It may well be true that we are graduating fewer people in STEM, but, we are also right-sizing the number of people that go into STEM. If we doubled the number of engineering grads, that would just mean we would have a glut of unemployed engineers that will spend most of their lives paying off their expensive educations working at jobs that will never let them use their technical thinking skills.
So let's not pretend that if someone graduates a EE in the USA that he or she will actually ever get paid to design a circuit.
Clearly this study is complete biased nonsense. Look at the institutions at which these supposed scientists work.
Columbia University, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, NASA Goddard, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of California Irvine, Western Carolina University, University of Toulon.
Each one is some garbage degree factory with no scientific rigor whatsoever.
The difficult part of pushing a design to market is building the thing. Once you have a factory, cloning a design and shipping a product is quite easy.
In fact, much of the industrial learning and knowledge comes from managing manufacturing processes.
This was always going to be the end game in the China manufacturing experiment. The USA closes its factories and exports the manufacturing process, but, holds on to "design" and "branding". China clones design and branding. The USA, unable to recreate the factories, becomes vassal to China.
It has happened at different rates for different industries: Giant ate Schwinn. Lenovo is eating IBM. Repeat 1000 times for 1000 corporations.
The only surprise here is that people are surprised.
In my corner of the industry (Aerospace) many government contracts require USA-made parts. Each year more and more subsystems become difficult to obtain from USA sources: Ethernet cards, bulkhead connectors, keyboards, etc.
In the mailing lists, the maintainer of Make implied that the Guile integration was put there essentially as a hedge. People would ask for extensions to Make that he didn't want to commit to, so now the Guile is there so that people can extend make their own way.
I would imaging that the Guile stuff would be valuable to do complicated pattern substitutions than Make can easily handle. It is trivial in GNU Make to convert a variable containing a list of *.c files to a list of *.o files, etc. But something more complicated of that nature is where a Guile extension would come in.
In the TFA, he speculates that these multipurpose devices are now "good enough" to suit most needs, and I think that is true, But it is true that the quality of our audio and video experience seems to have gotten worse of the last couple of years.
When it look at the pictures, or listen to the audio generated by the phones and tablets, or watch the video. It works, but, it just isn't very good.
What's happening is that the middle layer of high-end consumer products are just vanishing: everything is either multipurpose devices or pro devices.
For me, anyway, I still use digital camera and I still use dedicated audio that I used to play CDs and records. I'm a grumpy old man, I guess, but, it sounds better.
I use Linux, but a spend more time in Windows and its not just because of games. If Linux natively ran something as good as Visual Studio + C# + MSDN, I'd be running Linux far more often. I don't have the time or the patience to exhaustively sift through API references any longer.
Absolutely. I spend a lot of time coding using the whole C + EMACS + Autotools + 100 random barely documented libraries that have been cobbled together to form the GNOME GNU Linux API. I care about software freedom.
But Visual Studio and C# and MSDN is just so clean and complete and well documented. It really improves productivity.
One day coding on Visual Studio == 3 days coding in C on EMACS.
That's a fair point. I guess I do think of a photo editor as part of the dev environment, but, that is really stretching the definition of "dev environment" too far.
But the point I was trying to make, I guess, is that the native apps I use are used in my role as a developer. Rarely do I use native apps in the role of end user.
Despite being in free software for a bajillion years and using it as my desktop, I can't say that I've used any native Linux apps for anything really. For the past few years, it has just been a way to get a webbrowser running and to get online, and as a place to cache content. I also use Emacs and the dev environment to make my own (web) apps, and Apache to serve them.
The only native apps I use are games that need native audio/video control.
I read on the intarwebz that you need 0.1 acres to feed a person. So if I'm going to give up my software job and become a subsistence farmer here in LA, I just need to buy a couple of houses so I can farm.
So all I need is $500k in startup capital and I'm good to go.
I think the real question from TFA is if we all do pointless crap like market analysis, marketing, branding, and search engine optimization like the guy in the article, are we going to someday have a future where these skills can no longer be converted into food and shelter through the magic of the market.
For a while now, I've been wondering what the purpose of the USA economy is.
There are the basics, of course. I work so that I can have food, water, clothing, shelter, free time, fun. But it is through the magic of the world economy that I get those things by writing software specifications and unit tests. The economy somehow figures out how many lines of code I need to write to buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.
I suppose I don't worry too much about the fact that most of the work we do is of dubious importantance, so long as it is still convertible into food and shelter. But there is a tipping point somewhere. If everyone in the USA worked making click-through ads, we'd reach a point where no amount of work could be converted to food and shelter.
The truth is that this is all about the hard capitalist reality. But if it is important for the USA to retain at least some technical capability, we need find a way to bring wages down in the near term. To do that we need to find a way to reduce systemic costs for workers so that they can accept lower wages. For example
Make college free
Socialized medicine
Free transit
Lower rent
(Note the conundrum, soft forms of socialism like in China and Germany is the best way to compete in a capitalist world.)
But, with lower wages for the workers, you'll have to shift the tax burden to corporations and individuals that profit from lower wages for workers, which, of course, is impossible in the USA.
So, there's nothing that can be done. American workers will continue to migrate to those jobs that pay well.
Whenever I interview anyone that has "C" on their resume, I do a quick test to weed out the liars. I as them to write on a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker a program that prints out to the screen the numbers from 1 to 10. I've found that almost no one can do it.
IT professionals resumes are full of languages and skills that have been forgotton or never properly learned.
I used avalanche photo diodes as cheap photon counters back in university a decade ago. In our case, however, we would quench the diode after each count and allow it to reset. This works fine except that it severly limits the rate at which photons can be counted and doesn't distinguish when multiple photons arrive simultaneously.
Of course you are not an isolated case. I read physics at a college in London. Of the dozen physics PhDs that graduated at the same time I did, most ended up working in banks. I stayed in science. Those in banking make double what I do.
As president, I'd require every state to teach a second language through all of school and at state-funded universities. That language would be the same for every person in each state. The second language would be something that would unite the people of the state, give a local identity, and help global interaction.
First, we would try to be good neighbors.
California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas would teach Spanish, because of the proximity to Mexico.
Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania would teach French because of Quebec, and Louisiana would teach French because of history.
Then, we would try to keep some of our native heritage.
Hawaii would teach Hawaiian.
North and South Dakota would teach Dakota.
Oklahoma would teach, say, Cherokee.
Alaska would teach some Inuit language.
Some state would pick up American Sign Language.
And then the rest of the states would choose some language off the top 20.
Have to agree with this one. Games are supposed to be about fun. And since games are expensive to make, it only makes sense that that there is a need to appeal to the widest possible audience.
I think you can draw a distinction between highly scripted games with strong characters and less scripted games with more abstract characters. For the strongly scripted games (FFX), one needs to tell a story that will play to the big audience, which probably means being low on the explicit male homosexual behavior, because it might alienate some of the core audience. But for more abstract games, a sexual preference could be just another option in the avatar customization menu.
Since gays make up a small fraction of the audience, primarily gay-themed games will have a similar market to primarily gay themed movies. They will, by financial necessity, have smaller budgets, smaller scope and smaller development staff. Currently the state of game development tools means that it is still very hard to make a home-grown game (as compared to a home-recorded song or movie). But I think where the tools are mature and development is simple, gay games will pop up.
I work in aerospace at a big US firm. We still have developers onshore: many of the US government contracts disallow foreign workers for security reasons.
Amazingly, most of my day is not spent working on software, but, on software process. There is all of the overhead involved in keeping our work instructions up to date and our software processes documented so that were are compliant with ISO 9000/1, and CMMI level 5. All of our specs and testing must be formally documented to keep up with DO-178B and contractual obligations.
Because the govt is the customer, there are bi-monthly presentations of our progress, with all the PowerPoint that that entails. The government has their own separate safety team that monitors our team, so a lot of time is spent interfacing with them.
As a consequence we are rather inefficient. To deal with that inefficiency we spend a lot of time in Six Sigma meetings tryings to come up with ways of automating work and creating reusable frameworks. These meetings are truly valuable (see, I'm not totally cynical) but they do take time and require their own documentation.
(The sad thing is that once all this process is up and running, the ISO/CMM documentation makes is so much easier for the company to treat coders like cogs in the machine or to move their jobs offsite. I am so thankful for the government security rules that make my job US citizen only. Whether or not we can keep our California site from moving to Nebraska or some such is another question...)
One of the great improvements that WAAS offers over standard GPS is that it lets a user compute both a position and an error limit on that position. The position is guaranteed to be accurate within the error limit. Standard GPS gives you a position, but, can't "guarantee" that the position is correct. This is why the FAA doesn't allow standard GPS to be used as the primary navigation aid on an airplane during bad visibility conditions: there is no guarantee that the plane is going to find the runway where GPS says it is.
But when the FAA set the rules for determining how safe the error limit has to be, it pretty much guaranteed that the error limits broadcast by WAAS were going to be huge. (~30 meters) WAAS is way paranoid safe.
It will be interesting to see if EGNOS makes the same tradeoff between safety and usability that the WAAS system did. Maybe EGNOS will choose a less stringent safety requirement, and thus end up with smaller error limits.
Either way, both systems will probably have the same accuracy. (~1 meter)
At Netwinder.net, netwinder computers are still for sale. They have the transmeta-based Desktop Officeserver 3100 for sale for 900 USD. Isn't this the same computer (or very similar) to the one referenced in the article?
On the topic of internet radio, it can be expected that large record companies will adopt such a uniform scheme.
Here's a great idea for someone to implement: An indie label rights clearinghouse.
Nothing in the proposal disallows an independent webcaster from using content for free with the permission of the record label. So if we can get a website up that will allow indpendent webcasters and small record labels to meet, they could agree that no broadcasting fees will need to be paid.
Both sides win. Indie labels that weren't going to get any radio play anyway lose nothing by allowing free webcasting. Indie webcasters get to use songs for free.
If Big Music wants too much money for you to use their stuff, then don't promote Big Music.
Slashdot Mirror
It may well be true that we are graduating fewer people in STEM, but, we are also right-sizing the number of people that go into STEM. If we doubled the number of engineering grads, that would just mean we would have a glut of unemployed engineers that will spend most of their lives paying off their expensive educations working at jobs that will never let them use their technical thinking skills.
So let's not pretend that if someone graduates a EE in the USA that he or she will actually ever get paid to design a circuit.
Clearly this study is complete biased nonsense. Look at the institutions at which these supposed scientists work.
Columbia University, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, NASA Goddard, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of California Irvine, Western Carolina University, University of Toulon.
Each one is some garbage degree factory with no scientific rigor whatsoever.
hehe
The difficult part of pushing a design to market is building the thing. Once you have a factory, cloning a design and shipping a product is quite easy.
In fact, much of the industrial learning and knowledge comes from managing manufacturing processes.
This was always going to be the end game in the China manufacturing experiment. The USA closes its factories and exports the manufacturing process, but, holds on to "design" and "branding". China clones design and branding. The USA, unable to recreate the factories, becomes vassal to China.
It has happened at different rates for different industries: Giant ate Schwinn. Lenovo is eating IBM. Repeat 1000 times for 1000 corporations.
The only surprise here is that people are surprised.
In my corner of the industry (Aerospace) many government contracts require USA-made parts. Each year more and more subsystems become difficult to obtain from USA sources: Ethernet cards, bulkhead connectors, keyboards, etc.
NSA has purchased enough storage for this apparently.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Archive.org has estimated the amount of memory required to store all phonecalls.
http://blog.archive.org/2013/0...
One can draw an analogy between this and supermarket club cards, where you *can* buy groceries without one, but, it is 25% more expensive.
In this future, you can buy insurance without pervasive monitoring, but, it'll cost you extra.
In the mailing lists, the maintainer of Make implied that the Guile integration was put there essentially as a hedge. People would ask for extensions to Make that he didn't want to commit to, so now the Guile is there so that people can extend make their own way.
I would imaging that the Guile stuff would be valuable to do complicated pattern substitutions than Make can easily handle. It is trivial in GNU Make to convert a variable containing a list of *.c files to a list of *.o files, etc. But something more complicated of that nature is where a Guile extension would come in.
He may not have accomplished everything he set out to do, but, he certainly accomplished a great deal.
And while RMS and GNU alone didn't succeed at creating a free software OS and development stack, they got the ball rolling, and it exists now.
In the TFA, he speculates that these multipurpose devices are now "good enough" to suit most needs, and I think that is true, But it is true that the quality of our audio and video experience seems to have gotten worse of the last couple of years.
When it look at the pictures, or listen to the audio generated by the phones and tablets, or watch the video. It works, but, it just isn't very good.
What's happening is that the middle layer of high-end consumer products are just vanishing: everything is either multipurpose devices or pro devices.
For me, anyway, I still use digital camera and I still use dedicated audio that I used to play CDs and records. I'm a grumpy old man, I guess, but, it sounds better.
I use Linux, but a spend more time in Windows and its not just because of games. If Linux natively ran something as good as Visual Studio + C# + MSDN, I'd be running Linux far more often. I don't have the time or the patience to exhaustively sift through API references any longer.
Absolutely. I spend a lot of time coding using the whole C + EMACS + Autotools + 100 random barely documented libraries that have been cobbled together to form the GNOME GNU Linux API. I care about software freedom. But Visual Studio and C# and MSDN is just so clean and complete and well documented. It really improves productivity. One day coding on Visual Studio == 3 days coding in C on EMACS.
That's a fair point. I guess I do think of a photo editor as part of the dev environment, but, that is really stretching the definition of "dev environment" too far.
But the point I was trying to make, I guess, is that the native apps I use are used in my role as a developer. Rarely do I use native apps in the role of end user.
Despite being in free software for a bajillion years and using it as my desktop, I can't say that I've used any native Linux apps for anything really. For the past few years, it has just been a way to get a webbrowser running and to get online, and as a place to cache content. I also use Emacs and the dev environment to make my own (web) apps, and Apache to serve them.
The only native apps I use are games that need native audio/video control.
I read on the intarwebz that you need 0.1 acres to feed a person. So if I'm going to give up my software job and become a subsistence farmer here in LA, I just need to buy a couple of houses so I can farm.
So all I need is $500k in startup capital and I'm good to go.
I think the real question from TFA is if we all do pointless crap like market analysis, marketing, branding, and search engine optimization like the guy in the article, are we going to someday have a future where these skills can no longer be converted into food and shelter through the magic of the market.
For a while now, I've been wondering what the purpose of the USA economy is.
There are the basics, of course. I work so that I can have food, water, clothing, shelter, free time, fun. But it is through the magic of the world economy that I get those things by writing software specifications and unit tests. The economy somehow figures out how many lines of code I need to write to buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.
I suppose I don't worry too much about the fact that most of the work we do is of dubious importantance, so long as it is still convertible into food and shelter. But there is a tipping point somewhere. If everyone in the USA worked making click-through ads, we'd reach a point where no amount of work could be converted to food and shelter.
The truth is that this is all about the hard capitalist reality. But if it is important for the USA to retain at least some technical capability, we need find a way to bring wages down in the near term. To do that we need to find a way to reduce systemic costs for workers so that they can accept lower wages. For example
(Note the conundrum, soft forms of socialism like in China and Germany is the best way to compete in a capitalist world.)
But, with lower wages for the workers, you'll have to shift the tax burden to corporations and individuals that profit from lower wages for workers, which, of course, is impossible in the USA. So, there's nothing that can be done. American workers will continue to migrate to those jobs that pay well.
Whenever I interview anyone that has "C" on their resume, I do a quick test to weed out the liars. I as them to write on a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker a program that prints out to the screen the numbers from 1 to 10. I've found that almost no one can do it.
IT professionals resumes are full of languages and skills that have been forgotton or never properly learned.
This is pretty neat.
I used avalanche photo diodes as cheap photon counters back in university a decade ago. In our case, however, we would quench the diode after each count and allow it to reset. This works fine except that it severly limits the rate at which photons can be counted and doesn't distinguish when multiple photons arrive simultaneously.
So this is a cool extension to that technology.
Of course you are not an isolated case. I read physics at a college in London. Of the dozen physics PhDs that graduated at the same time I did, most ended up working in banks. I stayed in science. Those in banking make double what I do.
For me, it was also Avalon Hill and then Original D&D, with a bit of Ogre/GEV as well. Good Times.
As president, I'd require every state to teach a second language through all of school and at state-funded universities. That language would be the same for every person in each state. The second language would be something that would unite the people of the state, give a local identity, and help global interaction.
First, we would try to be good neighbors. California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas would teach Spanish, because of the proximity to Mexico. Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania would teach French because of Quebec, and Louisiana would teach French because of history.
Then, we would try to keep some of our native heritage. Hawaii would teach Hawaiian. North and South Dakota would teach Dakota. Oklahoma would teach, say, Cherokee. Alaska would teach some Inuit language.
Some state would pick up American Sign Language. And then the rest of the states would choose some language off the top 20.
I dunno. You sound like a terrorist to me.
Have to agree with this one. Games are supposed to be about fun. And since games are expensive to make, it only makes sense that that there is a need to appeal to the widest possible audience.
I think you can draw a distinction between highly scripted games with strong characters and less scripted games with more abstract characters. For the strongly scripted games (FFX), one needs to tell a story that will play to the big audience, which probably means being low on the explicit male homosexual behavior, because it might alienate some of the core audience. But for more abstract games, a sexual preference could be just another option in the avatar customization menu.
Since gays make up a small fraction of the audience, primarily gay-themed games will have a similar market to primarily gay themed movies. They will, by financial necessity, have smaller budgets, smaller scope and smaller development staff. Currently the state of game development tools means that it is still very hard to make a home-grown game (as compared to a home-recorded song or movie). But I think where the tools are mature and development is simple, gay games will pop up.
I work in aerospace at a big US firm. We still have developers onshore: many of the US government contracts disallow foreign workers for security reasons.
Amazingly, most of my day is not spent working on software, but, on software process. There is all of the overhead involved in keeping our work instructions up to date and our software processes documented so that were are compliant with ISO 9000/1, and CMMI level 5. All of our specs and testing must be formally documented to keep up with DO-178B and contractual obligations.
Because the govt is the customer, there are bi-monthly presentations of our progress, with all the PowerPoint that that entails. The government has their own separate safety team that monitors our team, so a lot of time is spent interfacing with them.
As a consequence we are rather inefficient. To deal with that inefficiency we spend a lot of time in Six Sigma meetings tryings to come up with ways of automating work and creating reusable frameworks. These meetings are truly valuable (see, I'm not totally cynical) but they do take time and require their own documentation.
(The sad thing is that once all this process is up and running, the ISO/CMM documentation makes is so much easier for the company to treat coders like cogs in the machine or to move their jobs offsite. I am so thankful for the government security rules that make my job US citizen only. Whether or not we can keep our California site from moving to Nebraska or some such is another question...)
One of the great improvements that WAAS offers over standard GPS is that it lets a user compute both a position and an error limit on that position. The position is guaranteed to be accurate within the error limit. Standard GPS gives you a position, but, can't "guarantee" that the position is correct. This is why the FAA doesn't allow standard GPS to be used as the primary navigation aid on an airplane during bad visibility conditions: there is no guarantee that the plane is going to find the runway where GPS says it is.
But when the FAA set the rules for determining how safe the error limit has to be, it pretty much guaranteed that the error limits broadcast by WAAS were going to be huge. (~30 meters) WAAS is way paranoid safe.
It will be interesting to see if EGNOS makes the same tradeoff between safety and usability that the WAAS system did. Maybe EGNOS will choose a less stringent safety requirement, and thus end up with smaller error limits.
Either way, both systems will probably have the same accuracy. (~1 meter)
At Netwinder.net, netwinder computers are still for sale. They have the transmeta-based Desktop Officeserver 3100 for sale for 900 USD. Isn't this the same computer (or very similar) to the one referenced in the article?
On the topic of internet radio, it can be expected that large record companies will adopt such a uniform scheme.
Here's a great idea for someone to implement: An indie label rights clearinghouse.
Nothing in the proposal disallows an independent webcaster from using content for free with the permission of the record label. So if we can get a website up that will allow indpendent webcasters and small record labels to meet, they could agree that no broadcasting fees will need to be paid.
Both sides win. Indie labels that weren't going to get any radio play anyway lose nothing by allowing free webcasting. Indie webcasters get to use songs for free.
If Big Music wants too much money for you to use their stuff, then don't promote Big Music.