Irrational Numbers and People Department
b,
I never understood the U.S. date format of month-day-year. Never made any sense when I was a child – I always got it wrong and now with the digital age, it makes even less sense. In my personal business, I have always used the date backwards as a Purchase Order Number, that is, year-month-day. I do this so Purchase Orders will automatically sort when listed by computer software. However, I would spend more time on the phone trying to get the sales person to get it right that it was almost impossible. Finally now, with Web Ordering available from my distributors, things work fine.
Why the U.S. public and government continues to use month-day-year formatting is beyond me.
Regarding pi, here is a line from our old Electrical Engineer’s chant: “Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!…3.14159!” And that is as many digits of pi that I ever could remember and more than I ever remember needing.

Posted by: Rick | Mar 18 2007 20:23 utc | 4

b, any Indian/Chinese companies there?

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Mar 18 2007 21:29 utc | 6

b,
Just wondering … I think I remember you mentioning a couple of days ago that you only had dial-up Internet connection while your were away. Was that just when you were initially setting up your display or while staying in a hotel? Isn’t free wireless 802.11b or greater available at the show for you and everyone else?

Posted by: Rick | Mar 18 2007 21:45 utc | 8

Rick, I’ve been in the field about as long as you have. When I left school for the world it took forever to find a job–the US was still in the throes of the ’69 recession which hit aerospace very hard.
I moved to California and went to work for one of the “seven dwarves” after Snow White being able to offer me only a job in marketing support back home. Fortunately, this was in Sunnyvale, smack dab in the middle of what would become Silicon Valley. I found the microelectronics revolution amazing and built my MITS Altair 8800 almost as soon as it came out. Shortly thereafter, I left Grumpy and went to work for one of a long series of startups, eventually running my own operation.
There was a lot of camaraderie back then; real estate prices were reasonable and the the Santa Clara valley was full of technical talent. You could rent space in an “incubator” industrial park for not a lot of money; surplus stores were plentiful and you always had a friend who could slip you a part you needed, particularly if you were one of the regulars at the Wagon Wheel. Manufacturer sales reps would talk with you as if you really meant something (I was treated to a monthly lunch by the Intel sales guy whether I wanted it or not).
It was exciting and intense and manufacturers knew that, while you probably would flop, there was a chance that you just might succeed.
By the time the mid-80’s came around, the atmosphere had changed dramatically. It mattered less about what you were trying to do than who was providing venture capital. New employees wanted lavish pay and benefit (not to mention stock) packages even though you were just a startup. Real estate prices went through the roof.
The attitude changed, in short–from people who were doing something for the excitement of it to those who were looking to get rich quick.
I pulled up stakes in 1990. I couldn’t take it any more. Frantic, crowded, all of the orchards and fields plowed up for tilt-ups; it really was unpleasant.
Nowadays, of course no one in the US manufactures much of anything, so who really needs engineers, particularly when there are excited hungry–and cheap–engineers in India and China willing to do the work.
As far as internationalization, that’s just shortsighted stupidity. In 1978 we had already fitted our computer system with Thai, Katakana and Cyrillic and were looking for a reasonable way to do Kanji.
In spite of increased travel among US citizens, there seems to be less real curiosity nowadays about other cultures. Very strange.
(BTW, Rick, my prof in EE466 never thought that the microprocessor (not invented yet) would amount to much. Go Boilermakers!).

Posted by: cpg | Mar 19 2007 1:49 utc | 10

Big time ot, and I would have waited till there was a new open thread as the current one has reached capacity (usually when b puts up a new one) but I thought this should be seen now:
U.S., IDF hold joint exercise on response to nuclear attack (March 21 and 22nd)

Israel and the United States are conducting a joint military exercise whose main goal, according to military officials in both countries, is to hone the allies’ abilities to fend off missiles equipped with nuclear, biological or chemical warheads.
This year’s Juniper Cobras drill, in contrast to those in recent years, will not involve intercepting live missiles due to logistical constraints associated with last summer’s Lebanon war and U.S. deployments.
The Israel Air Force’s Air Defense Artillery Brigade and the U.S. Army Corps’ 69th Air Defense Artillery Brigade are taking part in the maneuvers.
Israel is testing the latest version of the Arrow and Patriot PAC-2 anti-missile systems.
The Americans are testing, for the first time, the capabilities of their Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot PAC-3 systems.
The aim of the exercise is to measure the response time in the event of a missile assault on Israel, the missile interception capabilities and the communications, battle management and command-and-control systems of both countries.
Major Peggy Kageleiry, U.S. Army public affairs officer for Juniper Cobra 2007, told “Army Times” that despite the limitations of this year’s exercise, the computer simulation has proved valuable in advancing the primary purpose of Juniper Cobra, which is to improve the allies’ ability to cooperate against common threats.
“It’s all about interoperability – and the more we train together and exchange ideas, the readier we’ll be in any future scenario that may require joint or coalition operations,” Kageleiry said.
An Israeli defense official said the live-fire interoperability drills will resume in the next Juniper Cobra, tentatively planned for spring 2009.
Juniper Cobra is the name given by the U.S. Army to the maneuvers, which are part of an American emergency plan to defend Israel from missile attacks. The exercises, which began in 2001, have in the past involved the deployment of U.S. missiles on Israeli soil and trials of the Patriot missile system.

babelfish translation from German:
Landesweite Atomschutzübung in Israel

Country-wide atomic protection exercise in Israel Israel plans a country-wide atomic protection exercise for the coming month. With the test intended for 21 and 22 March is to be played to the end the case of a nuclear attack on the country, communicated the emergency services on Monday. Were rehearsed both the scenario of a solid missile attack, and Israel it in the past summer during the war against the schiitische Hisbollah-militia in Lebanon, and an attack with non-conventional rockets had experienced, explained a speaker stomach David Adom, the Israeli counterpart as the red cross. In the exercise the task forces of army, police and fire-brigade therefore participate. It was announced siren alarm for the whole country.

the German article above is the only thing I could find with a date on it, but there are a lot more articles on this exercise in English, but none have a date.
Israel, U.S. hold large-scale joint missile defense exercise

JERUSALEM: Israel and the U.S. are conducting a large-scale missile defense exercise aimed at combining their systems, American and Israeli officials said Sunday, as both countries warn that Iran could obtain nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
The operation, code-named “Juniper Cobra,” is taking place in the Negev desert in southern Israel with thousands of American and Israeli troops. Both sides described the timing as routine, denying a direct connection to the Iran threat.

Seeing as how we know about 9/11 and the London bombings occurring on the same day as terror drills, this next one ought to be widely publicized before hand- like, “we’re watching you”…
‘Coincidentally’, the 21st is when the UN is meeting to vote on sanctions for …. Iran…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 19 2007 5:08 utc | 12

Uncle $ @12: ‘Coincidentally’, the 21st is when the UN is meeting to vote on sanctions for …. Iran…
Also on March 21: this and this.

Posted by: Hamburger | Mar 19 2007 15:32 utc | 14

@Truth:
If displaying different character sets were all that was needed to make a system internationalized, then internationalization would have been completed on all the computers in the world by about 1990. Looking at the documentation I have here as an example, Macs could handle international text editing properly (that is, the built-in API could theoretically handle mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text, multiple character sets, and different sized byte encodings in the same run of text, and the system had support for multiple input methods) in 1987, but there was no system-level API
Perhaps you have a point, but consider that I was referring to a system released in 1978. Heck, the machine couldn’t remember the date between power cycling and whatever API you got was courtesy of the dialect of BASIC that the system used. Dates were maintained in Julian format, so the issue of “month” was up to the application software–and each country tailored its own apps from our baseline code. Date formats could be whatever was customary.
User interfaces came a long way on microcomputers between 1975 and 1982, mostly thanks to Moore’s Law. Doing various character sets on a Mac is trivial, because it’s got a graphic display–we were restricted to character-mode displays with ROM generators. Operating systems generally weren’t much on early micros–there was simply not the addressing space or horsepower to do much.
But in defense of the US manufacturers of the 1980’s when such stuff began to get reasonable, I believe that MS-DOS could accommodate dates in either MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY or YY/MM/DD formats as early as Version 1.25. At least my old documentation shows an API to set the format.

Posted by: cpg | Mar 19 2007 17:46 utc | 16

@Truth:
20-20 hindsight is wonderful, but the world was a much different place back then. The largest market for small computer systems was still the USA, not even Europe. So it made a lot of sense. We barely made a dent in marketing to non-English-speaking countries, as they weren’t really ready for it. We did best, perhaps in Japan, who had already begun to embrace the technology. We also did okay in Argentina and Mexico. And we’re talking very primitive technology. Try doing what you describe with a 2 MHz CPU, 32KB of RAM and floppies for storage. That we were able to include indexed-sequential file management as part of the operating system was remarkable for that time.
—————————
I’d also like to submit that one of the other reasons that we may have lost an edge is due to the decline of the GI Bill. Many major business ventures were founded by veterans from WWII, Korea and Vietnam who got their education paid for courtesy of Uncle Sam. Of course, we also had the military draft back then, so we were drawing from a wider cross-section of the population than we are now.
Nowadays, when a student comes out of school, he’s likely to have loans in the 6-figure range to pay back. This might be very confining regarding career paths.
I’m not certain, but it’s a thought.

Posted by: cpg | Mar 19 2007 21:49 utc | 18

@cpg:

That’s no excuse. The existence of Moore’s Law should have clued people in to the idea that someday computers would be cheap enough to be a global phenomenon. (It’s a little like manufacturing: the existence of modern factories in a country means that forty years from now, that country will be losing its manufacturing business. Modern factories mean lots of manufacturing, which means demand, which mean higher wages. After a few decades, the wages will still be high, but the factories won’t be modern any more, so it makes sense to build new factories somewhere with cheaper labor. This is a cycle which has repeated several times.)

A 32 KB, 2 MHz CPU machine might possibly be a little slow — although the whole point of using a library is to allow abstraction, so really there should have been a function to handle text-based date interactions, which would then have been localized — but no such excuse can be made for the Macintosh, which was 128 KB and 7.83 MHz (and ran on 400K floppies), or the equivalent PC systems of the mid-80s. The very first Macs were already loading internationalization data for display purposes; it would not have been difficult to create a date-selection control type, which would have been localized and loaded at startup. (That’s what they did with all sorts of other stuff.) You could implement a minimal GUI version — the equivalent of a JSpinner.DateEditor without the type-select function — for a machine of that era in a vanishingly small amount of space/RAM. A JSpinner is only slightly more complicated than a scroll bar, and is very similar in implementation: there’s a number in the background which is updated, and up and down arrows you can click. True, such a thing has one extra piece of state information (which part of the date is selected to be controlled by the arrows) and can theoretically be unlimited in scope, but on the other hand you never have to track a mouse drag or figure out how large the little thumb part should be. Somehow everyone working with GUIs got scroll bars, but it took another decade to think about dates.

The heavy debt load of modern students is partially the fault of the GI Bill. When the GI Bill came in, as you rightly say, lots of returning soldiers went to school. When the draft ended, there was a dramatic decline in enrollment and the schools were suddenly left with staff and facilities vastly in excess of the number of students. As a result, a lot of schools closed down, and those remaining jacked up tuition to stay solvent (and/or build up a endowment to see them through any future dry spells). Without the GI Bill, this would not have happened.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Mar 19 2007 23:14 utc | 20

Back to b’s original question.
Cost of European travel has become very high for the small guys. Remember when you could buy a euro for seventy cents?
Available cash has dropped in the last few years as our hidden recession eats away profits.
I showed at our annual industry meeting every year here in the states between 1988 and 2003, as the big companies steadily increased their domination until attendance had dropped (less interesting stuff to see) to the point where it was an expensive and dull to participate.
The interesting growing markets were by that time in Europe, so now I go there whenever cash is available. Oh and the newer euro-based enterprises are much more energetic and creative.
Lastly, it will pay to factor in the focused economic demolition currently in play, especially here in USA. I have trouble planning for a future based on the dollar.

Posted by: rapt | Mar 20 2007 15:02 utc | 22