> Marx was quite right about a key point - if capitalism is allowed to use competition between workers to drive wages down, buying power drops and the system stalls, or stabilizes with most people just above some minimum survival level. That's where we are now.

You know in heavily regulated France where we don't really do capitalism we are are at the point were most salaries have stabilized at or just above the legal minimum wage (about 1500 bucks a month).

> The US peak was in 1973.

maybe to do with the oil shock and the fact the 1st world could no longer grow on the back of cheap oil?

I don't know how much you value your backups but saving via a lossy compression seems like a recipe for problems.

I agree with you but have a different plan. I have a day a week without computers which I think works quite well for me, at least it lets me get a break from what is quite a full on IT career.

Although this is not what the OP was asking.

The UK Revenue come up with these kind of big statements now and again but I think they will make more money out of the FUD factor than from the actual bots - that is if they can get a working system. Without information from ISPs etc it will be difficult to tie most eBay identities to an actual tax payer, the amount of information to trawl and reconcile will be enormous and the SNR very high.

Until I read your post I hadn't realized just how much crap Google owns these days. They could do to shut down about 75% of that stuff really. Docs, Gmail, YouTube and that search engine should be enough.

Google have even contacted me, for the second time. That shows how desperate this hiring war is getting. Not heard from Microsoft though.

> and constantly in bewilderment at why Joe down the hall who hasn't produced anything in 4 years and who's last major project was a disaster is now a VP.

As you allude, and contrary to popular wisdom, those are the guys to watch. If they've survived 4 years in an organisation without producing anything tangible they must have a lot of powerful friends. You have less trouble with the producers, because they are doing stuff the scope for doing something wrong is much greater.

The blurring is always poorly done on French TV programs. They had a program about men who visit prostitutes and I recognized a work colleague being interviewed. The blurring didn't follow his head very well so you could see parts of his face, only the eyes were really covered.

I would go with 30 years except for the case where someone is profiting from your work (e.g. selling it in either digital or hardcopy form). In this case I think the author should receive a cut but this expires on the original author's death.

As noted in the original article they used references as an indication of quality. On that basis China was 9th rising from 0 -> 4% of published papers.

Regarding numbers, my wife is a University Professor in France. She has a target of at least 4 papers per year. So even in the "west" quantity not quality can be an important driver to publish. One of her colleagues has been suspended for not publishing enough (well nothing at all for 5 years).

Yes, it was one of them. I worked on another Reuters Intelligent Advisor which ran like a 3 legged dog, a very expensive dog, until someone did the decent thing and shot it through the head.

I don't think RIA's expensive failure can be wholly blamed on .net. I think the technical team deceived management and probably themselves about what they could do. They had drunk the SOA/Web Services kool aid and the architecture was basically wrong. I suspect a number of devs saw the project as resume keyword fodder.

While you 'Mercans were using women to do ballistics calculations over this side of the pond we had our purpose built babbage difference engines doing the job automatically. What do you mean, the first babbage engine was only completed in 2002? That's even later than the US arrives for wars!!! :-)

> Microsoft, as usual, were late to the party.

That is because they had to wait for the Mac to come out so they could see how it was done, decompile the OS etc etc. so they could produce their own rip-off version. I think this is widely known. Microsoft is late to every damn party, it is hard wired in their DNA from the day they ripped of CP/M via QDOS.

Other windows systems around the same time were GEM (1983) and Siemens Collage (for Unix - mid to late 80s similar to GEM). The term commonly used was WIMP systems for Windows, Icon, Mouse Pointer. This term dates from 1980. GEM was also widely used.

I remember using GEM back in 1986. It was quite good.

Interestingly it looks similar to a Unix Window System I worked on for Siemens around the same time called Collage (I think). This ran on the Siemens Sinix variant of Unix. I wrote a spreadsheet for Collage and there was a word processor. The system ran on the MX2 / X20 mini computers as well as MX500 multiprocessor systems. One model was a dinky little desktop about the size of a small form factor PC and ran using the National Semiconductor 32 bit processor range. It is was a kind of NeXT Pizzabox before its time. The big advantage of Collage was that it didn't crash all the time.

There doesn't seem to be any Wikipage on Collage so I guess it is lost in the midst of time.