1. CEO's tend to make the argument that they need to outsource in order to compete with their competitors who are outsourcing. (sounds an awful lot like an argument between kids on the playground - "he's doing it too!" - where nobody wants to take responsibility). Given that CEO salaries run into the $millions (typically 20 to 40X the pay of their average employees) why don't CEOs consider cutting their own salaries in an effort to remain competitive?
2. Many unemployed and about-to-be-unemployed US engineers would be happy to work for less money (within reason)in order to keep their jobs, however when this is suggested to companies the companies usually choose to go with outsourcing. If an engineer is willing to take a 30 - 40% pay cut to save his/her job, why isn't this offer taken seriously by most companies?
3. (related to 2) It's quite clear that if we want to continue working in the engineering fields in America that we'll either have to become much more productive (2 - 3X) or we'll have to accept much lower wages (or a combination of the two). By some measurements we're already much more productive than our overseas counterparts by virtue of the fact that we have more experience with real projects, so it all comes down to money. What can American engineers do to lower their cost of living in order to try to compete with 3rd world salaries?
4. Most offshoring advocates say that we need to just be patient as we await the 'Next big thing (TM)' that will be invented in America (they have a lot of faith). Any idea what the 'Next bit thing' will be and what do we do in the meantime?
5. (related to 4) In the software arena, most of the offshoring advocates say that US developers need to 'move up the foodchain' into project management. Given that you never need anywhere near as many managers as you do managees, what how will most US developers 'move up the food chain'? (perhaps they'll become hunters)
6. (related to 5) What if you'd much rather develop code than manage projects?
7. For outsourcing advocates: Why not make the argument that we should outsource every possible US job to cheaper, lower labor-cost countries and then bring in 'guest-workers' to fill the positions that can't practically be outsourced? It seems that the outsourcing advocates would find this a favorable plan since there would be so much potential money savings. If money savings is the primary economic motivator then this seems like a logical plan, however, what do we do with the millions of US workers that would be put out of work in this scenario?
Commentary: The outsourcing advocates take a very narrow view of economics. To them cost-cutting is the primary motivation for doing anything - "if it'll save a buck, then do it" is their motto. However, it isn't clear that the money savings from outsourcing white collar jobs are actually going to be able to counter-ballance the economic devestation brought on by widespread offshoring. So what if US corporations suddenly become wildly profitable (for a quarter or two) while millions of workers are put out of work. Eventually those millions of unemployed workers won't have the money to buy the products of the wildly profitable corporations and profits will go down. I'd rather see corporations break even while providing good jobs to millions, than see them be wildly profitable but providing no jobs to US workers. Oh, and if millions are unemployed, who is going to pay the taxes to support the schools that we supposedly need to train workers for the 'jobs of the future'?
If we, as Americans, can't compete with people from second and third world countries, there is a problem with us, not with them.
There's no way we as Amerians can compete on price. We can compete on productivity, quality, experience, but when it comes down to price you're not going to be able to compete against an Indian programmer. And since companies right now don't seem to care about quality or experience they're throwing away their American workers for workers in India that they can get away with paying $7/hour because in that economy it's a lot of money. They also don't have all the pesky laws that protect workers and the environment in India.
However, while the pay for American programmer is going down, the prices of things s/he has to buy are still going up in many cases (gasoline, electricity, housing, utilities, property taxes, insurance). If you want to compete with the 3rd world, then you'd better start negotiating with all your creditors:
You: "Yo, Electric company, I need to start competing with 3rd world workers so I need to pay at least 50% less on my electric bill from now on...", Electric Company: "Then why don't we just shut off your electricity for half the month? Oh, and there's a $50 fee to turn it back on..."
I'm sure you'll make a lot of headway in these negotiations.
Nobody is saying that we should totally shut out India, but what we are saying is let's do something to level the playing field. I'm not sure how that can be done. Perhaps the US gov could offer tax incentives for companies to hire workers in America - but even that couldn't go far enough to make up the disparity.
Well, the case for putting industry in Arizona was compelling enough for Intel to migrate much of its operation to Arizona.
Well, actually Intel has moved more of it's operation to Oregon than to Arizona. Intel is the largest employer in Oregon now.
Arizona (Phoenix, specifically) has a water problem. They can't support much more growth there because of the lack of water. And Fabs do use a lot of water.
Oregon, on the otherhand, has plenty of water. The other reason they initially found Oregon appealing was that the electricity rates here used to be lower than just about anywhere because of the cheap hydro power. Now that we've been 'deregulated' (and since Enron bought Portland General Electric) the power rates here have climbed significantly so that they are almost the same as everywhere else (we got the short end of the deregulation stick).
We're talking software here, not hardware. If you have some objections to UML, please state them in software terms.
I'm just relating what I saw happen in another design community. Creating hardware these days, btw, is very much like creating software. Design languages, compilers, etc. I do software for hardware design automation.
p.s. There are valid objections to UML, it's just that your analogy isn't one of them.
Why not? as someone who has been on the other side of the wall, I'm telling you about a major shift away from pictoral descriptions toward textual ones in the hardware design world. It's quite relevant.
Drawing schematics (or UML diagrams) is very time consuming and you have to question whether or not you're getting any increased productivity for the time spent - I contend you aren't.
You want other more 'software oriented' objections - how about, how do I grep for a string in pages of UML? Can I write a quick & dirty Perl script to change all of the instances of some variable to another name? Someone else mentioned that most UML tools now export XML, a textual description. Why not just use XML in the first place? How do I write scripts to automate the process of UML creation? You can't beat text when it comes to the ease of parsing, generation and automation via scripts.
p.p.s. And no matter how many valid objections you come up with, management likes to see UML, so it's all pointless.
That's apparently what's driving all of this. PHB's want pretty pictures to look at.
I'd wondered why there was this whole XMI thing that was running around the UML editor industry
OK, so UML editors are now able to spit out XML. That makes the concept a bit more usable. Now we have something to grep.
A prototype and a spec are two completely different things. They each have their place, and they aren't wisely exchanged.
Perhaps, but add 'test-first' development with unit tests to the mix and you've got an executable spec. If I can use the same set of unit tests for both my prototype and my final code (which I can) then I know that my final code behaves exactly as it should according to the executable spec.
What good does the graphical representation do me, I've got to keep my graphical representation in sync with my actual code. The two representations could be completely different at some point if I'm not careful and when that happens the graphical representation is worse than useless. This continual syncing between code and pictures becomes burdensome at some point. Unless you can use UML to completely genereate your code this will be a problem (I realize that this is now possible to some extent, but not completely.
There were similar issues in the hardware world when synthesis tools came on the scene: If your representation wasn't synthesizable to hardware then you were doing twice as much work - you had to keep your schematics up to date with your synthesizable HDL code, eventually people wondered why they were drawing the schematic at all and it wasn't long after that that they stopped drawing schematics. The holdouts wanted to hold onto schematics as documentation, but soon people realized that the code itself was documentation.
A lot of folks will tell you that they use UML in place of flowcharts for OO design. I say that the UML emperor is naked.
Chip designers (I used to be one) in the old days (before about '92) used to use schematics which are pictorial representations of their designs. But in the early 90's HDLs (hardware description languages) bagan to creep in. Now you rarely find schematics used for digital design. It's all done in HDLs. Why did this happen? Mainly because it's a whole lot easier and more powerful to describe a circuit with an HDL. You don't have to draw all those wires to connect everything. You can describe things at a very high level, such as an adder to add two 32bit values: A + B (where A and B are 32 bit vectors). What could be simpler.
Another reason that schematics were abondoned is that it's a lot easier to parse text than graphics. The UML promoters should take note.
Now the UML folks are essentially trying to take software design back to the schematic age. The hardware people learned that schematics are not the best representation.
The answer is to program at a higher level of abstraction. This might mean chosing a higher-level language to prototype in (I like prototyping in Ruby) or it might mean using techniques like state machines, for example.
It's fashionable to complain about how bad the US K-12 education system is. In some areas the complaints are justified, however, I've noticed in recent years that highschools seem to be teaching a lot more highlevel math & science courses than they did in the '70s when i was in HS.
I know of local schools which teach classes in C++/Java and Object Oriented programming as well - you were lucky to find a school with a single computer in it in the '70s.
I recently visited a regional science fair and was amazed at some of the projects being presented there by highschool students. A couple neural net projects, one on how to make better fiber optics... Anyway, I couldn't help thinking that these kids who are into technology are now cursed. They'll either have to move to India to find work that they like or they'll have to give up on their dreams and become lawyers, mechanics, dentists, etc (oh, they'll make a good living in those fields, but it probably won't be what they really like to do)
American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff.
In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
And why should the youngsters be interested in taking math & science if the kinds of jobs that use them are being sent overseas? Less highschoolers opting for math/science classes means you need less teachers in those areas and could probably lead to even less math & science being taught.
No, the kids may as well concentrate on getting into Lawschool and you don't need either math or science for that.
Teacher: Johnny, what do you want to do when you grow up? Johnny: I want to be a software engineer. Teacher: Are you willing to move to India? Johnny: India?! I don't think so, why? Teacher: Well, Johnny, if you're serious about being a software engineer, you'll have to move to India to find work. Johnny: (after a couple of minutes of intense thought) I think I'll be a fireman instead.
"As bandwidth costs become cheaper and more people adopt cable or DSL over standard dial-up connections,"
Where is this happening? Cable connection runs in the $40-$50/month range right now. A couple of years ago you could get them for about $35 in my area.
There really doesn't seem to be any price pressures on broadband access yet. Most places have either DSL or Cable. Some places have both. Neither the telcos (who do DSL) nor the Cable cos seem inclined to compete on price yet. Maybe when wireless broadband or broadband over powerlines become more common you'll start to see some competition.
After noting the current surge in Internet worms and the so-called Darwinist evolution of these things into more and more powerful incarnations,
It's not exactly Darwinian evolution. These things don't mutate on their own, people change them.
OK, so if everything is just going to be hunky-dory in 25 years then it's not going to be a very interesting show... neither will it be believable.
Most people don't assume that legal matters will improve over the next 25 years, to the contrary, most people assume they'll get worse. The trends of the recent past seem to bear this out:
DMCA, (so-called)Patriot ActI&II, Increasing litigiousness (so that you need malpractice insurance now to be a software developer).
I suspect that 25 years from now everyone will need some sort of mal-practice insurance and the percentage of the population that are Lawyers will at least double.
Well, they started with Puma, then Jaguar and now Panther, since they're running out of powerful cats to name 10.4 after, they want to conserve them so they didn't make it a major release.;-)
What _are_ they going to do after they use up Tiger and Lion? Tabby?
1) Sometimes (10% of the time?) I just get a black screen on wake and have to reboot (CAPSLOCK key LED turns on/off though...so it ain't "dead").
I've seen this happen once on my PowerBook as well. You're right, your machine isn't dead and it doesn't need to be rebooted.
What you need to do is to increase the brightness by pressing f2, that's all. For some reason sometimes after waking from a sleep the brightness stays turned all the way down.
I discovered this because my PowerBook was sitting in front of the window and it was sunny out. You know how the Apple logo glows when the screen is lit? Well, it works both ways - when the backlight is off light can shine through the Apple logo as well and you can see an Apple-logo shaped area of your screen that's readable. So I could tell that there was still stuff on the screen. I moved the cursor around till it showed up in that small lit region. Then I tried turning up the brightness and it worked.
http://www.rubyx.org
You can use the Rubyx script to create your own custom distribution. This seems a lot closer to the 'new kind of Linux distro' talked about on the Progeny site.
(and yes, distcc is supported, however compilation happens at your end, not at some central location, but it's still worth a look as you could probably build on Rubyx to do something like you describe.)
http://www.rubyx.org/
From the Rubyx page: Rubyx is an operating system, created and maintained by rubyx, a script written in the ruby language.
The script grew out of the need to create highly specialised linux installations for a massive multi-player online game, but has become a viable operating system for general use. It is working and usable (it's running this website) and package support grows daily.
The Rubyx script actually builds your own customizsed distro with pretty-much whatever you want in it.
Gotta love the quote from the Indian programmer in the article:
"Don't you think we're helping the US economy by doing the work here?" asks an exasperated Lalit Suryawanshi. It frees up Americans to do other things so the economy can grow, adds Jairam.
Yes indeed. It frees us up to work at Wall*Mort, and Starbunks. Yes, now we can do the important stuff like bagging groceries and pouring lattes. No more of that silly programming and engineering stuff. Now that there are so many of us freed up our economy can really grow!
Go back to school (as in a reputable University) and get a degree. (of course, some would say that Universities are a scam too, but at this point they're probably the preferable scam).
Of course at this point, you've got to conserve your cash, so if you had a 401K or IRA when you were employed you can pull money out of it to pay for school without paying the 10% penalty. It will, however, be considered income and you will be taxed on that income. However, there are a couple of education tax credits (the HOPE credit) that would offset a lot of that income.
Then the big question is what to major in? There are a lot of CS grads in the parks downtown asking for change these days (or soon will be). Be wise and get into some field that isn't easily offshored - consider medical related or environmental related degrees.
Was WinXP64 specifically optimized for the Itanium? Probably not. The Itanium places a lot of burden on compilers, and Microsoft's compilers probably aren't generating optimal Itanium code yet.
True. But the basic Itanium architecture has been out for a few years now. If it's proving to be that difficult to write compilers that generate efficient code for it, then maybe it's not all the fault of the compiler writers.
And, of course, if Win64 is running in the Itanium's x86 compatibility mode, then of course it's going to be slower.
I'm no expert on these issues, but if it was running on Itanium using the x86 compatibility mode, wouldn't that then imply that the same binaries could run on a Pentium? AFIK XP-64 bit edition only runs on Itaniums right now (there are plans to support AMD 64-bit processors soon, though) which would imply that it's not using the compatibility mode, but it's running native Itanium code. But as someone else mentioned, perhaps the video and other drivers are still x86, 32bit code which would significantly slow down IO.
We've got an Itanic box at work that has WinXP 64bit edition on it so we can build & test some 64bit Windows binaries.
It's the slowest box in the place! Open a terminal (oops, command shell, or whatever they call it on Windoze) and do a 'dir' - it scrolls so slowly that it feels like I'm way back in the old days when I was running a DOS emulator on my Atari ST box.
Pretty much everything is _much_ slower on that box. It's amazingly bad and I've tried to think of reasons for this: Was XP 64bit built with debugging options turned on when they compiled it? But even if that were the case it wouldn't account for all of it - I'd only expect that to slow things down maybe up to 20%, not by almost an order of magnitude.
I too prefer Ruby. And as such, it's nice to see Ruby being mentioned more often. Sure the Ruby community is smaller (in the US anyway) than the Python community, but we do seem to be steadily gaining new users (even some Python refugees).
The whole Ruby vs. Python issue is probably mostly a "different strokes for different folks thing". Either is a good choice to learn at this point. Try them both and see which one fits you better. In my case it mostly came down to the indentation- as-syntax issue with Python (often this is referred to as 'whitespace as syntax', but pretty much every language relies on whitespace somewhere, so indentation is more specific). I really strongly disliked Python's indentation-as-syntax 'feature'. I know that many Pythonistas will claim that with the right editor settings it's not problem, but for me not being able to cut&paste code is a deal-breaker (and having important pieces of your code be 'invisible' just doesn't sit well with me). I tried Python for a few days before trying Ruby and was bit a few times by the indentation-as-syntax thing - no thanks (but to each his own).
The culture of the two language communities also seems very different. Ruby's seems more 'free' (for lack of a better word), while Python's is, uh, more, um... well, I'm not wanting to start a flamewar here, but the Python folks do seem a tad bit more, uh, anal.. err, I mean 'uptight' (for lack of a better word).
By 'free' as applied to the Ruby community I mean that while there are some aspects of the language that some might consider 'dangerous' (the fact that classes are always open, for example) and others consider very powerful (I like the fact that classes are always open - it's a powerful feature) the attitude is that you're a grownup and you can figure out how to use these powerful features wisely, we're not going to constrain the language just because some kid might 'hurt himself'.
All this to say that I think that each language appeals to a different sort of person. Python probably tends to appeal to the safety conscious, neat person (and we need people like that, don't get me wrong). While Ruby probably tends to appeal to the more creative "don't cramp my style" type of person. That's not to say that Ruby is 'dangerous' - I'm starting to use it on a commercial project and it's a big productivity booster - just that you probably have to exercise a bit more wisdom when using it.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
Maybe not, but what if you do decide that you need it again 6 months later with some slight modifications you might not be able to figure out what your 'disposable' program was doing.
is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22.
Well, you're only half right. The '+' sign can indeed be used for string concatenation in Ruby, however you can't freely mix string and numeric variables:
irb(main):001:0> 2+"2" TypeError: String can't be coerced into Fixnum
from (irb):1:in `+'
from (irb):1
So you either need to do (if you want a numeric result): irb(main):005:0> 2+"2".to_i => 4
Or: irb(main):011:0* 2.to_s+"2" => "22"...to get the answer you find annoying.
'+' seems to make sense as a string concatenation operator. Isn't Perl6 planning to use '~' -that's intuitive.
Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
I suppose you could always redefine the '+' operator in both the String and Fixnum classes to act like it does in Perl (ie. do the automatic conversion), but that probably wouldn't be a good idea. It's not that big of a deal to do the conversion between String and Fixnum.
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1. CEO's tend to make the argument that they need to outsource in order to compete with their competitors who are outsourcing. (sounds an awful lot like an argument between kids on the playground - "he's doing it too!" - where nobody wants to take responsibility). Given that CEO salaries run into the $millions (typically 20 to 40X the pay of their average employees) why don't CEOs consider cutting their own salaries in an effort to remain competitive?
2. Many unemployed and about-to-be-unemployed US engineers would be happy to work for less money (within reason)in order to keep their jobs, however when this is suggested to companies the companies usually choose to go with outsourcing. If an engineer is willing to take a 30 - 40% pay cut to save his/her job, why isn't this offer taken seriously by most companies?
3. (related to 2) It's quite clear that if we want to continue working in the engineering fields in America that we'll either have to become much more productive (2 - 3X) or we'll have to accept much lower wages (or a combination of the two). By some measurements we're already much more productive than our overseas counterparts by virtue of the fact that we have more experience with real projects, so it all comes down to money. What can American engineers do to lower their cost of living in order to try to compete with 3rd world salaries?
4. Most offshoring advocates say that we need to just be patient as we await the 'Next big thing (TM)' that will be invented in America (they have a lot of faith). Any idea what the 'Next bit thing' will be and what do we do in the meantime?
5. (related to 4) In the software arena, most of the offshoring advocates say that US developers need to 'move up the foodchain' into project management. Given that you never need anywhere near as many managers as you do managees, what how will most US developers 'move up the food chain'? (perhaps they'll become hunters)
6. (related to 5) What if you'd much rather develop code than manage projects?
7. For outsourcing advocates: Why not make the argument that we should outsource every possible US job to cheaper, lower labor-cost countries and then bring in 'guest-workers' to fill the positions that can't practically be outsourced? It seems that the outsourcing advocates would find this a favorable plan since there would be so much potential money savings. If money savings is the primary economic motivator then this seems like a logical plan, however, what do we do with the millions of US workers that would be put out of work in this scenario?
Commentary: The outsourcing advocates take a very narrow view of economics. To them cost-cutting is the primary motivation for doing anything - "if it'll save a buck, then do it" is their motto. However, it isn't clear that the money savings from outsourcing white collar jobs are actually going to be able to counter-ballance the economic devestation brought on by widespread offshoring. So what if US corporations suddenly become wildly profitable (for a quarter or two) while millions of workers are put out of work. Eventually those millions of unemployed workers won't have the money to buy the products of the wildly profitable corporations and profits will go down. I'd rather see corporations break even while providing good jobs to millions, than see them be wildly profitable but providing no jobs to US workers. Oh, and if millions are unemployed, who is going to pay the taxes to support the schools that we supposedly need to train workers for the 'jobs of the future'?
If we, as Americans, can't compete with people from second and third world countries, there is a problem with us, not with them.
There's no way we as Amerians can compete on price. We can compete on productivity, quality, experience, but when it comes down to price you're not going to be able to compete against an Indian programmer. And since companies right now don't seem to care about quality or experience they're throwing away their American workers for workers in India that they can get away with paying $7/hour because in that economy it's a lot of money. They also don't have all the pesky laws that protect workers and the environment in India.
However, while the pay for American programmer is going down, the prices of things s/he has to buy are still going up in many cases (gasoline, electricity, housing, utilities, property taxes, insurance). If you want to compete with the 3rd world, then you'd better start negotiating with all your creditors:
You: "Yo, Electric company, I need to start competing with 3rd world workers so I need to pay at least 50% less on my electric bill from now on...",
Electric Company: "Then why don't we just shut off your electricity for half the month? Oh, and there's a $50 fee to turn it back on..."
I'm sure you'll make a lot of headway in these negotiations.
Nobody is saying that we should totally shut out India, but what we are saying is let's do something to level the playing field. I'm not sure how that can be done. Perhaps the US gov could offer tax incentives for companies to hire
workers in America - but even that couldn't go far enough to make up the disparity.
Well, the case for putting industry in Arizona was compelling enough for Intel to migrate much of its operation to Arizona.
Well, actually Intel has moved more of it's operation to Oregon than to Arizona. Intel is the largest employer in Oregon now.
Arizona (Phoenix, specifically) has a water problem. They can't support much more growth there because of the lack of water. And Fabs do use a lot of water.
Oregon, on the otherhand, has plenty of water.
The other reason they initially found Oregon appealing was that the electricity rates here used to be lower than just about anywhere because of the cheap hydro power. Now that we've been 'deregulated' (and since Enron bought Portland General Electric) the power rates here have climbed significantly so that they are almost the same as everywhere else (we got the short end of the deregulation stick).
We're talking software here, not hardware. If you have some objections to UML, please state them in software terms.
I'm just relating what I saw happen in another design community. Creating hardware these days, btw, is very much like creating software. Design languages, compilers, etc. I do software for hardware design automation.
p.s. There are valid objections to UML, it's just that your analogy isn't one of them.
Why not? as someone who has been on the other side of the wall, I'm telling you about a major shift away from pictoral descriptions toward textual ones in the hardware design world. It's quite relevant.
Drawing schematics (or UML diagrams) is very time consuming and you have to question whether or not you're getting any increased productivity for the time spent - I contend you aren't.
You want other more 'software oriented' objections - how about, how do I grep for a string in pages of UML? Can I write a quick & dirty Perl script to change all of the instances of some variable to another name? Someone else mentioned that most UML tools now export XML, a textual description. Why not just use XML in the first place? How do I write scripts to automate the process of UML creation? You can't beat text when it comes to the ease of parsing, generation and automation via scripts.
p.p.s. And no matter how many valid objections you come up with, management likes to see UML, so it's all pointless.
That's apparently what's driving all of this. PHB's want pretty pictures to look at.
I'd wondered why there was this whole XMI thing that was running around the UML editor industry
OK, so UML editors are now able to spit out XML. That makes the concept a bit more usable. Now we have something to grep.
A prototype and a spec are two completely different things. They each have their place, and they aren't wisely exchanged.
Perhaps, but add 'test-first' development with unit tests to the mix and you've got an executable spec. If I can use the same set of unit tests for both my prototype and my final code (which I can) then I know that my final code behaves exactly as it should according to the executable spec.
What good does the graphical representation do me, I've got to keep my graphical representation in sync with my actual code. The two representations could be completely different at some point if I'm not careful and when that happens the graphical representation is worse than useless.
This continual syncing between code and pictures becomes burdensome at some point. Unless you can use UML to completely genereate your code this will be a problem (I realize that this is now possible to some extent, but not completely.
There were similar issues in the hardware world when synthesis tools came on the scene: If your representation wasn't synthesizable to hardware then you were doing twice as much work - you had to keep your schematics up to date with your synthesizable HDL code, eventually people wondered why they were drawing the schematic at all and it wasn't long after that that they stopped drawing schematics. The holdouts wanted to hold onto schematics as documentation, but soon people realized that the code itself was documentation.
A lot of folks will tell you that they use UML in place of flowcharts for OO design. I say that the UML emperor is naked.
Chip designers (I used to be one) in the old days (before about '92) used to use schematics which are pictorial representations of their designs. But in the early 90's HDLs (hardware description languages) bagan to creep in. Now you rarely find schematics used for digital design. It's all done in HDLs. Why did this happen? Mainly because it's a whole lot easier and more powerful to describe a circuit with an HDL. You don't have to draw all those wires to connect everything. You can describe things at a very high level, such as an adder to add two 32bit values: A + B (where A and B are 32 bit vectors). What could be simpler.
Another reason that schematics were abondoned is that it's a lot easier to parse text than graphics. The UML promoters should take note.
Now the UML folks are essentially trying to take software design back to the schematic age. The hardware people learned that schematics are not the best representation.
The answer is to program at a higher level of abstraction. This might mean chosing a higher-level language to prototype in (I like prototyping in Ruby) or it might mean using techniques like state machines, for example.
But if they fix it then a lot of Word users would have to be retrained and M$ says retraining is expensive.
It's fashionable to complain about how bad the US K-12 education system is. In some areas the complaints are justified, however, I've noticed in recent years that highschools seem to be teaching a lot more highlevel math & science courses than they did in the '70s when i was in HS.
I know of local schools which teach classes in C++/Java and Object Oriented programming as well - you were lucky to find a school with a single computer in it in the '70s.
I recently visited a regional science fair and was amazed at some of the projects being presented there by highschool students. A couple neural net projects, one on how to make better fiber optics... Anyway, I couldn't help thinking that these kids who are into technology are now cursed. They'll either have to move to India to find work that they like or they'll have to give up on their dreams and become lawyers, mechanics, dentists, etc (oh, they'll make a good living in those fields, but it probably won't be what they really like to do)
In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
The AEA is all for offshoring. It represents business interests. So it makes sense that they would give this excuse for offshoring...
AEA: "We're not doing it 'cause we're greedy, honest! We just can't find qualified employees in the US anymore."
Casual Observer: "Errr... Ummm, what about all those engineers over there in the unemployment line?"
AEA: "Oh...yeah... well, um, those aren't the kind of engineers we need these days..."
Casual Observer: "Of course, you're looking for the ones who are willing to work for $7/hour, 16 hours per day with no complaints"
American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff.
In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
And why should the youngsters be interested in taking math & science if the kinds of jobs that use them are being sent overseas? Less highschoolers opting for math/science classes means you need less teachers in those areas and could probably lead to even less math & science being taught.
No, the kids may as well concentrate on getting into Lawschool and you don't need either math or science for that.
Teacher: Johnny, what do you want to do when you grow up?
Johnny: I want to be a software engineer.
Teacher: Are you willing to move to India?
Johnny: India?! I don't think so, why?
Teacher: Well, Johnny, if you're serious about being a software engineer, you'll have to move to India to find work.
Johnny: (after a couple of minutes of intense thought) I think I'll be a fireman instead.
Given that you have to select an E-mail to delete it, how are users supposed to protect themselves from this one?"
Install Linux or get a Mac immediately.
"As bandwidth costs become cheaper and more people adopt cable or DSL over standard dial-up connections,"
Where is this happening? Cable connection runs in the $40-$50/month range right now. A couple of years ago you could get them for about $35 in my area.
There really doesn't seem to be any price pressures on broadband access yet. Most places have either DSL or Cable. Some places have both. Neither the telcos (who do DSL) nor the Cable cos seem inclined to compete on price yet. Maybe when wireless broadband or broadband over powerlines become more common you'll start to see some competition.
After noting the current surge in Internet worms and the so-called Darwinist evolution of these things into more and more powerful incarnations,
It's not exactly Darwinian evolution. These things don't mutate on their own, people change them.
OK, so if everything is just going to be hunky-dory in 25 years then it's not going to be a very interesting show... neither will it be believable.
Most people don't assume that legal matters will improve over the next 25 years, to the contrary, most people assume they'll get worse. The trends of the recent past seem to bear this out:
DMCA, (so-called)Patriot ActI&II, Increasing litigiousness (so that you need malpractice insurance now to be a software developer).
I suspect that 25 years from now everyone will need some sort of mal-practice insurance and the percentage of the population that are Lawyers will at least double.
Well, they started with Puma, then Jaguar and now Panther, since they're running out of powerful cats to name 10.4 after, they want to conserve them so they didn't make it a major release. ;-)
What _are_ they going to do after they use up Tiger and Lion?
Tabby?
1) Sometimes (10% of the time?) I just get a black screen on wake and have to reboot (CAPSLOCK key LED turns on/off though...so it ain't "dead").
I've seen this happen once on my PowerBook as well. You're right, your machine isn't dead and it doesn't need to be rebooted.
What you need to do is to increase the brightness by pressing f2, that's all. For some reason sometimes after waking from a sleep the brightness stays turned all the way down.
I discovered this because my PowerBook was sitting in front of the window and it was sunny out. You know how the Apple logo glows when the screen is lit? Well, it works both ways - when the backlight is off light can shine through the Apple logo as well and you can see an Apple-logo shaped area of your screen that's readable. So I could tell that there was still stuff on the screen. I moved the cursor around till it showed up in that small lit region. Then I tried turning up the brightness and it worked.
No need to reboot.
http://www.rubyx.org
You can use the Rubyx script to create your own custom distribution. This seems a lot closer to the 'new kind of Linux distro' talked about on the Progeny site.
(and yes, distcc is supported, however compilation happens at your end, not at some central location, but it's still worth a look as you could probably build on Rubyx to do something like you describe.)
http://www.rubyx.org/
From the Rubyx page:
Rubyx is an operating system, created and maintained by rubyx, a script written in the ruby language.
The script grew out of the need to create highly specialised linux installations for a massive multi-player online game, but has become a viable operating system for general use. It is working and usable (it's running this website) and package support grows daily.
The Rubyx script actually builds your own customizsed distro with pretty-much whatever you want in it.
Gotta love the quote from the Indian programmer in the article:
"Don't you think we're helping the US economy by doing the work here?" asks an exasperated Lalit Suryawanshi. It frees up Americans to do other things so the economy can grow, adds Jairam.
Yes indeed. It frees us up to work at Wall*Mort, and Starbunks. Yes, now we can do the important stuff like bagging groceries and pouring lattes.
No more of that silly programming and engineering stuff. Now that there are so many of us freed up our economy can really grow!
Hey, who moved my paneer?
Go back to school (as in a reputable University) and get a degree. (of course, some would say that Universities are a scam too, but at this point they're probably the preferable scam).
Of course at this point, you've got to conserve your cash, so if you had a 401K or IRA when you were employed you can pull money out of it to pay for school without paying the 10% penalty. It will, however, be considered income and you will be taxed on that income. However, there are a couple of education tax credits (the HOPE credit) that would offset a lot of that income.
Then the big question is what to major in? There are a lot of CS grads in the parks downtown asking for change these days (or soon will be). Be wise and get into some field that isn't easily offshored - consider medical related or environmental related degrees.
Was WinXP64 specifically optimized for the Itanium? Probably not. The Itanium places a lot of burden on compilers, and Microsoft's compilers probably aren't generating optimal Itanium code yet.
True. But the basic Itanium architecture has been out for a few years now. If it's proving to be that difficult to write compilers that generate efficient code for it, then maybe it's not all the fault of the compiler writers.
And, of course, if Win64 is running in the Itanium's x86 compatibility mode, then of course it's going to be slower.
I'm no expert on these issues, but if it was running on Itanium using the x86 compatibility mode, wouldn't that then imply that the same binaries could run on a Pentium? AFIK XP-64 bit edition only runs on Itaniums right now (there are plans to support AMD 64-bit processors soon, though) which would imply that it's not using the compatibility mode, but it's running native Itanium code. But as someone else mentioned, perhaps the video and other drivers are still x86, 32bit code which would significantly slow down IO.
We've got an Itanic box at work that has WinXP 64bit edition on it so we can build & test some 64bit Windows binaries.
It's the slowest box in the place! Open a terminal (oops, command shell, or whatever they call it on Windoze) and do a 'dir' - it scrolls so slowly that it feels like I'm way back in the old days when I was running a DOS emulator on my Atari ST box.
Pretty much everything is _much_ slower on that box. It's amazingly bad and I've tried to think of reasons for this: Was XP 64bit built with debugging options turned on when they compiled it? But even if that were the case it wouldn't account for all of it - I'd only expect that to slow things down maybe up to 20%, not by almost an order of magnitude.
Then 16bit binaries should be even faster then 32.
And why stop there?
8bits should really scream.
I can see it now: 2GHz 6502 processors, retro computing. The 70's are back.
I too prefer Ruby. And as such, it's nice to see Ruby being mentioned more often. Sure the Ruby community is smaller (in the US anyway) than the Python community, but we do seem to be steadily gaining new users (even some Python refugees).
The whole Ruby vs. Python issue is probably mostly a "different strokes for different folks thing". Either is a good choice to learn at this point. Try them both and see which one fits you better. In my case it mostly came down to the indentation- as-syntax issue with Python (often this is referred to as 'whitespace as syntax', but pretty much every language relies on whitespace somewhere, so indentation is more specific). I really strongly disliked Python's indentation-as-syntax 'feature'. I know that many Pythonistas will claim that with the right editor settings it's not problem, but for me not being able to cut&paste code is a deal-breaker (and having important pieces of your code be 'invisible' just doesn't sit well with me). I tried Python for a few days before trying Ruby and was bit a few times by the indentation-as-syntax thing - no thanks (but to each his own).
The culture of the two language communities also seems very different. Ruby's seems more 'free' (for lack of a better word), while Python's is, uh, more, um... well, I'm not wanting to start a flamewar here, but the Python folks do seem a tad bit more, uh, anal.. err, I mean 'uptight' (for lack of a better word).
By 'free' as applied to the Ruby community I mean that while there are some aspects of the language that some might consider 'dangerous' (the fact that classes are always open, for example) and others consider very powerful (I like the fact that classes are always open - it's a powerful feature) the attitude is that you're a grownup and you can figure out how to use these powerful features wisely, we're not going to constrain the language just because some kid might 'hurt himself'.
All this to say that I think that each language appeals to a different sort of person. Python probably tends to appeal to the safety conscious, neat person (and we need people like that, don't get me wrong). While Ruby probably tends to appeal to the more creative "don't cramp my style" type of person. That's not to say that Ruby is 'dangerous' - I'm starting to use it on a commercial project and it's a big productivity booster - just that you probably have to exercise a bit more wisdom when using it.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
...to get the answer you find annoying.
Maybe not, but what if you do decide that you need it again 6 months later with some slight modifications you might not be able to figure out what your 'disposable' program was doing.
is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22.
Well, you're only half right. The '+' sign can indeed be used for string concatenation in Ruby, however you can't freely mix string and numeric variables:
irb(main):001:0> 2+"2"
TypeError: String can't be coerced into Fixnum
from (irb):1:in `+'
from (irb):1
So you either need to do (if you want a numeric result):
irb(main):005:0> 2+"2".to_i
=> 4
Or:
irb(main):011:0* 2.to_s+"2"
=> "22"
'+' seems to make sense as a string concatenation operator. Isn't Perl6 planning to use '~' -that's intuitive.
Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
I suppose you could always redefine the '+' operator in both the String and Fixnum classes to act like it does in Perl (ie. do the automatic conversion), but that probably wouldn't be a good idea. It's not that big of a deal to do the conversion between String and Fixnum.
can you imagine lining up the syntactically-significant indentation as your're typing in Python code on your cell phone?