Go re-read his (admittedly not well-written) comment. He's saying you need 8 years, after high school, to be productive (4 for EE school + 4 for a "job training track"), which is close to a decade.
Moving to standard interfaces is a good thing, not a bad thing. Basically you're using the Broken Window Fallacy. Moving to standard stuff allows engineers to be more productive by working on something new, instead of just reinventing the wheel.
The reason you're not seeing this happen is because of "the economy, stupid!", combined with offshoring. In a healthy economy, these engineers would move on to something more productive; they'd either get jobs elsewhere doing something more interesting that implementing yet another interface or some other wheel re-invention, or better yet their own company would take advantage of the improvement in efficiency and take on new projects, and put those engineers to work on those. Instead, we have a shit economy thanks to many factors (shortsightedness of Wall Street leading to shortsighted corporate management, various bubbles, excessive military spending, I could go on and on), so instead of being more productive, and developing new products and selling more stuff with that engineering talent, these companies just let the engineers go.
From what i know, it's more like FAT licensing, features on the phones, not linux,
According to the arstechnica article here, one of the supposed patents had to do with storing or organizing contacts. That doesn't have anything to do with Linux per se, that's just a feature unique to phones. FAT licensing does affect the kernel level, but it only applies because Android phones have to be able to access FAT filesystems on SD cards since that's the de-facto standard for those, all because of the Windows desktop monopoly. Apple probably has to license that same patent for their Macs if they want to be able to read SD cards with FAT filesystems.
Sending your product out overseas to be designed means it will be cloned and copied
So what? By the time that happens, it's a year or two later. Companies only care about the next quarter.
I used to work for a company that designed and manufactured its own retail checkout terminals (the kind used infamously at Target). They got rid of the manufacturing equipment and moved to a smaller building, and offshored that to Taiwan. Then they got rid of their EEs, except for one, and offshored all that to Taiwan too. Their latest product was designed by a Taiwanese ODM, and most of the software work was outsourced to an embedded Linux vendor. The only thing they kept in-house was some of the security/crypto stuff, since they have to meet PCI requirements. Last I heard, they moved again, into an even smaller location.
All that testing you talk about is done by the Taiwanese ODM. There's little reason to do EE in this country any more; the only thing we're still good at is software, and that's not that hard to keep separate from hardware.
If you're in college now and majoring in EE, you'd have to be an idiot to not change majors. This profession is totally dead. The only reason I'm still employed is that I moved into software early on.
This stuff has been going on for a long time; as someone in a comment above said, any smart engineer could have told you decades ago that this was going to happen, because manufacturing was being offshored, and where manufacturing goes, so does engineering eventually. The NSA flap only happened a few months ago; that's not remotely enough time to have a noticeable effect on this stuff.
No, he's not kidding. Yes, "free market" is a line for the suckers, but the suckers are the people voting for this shit, and they're the ones who worship the "free market" because they've been trained to do so by their handlers at Fox News.
While a lot of your criticisms seem valid, many of the other problems (lack of hash tables, networking, etc.; iosteams library sucking) are things that are solved by using libraries/toolkits. The Qt toolkit for instance has hash tables and networking, and lots more, and much better alternatives for iostreams. With C++, instead of expecting the language's standard libraries to have things you need, you pick a toolkit and/or libraries that contain the functionality you need, and use that.
I've been working on a side project in Qt/C++ lately, and it seems to handle Unicode just fine. This shouldn't be something that's a fault of the language, but rather whatever libraries you're using. Pointers are a different matter.
If you want a hatchback that's reliable and good for cold climates, you probably should take a look at Suburu. They have some hatchback models, and they're AWD. They're probably not that cheap though, but that's the price of AWD.
Broken hinges on the laptop are obviously more of a problem. But most companies have a service contract with either laptop manufacturer or maintenance company where they just ship it for repairs or replacement.
Right, and these places only support equipment that's so old. After it gets too old and parts aren't available any more, you're out of luck. With fans or other parts for desktop ATX systems, it's pretty easy because most of that stuff is standardized and hasn't changed much in years. Laptops (which lots of companies now use as their only machines, combined with docking stations; I'm typing this now on such a setup) are a totally different matter: all the parts in them are proprietary, except the hard drives, so once a laptop is too old and you can't get parts any more, you're out of luck. They also tend to have a lot of mechanical problems after they get old: keyboard keys come off or get dirty or broken, hinges get loose or broken, casing gets broken (from dropping), etc.
no not retards, simply 'old'-style linux users,...
Qt was initially released in May 1995. It's not exactly a product of young people, and is almost as old as the Linux kernel itself. GTK was initially released in April 1998, almost 3 years later. The GTK devs are the new kids on the block.
It works perfectly fine except for the fact that screen hinges are broken so I have the screen lean on the wall.
it's cooling system is completely borked - heat pipe is blocked and I have visibly protruding plastic from where the heat pipe is blocked on surface. It still works though!
especially GPU fan on it broke and I didn't notice for a few days, just wondering why my games started to occasionally crash
For a few years after that I had a damn 120mm case fan strapped to the card with metal wires
Yes, I'm sure lots of major corporations would love to have all their employees depending on computers set up this way.
Cars and computers are different. There's two issues with computers that aren't like cars: 1) security, and 2) hardware lifespan.
With security, problems are constantly being found and fixed by the vendor. However, once a product is considered EOL (end of life), the vendor no longer bothers with supporting the product. Would you expect Ford to continue supporting cars made in the 1960s? Of course not. After a product is EOL, you're on your own. And if security is a concern, it's pretty dumb to continue using a product that's EOL for your business.
Now, suppose you think your IT infrastructure and firewalling is so great that you don't need to worry about this (ha!). This still leaves the problem of hardware lifespan. Computers don't last forever. Hard drives die, motherboard capacitors die, eventually your computer is not going to work any more. Capacitors can be replaced, but companies don't generally want to send computers to electronics technicians for this kind of repair: no one (except hobbyists) repair things at the component level any more, they just replace boards. You can't get replacement boards for older computers. Hard drives also die, and interface standards change, so you might not be able to get a new hard drive that's compatible. (Maybe you could go on Ebay, but again, no serious business is going to run their company on used parts from Ebay.) So eventually you're going to want to replace your computers with newer models, as the old ones die out. Windows XP doesn't run on newer computers; it doesn't have device driver support for them.
If you insist on making a car comparison, think of it this way: suppose your father's Opel stops working one day, and it needs some part which is no longer made. What is he going to do now? Look for a NOS part on Ebay? Try to custom-fabricate a new part? He doesn't have that problem now because his car is only 17 years old; cars usually get part support, from both the manufacturer and the aftermarket, for several decades. But what about when his car is over 50 years old? Good luck finding parts for it then. That's almost how old Windows XP is now, when you compare computer-years to car-years (sorta like human-years vs. dog-years).
As for Netflix, just go ahead and use a dedicated device such as a Roku or a Bluray player with apps. You won't get a good Netflix experience with XBMC (kludged for NF), or most other media player softwares. Don't waste time trying to find it.
I have one of those Blu-Ray players with apps for watching Netflix. I don't get a good Netflix experience there either.
So the world is the USA's bitch is it? Edward Snowden is sitting pretty in Moscow thumbing his nose at Uncle Sam despite being wanted as a traitor under US law.
Russia is one of the countries which hasn't cowed under to the US (China is the other big one).
I'm talking about the European countries mainly, along with Canada and Australia. They're all the USA's bitches. Remember, not long ago the US had a Bolivian plane, carrying that country's President, forced to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on board. Why exactly was Austria doing the US's bidding there?
I have a lot of friends who proudly contribute to google maps. Whenever I try push them towards OSM, the response is. Its not good enough. roads are missing. POIs are less. Its like a big whoosh. OSM is user generated. More users will mean better maps. Looks at Europe. We did a trip in norway, and we could navigate perfectly just with OSM. Why? Because of local participation.
That's because Americans are stupid and are big fans of giant corporations. It's like sports teams to them; they pick a few big corporations to become fanboys of, and spend all their energy evangelizing that corporation's shitware and defending it. It's no different from how Americans become big fans of political parties (of which there's only two main ones, because if you're not a fan of one, then you must obviously be a big fan of the other).
Um, maybe I'm missing something, but when I tried it, I was just running the DLNA servers on my Linux box, which was connected to the same network as my crappy Sony player. I'm not using any firewalling on my PC, only on the WAN side of my wireless router (DD-WRT, though now that I think about it, I was using a Linksys E4500 (stock firmware) at the time, so maybe I should try it again). I wouldn't think firewalling should be an issue for me there.
This is simply nonsense. A single state laws can't make something legal in other countries.
Wrong, US law trumps everyone else's laws. Just ask the US government.
This is true because other countries go along with it. Just look at all the other countries that went along with the US when they were doing "extraordinary renditions".
The US laws cannot stop the Canadian government from prosecuting the NSA agents performing acts illegal there.
You mean like other countries prosecuted NSA agents for spying on their offices (outside the US)? Oh wait, they didn't, they just made complaints and nothing was done.
US law isn't superior to other countries laws, sspecially in other countries land.
Yes, it is. When other countries just go along with the US, and don't take any action when the US does something "illegal" in their countries, then effectively, US law is superior to other countries' laws.
Not in New Jersey you can't. Technically, you can turn right on red at any intersection that doesn't have a "No turn on red" sign posted; however, in reality, a majority of intersections here have those signs posted because the roads were designed by forest animals (literally).
Also, there's some states where you turning right on red is not legal (I think Delaware might be one, if not the only one).
But as the other responder said, the important thing is that it's allowed at some (most in most places) intersections, but not all, so that needs to be known by a navigation application so it can remind you.
Did you miss the part where the servers are in Canada? NSA has no reach here unless they want to act illegally.
Wrong. US law explicitly allows the NSA to hack into anything outside the US they want to, so it's perfectly legal for them to access those servers in Canada.
You're probably thinking about Canadian law, but that's irrelevant. According to the US Government, US law trumps all other jurisdictions' laws.
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Citation needed. This one is pretty ridiculous. How do you think employed engineers do business travel if they're on no-fly lists?
I'm sorry that you have poor reading comprehension. Please point me to where I wrote that there is a free market.
Name one thing the IEEE has actually done to protect electrical engineering jobs.
The only thing the IEEE does is print a magazine and beg for EEs to renew their memberships, and also push for more engineers to be imported to help keep wages low for the corporations who run the IEEE.
Go re-read his (admittedly not well-written) comment. He's saying you need 8 years, after high school, to be productive (4 for EE school + 4 for a "job training track"), which is close to a decade.
Moving to standard interfaces is a good thing, not a bad thing. Basically you're using the Broken Window Fallacy. Moving to standard stuff allows engineers to be more productive by working on something new, instead of just reinventing the wheel.
The reason you're not seeing this happen is because of "the economy, stupid!", combined with offshoring. In a healthy economy, these engineers would move on to something more productive; they'd either get jobs elsewhere doing something more interesting that implementing yet another interface or some other wheel re-invention, or better yet their own company would take advantage of the improvement in efficiency and take on new projects, and put those engineers to work on those. Instead, we have a shit economy thanks to many factors (shortsightedness of Wall Street leading to shortsighted corporate management, various bubbles, excessive military spending, I could go on and on), so instead of being more productive, and developing new products and selling more stuff with that engineering talent, these companies just let the engineers go.
From what i know, it's more like FAT licensing, features on the phones, not linux,
According to the arstechnica article here, one of the supposed patents had to do with storing or organizing contacts. That doesn't have anything to do with Linux per se, that's just a feature unique to phones. FAT licensing does affect the kernel level, but it only applies because Android phones have to be able to access FAT filesystems on SD cards since that's the de-facto standard for those, all because of the Windows desktop monopoly. Apple probably has to license that same patent for their Macs if they want to be able to read SD cards with FAT filesystems.
It's really telling that your comment was modded "Troll", obviously by some butt-hurt American. It's completely true.
Sending your product out overseas to be designed means it will be cloned and copied
So what? By the time that happens, it's a year or two later. Companies only care about the next quarter.
I used to work for a company that designed and manufactured its own retail checkout terminals (the kind used infamously at Target). They got rid of the manufacturing equipment and moved to a smaller building, and offshored that to Taiwan. Then they got rid of their EEs, except for one, and offshored all that to Taiwan too. Their latest product was designed by a Taiwanese ODM, and most of the software work was outsourced to an embedded Linux vendor. The only thing they kept in-house was some of the security/crypto stuff, since they have to meet PCI requirements. Last I heard, they moved again, into an even smaller location.
All that testing you talk about is done by the Taiwanese ODM. There's little reason to do EE in this country any more; the only thing we're still good at is software, and that's not that hard to keep separate from hardware.
If you're in college now and majoring in EE, you'd have to be an idiot to not change majors. This profession is totally dead. The only reason I'm still employed is that I moved into software early on.
This stuff has been going on for a long time; as someone in a comment above said, any smart engineer could have told you decades ago that this was going to happen, because manufacturing was being offshored, and where manufacturing goes, so does engineering eventually. The NSA flap only happened a few months ago; that's not remotely enough time to have a noticeable effect on this stuff.
No, he's not kidding. Yes, "free market" is a line for the suckers, but the suckers are the people voting for this shit, and they're the ones who worship the "free market" because they've been trained to do so by their handlers at Fox News.
While a lot of your criticisms seem valid, many of the other problems (lack of hash tables, networking, etc.; iosteams library sucking) are things that are solved by using libraries/toolkits. The Qt toolkit for instance has hash tables and networking, and lots more, and much better alternatives for iostreams. With C++, instead of expecting the language's standard libraries to have things you need, you pick a toolkit and/or libraries that contain the functionality you need, and use that.
I've been working on a side project in Qt/C++ lately, and it seems to handle Unicode just fine. This shouldn't be something that's a fault of the language, but rather whatever libraries you're using. Pointers are a different matter.
If you want a hatchback that's reliable and good for cold climates, you probably should take a look at Suburu. They have some hatchback models, and they're AWD. They're probably not that cheap though, but that's the price of AWD.
Broken hinges on the laptop are obviously more of a problem. But most companies have a service contract with either laptop manufacturer or maintenance company where they just ship it for repairs or replacement.
Right, and these places only support equipment that's so old. After it gets too old and parts aren't available any more, you're out of luck. With fans or other parts for desktop ATX systems, it's pretty easy because most of that stuff is standardized and hasn't changed much in years. Laptops (which lots of companies now use as their only machines, combined with docking stations; I'm typing this now on such a setup) are a totally different matter: all the parts in them are proprietary, except the hard drives, so once a laptop is too old and you can't get parts any more, you're out of luck. They also tend to have a lot of mechanical problems after they get old: keyboard keys come off or get dirty or broken, hinges get loose or broken, casing gets broken (from dropping), etc.
no not retards, simply 'old'-style linux users,...
Qt was initially released in May 1995. It's not exactly a product of young people, and is almost as old as the Linux kernel itself. GTK was initially released in April 1998, almost 3 years later. The GTK devs are the new kids on the block.
It works perfectly fine except for the fact that screen hinges are broken so I have the screen lean on the wall.
it's cooling system is completely borked - heat pipe is blocked and I have visibly protruding plastic from where the heat pipe is blocked on surface. It still works though!
especially GPU fan on it broke and I didn't notice for a few days, just wondering why my games started to occasionally crash
For a few years after that I had a damn 120mm case fan strapped to the card with metal wires
Yes, I'm sure lots of major corporations would love to have all their employees depending on computers set up this way.
Cars and computers are different. There's two issues with computers that aren't like cars: 1) security, and 2) hardware lifespan.
With security, problems are constantly being found and fixed by the vendor. However, once a product is considered EOL (end of life), the vendor no longer bothers with supporting the product. Would you expect Ford to continue supporting cars made in the 1960s? Of course not. After a product is EOL, you're on your own. And if security is a concern, it's pretty dumb to continue using a product that's EOL for your business.
Now, suppose you think your IT infrastructure and firewalling is so great that you don't need to worry about this (ha!). This still leaves the problem of hardware lifespan. Computers don't last forever. Hard drives die, motherboard capacitors die, eventually your computer is not going to work any more. Capacitors can be replaced, but companies don't generally want to send computers to electronics technicians for this kind of repair: no one (except hobbyists) repair things at the component level any more, they just replace boards. You can't get replacement boards for older computers. Hard drives also die, and interface standards change, so you might not be able to get a new hard drive that's compatible. (Maybe you could go on Ebay, but again, no serious business is going to run their company on used parts from Ebay.) So eventually you're going to want to replace your computers with newer models, as the old ones die out. Windows XP doesn't run on newer computers; it doesn't have device driver support for them.
If you insist on making a car comparison, think of it this way: suppose your father's Opel stops working one day, and it needs some part which is no longer made. What is he going to do now? Look for a NOS part on Ebay? Try to custom-fabricate a new part? He doesn't have that problem now because his car is only 17 years old; cars usually get part support, from both the manufacturer and the aftermarket, for several decades. But what about when his car is over 50 years old? Good luck finding parts for it then. That's almost how old Windows XP is now, when you compare computer-years to car-years (sorta like human-years vs. dog-years).
As for Netflix, just go ahead and use a dedicated device such as a Roku or a Bluray player with apps. You won't get a good Netflix experience with XBMC (kludged for NF), or most other media player softwares. Don't waste time trying to find it.
I have one of those Blu-Ray players with apps for watching Netflix. I don't get a good Netflix experience there either.
So the world is the USA's bitch is it? Edward Snowden is sitting pretty in Moscow thumbing his nose at Uncle Sam despite being wanted as a traitor under US law.
Russia is one of the countries which hasn't cowed under to the US (China is the other big one).
I'm talking about the European countries mainly, along with Canada and Australia. They're all the USA's bitches. Remember, not long ago the US had a Bolivian plane, carrying that country's President, forced to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on board. Why exactly was Austria doing the US's bidding there?
I have a lot of friends who proudly contribute to google maps. Whenever I try push them towards OSM, the response is. Its not good enough. roads are missing. POIs are less. Its like a big whoosh.
OSM is user generated. More users will mean better maps. Looks at Europe. We did a trip in norway, and we could navigate perfectly just with OSM. Why? Because of local participation.
That's because Americans are stupid and are big fans of giant corporations. It's like sports teams to them; they pick a few big corporations to become fanboys of, and spend all their energy evangelizing that corporation's shitware and defending it. It's no different from how Americans become big fans of political parties (of which there's only two main ones, because if you're not a fan of one, then you must obviously be a big fan of the other).
Um, maybe I'm missing something, but when I tried it, I was just running the DLNA servers on my Linux box, which was connected to the same network as my crappy Sony player. I'm not using any firewalling on my PC, only on the WAN side of my wireless router (DD-WRT, though now that I think about it, I was using a Linksys E4500 (stock firmware) at the time, so maybe I should try it again). I wouldn't think firewalling should be an issue for me there.
This is simply nonsense. A single state laws can't make something legal in other countries.
Wrong, US law trumps everyone else's laws. Just ask the US government.
This is true because other countries go along with it. Just look at all the other countries that went along with the US when they were doing "extraordinary renditions".
The US laws cannot stop the Canadian government from prosecuting the NSA agents performing acts illegal there.
You mean like other countries prosecuted NSA agents for spying on their offices (outside the US)? Oh wait, they didn't, they just made complaints and nothing was done.
US law isn't superior to other countries laws, sspecially in other countries land.
Yes, it is. When other countries just go along with the US, and don't take any action when the US does something "illegal" in their countries, then effectively, US law is superior to other countries' laws.
Not in New Jersey you can't. Technically, you can turn right on red at any intersection that doesn't have a "No turn on red" sign posted; however, in reality, a majority of intersections here have those signs posted because the roads were designed by forest animals (literally).
Also, there's some states where you turning right on red is not legal (I think Delaware might be one, if not the only one).
But as the other responder said, the important thing is that it's allowed at some (most in most places) intersections, but not all, so that needs to be known by a navigation application so it can remind you.
I've fixed stuff on Gmaps before. If it ever got changed at all, it usually took years.
Did you miss the part where the servers are in Canada? NSA has no reach here unless they want to act illegally.
Wrong. US law explicitly allows the NSA to hack into anything outside the US they want to, so it's perfectly legal for them to access those servers in Canada.
You're probably thinking about Canadian law, but that's irrelevant. According to the US Government, US law trumps all other jurisdictions' laws.