Many posts on this board accuse me of saying I only "invented the internet". This is patently false, I am greater than that, I said that "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" as the following interview with Mr. Blitzer will show.
BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.
Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?
GORE: Well, I will be offering - I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.
But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead.
Same here, although I specialize in eating the lunch of math majors. When I was in school I majored in Chemical Engineering, but took a lot of math courses on the side because I had a real talent for it, and thought it was a nice diversion from much harder stuff like Organic Chemistry. By the time I got my PhD I had more than enough math courses to qualify for a MS in math. Since I was generally doing the math for fun, I was normally the top student in any math course I took. Another ChE student had done a similar thing 4-5 years before, so the math guys were getting used to it. Towards the end of my education the math professors were telling me that they thought my solutions to the assignments were more elegant than their own. Several tried to recruit me into being their grad student.
Now that I'm doing programming it floors me when the CS guys jaws drop because I can do relatively simple integrals or other calculations in my head. Most of the CS people coming out of school these days can't multiply 4 times 5 without a calculator. LOL.
But as members of the video game generation become parents, teachers, journalists, cultural critics and policy makers, I think we'll see some of the criticism of games balanced by a better appreciation of how they enrich our lives and culture.
I think that what you will see in that once gamers become parents they will be horrified at how much time their children waste playing video games when they should be working to educate themselves.
One of the big driving forces in R&D during the Cold War was in fact military spending. This was a time when US tech was dominant. The post Cold War drop in military spending that occurred during the Clinton years gave us two things, a balanced budget and huge cuts in military R&D. Unfortunately the reduction in military R&D spending was not made up with increases in the civilian side. Now military R&D is being heavily funded again this factor will improve. It isn't a negative as the Times thinks.
Another thing to be aware of is that the US is the world leader in R&D spending as a percentage of GDP. The fact that the tech gap is closing isn't really reduction in US R&D spending, but more increasing GDP of other countries, and the increases in R&D that go along with that.
As far as schools being the problem, that's poppycock. Maybe K-12 isn't the best, but the US has a LARGE number of top flight research universities, yet they can't get US students to major in technical fields. Why? Supply and demand. There just aren't enough jobs in the tech fields, and salaries are not attractive enough. It's the same reason that CS enrollments have dried up.
Another really negative factor is the way corporations work in the US. CEOs are judged on quarterly and year over year results, so any project that lasts more than a year isn't going to affect the CEOs pay quickly enough. Most R&D takes 5 years to go from lab to product. Another factor is the great uncertainty associated with fundamental R&D. You might have a great new tech, but is your company going to be able to sell it? If you look at the history of these things it is pretty common for a company to invent something really great, but find that they can't take advantage of it for one reason or another. Xerox PARC is a great example of this sort of thing. When I worked in R&D, I found that all of my patents were eventually sold to competitors for the simple reason that my company's strategies changed over time making the projects less interesting to them.
Because of these problems with commercial R&D I don't see any solution other than government funding.
Outsourcing is fine if you realize that you are paying not only the wages of the 4 IT people that you would have in-house PLUS the M&A and net the outsourcing company generates for it's stockholders. If you think you can make it up in the increased sales of widgets because you can focus on widgets, all the more power to you.
It is just as likely some other widget manufacturer figures out how to manage business support internally and save over the outsourced solutions. You say accounting is not core business? What about accounts recievable? A LOT of companies don't like to outsource that because it involves a lot of direct customer contact. A lot of widget manufacturers find that everybody makes widgets, so they need to compete using operational efficiency. They have no pricing power. Outsourcing can be very bad for those companies.
Also, outsourcing product development is actually becomming pretty common these days. Many companies just do not have the critical mass internally to do it. Even the mighty Intel has to tap into a variety of technical resources to build the technology base it needs for next gen lithography.
Offshoring is a different kettle of fish. Many of those offshore IT workers live in countries where polio, malaria and tuberculosis are still rampant (example, India). Expecting US workers to compete by accepting their standards of living at those levels is totally unrealistic. If you are going have a policy of globalization, fine. But the US is ignoring the social issues by not funding training programs, and similar support for workers who are displaced, unlike other countries who support globalization. Businesses receive the economic benefits of offshoring - they should also expect to pay for the social costs that represent external diseconomies associated with offshoring. The are getting away with no doing it now, and it is NOT acceptable economic or social policy.
When Craig Barrett says he doesn't have a solution for recent IT grads, he's right. It isn't a private sector problem except in the sense we are seeing a dramatic decline in IT and CS students. It's a public sector problem. If you have a public policy of globalization because you think in the long term it will generate better economic growth, you had better think about the short term consequences too. If you don't you are going to get a lot of political flack and maybe not get re-elected.
Unless they've done a Master's degree, they're probably not at the same standard as people with Bachelor's degrees from Europe or India.
Technical graduate schools in the US (who often have 50% or better non-US student populations) generally prefer US students over foreign students because the US students have better preparation.
Ponting the finger at the education system? I call bullshit on that.
I agree. The flaw in these educational statistics is that the US has a much broader distribution in it's numbers because it has a much more diverse population. If you look at the distribution rather than the average, the to 10% in the US is just as good if not BETTER than anyone in the world. Generally the engineering professionals are taken from that top 10%.
The fact is that the American worker is the most productive in the world. Period.
It's a crock, and it's about one thing - finding the lowest cost labor to maximize profits.
I used to hang out with this guy who thought they were binary. He would constantly pump the gas or brake pedal depending on the circumstances. Annoying as hell.
It is the same dye system that Kodak used in their Gold Ultima that is unfortunately no longer manufactured. Kodak licensed the technology from Mitsui.
There is nothing that IT workers in the U.S., as a group can do, that they can't do in India as well.
If that is true, why don't we see Indian companies bring out products on their own? There seems to be one real deficiency with the plans of WiPro etc. - they are merely supplying services to companies who are actually building products. Where are the innovations? The products that US technology companies generate?
The answer to the question of how US programmers can differentiate themselves is domain knowledge - learn the business end of things. Innovate. Bring more to the table than a code module.
These guys are on crack. Auto dealers get a good deal of their profits from repairs. They aren't about to let the carmakers close off this business.
As far as the headlight cost, a full conversion kit including ballasts, headlights and wiring harness typically costs $500. The actual lights are about $50 ea. Not $3000.
Healthcare is cheaper in India because of India's weird patent laws
It's also cheaper because they don't achieve the same level of care. We are talking about a country with rampant tuberculosis and malaria, frequent outbreaks of plague, very high infant mortality, etc.
It is one thing to talk about Americans being overpaid and having an excessive lifestyle, but if you are talking about competition with a country where even basic public health is not taken care of, then there is a serious issue here.
I think that some of your arguments are rather overblown. For example, what makes you think that US security measures are going to become more harsh? Generally these things go in cycles, rather than just a continuous trend in one direction. There are a lot of complaints in the US about these measures - and a lot of backlash. Already parts of the Patriot act have fallen by the wayside.
The concept that the IP laws are stifling innovation is interesting, however there is little or no emprical evidence to support it. The US still leads the rest of the world by far when it comes to introducing revolutionary new technologies, and many people think that the fact that the patent system richly rewards inventors is one reason why.
Microsoft does have a negative impact in certain fields, but interestingly one of the things that comes from Microsoft's monopoly is that they run the largest industrial research organization in the world - their monopoly profits give them the ability to do things no other company can afford to do. The parallels with the old AT&T Bell Labs are striking; of course nobody knows if Microsoft will eventaully match the results of the old AT&T organization.
As far as Asia taking a huge interest in research, well people in the US have heard this many times before. Japan has had NUMEROUS large initiatives to improve it's basic R&D programs over the years, with little or no positive result. It is almost a joke now. Maybe China can do it, but I don't think that this is something that you can do in an authoritarian culture. I know many Chinese scientists who have fled that country because of political problems; it is a fact that no Chinese citizen has ever won a Nobel Prize.
Outsourcing might affect industrial development activities like drug research and aircraft wing design. But true fundamental, breakthrough R&D is not being outsourced - it is still rooted firmly in the great US R&D universities.
This is similar to the techniques that Disney did in the restoration of Snow White for DVD.
Disney took the original camera negative, hand cleaned it frame by frame, and then scanned it one frame at a time using a specialized Kodak hi-res 6000 line scanner. If you have ever seen one of the pre digital restoration prints in the theatres and then see the DVD you will realize the miracle this restoration is.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newsletters/in Ca mera/oct2002/snowwhite.shtml
How on earth is this "more convenient" than mozilla's built-in cookie management?
Ultimately a script gives you far more control than any browser menu. That translates into convenience. You aren't depending on a feature being present in a browser. Mozilla, for example, doesn't have per domain cookie settings, so if you used session only you couldn't have log-in cookies.
For your other points:
(1) I never ran a system long enough for it to be a problem. It will take many years to make enough files to be an issue. If you like you can modify the script. If you consider this a privacy problem you have other more serious issues with your system.
(2) I never had the script take more than a second. cron only lets you run on a minute granularity, so starting the script at 23:59:59 isn't going to happen.
Did this list include Microsoft products like Windows XP and Windows Media PLayer? Surely that is just as much spyware as any of the stuff that people download off the net.
That brings up a good question...how safe IS Linux from spyware?
Tracking cookies will work on Linux - however it's easy to write a shell script that runs as a cron job that will eliminate those. It's a little more convenient than using the browser to control cookie persistance. Something like this:
#copy yesterday's cookie file. We put it in tmp for now, because we want to #compare it later with the last cookie file cp ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt/tmp/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d`
#collect what we will allow to be kept in the cookie file #We can trust Malda, right?;) grep slashdot ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt >/tmp/cookies.new #That silly free-registration stuff grep nytimes ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt >>/tmp/cookies.new #Do you, uh, Yahoo!? #grep yahoo ~/.netscape/cookies >>/tmp/cookies.new #And whatever else you want to add. You get the idea, I think....
#make the new cookie file cp/tmp/cookies.new ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt
#look for new stuff put in the old cookie file diff/tmp/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d` `find ~/.mozilla/old/|tail -1` > ~/.mozilla/old/cookie.`date +%y.%m.%d`.diff
#add yesterday's cookie file to the old ones cp/tmp/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d` ~/.mozilla/old/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d`
Ad-Aware is great stuff, however you need to be careful recommending in beacause of the low life scum at Ada-Ware. I had one of my friends install that by mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not have C++ in mind
LOL. You know he won the Turning Prize for SmallTalk.
I, AlGore created the internet.
Many posts on this board accuse me of saying I only "invented the internet". This is patently false, I am greater than that, I said that "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" as the following interview with Mr. Blitzer will show.
BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.
Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?
GORE: Well, I will be offering - I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.
But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead.
Go play basketball with your buddy.
they're FAR from being completely "mindless", as so many critics claim.
Maybe not COMPLETELY mindless, but the difference is small enough to be inconsequential.
Not everything you need to know about the world can be found in a text book.
The only thing that you can't get from a textbook is experience applying the knowledge therein.
love CS guys who don't know any math.
Same here, although I specialize in eating the lunch of math majors. When I was in school I majored in Chemical Engineering, but took a lot of math courses on the side because I had a real talent for it, and thought it was a nice diversion from much harder stuff like Organic Chemistry. By the time I got my PhD I had more than enough math courses to qualify for a MS in math. Since I was generally doing the math for fun, I was normally the top student in any math course I took. Another ChE student had done a similar thing 4-5 years before, so the math guys were getting used to it. Towards the end of my education the math professors were telling me that they thought my solutions to the assignments were more elegant than their own. Several tried to recruit me into being their grad student.
Now that I'm doing programming it floors me when the CS guys jaws drop because I can do relatively simple integrals or other calculations in my head. Most of the CS people coming out of school these days can't multiply 4 times 5 without a calculator. LOL.
But as members of the video game generation become parents, teachers, journalists, cultural critics and policy makers, I think we'll see some of the criticism of games balanced by a better appreciation of how they enrich our lives and culture.
I think that what you will see in that once gamers become parents they will be horrified at how much time their children waste playing video games when they should be working to educate themselves.
One of the big driving forces in R&D during the Cold War was in fact military spending. This was a time when US tech was dominant. The post Cold War drop in military spending that occurred during the Clinton years gave us two things, a balanced budget and huge cuts in military R&D. Unfortunately the reduction in military R&D spending was not made up with increases in the civilian side. Now military R&D is being heavily funded again this factor will improve. It isn't a negative as the Times thinks.
Another thing to be aware of is that the US is the world leader in R&D spending as a percentage of GDP. The fact that the tech gap is closing isn't really reduction in US R&D spending, but more increasing GDP of other countries, and the increases in R&D that go along with that.
As far as schools being the problem, that's poppycock. Maybe K-12 isn't the best, but the US has a LARGE number of top flight research universities, yet they can't get US students to major in technical fields. Why? Supply and demand. There just aren't enough jobs in the tech fields, and salaries are not attractive enough. It's the same reason that CS enrollments have dried up.
Another really negative factor is the way corporations work in the US. CEOs are judged on quarterly and year over year results, so any project that lasts more than a year isn't going to affect the CEOs pay quickly enough. Most R&D takes 5 years to go from lab to product. Another factor is the great uncertainty associated with fundamental R&D. You might have a great new tech, but is your company going to be able to sell it? If you look at the history of these things it is pretty common for a company to invent something really great, but find that they can't take advantage of it for one reason or another. Xerox PARC is a great example of this sort of thing. When I worked in R&D, I found that all of my patents were eventually sold to competitors for the simple reason that my company's strategies changed over time making the projects less interesting to them.
Because of these problems with commercial R&D I don't see any solution other than government funding.
I blame intellectual property, copyright, and patents.
We had these when the US was dominant, too. Obviously it is some other factor.
Outsourcing is fine if you realize that you are paying not only the wages of the 4 IT people that you would have in-house PLUS the M&A and net the outsourcing company generates for it's stockholders. If you think you can make it up in the increased sales of widgets because you can focus on widgets, all the more power to you.
It is just as likely some other widget manufacturer figures out how to manage business support internally and save over the outsourced solutions. You say accounting is not core business? What about accounts recievable? A LOT of companies don't like to outsource that because it involves a lot of direct customer contact. A lot of widget manufacturers find that everybody makes widgets, so they need to compete using operational efficiency. They have no pricing power. Outsourcing can be very bad for those companies.
Also, outsourcing product development is actually becomming pretty common these days. Many companies just do not have the critical mass internally to do it. Even the mighty Intel has to tap into a variety of technical resources to build the technology base it needs for next gen lithography.
Offshoring is a different kettle of fish. Many of those offshore IT workers live in countries where polio, malaria and tuberculosis are still rampant (example, India). Expecting US workers to compete by accepting their standards of living at those levels is totally unrealistic. If you are going have a policy of globalization, fine. But the US is ignoring the social issues by not funding training programs, and similar support for workers who are displaced, unlike other countries who support globalization. Businesses receive the economic benefits of offshoring - they should also expect to pay for the social costs that represent external diseconomies associated with offshoring. The are getting away with no doing it now, and it is NOT acceptable economic or social policy.
When Craig Barrett says he doesn't have a solution for recent IT grads, he's right. It isn't a private sector problem except in the sense we are seeing a dramatic decline in IT and CS students. It's a public sector problem. If you have a public policy of globalization because you think in the long term it will generate better economic growth, you had better think about the short term consequences too. If you don't you are going to get a lot of political flack and maybe not get re-elected.
Unless they've done a Master's degree, they're probably not at the same standard as people with Bachelor's degrees from Europe or India.
Technical graduate schools in the US (who often have 50% or better non-US student populations) generally prefer US students over foreign students because the US students have better preparation.
Ponting the finger at the education system? I call bullshit on that.
I agree. The flaw in these educational statistics is that the US has a much broader distribution in it's numbers because it has a much more diverse population. If you look at the distribution rather than the average, the to 10% in the US is just as good if not BETTER than anyone in the world. Generally the engineering professionals are taken from that top 10%.
The fact is that the American worker is the most productive in the world. Period.
It's a crock, and it's about one thing - finding the lowest cost labor to maximize profits.
You can add Fermi LTS to that list.
IANAL , But I believe reverse engineering is legal except if some other law i.e. patent or DCMA is violated.
5 1, 39147906,00.htm6 427.html?legacy=c net
Here is a recent bit of news on the topic:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,390206
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-23
The most famous case of reverse engineering was Compaq developing a BIOS for it's IBM PC clone.
Thank goodness car pedals are analogue
I used to hang out with this guy who thought they were binary. He would constantly pump the gas or brake pedal depending on the circumstances. Annoying as hell.
The best is Mitsui Gold.
It is the same dye system that Kodak used in their Gold Ultima that is unfortunately no longer manufactured. Kodak licensed the technology from Mitsui.
There is nothing that IT workers in the U.S., as a group can do, that they can't do in India as well.
If that is true, why don't we see Indian companies bring out products on their own? There seems to be one real deficiency with the plans of WiPro etc. - they are merely supplying services to companies who are actually building products. Where are the innovations? The products that US technology companies generate?
The answer to the question of how US programmers can differentiate themselves is domain knowledge - learn the business end of things. Innovate. Bring more to the table than a code module.
These guys are on crack. Auto dealers get a good deal of their profits from repairs. They aren't about to let the carmakers close off this business.
As far as the headlight cost, a full conversion kit including ballasts, headlights and wiring harness typically costs $500. The actual lights are about $50 ea. Not $3000.
Healthcare is cheaper in India because of India's weird patent laws
It's also cheaper because they don't achieve the same level of care. We are talking about a country with rampant tuberculosis and malaria, frequent outbreaks of plague, very high infant mortality, etc.
It is one thing to talk about Americans being overpaid and having an excessive lifestyle, but if you are talking about competition with a country where even basic public health is not taken care of, then there is a serious issue here.
I think that some of your arguments are rather overblown. For example, what makes you think that US security measures are going to become more harsh? Generally these things go in cycles, rather than just a continuous trend in one direction. There are a lot of complaints in the US about these measures - and a lot of backlash. Already parts of the Patriot act have fallen by the wayside.
The concept that the IP laws are stifling innovation is interesting, however there is little or no emprical evidence to support it. The US still leads the rest of the world by far when it comes to introducing revolutionary new technologies, and many people think that the fact that the patent system richly rewards inventors is one reason why.
Microsoft does have a negative impact in certain fields, but interestingly one of the things that comes from Microsoft's monopoly is that they run the largest industrial research organization in the world - their monopoly profits give them the ability to do things no other company can afford to do. The parallels with the old AT&T Bell Labs are striking; of course nobody knows if Microsoft will eventaully match the results of the old AT&T organization.
As far as Asia taking a huge interest in research, well people in the US have heard this many times before. Japan has had NUMEROUS large initiatives to improve it's basic R&D programs over the years, with little or no positive result. It is almost a joke now. Maybe China can do it, but I don't think that this is something that you can do in an authoritarian culture. I know many Chinese scientists who have fled that country because of political problems; it is a fact that no Chinese citizen has ever won a Nobel Prize.
Outsourcing might affect industrial development activities like drug research and aircraft wing design. But true fundamental, breakthrough R&D is not being outsourced - it is still rooted firmly in the great US R&D universities.
This is similar to the techniques that Disney did in the restoration of Snow White for DVD.
n Ca mera/oct2002/snowwhite.shtml
Disney took the original camera negative, hand cleaned it frame by frame, and then scanned it one frame at a time using a specialized Kodak hi-res 6000 line scanner. If you have ever seen one of the pre digital restoration prints in the theatres and then see the DVD you will realize the miracle this restoration is.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newsletters/i
But what the hell you talking about with Windows XP?
r es ting-people/200304/msg00198.html. org/ciac/bulletins/m-005.shtml
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/inte
http://www.ciac
and others.
How on earth is this "more convenient" than mozilla's built-in cookie management?
Ultimately a script gives you far more control than any browser menu. That translates into convenience. You aren't depending on a feature being present in a browser. Mozilla, for example, doesn't have per domain cookie settings, so if you used session only you couldn't have log-in cookies.
For your other points:
(1) I never ran a system long enough for it to be a problem. It will take many years to make enough files to be an issue. If you like you can modify the script. If you consider this a privacy problem you have other more serious issues with your system.
(2) I never had the script take more than a second. cron only lets you run on a minute granularity, so starting the script at 23:59:59
isn't going to happen.
My boss used to give me stress, and a very high volume of it. My experience was I didn't like it one bit, so I found another job.
Did this list include Microsoft products like Windows XP and Windows Media PLayer? Surely that is just as much spyware as any of the stuff that people download off the net.
That brings up a good question...how safe IS Linux from spyware?
t xt
/tmp/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d`
;) /tmp/cookies.new /tmp/cookies.new /tmp/cookies.new
/tmp/cookies.new ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt
/tmp/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d` `find ~/.mozilla/old/|tail -1` > ~/.mozilla/old/cookie.`date +%y.%m.%d`.diff
/tmp/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d` ~/.mozilla/old/cookies.`date +%y.%m.%d`
Tracking cookies will work on Linux - however it's easy to write a shell script that runs as a cron job that will eliminate those. It's a little more convenient than using the browser to control cookie persistance. Something like this:
#!/bin/csh
#/home/eric/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.
#copy yesterday's cookie file. We put it in tmp for now, because we want to
#compare it later with the last cookie file
cp ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt
#collect what we will allow to be kept in the cookie file
#We can trust Malda, right?
grep slashdot ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt >
#That silly free-registration stuff
grep nytimes ~/.mozilla/eric/zidis8bu.slt/cookies.txt >>
#Do you, uh, Yahoo!?
#grep yahoo ~/.netscape/cookies >>
#And whatever else you want to add. You get the idea, I think....
#make the new cookie file
cp
#look for new stuff put in the old cookie file
diff
#add yesterday's cookie file to the old ones
cp
Ad-Aware
Ad-Aware is great stuff, however you need to be careful recommending in beacause of the low life scum at Ada-Ware. I had one of my friends install that by mistake.