It's quite obvious that the CPU and instruction set are designed for C programming.

Actually, as a historical note, it's the other way around. C was designed to map directly on to assembly instructions where possible (specifically, it mapped on to PDP series assembly). That it continues to map well shows K&R really knew what they were doing.

-JS

I would think everybody who started programming from around 1983 to 1990 would have started with Turbo Pascal and not BASIC.

Borland programs (like Turbo Pascal) only ran under MS-DOS. Not an option for the rest of us who got started on Apples, Commodores, or Ataris. TP also had to be purchased separately while BASIC came pre-loaded with pretty much every computer you could buy in that time frame.

We kids learned on BASIC first because that's what was available. As many have pointed out, the next step up, especially in the early 80's, was usually to assembly because it was the only other game in town. The late 80's are when I started learning other languages because that's when I could finally get my hands on other compliers (via Fred Fish's collection of free software for the Commodore Amiga).

OK, so that blurb makes no sense:

"It's been in colleges for the last few years, and now it's starting to move down into the high schools and in the middle schools,' said TCEA's executive director, Lori Gracey.

Austin Espinoza, president of Longhorn Gaming at the University of Texas at Austin. "Eventually, that's just going to trickle upwards into the college world."

So which is it?

The answer is, of course, neither. It's been well documented that the under-20 crowd isn't interested in professional sports the way we (their elders) were, so there's a big push to grow E-Sports into the new thing to keep the stadiums filled and the ad revenue rolling. Articles like this are just another part of the ongoing marketing campaign trying to convince us that this is something to pay attention to.

-JS

The radio spectrum is going to be a problem — the bandwidth just isn't there for a billion people to use the internet by satellite at the same time. As it is, phone companies are buying up every scrap they can get, and those are just line-of-site towers (so you can re-use the same frequency every 200 km). To put all that into a fleet of globally-visible satellites? I think the business vision statement has out-paced the engineering plan on this one.

There used to be books of nothing but tables of logarithms and other mathematical tables, like trig functions. You used them when you needed more significant places in your answer than a slide rule could give you. I still have the one my dad used in college. They don't make those any more.

Yes they do. Stegun and Abramowitz ("Handbook of Mathematical Functions," Dover Books, originally NIST) is what I use and it's still in print. Cost is about $30 from Amazon. If you want tables of integrals, Gradshtyen and Ryzhik is also available, but I can't tell if it's still being printed or that's just new-old-stock copies they're selling. Cover is the same as my 25-year-old copy.

-JS

For all the fledgling nerds-to-be in AR, I hope they can find a good, long-term solution to the problem.

Simple solution:: pay your CS teachers a market wage and your recruiting problems will disappear. According to the state of Arkansas, a starting teacher makes around $30k. Who wants to put up with a bunch of high school kids for $30/yr when I can make double that in a cube farm?

-JS

Is it ever chosen for new projects though? Would there ever be a reason to?

I can't speak for COBOL, but Fortran (with the 1990/95 language standard, not the ancient 1966/77 versions) is still being used in astronomy for new projects - the MESA stellar evolution project, for example, is completely written in Fortran (it launched in 2007, so isn't exactly a legacy project either). There's also a lot of supercomputer code still written in Fortran for the same reason: the language makes it easier to do the things I need to do.

I wouldn't do a webpage with it, but when you're doing heavy-duty mathematical calculation, Fortran is breeze to work in compared to lower-level languages like C.

Remember when everyone was supposed to become an aerospace engineer and then the industry collapsed in the early 90s?

Sorry Hugh, it's just you, me, and six other guys who remember the 90's. The rest of /. was still in diapers then.

-JS

PS I finished my Bachelors degree [in physics] in 1993, it was pretty grim days in all the fields. Funny how some myths never die - even then, everyone was screaming about how we needed millions of students to go into the sciences because the baby boomers were about to retire and the jobs would go empty. Now I'm old enough to have grown kids of my own, and I'm still waiting for those baby boomers to retire and create millions of unfilled jobs.

Why, for the love of God, are we still designing pages with fixed widths? The dreaded "This page best viewed at 800x600" was bad practice in the 1990's; haven't we learned anything about we design in the last 20 years?

My web browser is not 1024 pixels across. I don't want my web browser to be 1024 pixels across. You see, CSS has this wonderful thing were you can say width="15%" and the browser will decide how big the column is based on the current size of the window. Change the window, and the columns grow or shrink to match. It's lovely, it's portable, it works on mobile devices, web browsers; big screens, small screens. But it doesn't do a flaming bit of good if the code monkeys doing your web page design insist on saying width="1024 px"!

I'm sorry, but having to scroll left-right for every single line of text is a royal pain in the ass! If your window is smaller than the designed size, the new layout is completely unusable, and quite frankly, looks like shit because I can't see half of what's on the page.

If MATLAB is optimized for 32-bit integer arithmetic, then maybe it's time to change that?

Have you ever even used Matlab? Integer data types are there for convenience. The natural data type is double, because any engineer or physicist worth their salary spends most of their life calculating real-valued variables.

The there is profit. The pharmaceutical firms are doing research, but then what happens when they try to pay for the research?

Not even big pharma anymore. Instead of basic research, big pharma works hand-in-hand with the venture folks.

The process is something like this:

1. Researcher A at university B makes a potentially marketable discovery in his/her laboratory.
2. University B patents the discovery and, in return, will receive a portion of any future licensing revenue (typically a 50-50 split with the researcher; this is all part of the researcher's contract).
3. Researcher A, together with some ex-graduate students, forms a start-up with venture funding and does the initial animal studies (or sometimes just licenses the rights to someone else's start-up).
4. If the initial research looks promising enough, then big pharma swoops in and buys the entire company, with profits all around.
5. Big pharma does the human studies (expensive, but low-risk, since they already know it works in animals), gets FDA approval, markets and sells the drug to make massive profits.

The only research big pharma does anymore, then, is the human clinical studies needed to satisfy the FDA — basically it's product development disguised as research.

Also, if you look at their balance sheets, you'll discover that Pharma spends significantly more on marketing than R&D. Viagra is $10/pill has as much to do with paying for the TV ads as it does with recouping any research costs.

-JS

Disposable plastics in medicine are critical in stopping infections.

Autoclaving for sterilizing medical tools is old tech. Disposable plastics are ubiquitous because that's how the device manufacturers make money (I used to do work related to medical devices). If you don't have either have a disposable bit or a per-unit cost of over $10M, your business plan will never be funded — the return on investment is too small for the venture folks to even bother reading your proposal.

-JS

Basically journals get academics to edit and review for free, to write for free, they force you to sign over copyright, and they charge you to access your own paper. [...] Most of the research is probably government and publicly funded anyways. Anyone see anything wrong with this??

No, I don't (and I say this having both published and reviewed academic articles myself).

The point most people here seem to not understand (or find inconvenient) is that most of these journals are published by non-profit organizations. The only significant exception is Elsevier, and I don't publish in their journals.

We researchers submit and review for free because otherwise the journals would stop publishing. Physical Review, for example, publishes something like 150000 pages of articles a year — and that costs money. Yes, they charge libraries a lot, but financially, they're luck to break even each year.

As for charging you for access to your own papers, the policy varies from journal to journal, but here's the APS policy from their author copyright FAQ:

Similary policies are spelled out for Wikipedia articles, re-use of figures in other articles, on-line reprints, and the like. Frankly, I've never heard of a copyright transfer getting in the way of getting work done...

-JS

The point of working in academia is to seek knowledge and share it with others. Copyright prevents or severely limits that. If knowledge isn't shared, we're all more ignorant because of it.

This is a silly argument. Copyright is granted when material is published. If it's published, then it has been made public for anyone to read. In what possible world is this not the definition of sharing knowledge?

-JS