The US
has lost a quarter of its high-tech jobs since 2000, the number declining by 687,000. A veteran headhunter
opines on the causes:
The technical jobs in Silicon Valley are hard to fill with Americans...I get email every day from new grads, asking for help finding jobs, but honestly, most are Indian or Chinese, not many Americans. He cites a
NYT article which claims that the reason iPhone manufacturing doesn't happen in the US is that
Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
posted by shivohum
on Jun 2, 2012 -
86 comments
Trash cans, landfills, and incinerators. Erasure, deletion, and obsolescence. These words could describe what has happened to the various building blocks of the video game industry in countries around the world. These building blocks consist of video game source code, the actual computer hardware used to create a particular video game, level layout diagrams, character designs, production documents, marketing material, and more.
These are just some elements of game creation that are gone -- never to be seen again. These elements make up the home console, handheld, PC and arcade games we've played. The only remnant of a particular game may be its name, or its final published version, since the possibility exists that no other physical copy of its creation remains.
As a community of video game developers, publishers, and players, we must begin asking ourselves some difficult but inevitable questions. Some believe there is no point in preserving a video game, arguing that games are short-term entertainment, while others disagree with this statement entirely, believing the industry is in a preservation crisis.
Where Games Go To Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis [more inside]
posted by timshel
on Feb 9, 2011 -
44 comments
To work around the proprietary whims of digital audio software developers and laptop processor limitations during the mid- and late-1990s, a small band of technically-minded people, including the electronic musician
Blitter, pulled together in the late 1990s to engineer the open-source
OPEN DSP EZ-Kit platform, a 16-bit computer designed entirely with a focus on low cost and extensible control and DSP arithmetic capabilities. While this project and
similar commercial offerings never seemed to gain the critical mass needed to sustain long-term interest, perhaps the new
Arduino hardware project from MIT's
Processing hardware group may gain a foothold with
Processing and
Pure Data audio software hobbyists and artists alike, allowing the creative community to extend, enhance and share inventive uses of new technology. Arduino's use has
already begun in
fascinating museum installations around the world, and has become a part of this year's
SONAR and
Ars Electronica festivals.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 12, 2006 -
10 comments
Trusted Computing. Microsoft and friends are proposing some major
alterations to the way that computers work, the ostensible goal being to increase security. But
others say that the real goals are much more insidious.
posted by bingo
on May 22, 2004 -
15 comments
How to tilt at windmills. What these guys don't undestand is that Apple can't make money selling software. They develop software so that they can sell the hardware on which it runs, which is their real profit center.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Sep 18, 2000 -
32 comments
