Bernie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Yes, this is a fact in most of the former "east block". I have a friend who
>has been to Lattvia a few times (working for free for the swedish church
>and other organisations) and it's amazing how you can buy most things there
>for a very small ammount of money. I make two-three times as much as a
>normal worker in the Baltic states do (I assume that it's roughly the same
>in the most of the other countries as well) but here I can't actually live
>on it because of the high prices on things. (I would need to make almost
>the double only to get myself an appartment). BTW: I'm a student.
I suppose your major is not economics ;-)
>
>Most shareware comes from that part of the world.
You mean _more_ shareware comes from there (than before), don't you?
Otherwise I must have missed something. And certainly Michael's remark
was meant ironically (that's why the smiley). No programmer in Eastern
Europe could survive by selling shareware for DOS or any other OS. This
has a simple reason: in most of these countries buying a PC for private
use still means a meaningful cut in the household's budget. And
shareware is first of all for private use at home. So simply there is no
market for it, unfortunatelly.
>I assume that's one
>reason, but also because of theheact that not everyone there got new jobs
>when market economy came.
In fact, lots of people lost their job.
>"Eastern" programmers are in general very good at programming. To bad not
>all that is used, atleast very few make programs for Windows that's good :)
They are good because most of them had _no_ PC and had to learn much
more mathematics instead. So an algorithmus had to be perfect when they
got the chance to take a seat in front of a terminal. Since there is
only a neglectable ( but growing) home market most of these programmers
still work for the industry or gov. agencies which use different systems
(MVS, VMS, UNIX, AS/400 etc ), hardly comparable with the DOS/Windows
systems at home. Most of the important products of these software
engineers were not the tipical office applications like wordprocessor
etc., but highly specialized software for optical recognition, CAD/CAM,
software for architecture or embedded applications for medical diagnose.
I'm afraid, the level of Eastern European programers could be lower in
future. The best software engineers are in the US already (braindrain)
and the education at home is not the same like before. ( I just read
this: faculty of computer sciences at the Technical University in
Budapest doesn't hold entry examination anymore )
My time has come ! ;-)
--
Tibor Mocsar
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