Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (256860)	8/20/2003 4:19:18 PM
From: orkrious	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Did I tell you lately this will all end badly? yes, you and everyone else on this thread, approximately 256,000 times. <g>

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (256860)	8/20/2003 5:05:11 PM
From: Alias Shrugged	Respond to of 436258

Patron Each nation needs to survey the competitive international landscape, define their core competencies, and focus on what they do best! Apparently, this nation excels at putting lipstick on pigs. -gg-

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (256860)	8/20/2003 8:17:16 PM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Everyone lives in rural areas. This vast land, once crisscrossed with a million miles of gleaming highways, supports a network of family owned and run small farms. We're again an agrarian society. Trade flourishes despite the IRS's attempt to tax barter. An almost nonexistent tax base has shrunk federal employment from its high of over two million to a few thousand today.[...] But life as an engineer was good. We knew—we all knew—that only Americans could design great electronic products. Many of our colleagues lost their jobs forever in The Great Recession of 2000, but most of us survived. When the workload increased, schedules became even more unrealistic, and consumers demanded ever more from us, we responded with smaller, better, and cheaper products. Around 2005, the ASIC industry failed. Some say that event, nearly unnoticed at the time, was the crack in the dam that precipitated the loss of electronics to the developing world. Why were we so focused on Moore's Law? It had become an end in itself. Semiconductor vendors pushed their processes from 150 nanometers to 130, then to 90, with sights set on 45. Billions went into new fabs; mask sets cost millions. Transistor counts soared to the hundreds of millions on a single chip. Though the technology was awesome, consumers didn't care. With costs so high, only a few applications could benefit from the astonishing level of integration. Venture capital dried up since the big investors only funded outfits that could service those few apps. No new capital meant no new jobs, which translated into a continued stock market slump. Belt tightening turned into corporate anorexia. The U.S. economy staggered along, shedding jobs. The long-awaited recovery never happened. Consumer spending dried up. CIA reports revealed that an old chemical weapons factory in Pakistan had been retooled to produce chips using surplus steppers. That was considered a Good Thing at the time. Its 200-nanometer technology was the laughingstock of the semiconductor industry. But the company modeled itself on the Russian's brute force—but reliable and cheap—space program. Iran and the former Iraq followed suit. A $6 CPU that ran at 30% of the speed of the latest $500 whiz-bang device proved itself good enough for most of the market. Intel and AMD dropped off the big board as the PC industry migrated overseas. [...] Ramesh Indira's invention of the DWIMNWIW (Do What I Meant, Not What I Wrote) compiler drew on his work at Sun and Mentor. Coupled with India's long-established tradition of using a well-managed software process and the secrecy surrounding his compiler, an explosion of cheap yet innovative products flowed from Bangalore. The long-established middle-class profited; a surge of consumerism from that nation's poorer people made India's economy the world's largest. "American software" remained a convoluted mess and became an epithet equivalent to the old "Made in Japan" from the '50s. Microsoft was the only glue that held the U.S. software industry in any semblance of financial order. Long struggles with Linux and other open source competition had resulted in an open source version of Windows. Finally, Microsoft also succumbed when an enterprising 14-year-old in New Delhi ran Windows through the DWIMNWIW compiler, removing all of the buffer overflow problems that had plagued the product for so long. Political and ethical bodies had never had the courage or wisdom to address the rampant piracy enabled by the 'Net, so the perfected OS had over a billion downloads in its first day on-line. Joe's superprogrammer status helped him survive the layoffs. He worked at a small company that squeaked by only through long hours and wave after wave of salary cuts. His marriage tottered and then collapsed as he buried himself in his work. Estranged from his daughter, his increasing bitterness with his personal life spilled over into work. Abrupt with his peers, cynical with the boss, haggard and overworked, he, like so many others with minimal health care, succumbed to the influenza epidemic of 2018. As I foresaw, even India's success was doomed. [...] ... and on and on... embedded.com