It's less an economic law and more of a political economy theory. Scientific and technological advances are the chief mechanism of long-term economic growth improvement. These fields also tend exhibit large returns-to-scale and thus be dominated by a few large firms (e.g. operating systems, pharma) and are relatively high-risk and can be capital-intensive. Further, sci/tech advances have spillover effects that improve the productivity of other firms within the economy as well. Advances diffuses across national lines, but they tend to benefit the domestic economy most, making domestic firms more competitive worldwide. Sci/tech advances have a big impact on maintaining a strong, advanced military.
So, you could argue that is in a nation's political interest to promote a strong science and technology sector. Promotion could take the form of education incentives, direct subsidies, or other means, with varying degrees of efficacy.
Your point about it being in the US' national interest to have a lower number of scientists and let countries where wages are lower do more science is false.
Having science pursued abroad is in the US' national interest only if it can fully absorb and take advantage of the discoveries made abroad. That can kind of work if US companies are doing scientific operations abroad, but what will happen is that those foreign scientists will eventually stop working for American companies and found their own companies and such. The discoveries those scientists then make will benefit foreign interests over American interests. Further, scientific and technological advances in one company/industry typically cause spillover effects that benefit other companies/industries. These positive effects have the most impact in the economy where the advances are made.
It's definitely in a country's interest to pursue strong science and technology programs at home for the military and economic, and thus political, advantages they provide.
Homer: Hey, look! Those frogs are eating all their crops.
[everyone starts laughing]
Lisa: Well, that's what happens when you introduce foreign species into
an ecosystem that can't handle them.
The Gates foundation has filled a pretty important niche in delivering health care to the poor around the world.
Bill Gates and Bill Clinton were in a good discussion earlier this year at a Global Health summit. I encourage you to check it out. Video of Clinton and Gates' talk is about 1/2 way down, nov. 2 at 4:00pm.
I disagree; in fact, I think the opposite is true. Working on other's people code I find to be one of the more difficult things to do as a programmer. It's hard to grok the subtleties that one person may put into his or her code, and a beginner may feel discouraged if the additions he or she adds never work, or the beginner simply never figures out what's going on. Unfortunately, documentation isn't one of the strengths of FOSS.
Working on your own projects from scratch is a great way to learn how to code. By doing a project, you'll inevitably have to learn the major parts of the language and encounter some of the tricky bits of the language you're learning and have to work around them. Typically, the fun part of programming is the first part of a project anyway. You set up a project, make some major strides, learn a few things, get bored and move on.
My advice to the budding programmer: think of a project that sounds interesting, learn the basics of a language from a book, then do your best to implement the project. If it doesn't work out, scrap the project and try another. After each iteration you will have picked up a few things. Also, IRC is your friend in case you have questions.
I agree that major additions to the language like a garbage collector should be put in a library and not become part of the language to keep the flexibility that has been one of the major advantages of c++. At the same time, the standards committee has moved pretty slowly in adopting new features into the standard library. There's a pretty good community of people creating new public libraries for C++, such as boost, but few C++ programmers take any time to use libraries that are not part of the standard.
I think something like Perl's CPAN would be an excellent thing to have for C++, and many other languages. There's a lot of rich external libraries for C++ that just go unnoticed by too many programmers.
There was a good article at issues.org discussing the stigma attached to nuclear power arising due to groups such as greenpeace sensationalizing the debate. By getting scared away from nuclear, we've only increased our coal consumption.
There used to be great site technetcast that had streaming presentations from all areas of computers and technology. Quite a few of previous years' state of the onion addresses are online. I guess they ran into money problems and stopped adding new content, but all the old content is still available for viewing.
After editing my profile, I checked to see what results would come up when I searched for 'news'.
With minimum personalization the first entry was CNN. With maximum personalization the first entry was slashdot. Seems good to me.
An interesting addendum to this: at my university there was a talk on graduate studies, and a chart of the percentage of successful applicants to MBA and similar programs broken down by discipline was shown. The highest percentage of successful applicants came from math, physics, and philosophy majors, and one of the lowest was marketing and communications majors. Now I'm sure there are many variables that may not have been considered, but it does say a lot about the general analytical skills that these types of majors confer.
You seem to imply that a degree without a strong connection to a particular industry has no future, your example: philosophy. History, semiotics, etc. would also get lumped into this category of "useless" degrees. Sure, there isn't a huge market for "philosophers", but I imagine most philosophy majors don't expect to sit in an armchair and philosophize for a living. The critical thinking and writing skills can be easily transferred to law or business.
I would argue that if you're not talented at something you shouldn't pursue and expect financial rewards like a good job. Furthermore, a lot of people are looking for more than just money. I would say job satisfaction is critical to a happy life. You spend the majority of your life working, so you better enjoy it. A history major that ends up curating a small town musuem might not make the big bucks, but in the end he/she lives a happy life because they spend all day doing something he or she enjoys.
If you go into a field for the money, you'll end up living for your weekends and look back and realize you wasted a lot of time in pursuit of money, and, odds are you probably won't make big money anyway if you don't like what you do. Take the legions of people who went into computer science in the mid to late nineties because it was a supposedly an infinitely lucrative field: now they are working shitty jobs for much less money than they expected and hating it.
Finally, you mention medicine and biotech as fields rich in jobs. Getting into medicine is a huge committment, definitely not something that can be decided on a whim. And then, when you become a doctor, it continues to be a lot of work. Competition is also fierce for a limited number of biotech related jobs; if you're not talented you're going to end up as a low-paid lab technician or not have a job directly in the field. The benefits of the genome project and proteomics aren't coming to fruition as quickly as hoped and there isn't going to be a huge boom because of it.
If you want to just make money, consider taking up a trade. Tradespeople makes tonnes of cash, especially if you have any entreprenuerial sense to start your own business. Trades are going away any time soon.
Electrical engineering is a lot of physics whereas compsci is a lot discrete math. If you're not interested in physics, then don't go for an EE degree. For example, in EE you'll learn how semi-conductors work and such; in comp sci you'll learn ways to traverse graphs, etc. Though there's certainly overlap in the fields. EE's need to know what they're designing for, and a comp sci that know's what's going on under the hood is typically better off than one who doesn't when doing anything practical.
If you pick a major based on future job prospects you'll probably end up choosing a degree that doesn't suit your particular interests and wasting a lot of time doing something you don't like, and, odds are, if you don't like something you won't excel at it.
Rather, choose the degree that most enjoy and run with it. If you're a talented computer scientist you'll have no trouble finding a job no matter what the economy is like. Personally, I think the EE degree is more versatile than a compsci degree, but that's just me.
The choice also depends on the school you're planning to attend; the quality of each major with respect to the other will vary significantly between each school. You could also consider computer engineering, which lies somewhere between EE and compsci.
Interestingly, I remember a couple weeks ago Japan decided to send troops to Iraq to (supposedly) help with reconstruction efforts, but troops nonetheless. A surprising decision given Japan now has pacifist policies in their constitution.
I wonder if the reactor site vote had anything to do with Japan's decision?
The problem with forking is that the developer pool is not unlimited. There are a couple possible outcomes of the a project forking:
First, both projects go on to be successful. In this case, the number of developers on each project will effectively be halved, making both projects suffer. Admitedly, both projects may gain more users in total over both projects than with a single project, but the number of developers on a single project will not be as high, and will suffer slightly. Odds are the people that leave a project due to some conflict of opinion are passionate developers with strong knowledge of the project--very valuable in the open source world--leaving fewer power-developers on each project.
Second, one of the projects dies. In this case, the developers from the project that dies will most likely be turned off on the idea of the project and will most likely do work elsewhere than join the other project on which development continues. Leaving fewer developers in the pool.
Now, I'm not saying that forking is a bad idea, rather it's not a win-win situation. By forking, you're choosing choice over absolute progess.
Jesus, I had to pick between UW comp eng and UofT Engineering Science (to be nano option). Thankfully I chose UofT. I'd be much more fulfilled knowing that the learning I paid for isn't being influenced in such a manner as not to optimum.
I'm really surprised that UW went for this; I realize it's a lot of money, but UW has been known for being pretty active in the Open Source community.
It will be interesting to see how this develops, for not only UW, but other universities as well...
>> the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.
Does CLI based UT sound all that appealing though? I mean obviously there are times when graphics are important; they just have to be made in such a way that they _add_ to game rather than ditract from it. I game with realistic, consistent graphics is more immersive. Seem deal with the physics (maybe not realistic, but the physics should be consistent and intuitive, otherwise you'll have players getting frustrated when something doesn't work the way it's "supposed to").
>> I saw Star Wars for $1.50 in 1976. I saw Spiderman for $9.00 in 2002.
Wow, the MPAA wasn't kidding when they said Ep II was leaked:). Some how I don't think inflation had much to do with the difference between Spider-man and Episode II.
I've been wanting to do something similar for years, but with technical magazines, not books. But the sheer amount of manual labor involved has turned me off considerably (not to mention the thought of destroying the original source).
Dr Dobbs (and I'm sure others) offers CDs full of all their articles from the past couple years for a pretty good price (less than $100, I believe). They also offer collections of books on CD for about the cost of one original.
google shows you don't need.NET but can just as well use Java to make use of XML web services
Of course anybody who has any background knowledge of web services knows that pretty much any language with text manipulation can be used to create web services. The point of.NET is not that it is the only way of creating web services but rather it makes creating them a lot easier; WSDL, DISCO, SOAP, etc. are abstracted away to make the developing web services easier. Yon don't need to know the bare protocol to start coding (of course it always helps).
WSDL offers no advantages over Corba. The only difference is the use of XML...
The use of XML is an advantage. XML is easy to use, and is an open standard. Although binary specs are slightly more efficient in transfer time and space requirements, this is becoming more and more negligible. More important is a developer's time. It is a lot easier to use and debug and text-based spec like XML than a binary spec.
The only justification for XML web services is that MSFT hates Corba
Maybe before you spout worthless anti-msft drivel you should research the origins of Web Services. Check out this article by Tim Berners-Lee for a quick intro.
Hehe, anyone else remember the old Dilbert cartoon where the PHB decides that bonuses will be awarded for each bug fixed? Wally tells Dilbert: "I'm going to write me a minivan this afternoon".
Then, Dilbert has Ratbert dance on the keyboard to create more bugs. The result: a web browser. hahaha...
Slashdot Mirror
It's less an economic law and more of a political economy theory. Scientific and technological advances are the chief mechanism of long-term economic growth improvement. These fields also tend exhibit large returns-to-scale and thus be dominated by a few large firms (e.g. operating systems, pharma) and are relatively high-risk and can be capital-intensive. Further, sci/tech advances have spillover effects that improve the productivity of other firms within the economy as well. Advances diffuses across national lines, but they tend to benefit the domestic economy most, making domestic firms more competitive worldwide. Sci/tech advances have a big impact on maintaining a strong, advanced military.
So, you could argue that is in a nation's political interest to promote a strong science and technology sector. Promotion could take the form of education incentives, direct subsidies, or other means, with varying degrees of efficacy.
Your point about it being in the US' national interest to have a lower number of scientists and let countries where wages are lower do more science is false.
Having science pursued abroad is in the US' national interest only if it can fully absorb and take advantage of the discoveries made abroad. That can kind of work if US companies are doing scientific operations abroad, but what will happen is that those foreign scientists will eventually stop working for American companies and found their own companies and such. The discoveries those scientists then make will benefit foreign interests over American interests. Further, scientific and technological advances in one company/industry typically cause spillover effects that benefit other companies/industries. These positive effects have the most impact in the economy where the advances are made.
It's definitely in a country's interest to pursue strong science and technology programs at home for the military and economic, and thus political, advantages they provide.
Homer: Hey, look! Those frogs are eating all their crops.
[everyone starts laughing]
Lisa: Well, that's what happens when you introduce foreign species into
an ecosystem that can't handle them.
Bill Gates and Bill Clinton were in a good discussion earlier this year at a Global Health summit. I encourage you to check it out. Video of Clinton and Gates' talk is about 1/2 way down, nov. 2 at 4:00pm.
I disagree; in fact, I think the opposite is true. Working on other's people code I find to be one of the more difficult things to do as a programmer. It's hard to grok the subtleties that one person may put into his or her code, and a beginner may feel discouraged if the additions he or she adds never work, or the beginner simply never figures out what's going on. Unfortunately, documentation isn't one of the strengths of FOSS.
Working on your own projects from scratch is a great way to learn how to code. By doing a project, you'll inevitably have to learn the major parts of the language and encounter some of the tricky bits of the language you're learning and have to work around them. Typically, the fun part of programming is the first part of a project anyway. You set up a project, make some major strides, learn a few things, get bored and move on.
My advice to the budding programmer: think of a project that sounds interesting, learn the basics of a language from a book, then do your best to implement the project. If it doesn't work out, scrap the project and try another. After each iteration you will have picked up a few things. Also, IRC is your friend in case you have questions.
I agree that major additions to the language like a garbage collector should be put in a library and not become part of the language to keep the flexibility that has been one of the major advantages of c++. At the same time, the standards committee has moved pretty slowly in adopting new features into the standard library. There's a pretty good community of people creating new public libraries for C++, such as boost, but few C++ programmers take any time to use libraries that are not part of the standard.
I think something like Perl's CPAN would be an excellent thing to have for C++, and many other languages. There's a lot of rich external libraries for C++ that just go unnoticed by too many programmers.
There was a good article at issues.org discussing the stigma attached to nuclear power arising due to groups such as greenpeace sensationalizing the debate. By getting scared away from nuclear, we've only increased our coal consumption.
http://www.issues.org/issues/21.3/lorenzini.html
hgh
hgh
After editing my profile, I checked to see what results would come up when I searched for 'news'. With minimum personalization the first entry was CNN. With maximum personalization the first entry was slashdot. Seems good to me.
An interesting addendum to this: at my university there was a talk on graduate studies, and a chart of the percentage of successful applicants to MBA and similar programs broken down by discipline was shown. The highest percentage of successful applicants came from math, physics, and philosophy majors, and one of the lowest was marketing and communications majors. Now I'm sure there are many variables that may not have been considered, but it does say a lot about the general analytical skills that these types of majors confer.
You seem to imply that a degree without a strong connection to a particular industry has no future, your example: philosophy. History, semiotics, etc. would also get lumped into this category of "useless" degrees. Sure, there isn't a huge market for "philosophers", but I imagine most philosophy majors don't expect to sit in an armchair and philosophize for a living. The critical thinking and writing skills can be easily transferred to law or business.
I would argue that if you're not talented at something you shouldn't pursue and expect financial rewards like a good job. Furthermore, a lot of people are looking for more than just money. I would say job satisfaction is critical to a happy life. You spend the majority of your life working, so you better enjoy it. A history major that ends up curating a small town musuem might not make the big bucks, but in the end he/she lives a happy life because they spend all day doing something he or she enjoys.
If you go into a field for the money, you'll end up living for your weekends and look back and realize you wasted a lot of time in pursuit of money, and, odds are you probably won't make big money anyway if you don't like what you do. Take the legions of people who went into computer science in the mid to late nineties because it was a supposedly an infinitely lucrative field: now they are working shitty jobs for much less money than they expected and hating it.
Finally, you mention medicine and biotech as fields rich in jobs. Getting into medicine is a huge committment, definitely not something that can be decided on a whim. And then, when you become a doctor, it continues to be a lot of work. Competition is also fierce for a limited number of biotech related jobs; if you're not talented you're going to end up as a low-paid lab technician or not have a job directly in the field. The benefits of the genome project and proteomics aren't coming to fruition as quickly as hoped and there isn't going to be a huge boom because of it.
If you want to just make money, consider taking up a trade. Tradespeople makes tonnes of cash, especially if you have any entreprenuerial sense to start your own business. Trades are going away any time soon.
Electrical engineering is a lot of physics whereas compsci is a lot discrete math. If you're not interested in physics, then don't go for an EE degree. For example, in EE you'll learn how semi-conductors work and such; in comp sci you'll learn ways to traverse graphs, etc. Though there's certainly overlap in the fields. EE's need to know what they're designing for, and a comp sci that know's what's going on under the hood is typically better off than one who doesn't when doing anything practical.
If you pick a major based on future job prospects you'll probably end up choosing a degree that doesn't suit your particular interests and wasting a lot of time doing something you don't like, and, odds are, if you don't like something you won't excel at it.
Rather, choose the degree that most enjoy and run with it. If you're a talented computer scientist you'll have no trouble finding a job no matter what the economy is like. Personally, I think the EE degree is more versatile than a compsci degree, but that's just me.
The choice also depends on the school you're planning to attend; the quality of each major with respect to the other will vary significantly between each school. You could also consider computer engineering, which lies somewhere between EE and compsci.
Good luck
Interestingly, I remember a couple weeks ago Japan decided to send troops to Iraq to (supposedly) help with reconstruction efforts, but troops nonetheless. A surprising decision given Japan now has pacifist policies in their constitution.
I wonder if the reactor site vote had anything to do with Japan's decision?
hgh
The problem with forking is that the developer pool is not unlimited. There are a couple possible outcomes of the a project forking:
First, both projects go on to be successful. In this case, the number of developers on each project will effectively be halved, making both projects suffer. Admitedly, both projects may gain more users in total over both projects than with a single project, but the number of developers on a single project will not be as high, and will suffer slightly. Odds are the people that leave a project due to some conflict of opinion are passionate developers with strong knowledge of the project--very valuable in the open source world--leaving fewer power-developers on each project.
Second, one of the projects dies. In this case, the developers from the project that dies will most likely be turned off on the idea of the project and will most likely do work elsewhere than join the other project on which development continues. Leaving fewer developers in the pool.
Now, I'm not saying that forking is a bad idea, rather it's not a win-win situation. By forking, you're choosing choice over absolute progess.
heh, just break the diamond down and add water like the old batman movie... one drop *blam*, person.
I'm really surprised that UW went for this; I realize it's a lot of money, but UW has been known for being pretty active in the Open Source community.
It will be interesting to see how this develops, for not only UW, but other universities as well...
Hans
>> the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.
Does CLI based UT sound all that appealing though? I mean obviously there are times when graphics are important; they just have to be made in such a way that they _add_ to game rather than ditract from it. I game with realistic, consistent graphics is more immersive. Seem deal with the physics (maybe not realistic, but the physics should be consistent and intuitive, otherwise you'll have players getting frustrated when something doesn't work the way it's "supposed to").
hgh
Why waste all the CPU cycles:
$ perl -e 'print (100+101)/2;'
hgh>> I saw Star Wars for $1.50 in 1976. I saw Spiderman for $9.00 in 2002.
:). Some how I don't think inflation had much to do with the difference between Spider-man and Episode II.
Wow, the MPAA wasn't kidding when they said Ep II was leaked
Judging by my inbox, WAY too many :)
hghAll articles from past 12 years.
Dr Dobbs (and I'm sure others) offers CDs full of all their articles from the past couple years for a pretty good price (less than $100, I believe). They also offer collections of books on CD for about the cost of one original.
Just a thought,
hghgoogle shows you don't need .NET but can just as well use Java to make use of XML web services
Of course anybody who has any background knowledge of web services knows that pretty much any language with text manipulation can be used to create web services. The point of .NET is not that it is the only way of creating web services but rather it makes creating them a lot easier; WSDL, DISCO, SOAP, etc. are abstracted away to make the developing web services easier. Yon don't need to know the bare protocol to start coding (of course it always helps).
WSDL offers no advantages over Corba. The only difference is the use of XML...
The use of XML is an advantage. XML is easy to use, and is an open standard. Although binary specs are slightly more efficient in transfer time and space requirements, this is becoming more and more negligible. More important is a developer's time. It is a lot easier to use and debug and text-based spec like XML than a binary spec.
The only justification for XML web services is that MSFT hates Corba
Maybe before you spout worthless anti-msft drivel you should research the origins of Web Services. Check out this article by Tim Berners-Lee for a quick intro.
hghThen, Dilbert has Ratbert dance on the keyboard to create more bugs. The result: a web browser. hahaha...
hgh>> That is, LOC are not something we produce, but something we spend.
I don't see how that makes a difference. Managers are just going to ask "well, how much more are we going to have to spend."
hgh