Dr. Dobb's Journal October 2003
As usual, the entertainment industry just doesn't get it. Not having a clue of what else to do about file sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America has started subpoenaing ISPs by the dozen—with the promise of hundreds to come—to find out the names and addresses of MP3 downloaders. You don't make friends when you sue children and grandparents. This is just one reason why there's so little sympathy for the entertainment industry, which took it on the chin this summer. It turns out that teenagers—the traditional core summer movie audience—opted to spend their pin money on video games and DVDs instead of the silver screen. According to industry reports, summer attendance was down 8 percent and revenues 2 percent. DVD sales/rentals, on the other hand, gushed from $3.9 billion in 2000, to almost $12 billion in 2002, and should hit $23.9 billion by 2005. In comparison, movie revenues increased from $7.7 billion to $9.2 billion, with projections at $10.5 billion by 2005. The real problem is that everyone but the entertainment industry seems to understand the concept of a good product at a reasonable price.
Of course, this begs the question of who will write the software for those video games and DVDs, and where will it be written. According to a recent report from Gartner Inc., more and more of these jobs will continue to move offshore. Specifically, by the end of this year, 1 in 10 IT jobs—as compared to 1 in 20 nonIT jobs—will be outside the U.S. This means business processing done by workers outside the U.S. could reach $1.8 billion in 2003, a 38 percent jump from 2002. Furthermore, says Gartner, this trend is irreversible and permanent. For its part, the U.S. Senate seems to be concerned about everyone's job security—except IT. In quashing an energy bill that would cut gasoline consumption by 45 percent by 2015, senators cried crocodile tears, saying they voted to save jobs in the auto and petroleum industries. Too bad they aren't as concerned about IT jobs, especially as unemployment hits 8 percent in some parts of the country.
One upshot of this off-shore job flight is more talk about unionizing. In a recent Search400.com survey, 39 percent of the people queried said unionization was the only way to stem the exodus of IT jobs due to offshoring and government policies regarding H-1B and L-1 work visas. According to Programmer's Guild founder John Miano, "Until programmers actually start to organize, nothing is going to get done to stop the offshoring. I'm shocked we have not had a national programmers' strike already."
Shifting phases, I've always envied Jeff Duntemann, Al Williams, Harry Helms, and others who tag those too-cool ham-radio call signs—K7JPD, WD5GNR, and W7HLH, respectively—onto their bylines. For the most part, I missed the amateur-radio wave, either being too young, too old, too interested in partying, or (the truth be told) too lazy. Still, I'm fascinated by both the simplicity and history of Morse code. That's why it's fun to see Morse code is indeed alive and tapping, with people using it to communicate via the Internet. (Take that Instant Messaging!) All you need is a mouse, soundcard, speakers, and a freely available program like MorseMail (http://www.seanet.com/~harrypy/MorseMail/).
Hams have always pioneered new communication technologies, including everything from slow-scan TV to send images over the airwaves (like today's cell phones do to send images) to techniques that operate at microwave frequencies (also like cell phones). Likewise, techniques such as phase-shift keying (PSK) are getting attention because they let hams use 31-Hertz-wide signals, making it possible to pack lots of signals close together using Huffman-type encoding. And for the most part, again, all you need is a soundcard and freely available software (http://www.kender.es/~edu/software.html).
Finally, we're pleased to present the Dr. Dobb's Journal 2004 Editorial Calendar. More than anything else, we're looking forward to seeing the article proposals you send in on these (and other) topics. Don't worry if your article doesn't specifically match one of these topics—we're looking for anything that is of interest and relevance to the art and craft of computer programming. Please send all questions and proposals to me. And who knows—maybe even something on ham radios will turn up.
Dr. Dobb's Journal
2004 Editorial Calendar
January Best Practices
February Web Services
March Languages
April Algorithms
May Optimizations & Performance Tuning
June Communications—Wireless & Otherwise
July Java
August Testing & Debugging
September Distributed Computing
October Intelligent Systems
November Computer Security
December Database Development
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com