Everquest II does this to a point. There are Station Exchange-equipped servers in which players can buy/sell any droppable item, cash, even characters. Sony released a report about station exchange server statistics (including differences in playtime, leveling, etc.) and it was pretty interesting.
My wife likes EQII (I was more of an original Everquest type myself) and I play occasionally on both a station exchange server and a non-exchange server, just to try them both out, and at mid-40's I can't really tell a large difference. Back in the day you could make some cash selling plat ($5 or so per plat) but nowadays its under $1 a plat which just isn't worth it...
We do watch movies from time to time, but tend to prefer video games for entertainment. Only slightly less brain rotting:) And again there is the social aspect. You are right about the home cooking, I'm thankful my wife is a good cook, cause I'm useless beyond mac and cheese and hot dogs.
But come football season... watch out. Green Bay Packers on a 50" DLP:P.
Oh yeah, I played Diablo those months in college when I couldn't scrape up $15 and was living off of Ramen:)
I played WoW for about 2 months (right after release) and promptly sold my account. Didn't really like it, although some of my longtime friends are still playing it. Wasn't enough depth for my taste. EQ, I feel like even though I've played for 6 years, I've barely scratched the surface.
Yeah, I played Everquest hardcore in college. And when I first got married I still played some. My wife was convinced she'd "fix me"... but turns out I got her into EQ (I sat her down one night and made her make a character and just said "honey, just try and see what I see when I play the game, then tell me what you think"... after the evening she was hooked). We played till our first kid was born then laid off it. Now our two kids are older, sleeping through the nights, we play again after the kids are in bed for a few hours (8pm-10pm). It's a fun outlet, and it's cheaper than dinner and a movie once a month (and the damn babysitter, they are so expensive nowadays). The other factor for me at least is I moved 1000 miles away to go to college, and it was a good way to keep in touch with friends. A few of which still play...
I'd like to think that the way the company I work for "innovates" is by hiring innovative employees. I'd like to think most companies operate that way.
In that frame of mind, a mass acquisition is similar to a mass hiring, except you also get existing code, hardware, processes, etc.
The hydrazine has a low boiling point (114C). The high temperatures from the satellite rentry would have boiled the hydrazine and caused fuel tank rupture LONG before the satellite hit the ground.
Not necessarily. If the hydrazine tank is parked in the center of the vehicle it's very probable that it could remain cold enough. You completely negate radiation and most likely convection depending on design, so you rely solely on conduction for heating. If you have a big, massive satellite that is densely packed it is conceivable that the center could remain cold, just like the Apollo modules kept three people comfortable for reentry. Also a big dense object like a satellite is likely to stay intact through re-entry with very little breakup.
Although I agree there is much more at stake than just hydrazine, and I think spy secrets alone would have been justification, there's no saying the hydrazine would be completely gone. There's multiple justifications for this shot, they just picked one to tell people.
but days of God, which are explained to be any length of time in two different places in the Bible.
In several places in the Bible it explains how the passage of time is not a factor to God as it is to us (a day is like a millenia, a millenia like a day), but it explicitly says in Genesis, after each day of creation, "And there was evening and there was morning, the Nth day." If you hand-wave away that phrase, then what else do you hand-wave away?
I don't get the obsession with C++. Yes, its powerful. It also lets you shoot yourself in the foot. Since moving to C# (or Java), I find I'm spending most of my time dealing with solving the actual problem at hand.. not writing lots of code to micromanage memory. Why is it that when your manager micromanges you, he's incompetent, yet developers have no problem micromanaging memory?
Go write an industrial scale CFD code in the flavor-of-the week, and then come back and talk to me. A little time spent in up-front memory micromanagement and playing **safely** with the thing that could shoot you in the foot results in a code that will run orders of magnitude faster than the other options.
You say you don't care about speed, but when you are working on programs that take entire clusters of computers days or weeks to solve, a 10% optimization in speed can result in thousands of dollars of savings. What's that Benjamin Franklin saying, "a stitch, in time, saves nine"? A little up-front extra work can reward you ten times over in the long run.
Right, the only way to make things worse is to increase the tangential velocity (to the surface of the earth). This would increase the orbital velocity and raise the orbital height on the other side of the earth, potentially extending it's stay. But again, you're not going to get it to circularize...
Take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm not a CS, I'm an aerospace engineer who writes a lot of code.
I used to work on a missile simulation toolkit for the Army that targeted Windows and Linux and a few other minor platforms. It seemed like we always had to tweak it for different changes in GCC, not just major revisions from 3 to 4 but even point changes in 3 and 4. It was perfectly valid c++ code, compiled fine in Intel's compiler and MSVC++ under Windows (multiple releases), but GCC for some reason liked to whine.
My second data point is personal experience on my master's thesis work. It was a a computationally intense code. I played around with code speed optimization under both GCC 4 and MSVC++ (Express), and found my code ran substantially faster on the same computer under MSVC++. It sounds counterintuitive if you believe everything about Windows and Linux, but I did my research and I do believe I was flipping the right optimization switches under GCC. Even unoptimized, MSVC under Windows was faster.
I try my best to keep my code clean so it will compile anywhere (just today I ran some code under Linux that was born under Windows 4 months ago and never touched Linux, only required three edits, capitalization of include files...), so I'm not tied to a compiler, I just use what feels best based off of comparisons. What works well for me might very well not work for someone else. I do very specific kinds of code - generally very computationally intense though not very memory intense, no GUI's, etc.-
Linux won't run on my Windows Mobile enabled phone, but Windows Mobile will! What the fuck is wrong with linux?
That pretty much sums up your post.
Try comparing Glade or KDevelop to Visual Studio, even the free-for-all Express Edition, on a technical level and then we can talk. I develop for both Windows and Linux, but I got to say, I prefer both Microsoft's compiler and IDE.
Now, instead of one big vaguely predictable chunk of technology falling down, we're going to have hundreds if not thousands of smaller chunks that are going to be absolutely impossible to predict their trajectory.
As someone whose day job is re-entry of large objects from near-orbital velocities I feel pretty qualified to respond to this. "vaguely predictable" is pretty generous. For the upper stage of a launch vehicle re-entering under an hour after launch (read: we know precisely where it is coming from, have the trajectory modeled, etc), there are thousands of miles in the "footprint" of the debris. And while most of it will come down in one or several big chunks, there will be a lot of scatter debris over that footprint. Now, think of something that's been in orbit for a number of years. Sure, we can observe it for a few months and try and nail the orbital parameters, but any way you slice it, it's an uncontrolled re-entry. We don't know with high precision the injection orientation, velocity, orientation, etc. That baby could have an uncertainty of 10,000 miles or more on it's footprint.
Also another note: big, dense, heavy things tend to break up very little on re-entry. They soak a lot of heat and come down hard and heavy. Big, light things like expended stages tear apart into little pieces and essentially dissipate in the atmosphere, leaving very little debris. And what debris remains, slows down very quickly, reducing scatter versus heavy pieces that just keep on flying. So there is a distinct advantage to breaking this thing into pieces. It will tear itself to shreds, versus coming down like a rock.
there's even the risk that the explosion might send pieces of debris upwards in the atmosphere, and it may even reach an altitude that will not allow it to fall back down for a very long time.
Don't believe everything you read on slashdot. What goes up must come down. The only way it will stay in orbit is if you give it the appropriate energy tangential to the surface of the earth to sustain an orbit, or more. That's it. I could shoot a bullet up into the sky right now at M=10,000, and it's either escaping the gravitational grasp of the earth or coming back to hit it. The chances of random pieces entering a stable orbit for the long term is slim. The chance of a few random pieces extending their stay? Granted, maybe for a few months to a year.
I try to catch "Earl", I'm a jason lee fan (Mallrats, chasing Amy, Dogma, etc. the whole Kevin Smith Askew-niverse) but it's about the time the kids go to bed. His brother makes the show though.
"Hey Earl?"
"yeah, Randy?"
"If the muppets and sesame street got in a fight..."
Not necessarily hardcore "Nerd" shows but the only three shows I really watch are "24", "the office" and "30 rock". I like the believeable action and format of "24" (although some suspense of disbelief is needed), and the comedy styles of the latter two, particularly 30 Rock. Different types of "geeks", more office and production humor, but still good stuff IMO.
If I'm feeling geeky, I pull out the computer, pull out some hardware, my Fischertechnik set, etc. I use my 2-5 hours a week of TV (more during football season) as my relaxation time away from the normal hobbies.
I've worked in the private sector. I have a number of friends from Wisconsin to Alabama who still do, both as entrepreneurs and as employees. The same benefits abound.
we, who actually work hard for a living, have not had it so well.
Thanks. Like I said, I have worked in the private sector. In fact, the company I used to work for did as much private contracting as government contracting. They started out as a private contractor before expanding into government work, and offered the same damn benefits. I worked on the government side because I enjoy the work. There just aren't that many private companies doing the level of modeling and simulation, especially the cutting-edge stuff, not using canned codes, that the government is interested in.
I can understand the hostility if you are stuck in a crappy job. I feel you. Been there, done that. Do a little research. There are plenty of companies, in all sectors of work, that realize that keeping an employee happy is the best method of business, and that paying for tuition is one of the cheapest forms of employee education.
You don't know that is their goal. Maybe it's to sell Widget Y, which requires the widget I'm subsidizing (see: XBOX 360). Maybe they are getting rid of old stock (selling it below cost is better than junking and you get other benefits as well [overstock.com]).
What I'm saying is, anytime you let the gov't tell you that you can't do something, you get rid of business models that work. Like the two examples cited above. You may be fine with that, but I'm not. Give the consumers a little credit.
Maybe as a CS. I'm a MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineer) and I've gone from a simulationist (6DOF modeling and simulation) to a guy who writes seeker models and guidance models to working for NASA as an aerothermodynamist (heat transfer on rocket re-entry). In under three years time. The key is to keep on learning. Get that masters, and don't stop till your business cards say "Ph.D." on them. And learn outside the classroom too:) It's good for you and good for your career.
Don't consider what you are doing now a pigeon hole, rather a leaping point. What can I jump to from here, with a little hard work and determination?
I have this widget, which normally sells for $5. If I want to sell it for $2.50, what right has anyone to say I can't? Again, I say, it's government price fixing. They are setting a minimum sale price threshold.
Yeah, I bought a $300 laptop with Vista Home on it, just to dink around on (we have one home computer and my wife's been getting into video games) for dissertation research, and it's been great. Actually the first thing I did was dual boot XP, but after running a few comparisons side by side over the first month I shredded the XP partition, it wasn't much if any faster than Vista for what I did (programming/writing/simulating).
The only "trick" to vista is RAM. If you have less than a gig, stick another gig at least in there. RAM is so dirt cheap anyways...
If you are running windows like most consumers in the world, you cannot do that without a fresh install of the OS. As more of these users are forced into Vista, this gets harder as there are license restrictions preventing this.
Like the AC said, I swapped out chips and motherboards without reinstalling Windows. Just installed updated firmware drivers and an AMD dual core patch to Windows and I was good to go.
Regardless of OS, you understand that the bits and bobs are roughly interchangeable. You are in the minority.
Irrelevant. Your average user won't care to upgrade an individual component based on a specific need, because that specific need does not arise, so their comprehension of the situation doesn't matter.
the vast majority of computer users are not you and generally don't mind over paying for their hardware, OS and HP peripherals for the same reasons Intel is being investigated.
The vast majority of computer users are corporations, not end users. They buy computers by the hundreds and thousands. These people are extremely budget-conscious. A few bucks per machine translates into thousands or tens of thousands saved.
This kind of mentality wrongly assumes that there is a sort of perfect market state that translates into people switching retailers/PC's as features/price change.
If I want to change from an Intel to a AMD CPU, like I did last year, all you have to do is purchase the replacement CPU and an appropriate motherboard. All other perhipherals are usable under either system. It doesn't get much easier than that... It isn't like I have to throw away my video card or data to upgrade CPU's.
However... I do see a few probl... err... I mean of course "Opportunities" here.
The first one being the opportunity to convince management in the US to pay engineers and scientists more and/or MBA's less.
I don't know how much a MBA makes, but as someone who worked for an Army contractor building missile simulations and now NASA doing heat transfer work on Ares, I think I can say with some certainty that engineers do all right. I started fresh out of by bachelors making over 50k and in under three years have increased my earnings by 25%. I have friends that are EE's and other forms of engineers who have followed similar paths, so I know I am not an abnormal case.
The second one would be to convince them to stop seeing the engineering and R&D departments as regrettable cost centers to be outsourced and/or off-shored at the first opportunity.
If you get into the right aspect of engineering, it is difficult to outsource (see: the above two examples. Having a job requiring a security clearance helps:) ) I know of a lot of IT work and call-center type work that has been outsourced, really familiar with it having worked in those environments in high school and college, but I am aware of very little outsourced engineering work. Engineering work is a lot harder to outsource.
The third opportunity would be to convince industry to offer Ph.D's opportunities (and to some extent academic entry-level positions) that make it less of a financial risk to do a Ph.D.
I haven't paid a nickle for either my Master's or PhD coursework/books/etc. Both employers paid tuition and provided a flexible work schedule around classes. Both guaranteed good on-the-spot raises upon the completion of either. There is no financial risk in doing a PhD along with work in engineering, in fact it is encouraged. The only risk you take is taking away some of your own free time.
I completed my master's in 18 months. I'm a year and a half into my PhD, all coursework completed, starting on my research. So you can't say that industry will slow down your progress, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Everquest II does this to a point. There are Station Exchange-equipped servers in which players can buy/sell any droppable item, cash, even characters. Sony released a report about station exchange server statistics (including differences in playtime, leveling, etc.) and it was pretty interesting.
My wife likes EQII (I was more of an original Everquest type myself) and I play occasionally on both a station exchange server and a non-exchange server, just to try them both out, and at mid-40's I can't really tell a large difference. Back in the day you could make some cash selling plat ($5 or so per plat) but nowadays its under $1 a plat which just isn't worth it...
We do watch movies from time to time, but tend to prefer video games for entertainment. Only slightly less brain rotting :) And again there is the social aspect. You are right about the home cooking, I'm thankful my wife is a good cook, cause I'm useless beyond mac and cheese and hot dogs.
:P.
But come football season... watch out. Green Bay Packers on a 50" DLP
Oh yeah, I played Diablo those months in college when I couldn't scrape up $15 and was living off of Ramen :)
I played WoW for about 2 months (right after release) and promptly sold my account. Didn't really like it, although some of my longtime friends are still playing it. Wasn't enough depth for my taste. EQ, I feel like even though I've played for 6 years, I've barely scratched the surface.
Man, generations must be getting tighter, Brad McQuaid was still relevant as of last year with Vanguard :). It's too bad...
Yeah, I played Everquest hardcore in college. And when I first got married I still played some. My wife was convinced she'd "fix me" ... but turns out I got her into EQ (I sat her down one night and made her make a character and just said "honey, just try and see what I see when I play the game, then tell me what you think" ... after the evening she was hooked). We played till our first kid was born then laid off it. Now our two kids are older, sleeping through the nights, we play again after the kids are in bed for a few hours (8pm-10pm). It's a fun outlet, and it's cheaper than dinner and a movie once a month (and the damn babysitter, they are so expensive nowadays). The other factor for me at least is I moved 1000 miles away to go to college, and it was a good way to keep in touch with friends. A few of which still play ...
I'd like to think that the way the company I work for "innovates" is by hiring innovative employees. I'd like to think most companies operate that way.
In that frame of mind, a mass acquisition is similar to a mass hiring, except you also get existing code, hardware, processes, etc.
The hydrazine has a low boiling point (114C). The high temperatures from the satellite rentry would have boiled the hydrazine and caused fuel tank rupture LONG before the satellite hit the ground.
Not necessarily. If the hydrazine tank is parked in the center of the vehicle it's very probable that it could remain cold enough. You completely negate radiation and most likely convection depending on design, so you rely solely on conduction for heating. If you have a big, massive satellite that is densely packed it is conceivable that the center could remain cold, just like the Apollo modules kept three people comfortable for reentry. Also a big dense object like a satellite is likely to stay intact through re-entry with very little breakup.
Although I agree there is much more at stake than just hydrazine, and I think spy secrets alone would have been justification, there's no saying the hydrazine would be completely gone. There's multiple justifications for this shot, they just picked one to tell people.
but days of God, which are explained to be any length of time in two different places in the Bible.
In several places in the Bible it explains how the passage of time is not a factor to God as it is to us (a day is like a millenia, a millenia like a day), but it explicitly says in Genesis, after each day of creation, "And there was evening and there was morning, the Nth day." If you hand-wave away that phrase, then what else do you hand-wave away?
I don't get the obsession with C++. Yes, its powerful. It also lets you shoot yourself in the foot. Since moving to C# (or Java), I find I'm spending most of my time dealing with solving the actual problem at hand.. not writing lots of code to micromanage memory. Why is it that when your manager micromanges you, he's incompetent, yet developers have no problem micromanaging memory?
Go write an industrial scale CFD code in the flavor-of-the week, and then come back and talk to me. A little time spent in up-front memory micromanagement and playing **safely** with the thing that could shoot you in the foot results in a code that will run orders of magnitude faster than the other options.
You say you don't care about speed, but when you are working on programs that take entire clusters of computers days or weeks to solve, a 10% optimization in speed can result in thousands of dollars of savings. What's that Benjamin Franklin saying, "a stitch, in time, saves nine"? A little up-front extra work can reward you ten times over in the long run.
Right, the only way to make things worse is to increase the tangential velocity (to the surface of the earth). This would increase the orbital velocity and raise the orbital height on the other side of the earth, potentially extending it's stay. But again, you're not going to get it to circularize ...
Take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm not a CS, I'm an aerospace engineer who writes a lot of code.
I used to work on a missile simulation toolkit for the Army that targeted Windows and Linux and a few other minor platforms. It seemed like we always had to tweak it for different changes in GCC, not just major revisions from 3 to 4 but even point changes in 3 and 4. It was perfectly valid c++ code, compiled fine in Intel's compiler and MSVC++ under Windows (multiple releases), but GCC for some reason liked to whine.
My second data point is personal experience on my master's thesis work. It was a a computationally intense code. I played around with code speed optimization under both GCC 4 and MSVC++ (Express), and found my code ran substantially faster on the same computer under MSVC++. It sounds counterintuitive if you believe everything about Windows and Linux, but I did my research and I do believe I was flipping the right optimization switches under GCC. Even unoptimized, MSVC under Windows was faster.
I try my best to keep my code clean so it will compile anywhere (just today I ran some code under Linux that was born under Windows 4 months ago and never touched Linux, only required three edits, capitalization of include files...), so I'm not tied to a compiler, I just use what feels best based off of comparisons. What works well for me might very well not work for someone else. I do very specific kinds of code - generally very computationally intense though not very memory intense, no GUI's, etc.-
Linux won't run on my Windows Mobile enabled phone, but Windows Mobile will! What the fuck is wrong with linux?
That pretty much sums up your post.
Try comparing Glade or KDevelop to Visual Studio, even the free-for-all Express Edition, on a technical level and then we can talk. I develop for both Windows and Linux, but I got to say, I prefer both Microsoft's compiler and IDE.
Now, instead of one big vaguely predictable chunk of technology falling down, we're going to have hundreds if not thousands of smaller chunks that are going to be absolutely impossible to predict their trajectory.
As someone whose day job is re-entry of large objects from near-orbital velocities I feel pretty qualified to respond to this. "vaguely predictable" is pretty generous. For the upper stage of a launch vehicle re-entering under an hour after launch (read: we know precisely where it is coming from, have the trajectory modeled, etc), there are thousands of miles in the "footprint" of the debris. And while most of it will come down in one or several big chunks, there will be a lot of scatter debris over that footprint. Now, think of something that's been in orbit for a number of years. Sure, we can observe it for a few months and try and nail the orbital parameters, but any way you slice it, it's an uncontrolled re-entry. We don't know with high precision the injection orientation, velocity, orientation, etc. That baby could have an uncertainty of 10,000 miles or more on it's footprint.
Also another note: big, dense, heavy things tend to break up very little on re-entry. They soak a lot of heat and come down hard and heavy. Big, light things like expended stages tear apart into little pieces and essentially dissipate in the atmosphere, leaving very little debris. And what debris remains, slows down very quickly, reducing scatter versus heavy pieces that just keep on flying. So there is a distinct advantage to breaking this thing into pieces. It will tear itself to shreds, versus coming down like a rock.
there's even the risk that the explosion might send pieces of debris upwards in the atmosphere, and it may even reach an altitude that will not allow it to fall back down for a very long time.
Don't believe everything you read on slashdot. What goes up must come down. The only way it will stay in orbit is if you give it the appropriate energy tangential to the surface of the earth to sustain an orbit, or more. That's it. I could shoot a bullet up into the sky right now at M=10,000, and it's either escaping the gravitational grasp of the earth or coming back to hit it. The chances of random pieces entering a stable orbit for the long term is slim. The chance of a few random pieces extending their stay? Granted, maybe for a few months to a year.
I try to catch "Earl", I'm a jason lee fan (Mallrats, chasing Amy, Dogma, etc. the whole Kevin Smith Askew-niverse) but it's about the time the kids go to bed. His brother makes the show though.
..."
"Hey Earl?"
"yeah, Randy?"
"If the muppets and sesame street got in a fight
Not necessarily hardcore "Nerd" shows but the only three shows I really watch are "24", "the office" and "30 rock". I like the believeable action and format of "24" (although some suspense of disbelief is needed), and the comedy styles of the latter two, particularly 30 Rock. Different types of "geeks", more office and production humor, but still good stuff IMO.
If I'm feeling geeky, I pull out the computer, pull out some hardware, my Fischertechnik set, etc. I use my 2-5 hours a week of TV (more during football season) as my relaxation time away from the normal hobbies.
Stop comparing apples and oranges.
I've worked in the private sector. I have a number of friends from Wisconsin to Alabama who still do, both as entrepreneurs and as employees. The same benefits abound.
we, who actually work hard for a living, have not had it so well.
Thanks. Like I said, I have worked in the private sector. In fact, the company I used to work for did as much private contracting as government contracting. They started out as a private contractor before expanding into government work, and offered the same damn benefits. I worked on the government side because I enjoy the work. There just aren't that many private companies doing the level of modeling and simulation, especially the cutting-edge stuff, not using canned codes, that the government is interested in.
I can understand the hostility if you are stuck in a crappy job. I feel you. Been there, done that. Do a little research. There are plenty of companies, in all sectors of work, that realize that keeping an employee happy is the best method of business, and that paying for tuition is one of the cheapest forms of employee education.
The goal is to move on to this
You don't know that is their goal. Maybe it's to sell Widget Y, which requires the widget I'm subsidizing (see: XBOX 360). Maybe they are getting rid of old stock (selling it below cost is better than junking and you get other benefits as well [overstock.com]).
What I'm saying is, anytime you let the gov't tell you that you can't do something, you get rid of business models that work. Like the two examples cited above. You may be fine with that, but I'm not. Give the consumers a little credit.
Maybe as a CS. I'm a MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineer) and I've gone from a simulationist (6DOF modeling and simulation) to a guy who writes seeker models and guidance models to working for NASA as an aerothermodynamist (heat transfer on rocket re-entry). In under three years time. The key is to keep on learning. Get that masters, and don't stop till your business cards say "Ph.D." on them. And learn outside the classroom too :) It's good for you and good for your career.
Don't consider what you are doing now a pigeon hole, rather a leaping point. What can I jump to from here, with a little hard work and determination?
Why?
I have this widget, which normally sells for $5. If I want to sell it for $2.50, what right has anyone to say I can't? Again, I say, it's government price fixing. They are setting a minimum sale price threshold.
Yeah, I bought a $300 laptop with Vista Home on it, just to dink around on (we have one home computer and my wife's been getting into video games) for dissertation research, and it's been great. Actually the first thing I did was dual boot XP, but after running a few comparisons side by side over the first month I shredded the XP partition, it wasn't much if any faster than Vista for what I did (programming/writing/simulating).
The only "trick" to vista is RAM. If you have less than a gig, stick another gig at least in there. RAM is so dirt cheap anyways...
If you are running windows like most consumers in the world, you cannot do that without a fresh install of the OS. As more of these users are forced into Vista, this gets harder as there are license restrictions preventing this.
Like the AC said, I swapped out chips and motherboards without reinstalling Windows. Just installed updated firmware drivers and an AMD dual core patch to Windows and I was good to go.
Regardless of OS, you understand that the bits and bobs are roughly interchangeable. You are in the minority.
Irrelevant. Your average user won't care to upgrade an individual component based on a specific need, because that specific need does not arise, so their comprehension of the situation doesn't matter.
the vast majority of computer users are not you and generally don't mind over paying for their hardware, OS and HP peripherals for the same reasons Intel is being investigated.
The vast majority of computer users are corporations, not end users. They buy computers by the hundreds and thousands. These people are extremely budget-conscious. A few bucks per machine translates into thousands or tens of thousands saved.
I prefer the market to bear itself out, yes.
And saying Intel is a monopoly, at this point, is laughable. Unfair practices? Perhaps. We will find out. But they aren't a monopoly yet.
This kind of mentality wrongly assumes that there is a sort of perfect market state that translates into people switching retailers/PC's as features/price change.
... It isn't like I have to throw away my video card or data to upgrade CPU's.
If I want to change from an Intel to a AMD CPU, like I did last year, all you have to do is purchase the replacement CPU and an appropriate motherboard. All other perhipherals are usable under either system. It doesn't get much easier than that
So... you want the Government to fix pricing? Yech.
However ... I do see a few probl... err ... I mean of course "Opportunities" here.
The first one being the opportunity to convince management in the US to pay engineers and scientists more and/or MBA's less.
:) ) I know of a lot of IT work and call-center type work that has been outsourced, really familiar with it having worked in those environments in high school and college, but I am aware of very little outsourced engineering work. Engineering work is a lot harder to outsource.
I don't know how much a MBA makes, but as someone who worked for an Army contractor building missile simulations and now NASA doing heat transfer work on Ares, I think I can say with some certainty that engineers do all right. I started fresh out of by bachelors making over 50k and in under three years have increased my earnings by 25%. I have friends that are EE's and other forms of engineers who have followed similar paths, so I know I am not an abnormal case.
The second one would be to convince them to stop seeing the engineering and R&D departments as regrettable cost centers to be outsourced and/or off-shored at the first opportunity.
If you get into the right aspect of engineering, it is difficult to outsource (see: the above two examples. Having a job requiring a security clearance helps
The third opportunity would be to convince industry to offer Ph.D's opportunities (and to some extent academic entry-level positions) that make it less of a financial risk to do a Ph.D.
I haven't paid a nickle for either my Master's or PhD coursework/books/etc. Both employers paid tuition and provided a flexible work schedule around classes. Both guaranteed good on-the-spot raises upon the completion of either. There is no financial risk in doing a PhD along with work in engineering, in fact it is encouraged. The only risk you take is taking away some of your own free time.
I completed my master's in 18 months. I'm a year and a half into my PhD, all coursework completed, starting on my research. So you can't say that industry will slow down your progress, either.