Best of Tech Talk Edition Emails and Forum Profiles in IT: Nolan Kay Bushnell IT Predictions for the Next Ten Years Trivia of the Week: Meaning of Lorem ipsum filler text? Multiple Social Networks Can Reveal Secrets? Asia Challenges U.S. Innovation Leadership Global Demographic Trends Website of the Week: Foodista
Letter from Alan: Dear Tech Talk, I would like to start an IT career. What do you advise? I can’t get a job without experience and I can’t get experience without a job.
Tech Talk Answers: Starting a new career in Information Technology is not as difficult as you might expect.
First understand where the field is going by reading industry magazines or "rags." Most of these publications are free and give you something interesting to talk about during the interview.
Second, get the competencies demanded by the industry, either through self-study or through an educational institution, like Stratford University.
Third, learn the standards and procedures that support your industry in order to demonstrate that you will be in a position to make valid technical decisions.
Fourth, package yourself with a well written resume that emphasizes where you are going rather than where you have been (particularly if you are making a radical career change).
Fifth, network by joining user groups and trade associations (and don’t make the mistake of asking for a job at these meetings!). You will uncover opportunities and make many friends through this process.
Survey employers to find out where they are going. Research each firm you visit and send thank you notes after you the complete informational interview. This process normally leads to a "lucky" discovery. Remember, you can’t find a gold coin in the grass unless you are walking around the lawn.
Finally, start doing technical projects at home. You don’t need paid experience. Install Linux, MySQL, build a cluster using Beowolf, make a website.
And, if you are a woman, don’t forget to tap the Women in IT support groups. They are excellent.
Profiles in IT: Nolan Kay Bushnell
Bushnell is father of the video game industry and founder of Atari.
Nolan K. Bushnell was born in February 5, 1943 in Clearfield, Utah
Bushnell received a BSEE from the University of Utah in 1968.
Bushnell would sneak into the computer labs between 1 and 4 in the morning to play Space War and Fox and Geese on the university’s $7 million mainframes.
He moved to Santa Clara, CA in 1968. He built his first computer game in a spare bedroom, a knockoff of Space War called Computer Space.
At age 27 he founded Atari with $250 of his own money and another $250 from business partner Ted Dabney. The original name of the company was Syzygy.
Bushnell conceived Pong, what would become the world’s first commercial video game, and in 1972 Atari’s first full-time employee, Al Alcorn, built it.
Atari had revenues of $11M in 1973. Two years later, revenues were $36M.
Using parts from Atari, having the main PCB printed up by Atari employees Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, created their own computer and offered it to Atari.
He sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976 for $28M. He stayed on as a consultant for another two years.
First Atari took on the coin-operated video-game market and soon dominated it.
Atari started producing home game systems and Sears promised to buy them all.
By 1982, Atari had $2 billion in annual sales.
Atari introduced the 800 computer, which at the time contained superior technology to the Apple II and the IBM PC, with the exception of memory management.
Warner’s was slow at accommodating Dan Bricklin’s spreadsheet program, VisiCalc. Apple got it first because the Atari machine wasn’t ready.
After a half-billion-dollar operating loss, Atari was fire-sold by Warner in 1984.
Bushnell had left the Atari in 1978 to turn his attention to his next Big Idea.
The first Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater opened in San Jose in 1978.
The company went public in 1981 and pushed Bushnell’s net worth to $70 million.
By 1983, Pizza Time Theater has 200 restaurants operating internationally.
He started a business incubator called Catalyst Technologies, where he would invest $500,000 a pop in a portfolio of startups, including Etak and Androbot.
Etak, which made electronic maps for autos and other navigation uses. It was ultimately purchased by a Rupert Murdoch firm for $50 million.
Androbot was developing personal robots Bob and Topo.
To finance the Androbots marketing and R&D costs, he took out personal loans from Merrill Lynch Private Capital Inc. (ML), secured by Pizza Time stock.
ML has announced to the public that it intended to take Androbot public in 1983.
ML reneged on the Androbot IPO after Bushnell had more than $5 million invested.
Pizza Time lost money in 1983 and Bushnell’s worth dropped from $23M to $9M.
In 1984, with Bushnell having racked up $22.8 million in debt financing Androbot and other ventures, Pizza Time filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11.
He started paying Merrill Lynch back. By 1990, Bushnell had paid $27.5 million. In 1997, he was forced to sell his home to make the final payment to ML.
His newest venture is Uwink.com. He plans to develop coin-operated game machines, networked over the Internet and placed in public places like bars and restaurants
IT Predictions for the Next Ten Years
Some observations by Graeme Philipson
The Internet will become the "supernet.
Many devices connected to the internet are mobile (phones, cars, household appliances). That trend will continue toward "embedded computing," where the internet links objects as well as general-purpose computers.
The decline of the PC
This is a consequence of the first prediction. PCs will not die, but they will become only one of many types of computing device. Mobile phones and "thin clients" will be much more popular ways of connecting to the supernet.
The rise of software as a service
Data and processing and applications are moving off fixed computers – or even mobile computers – and on to the web. This is increasingly being called "cloud computing" as all processing takes place in the "cloud."
The decline of copyright
Attempts by record companies and film studios and book publishers to stop people copying digital media are doomed to failure Technology is forcing big changes to business models.
The threat from intelligent machines
Look up "The Singularity" in Wikipedia or somewhere. The term, invented by Ray Kurzweil, refers to the time in the near future when machines become more intelligent than humans and start replicating themselves.
Increased importance of technology for the aged
The population is aging. The rise of so-called "e-health" is a big trend in this direction – use of technology to remotely monitor people’s vital signs, to provide diagnoses at a distance and to supplement communications systems.
The decline of IT as a specialty
IT workers are going the same way as telephone operators a hundred years ago. Today we all program computers, by the very act of using them. There are fewer specialists, but many more generalists.
The death of newspapers
Newspapers as we know them are in decline. Are you reading this in hard copy or online? Around the world, newspapers are shutting down or moving to the web. Blogs are replacing the mainstream media.
The growth of internet TV
TV is going digital. At the same time, internet bandwidth is quickly increasing, and most of the data it carries is video. The existing pay TV model of expensive content over a proprietary distribution medium has only a few years left. And "free-to-air" will become "free-to-internet".
Trivia of the Week: Meaning of Lorem ipsum filler text?
Lorem ipsum is the beginning of a pseudo-Latin passage commonly used as placeholder text when a graphic designer dummies up a page layout.
It’s intended to show how the type will look before the copy is available.
The text continues lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, etc.
In the graphic design business, nonsense filler like this is known, somewhat incongruously, as "greeking," presumably because "it’s Greek to me."
Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, figured out the source.
Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero.
The original reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.
It means: There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.
This text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
It has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.
Multiple Social Networks Can Reveal Secrets?
Researchers at Google caution in a paper (pdf) that by becoming entangled in ever more social networks online, people are building up revealing data.
And as more websites gain social features, even the things users strive to keep private won’t necessarily stay that way.
As a hypothetical example, combining public information on, say, the business social network LinkedIn with that on another like MySpace could reveal to much about your social life.
That approach is dubbed "merging social graphs" by the researchers.
In fact, it has already been used to identify some users of the DVD rental site Netflix, from a supposedly anonymised dataset released by the company.
The identities were revealed by combining the Netflix data with user activity on movie database site IMDb.
The Google team’s proposed solution is a kind of privacy warning system. When you sign up for a new online service, it would take a look on the internet and let you know if there’s a risk that the new information you are uploading could be used to make connections about you.
In 2007 computer scientists at Palo Alto Research Center, California, and the University of Waterloo, Ontario, built a similar warning system.
It calculates whether data about to be released – for example medical records sent to insurers – could be combined with publically available information – for example wikipedia articles on health conditions – to reveal diagnoses purposefully removed from the original data.
The Google team’s paper (Under)mining privacy in social networks (pdf) will be presented at the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2009 Meeting in May.
Asia Challenges U.S. Innovation Leadership
A report released last week by the National Science Board concludes that U.S. global leadership in science and technology is declining as foreign nations – especially China and other Asian countries – rapidly develop their national innovation systems.
China is achieving a dramatic amount of synergy by increasing its investment in science and engineering education, in research, and in infrastructure.
The report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2010, is published every two years by the National Science Board, a 25-member expert council that advises the National Science Foundation, President, and Congress on science and technology policy.
Asia’s rapid ascent as a major world science and technology (S&T) center—beyond Japan—is driven by developments in China and several other Asian economies.
Governments [in Asia] have implemented a host of policies to boost S&T capabilities as a means to ensuring their economies’ competitive edge.
The United States continues to maintain a position of leadership but has experienced a gradual erosion of its position in many specific areas.
Asia has narrowed the gap due to the sustained annual increases by China.
U.S. investment in R&D as a ratio of total GDP has remained relatively constant since the mid-1980s, at around 2.7%,
The federal share of total R&D in US has been consistently declining. In contrast, Asian nations have rapidly expanded their R&D to GDP ratio.
Increasingly, governments around the world have come to regard movement toward a knowledge-based economy as key to economic progress.
Realizing that this requires a well-trained workforce, they have invested in upgrading and expanding their higher education systems and broadening participation.
The U.S. higher education system maintains critical strengths – especially U.S. research universities, which perform 56% of U.S. basic research and educate the majority of future scientists and engineers – but its position continues to decline in terms of S&E graduates.
US students earned only 11% of the world’s 4 million S&E first university degrees (equivalent to an undergraduate degree) awarded in 2006, compared to 21% in China and 19% in the European Union.
A large portion of these degrees in the United States are awarded to foreign students.
International students received 24% of U.S. S&E master’s degrees, 33% of S&E doctoral degrees, and 4% of S&E bachelor’s degrees in 2007.
Twenty-five percent of all college-educated U.S. workers in S&E occupations in 2003 were foreign born.
About half of all foreign-born scientists and engineers are from Asia, and more than a third of U.S.-resident doctorate holders come from China (22%) and India (14%).
Global Demographic Trends
Demographic Bonus in India and China
Shortage of Workers in the US over the next 20 years
Tightened immigration policy is making US less inviting.
Innovators are going back home to start their companies there.
US Education is respected worldwide, but is becoming less accessible to the international community.
US government taxation and spending policy is not focused on increasing our innovation advantage.
Our Innovation EcoSystem may be damaged in the long term.
Is the US passing the leadership baton to India and China?
Website of the Week: Foodista
Foodista: The Cooking Encyclopedia Everyone Can Edit
Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world’s largest, highest quality cooking encyclopedia.
Foodista organizes cooking information into four linked categories:
Recipes: Combinations of ingredients.
Foods: The most basic of ingredients. Either as they are produced naturally, such as apples and eggs, or with minimal processing, such as salt or flour.
Cooking Techniques: Methods of preparing foods, such as baking, boiling, slicing, and braising.
Kitchen Tools: All the gadgets, appliances, and equipment you use to make meals, including saucepan, chef’s knife, blender, and cutting board.
The site uses pictures of food from Flickr Creative Commons and encourages uploading of photos from directly to the site.
Tools For Food Bloggers – The site has embeddable widgets that create automated links from Foodista to your food blog. These links will help you build traffic to your blog and improve search engine rankings.
Foodista, Inc. was founded in February of 2008 and launched on December 17, 2008.