Manny Davis responds:
Microsoft Natural keyboard, with the two splits in the keys that let your wrists arch more naturally.
Helps reduce my carpal tunnel symptoms...and I've been using it so long, it's a PITA to use a straight keyboard now.
Charlie Self
"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things." Sir Winston Churchill
It's China's century Charlie, get used to it. America has had its day, just like England had hers in the century before.
I'd agree though that US minimum wage jobs aren't the ones going to China.
-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods
I'm an unemployed UK IT guy. _My_ job didn't go to India, but I used to write software that was used by people in UK call centres. As their jobs went to India (and they surely are going), there was no longer a need for people like me in the UK.
-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods
So what are YOU going to do about it? Really, I'm curious about what individuals are going to do in the face of this over the next 10-50 years.
-Jack
(I lost my computer-related job as part of the .com crash and have yet to make 50% of the income I was making before. I personally feel the pain.)
If indeed we're in a global economy, why isn't this "natural" or even "desireable"? The key is for the workers who lost their jobs to find other ways to add even more value to the entire human species. See the writings of Paul Zane Pilzer for more on this.
I have yet to realize the way in which I can add sufficient value to the human race to derive the income I wish to receive, but believe me, I'm working on it. You can't sit around and wish for things to be as they used to be!
-- Mark
I would if the product was in fact superior, however most are not. Yup, I know I'm adding to the overall problem too.
Once upon a time I was a super-expert (IMHO ) on xBASE, especially on combination DOS / UNIX development and implementation. I was the lead on one project that literally took xBASE to its design limits in the call stack. I architected and implemented a data-dictionary based directory crawler that would update database versions overnight. (Extremely necessary when developing systems whilst data entry people were typing in data. )
Then Microsoft released MS Access 1.0 for $99.00. Literally overnight, I saw all my hard-won SET EXCLUSIVE ON skills had gone the way of the horse and buggy.
Adapt or die.
Currently, I'm closer to dying than adapting, but I'm trying...
-- Mark
Back when I used to make a lot of money as a software programmer, I knew it was a short-term jig. Much of what I spent time doing was trivial, repetitive, and essentially useless.
I have a book titled "Bus Maintenance" from the 1920's. Lots of mechanics were employed in those days fixing problems many people today haven't seen a single example of -- like broken axles. I bought my first home/business computer in 1983. From the mid 1980's to the .dot com crash I fixed a lot of software broken axles. The basic engineering has improved in both cases so you don't need a room full of people. Toyota's don't (as a rule) break their axles; connecting PCs on a network doesn't "break their axles" anymore either.
Much of the .com boom was the incompetent doing the unnecessary for the unrealistic, with the net result of inconsequentiallty.
-- Mark
Well right this week, I'm planning on starving 8-(
8-)
I did fairly well on the dot.com boom (but nothing like as well as some). Now I'm chasing work that isn't there, for rates that are somewhere near they were 15 years ago, and less than half I was getting two years ago.
I'm old. I was doing this stuff _long_ before the dot.com thing, and I'm good at it (if I go to an overseas conference, it's because I'm an invited speaker). But there's a horde of mid-20s dot-com idiot Nathans out there who think they know it all, yet will now work for peanuts. It's very hard to find work in this climate.
Even woodworking isn't paying. All I can get is minimum-wage labouring work. I can't even get a decent joinery job, because I'm not officially trained as a toobefour chopsaw merchant. Then I come home to my own workshop and agonise over the accuracy of my 17th century sandarac varnish formulation, or the exact proportions of a Greene & Greene bridle joint. The only option seems to be selling my own work, but that's fighting against Ikea's pricing and I really _don't_ want to run a business (BTDT, hated it).
-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods
Guess the bottom has fallen out of the trebuchet market...
-Jack
Try building furniture with bellbottoms...
-Jack "Trying to be helpful here"
I have no intention of "adapting" to a new skillset. I _invent_ the new skillsets.
A local research lab is currently working on triple stores for RDF (what you use when you realise XML doesn't work). The prototypes they have are still very inefficient and damned slow on large datasets. One day they'll notice that one of the patents I left there three years ago solves a useful piece of this. ( Or maybe the whole company will fold first. )
-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods
LOL! I was in high school in the 1970's. I'd still wear bell bottoms if they were available!
-- Mark
(100% honest) Best of luck to you!
-- Mark
Well, then...I'm working on a couple books, but, like you, I had no intention of going back in business, at least full-time, again, until Ms MBA changed my mind abruptly (after helping force me to shear off the old ties a few months earlier).
So, what the hell. This WV/retail writer (that's a joke, but I didn't know it until too late) adventure cost me enough so retirement is out of the question for now, but at least I've still got a marketable skill, though it's difficult to implement some parts of it in a garage workshop with a single 115 volt circuit.
Come spring, go house, get my tail back to VA and a full-sized shop and really wind things up. Unless someone wants to buy a small (1550 square feet) house on a tiny lot in a dying town right NOW!
Charlie Self
"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things." Sir Winston Churchill
What, yours is busted? I have a knockoff that's similar except they put the
6 on the wrong side of the split, and the backslash is in a stupid place. Other than the minor inconvenience, it's a pretty solid keyboard. I have it on my son's computer, but he never uses it. I'd be happy to send it your way if you need it. Dad gave it to me a long time ago, and I've been hanging onto it mostly as a spare in case my own Natural keyboard kicks the bucket. Thing is so old that most of the letters are worn off.I absolutely detest Microsoft, but I have to admit that this has been an excellent keyboard. I was bored and counted my lifetime usenet achievement awhile back, and came up with around 18,000 messages. If you figure an average of only 100 words per message, and five letters and a space per word (both low, since I write big messages with lots of twenty dollar college boy words), that's 10,800,000 keystrokes just for usenet posting alone.
Yup. Made in USA.
There never was a trebuchet market. Anyone fool enough to want one also wants to build their own.
-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods
That's a really good analogy.
I hear you guys (by way of the BBC World Service) frequently talking about the glory days of the Britsh Empire with a combination of nostalgia and the pragmatic realization that those days are forever relegated to the pages of history.
I'm feeling the same about the US, so it's funny you should put my feeling into words so succinctly. We're losing the limelight, and the empire is collapsing. I don't know if it will be China's century, or the EU's, but I fear it won't be America's.
I'm thinking what will make or break us will be the space race to Mars. Whoever gets there first gets the stage, and at this point it's likely that the first human language spoken from the surface of the red planet will not be English.
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