi higher than the development costs of Free Pascal?
Go over to your buddies keyboard, turn it upside down, and shake it. You'll find out what he's been eating/doing.
The moguls want us to watch their movies about thin people and the trainers want us to hire them to get trim. It's all a conspiracy.
The Japanese workers were said to be more productive, and they may have been, but what Japan Inc. did was make their own products in their own companies, which earned the respect of the US citizens. Do the names Toyota or Sony ring a bell?
The Indians apparantly are unable or unwilling to form their own mega-corporations and so they export their workers electronically. They "Work at Home" so to speak. This may result from the more left-wing political and social structure in India than in Japan. If this changes, will an Indian software company be the thing that truly challenges Microsoft?
The Phillipinos are also paid a lot less than Westerners but do different work, so the entire national economy is built around physically exporting workers to the First World as mostly low-paid labor. You'd think they'd do the same thing as India but they don't have the same tradition of using English as the Indians. But I don't know why Phillipino corporations haven't dominated some sector or another.
The South Koreans have "Cheap Labor" but they went the Japanese route (Samsung etc). Likewise Singapore and the rest of the "Asian Tigers".
The traditions and characteristics of each nation do vary and this variation seems to dictate different paths to development and joining the industrial (Western) world.
One could argue that smart citizens of the West would demand that their governments suppress the development of the Third World countries in such disruptive ways, but the prevalent ideology and the interests of the elites are not compatible with that sort of mercantilism. Media consolidation is further ensuring that the prevalent ideology is transnational rather than local.
You can be sure that C and Java programmers, formerly seen as elitist yuppies, will be treated no better than obsoleted blue collar workers, most of which had a union.
There was a small effort to unionize software types in the eighties and nineties. If it had succeeded, it would no doubt be blamed for the outsourcing revolution. Since we can't blame the union movement for outsourcing, should unions be becoming more popular?
I may have given you more of a taxonomy than an analysis, but I hope it helps.
The Future
One trend to look for might be the accelerated number of microprocessors and microprocessor -driven devices increasing even more tremendously as a side effect of Moore's Law. So if the demand for software is a function of the number of computers, then there might be another "Programmer shortage" after the Indian wave has peaked. In world with two billion PC's and 5 billion embedded devices, say, most hardware cycles will be running standardized software written by a few programmers (i.e. Microsoft) but 90% of the software engineers may be employed writing the software that runs on 10% of the machine cycles.
The thirst for software may be insatiable. That is, I'd like to know how elastic the market is for software, and how much the world could absorb. At one time 99% of all humans worked the land. How many people could be employed writing programs and web pages?
Thank You for the best belly laugh I've had all week.
Yes, there is a God.
Modern Aircraft Carriers use nuclear power.
Your themes are: Domination and Occupation exacerbated by Oil causes Terrorism.
Not exactly. You are ignoring the impact of wealth, of Islam, and the fall of the Caliphate.
The west has also poured billions of dollars (and pounds and lira...) into the Islamic societies of the mideast and this has caused great distortion. Saddam would only have been a tin-pot dictator had he not been able to buy weapons from the major powers. Saudi Arabia would not have been able to spread its message of Islamic Radicalism and hatred of the West had it remained a poor nation of pearl divers and camel drivers.
The populations of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Gulf states have become used to unearned wealth and often astonishing levels of sloth and luxury. This is not what is usually understood as "Imperialism". That the wealth is not more widely shared is the result of indigenous political processes, not Western intervention.
The Mideast, like the entire rest of the world, was a battleground in the Cold War between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, or, if you prefer, between the Soviet Union and the US. Yet global terrorism arose only in the Islamic Mideast. Colonialism was equally widespread and lasted longer elsewhere. Your formulation fails to take this into account.
In order for the West to become wealthy it had to change its medieval world view to a modern scientific world view. The Islamic Radicals are unwilling to do this and it is their swift empowerment by oil money that has made a crisis out of the situation.
Egypt was a colony for over a hundred years and terrorism is a great problem. Yet Saudi Arabia was never invaded and has spawned a lot of terrorism worldwide. Each country is different. What is common is the ideology of Islamic world domination, and the impact (even in poor Egypt) of Islamic oil money to get the whole jihad moving.
Even in the Palestinian areas they have had many opportunities for a Palestinian State and real peace, yet prefer endless war and bloodshed because the Israelis are a different religion. When Jordon and Egypt conquered the Palestinian areas there was no peep of protest because these were Islamic countries. Don't underestimate the importance of the Islamic ideology of domination.
If you doubt the power of Islamic religious intolerance take a look at the history of the Bahai faith, and the treatment of the Sufi at the hands of the mainstream Muslims. For that matter look at the way the Sunni treat the Shiite. See also this site for more information.
An important response of the Mideastern Islamic world to modernity was Nasserite Arab Nationalism. That idea competed with and complemented Islamic radicalism, which is now more powerful than Nationalism, because Nationalism was seen as a failure. Arab Nationalism favored traditional wars between nations as a means of domination. Islamic radicalism likes war but has also developed a taste for Kamikazi tactics.
The stage was set for all this instability by the fall of the Turkish-dominated Caliphate at the end of the First World War. Huge areas of the Mideast were without government, spawning wars of succession as the political vacuum was filled during the rise of Hitler and through the development of the Cold War. The 500 years of Calipha
Your point about nuclear proliferation in the next 5 or 6 decades is on point, however. Humanity may indeed kill itself off.
When I was writing business systems in COBOL in the 1970's we had all the same problems and all the same arguments.
The one thing that seemed to work well was the polymath style of person who had coded for at least a few years in that industry and then been promoted to the level of "Business Analyst". Having line-of-business area specialists who also knew about programming and the personalities in the user base write the user-level specs permitted reasonably successful systems in a reasonable amount of time. These people are both "Suits" and "Techies", at least to a certain extent.
Nowadays there is more computer sophistication among the user base, but the problem is not eliminated.
One thing you need to reduce or eliminate is the raising of business questions in the middle of coding, where the progammer has to stop software development to go out and research more requirements. Half the time they discover they need to rebuild what they've already coded, as it isn't appropriate.
Area Specialists
In the 1970's I worked on an accounting software project where the very successful but bull-headed boss had canned all the accountants! Needless to say it didn't matter that the code worked brilliantly, from a technical point of view. I did learn how to code a table driven Binary Search in COBOL, however, it added no value to my user base.
When the corporate level evaluated the software and, of course, found it to be a complete waste of time, I was personally accused of stealing company resources by writing useless software. That's one meeting I will never forget.
I digress, but that was when I learned that there are some managers and "Business leaders" whose only management tool is to apply pressure to their staff, as they don't understand anything else. At all.
Years later I worked on an embedded data acquisition system where the hardware guys had to reverse engineer the data sources so we could extract the data. Massive chaos reigned until we found a retired engineer who actually understood the massively complex old hardware systems with which we were trying to interface.
Don't Build What You're Told
It doesn't take a software developer long to realize that the software customer base is rarely happy when you build exactly what they specify. Some of the more intelligent customers (aka "Users") have learned to deal with this by refusing to agree to a spec.
Successful business software developers learn early that you build what they need rather than what they say. Of course, then you have to sell it to them.
It is this disconnect between user requests and user happiness that gave rise to the collaborative techniques that involve the User in specifying "Use cases" and all that, so that they are emotionally and politically committed to a particular solution before coding. Of course, this method allows the user community to learn about IT/DP from experience.
Puppies are not violent! They are playful! If you think you can justify raping puppies because they are violent you have another thing coming.
Are you sure you want to live under a world dominant India/China/OPEC axis? Do you think they will promulgate civil or human rights? Would they have done better in Kosovo or even Rwanda? Want to bet on women's rights? Think the UN is too corrupt now?
Is the US a personal danger to you?
If you've got your real time system in rom inside a piece of equipment, or in thousands of pieces of equipment, you've got to be very careful with it.
Desktop system can be patched and upgraded, but ROMs have to be replaced or flashed. For example, you've got to bring the missle into the hanger/lab and hook up the reflashing unit or swap out the ROM chip. You've got to test the missle with the new chip. Out in the field, the soldiers have new ly upgraded missles (or tanks...) and would really like to know that it will work when they need it. You can field test a tank, but some missles are expensive, especially when all you want to do is prove you installed the right chip in the right way.
When a desktop or server software hiccups, the human user can work around it. Often this is not the case in communications and avionics.
Linux Advantages Don't Translate to Military Embedded Systems
Embedded systems are almost always memory-resident and have no disk for software storage. There are usually no user identities to manage, and the user interface is quite often absent or primitive.
Most of the advantages of Linux do not apply to an embedded, military situation: Licensing fees for software are usually a negligable part of a tank, missle or radar. Embedded RTOS systems are already quite reliable, and do not suffer from nearly as many buffer overruns, neither are they susceptible to hackers. Embedded military systems are almost never connected to the internet.
You could build a reliable, compact embedded software system from embedded Linux, but you'd want to write all your own drivers and you would have to port it to special hardware. This approximately the same amount of work that you would have to do if you were to use a proprietary RTOS.
The vast bulk of the problems users experience with proprietary OS's are 1) expensive to license, more expensive to license across many machines. 2) Security vulnerabilities resulting from using a system designed and built for stand-alone personal use in an internetworked environment. Neither of these problems matters much to embedded, military systems.