I really really doubt that it takes 4x more Java developers than C# developers to get the same thing done. There are perfectly good Java dev tools (Eclipse is IMHO significantly better than Visual Studio, and WSAD is even better) and the language syntax is pretty damn close. And to top it off the Jakarta project offers a giant metric buttload of free stuff that you can leverage bigtime.
How dominant was the Java language/platform in its 1.0/1.1 days.
Not very dominant at all, but on the other hand Java wasn't (and still isn't) heavily marketed by the company with a 96% desktop market share, and it isn't following (ripping off some would say) a well established path of how to do a VM based programming model,
Personally, considering that Microsoft has dumped VB 5 support and they don't offer VB tools any more I can't see where they will get any more market share than they currently have.
FWIW, the company I work for used to be a VB shop. After taking a look at.Net they said no thanks and moved to Java so that they had a clear path to larger iron than.Net can address. And I don't want to hear about Mono. Every one of our enterprise customers would laugh us out the front door if we suggested that we run their production systems on software written using Mono.
Among the products included a microwave, fridge, coffee maker, toaster, dishwater and washer drier. These all tied into a control panel which could be accessed from a household computer which showed the status of each item.
Bad enough that your PC gets owned. With this it's going to be all your house are belong to us. Just think - spyware in your fridge tracking what products you buy and eat, the washer refuses to run because it is new and hasn't been authorized by Microsoft yet?
Now imagine how much she made when she announced she was leaving.
1. Become CEO of BigCompany. 2. Drive down value of stock. 3. Get millions of stock options. 4. Leave company. 5. Stock price goes up as investors celebrate. 6. Sell options. 7. PROFIT!!!
Yes, but how many of them end up staying? More than a few, I'd wager.
20 years ago they would all try to stay becuase there were no oportunities for them at home. US companies would snap them up and give them good stable jobs and funding to do innovative work. Now they get treated like crap when they get out of school, and there are opportunities back in their homeland, so they go home when they are done getting their education here.
Now here is the killer - the best of the foreign PhDs would become leaders in US industry or professors at US universities, and train the next generation or start the Ciscos and so on. Guess what - they are now doing that in their home country. No longer does the US attract and keep the cream of the technical talent world-wide.
We are basically slitting our own throats thanks to the shortsightedness of the quarterly results syndrome that drives the prices on the stockmarket.
There are still benefits to running a company in the US - access to capital, lower taxes and more flexibility in managing the workforce, and worker productivity are advantages over most anywhere else. But no longer can you say that the US has an essential monopoly on the top engineering talent.
Eh, gotta love keying in the boot loader from the front panel to get it to load the OS from paper tape. I remember the PDP-11 I used too. Gotta love 12 bit words.
No, I left the PDP-8 behind when I graduated, but I do have a 6 year old dual Pentium II box in my house that I use for DNS/mail etc. services. It will probably hit 8 before I retire it. I also have a 13 year old (HP) laserprinter, a 15 year old TV, and a pair of 25 year old speakers that I reconed myself in service.
I went looking for a new laser printer the other day and became kind of PO'ed at the obvious cheapness of current models compared to the one I have. I don't see why it is any benefit whatsover to making a throwaway laser printer. Especially since it's pretty obvious that something made like this is probably not going to even work right when it is new. And the manufacturer is perfectly capable of getting good repeat business through selling cartridges.
Brain dead if you ask me.
I'm going back to Ebay now to look at a nice HP-15C they have offered. I hope the bids haven't broken the $300 mark.
But that's not because miniaturization of computing technology has stagnated.
Miniaturization doesn't have much to do with calculator features/quality. HP even said something like this when they introduced the HP-41 in 1980 - that for calculators miniaturization had advanced enough so they could put whatever they wanted in the calculator. The remaining issues where making it easy for the user to tap that power. That means attention to human factors engineering and software design.
This plus durability is IMHO why the older calculators are so prized - HP understood that and took the time to get it right. Nowadays you can buy all sorts of calculators with more faetures, including synthetic algebra, etc. But on these modern machines figuring out how to get answers to everyday problems is much harder.
does not mean that all cheap disposable products are bad
Yes, there are times when a cheap, disposable product can make sense to both the producer and consumer. Products such as the daily newspaper that by their very nature are ephemeral. But in general I don't think electronics are in that category.
I started having serious health problems - overweight, incipient type 2 diabeties, high blood pressure etc. all pointing to early CV problems.
The solution was to find a job closer to home and spend no more than 45 hours a day at work. The rest, diet, exercise, etc. became easy after I got away from the pressure cooker.
I don't know, I bought several of them because I loved the quality and the geekiness of having the latest features. Now I do my calculator shopping on EBay because nobody makes good ones any more. From me personally HP sure doesn't get any recurring anymore sales because their current product is crap. If they came out with something like the 15C again I would be first in line.
Some of these have some real history behind them. The 41CV's were carried on early Space Shuttle missions to take some load off the on board computers. Sally Ride's is on display at the National Air and Space Museum. My Dad has one with a NASA property tag on it. I can't imagine how much that would draw on EBay.
but just look at how many items in the average kitchen were really invented by a big company (hint none). Look at the electricity, phone, the PC, the radio,
The problem with your thesis is that while all of these inventions were done by small operations, they were all certainly patented. Edison in particular rang the patent system like a bell all day long. The Bell patent was absolutely crucial. The fact of the matter is that patents are much more important to single inventors of small organizations because without them the big companies would just take their invention, and use it freely without and any compensation to the small inventor.
And now HPs calculators from the 70's and 80's sell for hundreds of dollars on EBay, while their current flagship product is a bug ridden POS with a bad keyboard. It's not only a matter of lack of interest at the fundamental R&D level, but a policy of making it as cheaply as possible, regardless of the quality level the market really wants. It is sickening to see the current product, feel the tacky keyboard and the gaudy painted plastic shell that the paint chips off easily and read reports of keypress detection problems, while that 25 year old model has keys that still work perfectly, with no sign of wear on key labels.
Marketing is fine as a tool for finding products people want. But it's useless for determining if a completely new technology might create or revolutionize a market.
Marketing is much, much worse than that in a technology driven company because the marketers do not understand even the current products and how they are used.
Hey - the basic catechism of life in America is that you have the right to pursue happiness. This implies that you cannot ever achieve it because then you would lose the ability to pursue it.
The document also states that in 1970 74% of education degrees were awarded to women and that number has only gone up since then. So really, not much has changed in the last twenty years or so.
Maybe not in the education field, but certainly in engineering things have changed a lot. I've been in engineering of one sort or another for 30 years now. When I was in school there were 200 undergraduates in my university's engineering school. One was female. Now when I go back to visit the undergraduate population is more like 30% female. The same holds true in the workplace. When I started work their were no women in the engineering organization. Now where I work (telecomm software development) it is more like 25% women.
You put it on a scale, which gives you a reading in grams. Did you just "mass" that sample? NO. You weighed it. This is because you didn't even measure its mass; you measured its weight: the force that it presses downwards onto the scale with because of gravity. The scale only reads in grams because it's been calibrated to translate the force (weight) measurement into mass, by assuming a fixed value for gravitational force.
Poppycock. F=mg. The calibration establishes the value of g because the scale determines F and you inform the scale what m is by setting the calibration controls to that mass. Adjustment of the calibration sets the value of g at the location of the scale. When you then place another sample on the scale the computation based on the calibration returns the value of the mass using F=mg. Yes, internally the scale uses gravitational pull to detect the mass, however that is only PART of the measurement process. The entire process includes the determination of g so that you actually measure the mass. This is why the display on the scale says grams and not Newtons.
To encourage someone to become a help desk employee is a bit premature at age 14 imo.
One of the strange things about all of this is that in the US anyway more than 50% of all undergraduate degrees in mathematics are awarded to women. So it is not a case of the aptitude or interest in the quantitative world not being there.
There is some other exclusion mechanism in operation. And I think that women are not going to fight it when there are other ways they can express their talent without having to contend with this mechanism.
So what this Microsoft executive is trying to do is wrong headed. You can't get people interested by pushing. There has to be an effort to remove any forces that discourage people from considering a vocation.
- A gram is a unit of mass, not weight. - One cc of water can contain any number of water molecules depending on temperature and pressure, so who can say what its mass is without this information. - How much something weighs depends on the local gravitational constant which is different from one place to another.
So I think I can say that it is very unlikely that one cc of water weighs one gram.
We were earning the same salary in local currency.
That's really not a good way to measure things. The most important measurement is how much a government spends as a percentage of GDP. For New Zealand it's about 40%, in the US it's 29%. That means New Zealand is a pretty highly taxed nation, on par with most of Europe.
Long term I would expect that to be a drag on economic growth simply because government is siphoning away an extra 10% of the economy that could be used for private investment.
The fact that NZ has good numbers for unemployment and growth can mean that you don't have as mature an economy as is the case in Europe, so your potential for growth is higher.
The OECD publishes reports on this sort of thing, you might want to look at what NZ's growth potential is vs. what it is actually realizing to assess the impact of the social benefits and taxes on economic growth.
Slashdot Mirror
I really really doubt that it takes 4x more Java developers than C# developers to get the same thing done. There are perfectly good Java dev tools (Eclipse is IMHO significantly better than Visual Studio, and WSAD is even better) and the language syntax is pretty damn close. And to top it off the Jakarta project offers a giant metric buttload of free stuff that you can leverage bigtime.
It's gotta be a non-factor.
How dominant was the Java language/platform in its 1.0/1.1 days.
.Net they said no thanks and moved to Java so that they had a clear path to larger iron than .Net can address. And I don't want to hear about Mono. Every one of our enterprise customers would laugh us out the front door if we suggested that we run their production systems on software written using Mono.
Not very dominant at all, but on the other hand Java wasn't (and still isn't) heavily marketed by the company with a 96% desktop market share, and it isn't following (ripping off some would say) a well established path of how to do a VM based programming model,
Personally, considering that Microsoft has dumped VB 5 support and they don't offer VB tools any more I can't see where they will get any more market share than they currently have.
FWIW, the company I work for used to be a VB shop. After taking a look at
Real R&D involves exploiting and extending the sciences, not this sort of nightmare toy.
Among the products included a microwave, fridge, coffee maker, toaster, dishwater and washer drier. These all tied into a control panel which could be accessed from a household computer which showed the status of each item.
Bad enough that your PC gets owned. With this it's going to be all your house are belong to us. Just think - spyware in your fridge tracking what products you buy and eat, the washer refuses to run because it is new and hasn't been authorized by Microsoft yet?
Makes me think of the bear in the Kubrik/Speilberg movie 'AI', derived from the story 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' by Brian Aldiss.
What next, little boys for parents who can't have children?
It said that the emphasis on research in the neo-tech countries, India, China, etc., might not pay off for them because they can't retain their IP.
You do have to be able to bring it to market too. But if you can you have a huge advantage over #2, regardless of IP etc.
Carly made lots of money for stockholders.
Now imagine how much she made when she announced she was leaving.
1. Become CEO of BigCompany.
2. Drive down value of stock.
3. Get millions of stock options.
4. Leave company.
5. Stock price goes up as investors celebrate.
6. Sell options.
7. PROFIT!!!
Yes, but how many of them end up staying? More than a few, I'd wager.
20 years ago they would all try to stay becuase there were no oportunities for them at home. US companies would snap them up and give them good stable jobs and funding to do innovative work. Now they get treated like crap when they get out of school, and there are opportunities back in their homeland, so they go home when they are done getting their education here.
Now here is the killer - the best of the foreign PhDs would become leaders in US industry or professors at US universities, and train the next generation or start the Ciscos and so on. Guess what - they are now doing that in their home country. No longer does the US attract and keep the cream of the technical talent world-wide.
We are basically slitting our own throats thanks to the shortsightedness of the quarterly results syndrome that drives the prices on the stockmarket.
There are still benefits to running a company in the US - access to capital, lower taxes and more flexibility in managing the workforce, and worker productivity are advantages over most anywhere else. But no longer can you say that the US has an essential monopoly on the top engineering talent.
Still carry'n 'round that PDP-8, eh?
Eh, gotta love keying in the boot loader from the front panel to get it to load the OS from paper tape. I remember the PDP-11 I used too. Gotta love 12 bit words.
No, I left the PDP-8 behind when I graduated, but I do have a 6 year old dual Pentium II box in my house that I use for DNS/mail etc. services. It will probably hit 8 before I retire it. I also have a 13 year old (HP) laserprinter, a 15 year old TV, and a pair of 25 year old speakers that I reconed myself in service.
I went looking for a new laser printer the other day and became kind of PO'ed at the obvious cheapness of current models compared to the one I have. I don't see why it is any benefit whatsover to making a throwaway laser printer. Especially since it's pretty obvious that something made like this is probably not going to even work right when it is new. And the manufacturer is perfectly capable of getting good repeat business through selling cartridges.
Brain dead if you ask me.
I'm going back to Ebay now to look at a nice HP-15C they have offered. I hope the bids haven't broken the $300 mark.
All your money belong to us!
But that's not because miniaturization of computing technology has stagnated.
Miniaturization doesn't have much to do with calculator features/quality. HP even said something like this when they introduced the HP-41 in 1980 - that for calculators miniaturization had advanced enough so they could put whatever they wanted in the calculator. The remaining issues where making it easy for the user to tap that power. That means attention to human factors engineering and software design.
This plus durability is IMHO why the older calculators are so prized - HP understood that and took the time to get it right. Nowadays you can buy all sorts of calculators with more faetures, including synthetic algebra, etc. But on these modern machines figuring out how to get answers to everyday problems is much harder.
does not mean that all cheap disposable products are bad
Yes, there are times when a cheap, disposable product can make sense to both the producer and consumer. Products such as the daily newspaper that by their very nature are ephemeral. But in general I don't think electronics are in that category.
I started having serious health problems - overweight, incipient type 2 diabeties, high blood pressure etc. all pointing to early CV problems.
The solution was to find a job closer to home and spend no more than 45 hours a day at work. The rest, diet, exercise, etc. became easy after I got away from the pressure cooker.
The problem with your thesis is that it's too expensive and time-consuming for single inventors or small organizations to get patents.
Then how do you explain that history has shown exactly the opposite occurs with great regularity?
Which doesn't much help recurring sales, though.
I don't know, I bought several of them because I loved the quality and the geekiness of having the latest features. Now I do my calculator shopping on EBay because nobody makes good ones any more. From me personally HP sure doesn't get any recurring anymore sales because their current product is crap. If they came out with something like the 15C again I would be first in line.
Some of these have some real history behind them. The 41CV's were carried on early Space Shuttle missions to take some load off the on board computers. Sally Ride's is on display at the National Air and Space Museum. My Dad has one with a NASA property tag on it. I can't imagine how much that would draw on EBay.
but just look at how many items in the average kitchen were really invented by a big company (hint none). Look at the electricity, phone, the PC, the radio,
The problem with your thesis is that while all of these inventions were done by small operations, they were all certainly patented. Edison in particular rang the patent system like a bell all day long. The Bell patent was absolutely crucial. The fact of the matter is that patents are much more important to single inventors of small organizations because without them the big companies would just take their invention, and use it freely without and any compensation to the small inventor.
And now HPs calculators from the 70's and 80's sell for hundreds of dollars on EBay, while their current flagship product is a bug ridden POS with a bad keyboard. It's not only a matter of lack of interest at the fundamental R&D level, but a policy of making it as cheaply as possible, regardless of the quality level the market really wants. It is sickening to see the current product, feel the tacky keyboard and the gaudy painted plastic shell that the paint chips off easily and read reports of keypress detection problems, while that 25 year old model has keys that still work perfectly, with no sign of wear on key labels.
Marketing is fine as a tool for finding products people want. But it's useless for determining if a completely new technology might create or revolutionize a market.
Marketing is much, much worse than that in a technology driven company because the marketers do not understand even the current products and how they are used.
Original author of Make and IBM Researcher, Stu Feldman
make = pain. So now I at least know who to blame.
Hey - the basic catechism of life in America is that you have the right to pursue happiness. This implies that you cannot ever achieve it because then you would lose the ability to pursue it.
So this helmet has to go.
The document also states that in 1970 74% of education degrees were awarded to women and that number has only gone up since then. So really, not much has changed in the last twenty years or so.
Maybe not in the education field, but certainly in engineering things have changed a lot. I've been in engineering of one sort or another for 30 years now. When I was in school there were 200 undergraduates in my university's engineering school. One was female. Now when I go back to visit the undergraduate population is more like 30% female. The same holds true in the workplace. When I started work their were no women in the engineering organization. Now where I work (telecomm software development) it is more like 25% women.
You put it on a scale, which gives you a reading in grams. Did you just "mass" that sample? NO. You weighed it. This is because you didn't even measure its mass; you measured its weight: the force that it presses downwards onto the scale with because of gravity. The scale only reads in grams because it's been calibrated to translate the force (weight) measurement into mass, by assuming a fixed value for gravitational force.
Poppycock. F=mg. The calibration establishes the value of g because the scale determines F and you inform the scale what m is by setting the calibration controls to that mass. Adjustment of the calibration sets the value of g at the location of the scale. When you then place another sample on the scale the computation based on the calibration returns the value of the mass using F=mg. Yes, internally the scale uses gravitational pull to detect the mass, however that is only PART of the measurement process. The entire process includes the determination of g so that you actually measure the mass. This is why the display on the scale says grams and not Newtons.
To encourage someone to become a help desk employee is a bit premature at age 14 imo.
One of the strange things about all of this is that in the US anyway more than 50% of all undergraduate degrees in mathematics are awarded to women. So it is not a case of the aptitude or interest in the quantitative world not being there.
There is some other exclusion mechanism in operation. And I think that women are not going to fight it when there are other ways they can express their talent without having to contend with this mechanism.
So what this Microsoft executive is trying to do is wrong headed. You can't get people interested by pushing. There has to be an effort to remove any forces that discourage people from considering a vocation.
because there is no commonly used verbal form for mass
There are at least two perfectly good ways of expressing this without incurring the incorrectness and ambiguity of 'weighs a gram'.
1. The mass of 1 cc of water is 1 gram.
2. 1 cc of water masses 1 gram.
As far as what the NIST says, that is baloney and an erosion of the precision of the meaning of words. That is extemely bad in this context.
That's pretty crappy gas roddage.
I get at least 450,000 rods per hogshead highway.
I thought one cc of water weighs one gram.
This is so wrong on so many levels.
- A gram is a unit of mass, not weight.
- One cc of water can contain any number of water molecules depending on temperature and pressure, so who can say what its mass is without this information.
- How much something weighs depends on the local gravitational constant which is different from one place to another.
So I think I can say that it is very unlikely that one cc of water weighs one gram.
We were earning the same salary in local currency.
That's really not a good way to measure things. The most important measurement is how much a government spends as a percentage of GDP. For New Zealand it's about 40%, in the US it's 29%. That means New Zealand is a pretty highly taxed nation, on par with most of Europe.
Long term I would expect that to be a drag on economic growth simply because government is siphoning away an extra 10% of the economy that could be used for private investment.
The fact that NZ has good numbers for unemployment and growth can mean that you don't have as mature an economy as is the case in Europe, so your potential for growth is higher.
The OECD publishes reports on this sort of thing, you might want to look at what NZ's growth potential is vs. what it is actually realizing to assess the impact of the social benefits and taxes on economic growth.