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Will IBM give Red Hat the AIX?

The other day /. referenced Robert Cringley's prediction that Amazon and Microsoft will dominate the cloud. Seeing how that's where IT is going, IBM must be worried. Buying RH makes sense.

IBM’s core cloud technology and development stack has been seriously lagging the others, so Red Hat fills a huge void in IBM’s portfolio...The deal should move IBM sales from its long obsession with profit or loss on gross revenues to a concentration on net new sales, killing the old Country Club sales force in the process. https://www.cringely.com/2018/10/29/red-hat-takes-over-ibm/

Like Cringley, I too hope that RH takes over IBM.

Mandatory missing link.

Bob's predictions haven't been right all the time. But never at 50-50. More something like 75-25 or even 80-20.
The good part of Bob's predictions is how acute and sharp he's been so far.
And not just the predictions, but also any other piece he'd added to his blog (or whatever else you define it), one or a kind.
Going far beyond the pure appearance and surface, adding thought value by interconnecting news and facts from different sources and, of course, putting in a good dose of his own sharp intelligence.

I would suggest anyone how likes seeing things under a different light and yet getting most of those right, go heave a deep read to that blog.
It's worth every single information bit.

This is the link to the actual post by Cringely with the Apple prediction: https://www.cringely.com/2019/...

I work at Amazon at AWS. One of our main principles is customer obsession - we try REALLY hard not to break any customers' workflows. Sometimes it means supporting awkward API features misconceived more than 10 years ago.

For big customers we also try to bend over backwards to accommodate them. "Pain to deal'? Hardly. There's a reason why CIA has chosen Amazon over IBM.

Supporting legacy is a pain but helps with customer retention which, in turn, makes the sales guys happy and adds to the bottom line. It can have unintended consequences as "old API think" can interfere with "the new way of doing things". In an attempt to support old and new, a product can become contorted, like someone with a bad knee who can't afford a replacement or doesn't want surgery. They learn to walk funny to relieve the knee pain and, as a result, develop hip, spine and neck problems.

Different AWS AC here. This is why we have a number of leadership principles, another of which is 'Invent and Simplify', to try and avoid complex solutions due to legacy cruft.

(Note that some of the names of the leadership principles are in "Amazon speak", and you may need more context to understand them. For example, "Disagree and Commit" is specifically intended to address "analysis paralysis" which often happens in big companies. Amazon tries very hard to ensure that teams can be as independent as possible, and this leadership principle is one way that is achieved, by realising that in many cases it is cheaper to take the wrong decisions early (and find the mistakes quickly) than to take the correct decision late (and lost time).

Any input on this paragraph from the article:

Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven’t worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it’s your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that’s the only world you know.

I think the problem Cringeworthy is trying to express here is that younger employees may only see a limited set of (the externally shown) values in their leaders unless they are made explicitly aware of other less visible traits. Amazon actively works against this by having good training on where the leadership principles originated, how leaders use them, and actually having real adoption of the values by leaders at all levels of the organisation. The leadership principles are presented by Jeff in one of the training videos. I haven't seen this before (in other large companies I have worked at which tried to bolt good culture on later, training was provided and created by external consultants, not by the CEO himself).

I work at Amazon at AWS. One of our main principles is customer obsession - we try REALLY hard not to break any customers' workflows. Sometimes it means supporting awkward API features misconceived more than 10 years ago. For big customers we also try to bend over backwards to accommodate them. "Pain to deal'? Hardly. There's a reason why CIA has chosen Amazon over IBM.

Supporting legacy is a pain but helps with customer retention which, in turn, makes the sales guys happy and adds to the bottom line. It can have unintended consequences as "old API think" can interfere with "the new way of doing things". In an attempt to support old and new, a product can become contorted, like someone with a bad knee who can't afford a replacement or doesn't want surgery. They learn to walk funny to relieve the knee pain and, as a result, develop hip, spine and neck problems.

Any input on this paragraph from the article:

Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven’t worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the ounder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it’s your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners because that’s the only world you know.

Kickstarter should be doing something about Robert X. Cringely's Mineserver project. Advertised in September 2015 as "unlike many Kickstarter hardware projects, for the $99 Mineserver virtually all development work is already done so risks are minimized. If we had cases we could start shipping tomorrow.", and promised to ship in time for Christmas 2015, they still haven't shipped a single unit. The most recent project update was November 2016 when they promised to start "shipping the week after next". There hasn't been a word from them since then. Backers have over-run the comments section on the last three posts at his blog, and he's not uttered a peep about it since promising in comments "more on that in a few days" back on January 10.

Comments have been pretty entertaining. There's a rumor that the delay is all about trying to program these little servers to secretly mine bitcoins for the Cringely clan in the background while pretending to be Minecraft servers.

Kickstarter should be doing something about Robert X. Cringely's Mineserver project. Advertised in September 2015 as "unlike many Kickstarter hardware projects, for the $99 Mineserver virtually all development work is already done so risks are minimized. If we had cases we could start shipping tomorrow.", and promised to ship in time for Christmas 2015, they still haven't shipped a single unit. The most recent project update was November 2016 when they promised to start "shipping the week after next". There hasn't been a word from them since then. Backers have over-run the comments section on the last three posts at his blog, and he's not uttered a peep about it since promising in comments "more on that in a few days" back on January 10.

Comments have been pretty entertaining. There's a rumor that the delay is all about trying to program these little servers to secretly mine bitcoins for the Cringely clan in the background while pretending to be Minecraft servers.

Old timers here might remember Robert X Cringely from InfoWorld decades ago. He has an interesting take on the H1B program here.

Comments are even more interesting. If you're not familiar with the controversy around his kids' Kickstarter project, strap on your seatbelt and get ready for a wild ride!

Hearing a lot about problems with Kickstarter projects lately.

Robert X Cringely is involved with a kickstarter project that he seems to be hiding from after collecting $35k, promising in comments on his blog a long-awaited status update "in a few days" and still getting complaints about not following through 3 weeks later with updates on a project that was supposed to ship over a year ago and hasn't posted a status update in over 11 weeks.

Kickstarter is looking more and more like a great place to get scammed. Caveat emptor, and don't assume you can trust a name you've been familiar with for decades.

Hearing a lot about problems with Kickstarter projects lately.

Robert X Cringely is involved with a kickstarter project that he seems to be hiding from after collecting $35k, promising in comments on his blog a long-awaited status update "in a few days" and still getting complaints about not following through 3 weeks later with updates on a project that was supposed to ship over a year ago and hasn't posted a status update in over 11 weeks.

Kickstarter is looking more and more like a great place to get scammed. Caveat emptor, and don't assume you can trust a name you've been familiar with for decades.

Hearing a lot about problems with Kickstarter projects lately.

Robert X Cringely is involved with a kickstarter project that he seems to be hiding from after collecting $35k, promising in comments on his blog a long-awaited status update "in a few days" and still getting complaints about not following through 3 weeks later with updates on a project that was supposed to ship over a year ago and hasn't posted a status update in over 11 weeks.

Kickstarter is looking more and more like a great place to get scammed. Caveat emptor, and don't assume you can trust a name you've been familiar with for decades.

> H1-B holders need to be paid market salary.

Its a lot more tricky than that.

Determining prevailing wage is based on the LCA (labor conditions application) which basically defines the job. But the employer can file for an H1B for a job multiple times using a different LCA each time. So they can list different "prevailing wage" rates for the same job. Then, once any one of those H1B applications is approved by the government, they switch out the LCA for any of those that were filed, even the ones that were not approved. So basically its a bait-and-switch the labor department, promising to pay high wages and then paying the lowest wages they ever filed for. And the kicker is its all legal.

'For those who don’t remember it or have forgotten, Teledesic was one of a number of 1990s plans to use low-earth orbiting satellites to provide wireless Internet service almost everywhere on Earth.'

Outright fraud is easy. But the real problem with H1B isn't what is illegal, it is all the parts that are legal.

No more using H1B to bring in people for training as the first step in off-shoring work.
No more letting them bait-and-switch labor condition applications in order to circumvent the prevailing wage requirement.
No more using the 5+ year green card process to prevent H1B holders from switching to better paying jobs.

But the DoJ can't fix those problems because those are all baked into the current H1B legislation and are 100% legal.

http://www.cringely.com/2016/0... Cyingely about it!

It's hard to parse the terminology, spin, etc. but Cringely's words were "IBMâ(TM)s reorg-from-Hell launches next week: IBMâ(TM)s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone." As I read it, he was talking worldwide. And as I read the current news, it doesn't sound as if that happened. Or did it?

Pirates is highly inaccurate. It's like the Saturday After School Special version of the birth of the PC industry.

Instead, I recommend Robert X. Cringely's documentary Triumph of the Nerds, where he actually talks to the people involved. You get to hear it from the horses' mouths.

It was based on the research Cringely did for his book Accidental Empires, of which he wrote:

"Not that everyone is happy with me. Certainly Bill Gates doesn’t like to be characterized as a megalomaniac, and Steve Jobs doesn’t like to be described as a sociopath, but that’s what they are. Trust me."

You can clearly see the way the companies are manipulating the system. Don't hire them as 'engineers', but as 'technology leads' then make up a low salary for them.

FWIW Cringley exposed how this scam works 3 years ago:

What data is available comes from the initial employer applications for H-1B slots These Labor Condition Applications, called LCAs, include employer estimates of prevailing wages. Because there are always more H-1B applications than there are H-1B visas granted, every employer seeking an H-1B may file 3-5 LCAs per slot, each of which can use a different prevailing wage. But when the visa application is approved, it is my understanding that sponsoring companies can choose which LCA they really mean and apply that prevailing wage number to the hire.

Because the visa has already been granted of course they'll tend to take the lowest prevailing wage number, because that's the number against which they match the local labor market.

Remember that part of this business of getting H-1Bs is there must not be a US citizen with comparable skills available at the local prevailing wage. If we consider that exercise using the data from Charlotte, above, a company would probably be seeking a programmer expecting $73,965 or above (after all, they are trying to attract talent, right?) but offering $50,170 or below (the multiple LCA trick). No wonder they can't get a qualified citizen to take the job.

Based solely on approved LCAs, 51 percent of recently granted H-1B visas were in the 25th percentile for pay or below. That's statistically impossible under the intent of the program.

FWD.US is a conspiracy created by Mark Zuckerberg to help drive down IT wages in America.

I have no problem with talented immigrants, but American corporations are LYING about the need for those H1B immigrants due to so-called "shortages" of STEM workers in America, and in the offing they are displacing QUALIFIED American workers with those immigrants (in clear violation of the law). Here are some FACTS to counter Zuckerberg's SPIN around his company's (and others, like MSFT, Cisco, Facebook, Google, etc.) cynical attempt to drive down wages. Just look at the recent policy decision to permit H1B spouses to seek work permits in May, 2015 something; that's 150,000 new workers (most of them professionals - and many with IT skills) into an already challenged IT economy. FWD.US is part of a legal conspiracy to drive down tech wages, under cover of the lie that America does not have sufficient STEM talent. Zuckerberg is shilling for his pals, and working against the American IT worker.

FACTS: One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1...

Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con...

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...

Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or...

How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do...

Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs...

Unemployment is a problem in America, and so are our sticky problems with immigration. Undercover of helping those immigrants who have so long labored in our agricultural sector, the American IT sector has seen fit to use the sentiment to help agricultural workers to create a Landslide of advantage for itself. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

H1Bs in Sacramento http://www.news10.net/story/ne...

The site says the data comes from the US Dept of Labor. However, H1B fraud often follows a pattern of submitting multiple Labor Condtion Applications (LCAs) with different salaries for the same job and then when the H1B is approved for one particular LCA the employer uses the LCA with the lowest salary.

I do not have the expertise to say if the DoL stats reflect salary info from the actual LCA the employer ends up using or just the salary info from the LCA that the H1B was issued for. My innate cyncism says it is the later rather than the former, but I honestly don't know. Perhaps there is someone here with the expertise to say (and show) the definitive answer?

Undercover of helping immigrant agricultural workers who have long needed a break in America, the American technology sector - lead by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg - has seen fit to heavily lobby Congress to increase H1-B and other worker visa permits, vastly increasing H1-B visas at a time when very good research shows that there is no shortage of tech workers in America. Zuckerberg has so far succeeded, in the Senate. What is motivating the claim for more H1-B visas?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

previously

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem and Two H1-B's walk into a Bar: More on the H1-B visa problem

One of many examples of what goes on behind closed doors: an immigration attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers.

H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg; there are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas.

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on the H1-B and foreign worker visa problem. Matloff claims that Hi-B abuse has cost Americans $10Trillion dollars, since 1975. Inc. Magazine weights in Professor Matloff's Webpage

Mother Jones weighs in:How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers

Marc Zuckerberg and other wealthy tech scions - including large immigration law firms and corporation who profit from importing H1-B's continue to perpetuate this trend

How H1-B malpractice hurts the American economy

Most of the new crop of H1-Bs is coming from one of the most corrupt university systems in the world.

Indian government officials are not happy that the universities that they collude with might have some limitations placed on the abuses that have enabled them to "sell" their product to the American IT sector.

How the new immigration bill could ignite a trade war with India

How to underpay an H1-B worker

Undercover of helping immigrant agricultural workers who have long needed a break in America, the American technology sector - lead by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg - has seen fit to heavily lobby Congress to increase H1-B and other worker visa permits, vastly increasing H1-B visas at a time when very good research shows that there is no shortage of tech workers in America. Zuckerberg has so far succeeded, in the Senate. What is motivating the claim for more H1-B visas?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

previously

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem and Two H1-B's walk into a Bar: More on the H1-B visa problem

One of many examples of what goes on behind closed doors: an immigration attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers.

H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg; there are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas.

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on the H1-B and foreign worker visa problem. Matloff claims that Hi-B abuse has cost Americans $10Trillion dollars, since 1975. Inc. Magazine weights in Professor Matloff's Webpage

Mother Jones weighs in:How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers

Marc Zuckerberg and other wealthy tech scions - including large immigration law firms and corporation who profit from importing H1-B's continue to perpetuate this trend

How H1-B malpractice hurts the American economy

Most of the new crop of H1-Bs is coming from one of the most corrupt university systems in the world.

Indian government officials are not happy that the universities that they collude with might have some limitations placed on the abuses that have enabled them to "sell" their product to the American IT sector.

How the new immigration bill could ignite a trade war with India

How to underpay an H1-B worker

He anticipated and wrote perceptively on the subject five years ago - http://www.cringely.com/2009/0...

It is ludicrous that the mainstream media is only now getting a clue. This says much about the media in general.

Zuckerberg is also a traitor to the American tech worker.

Hey, Mark, MSFT just laid off 18,000 people; Cisco just laid off a bunch; MSFT just the other day closed its research center right down the street from you - filled with gifted coders and brilliance. Mark, there is a MOUND of studies showing NO shortage of STEM works in the US.

Some facts: The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans **$10TRILLION** dollars, since 1975. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1... Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con...

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...

Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or...

How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do...

Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs...

Also, little known is the tactic of creating many different kinds of sub-visa categories to "fool the system". There are almost TWENTY different kinds of work visas. The whole thing is a sham and a lie, designed to drag down wages and keep from having to re-train Americans. Never thought I would see this day!

Some of the information presented in the following links will shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. Bill Gates, John Chambers, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and many, many others - including the principals of the most prominent immigration law firms, who profit from this outrage, are lying through their teeth. There is NO shortage of STEM workers in the US!!

Last, Zuckerberg has all out lied since day 1 about guaranteeing privacy on Facebook - just outright lied. Facebook has become something that teens shun and will soon go the way of MSFT, run by another deceiver, Bill Gates, on the H1-B issue.

Google's been pissing away cash on monorail projects ever since the IPO.

Robert X. Cringely's opinion is that many Google research projects are Larry Page's way to keep Sergey Brin out of his hair.

Can a city decide to advance at its own pace or is it slowed down by the slowest and weakest points in it's network?
I wouldn't mind seeing competition in this city as long as the old stuff such as buffer bloat and privacy violations are taken care of at the same time. The Peering proposed by Bob Cringely is the right solution. http://www.cringely.com/2014/05/06/14890/

There is ample evidence that many American corporations have been actively discriminating against American Workers for well over a decade. This is especially true when it comes to STEM work skills. India, China, and Russia have been the main sources of off-shoring (and now, in-shoring). India is the absolute worst, with India's goovernment actively pushing for more H1-Bs because they would rather America hire them than India build proper educational and business infrastructure systems. Indian government is one of the most corrupt on earth (easily as corrupt as some of the worst African states).

Want proof? Unemployment is a problem in America, and so are our sticky problems with immigration. Undercover of helping those immigrants who have so long labored in our agricultural sector, the American IT sector has seen fit to use the sentiment to help agricultural workers to create a Landslide of advantage for itself. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans **$10TRILLION** dollars, since 1975. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1...

Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con...

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...

Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or...

How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do...

Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs...

Also, little known is the tactic of creating many different kinds of sub-visa categories to "fool the system". There are almost TWENTY different kinds of work visas. The whole thing is a sham and a lie, designed to drag down wages and keep from having to re-train Americans. Never thought I would see this day!

Some of the information presented in the aforementioned links will shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. Bill Gates, John Chambers, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and many, many others - including the principals of the most prominent immigration law firms, who profit from this outrage, are lying through their teeth. There is NO shortage of STEM workers in the US!!

Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

Robert X. Cringely's Ten technology predictions for 2014: #2 - IBM throws in the towel.

No, he predicted IBM would give up on their financial boast^H^H^H^H^Hambition of reaching $20 EPS by 2015, which the previous CEO Sam Palmisano announced to Wall Street several years ago. Cringely's not the only one - other analysts think that's out of reach for IBM. But this server division sale shows that top management still thinks it can make it happen.

Robert X. Cringely's Ten technology predictions for 2014: #2 - IBM throws in the towel.

Crystal Ball? More like a clue-by-four...a little late in the game to be calling this a "prediction."

Robert X. Cringely's Ten technology predictions for 2014: #2 - IBM throws in the towel.

The health insurance industry did this about twenty years ago (ish. I don't remember exactly). Instead of binning people by risk and associated cost, they starting looking at people on an individual level and simply denying those who might not be profitable. It sounds good when you're angry at irresponsible drivers, and it certainly makes money for the insurance companies, but it doesn't work when you're dependent on cars on driving to make your infrastructure work and when insurance is an integral part of that (required in many states).

This article discusses this very point on health insurance: http://www.cringely.com/2013/10/26/big-data-destroying-u-s-healthcare-system/

Let's see...clicking around TFA's website:
http://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/

Cringely has some interesting theories about the Nokia deal:

1. Effective price is cheap - MS, Apple and other US corporations looking for ways of spending offshore tax-sheltered dollars

2. MS will probably sell off Nokia's manufacturing plants (w/ thousands of employees) to the Chinese

3. Elop won't be MS CEO

4. MS might still be looking at big acquisitions in this space (Blackberry, Qualcomm)

Those keywords mean they're postings to meet the legal obligation of advertising for a position before bringing someone in on a work visa.

Sometimes, they don't even post the jobs at all. Keeps those pesky citizens from applying and creating more makework.

I, Cringley Cringley had a very interesting post on how H1B fraud is accomplished, except in this case, the he got caught.

The gist of the crime has two parts. First Mr. Cvjeticanin’s law firm reportedly represented technology companies seeking IT job candidates and he is accused of having run on the side an advertising agency that placed employment ads for those companies. That could appear to be a conflict of interest, or at least did to the DoJ.

But then there’s the other part, in which most of the ads — mainly in Computerworld — seem never to have been placed at all!

Client companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for employment ads in Computerworld that never even ran!

The contention of the DoJ in this indictment appears to be that Mr. Cvjeticanin was defrauding companies seeking to hire IT personnel, yet for all those hundreds of ads — ads that for the most part never ran and therefore could never yield job applications — nobody complained!

The deeper question here is whether they paid for the ads or just for documentation that they had paid for the ads?

This is alleged H-1B visa fraud, remember. In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job. Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates.

How many other scams like this, are being run to prevent American engineers from being hired?

How does that fit into the free market capitalism that made America great? If someone else can do the same job cheaper, hire them instead.

You mean to say, "If someone can be hired for slave wages and locked into a single-employer contract with no chance to move jobs rather than hiring people on an equal footing."

This is about as far from "free market capitalism" as it comes. The H-1B system deliberately alters the agreement and creates a semi-slave labor deliberately paying under-market wages.

And then there's all the fraud in the system. Including falsely inflated skills listings designed to keep anyone from successfully applying for the jobs later salted to H-1Bs with far less than the originally advertised qualifications. And of course the demand for H-1Bs rather than actual EB-5s where they would have legal right to leave for better employment if it was offered by another company.

Don't you dare use the term "free market capitalism", you fucking slavemonger. It's nothing of the sort.

Some of the information presented in the following links will shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. Bill Gates, John Chambers, Eric Schmidt, and many, many others - including the principals of the most prominent immigration law firms, who profit from this outrage, are lying through their teeth. There is NO shortage of STEM workers in the US!!

The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans **$10TRILLION** dollars, since 1975. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley: http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-about-h-1b-visas-could-hurt-us-all/

Watch this attorney and his consultants teach corporations how to manipulate the law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

Here's more abuse of the L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg http://economyincrisis.org/content/l-visa-programs-brimming-abuses

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

Also, little known is the tactic of creating many different kinds of sub-visa categories to "fool the system". There are almost TWENTY different kinds of work visas. The whole thing is a sham and a lie, designed to drag down wages and keep from having to re-train Americans. Never thought I would see this day!

LOL, man Foxconn sounds like the US Auto Makers in the 1970s. It's because as others have pointed out. Bolted Down robotic workers don't complain and don't jump out of the nearest window. They depreciate, require routine maintenance but day after day they do what they're instructed within extremely precise tolerances. That means a better quality product for their customers without all of those "soft problems" that complicates business.

With China pushing people out of rural areas and into ever larger cities, it will be very interesting over the next few years to see how all of those people will earn a living. While the jobs at Foxconn are drudgery by any modern standard, they do allow people to earn money and contribute to the economy. Turning them ultimately into those nice wage slaves that all companies love that buy products and need services. Workers in China are already pushing for higher wages and better working conditions, something that the beneficent Foxconn would be very reluctant to go along with given their recent labor relations gaffs and breakup with Apple. Unfortunately the stories about labor shortages in China seem a bit disingenuous and reminds me of how there's a presumed "tech shortage" in this country. It seems even in China getting labor for the absolute cheapest price may be pushing this 12 year urbanization plan. These are all problems for China which are magnitudes of order more complex when you're talking about the scale in terms of a population of over one billion. I don't think China can make enough of anything, electronics, knock-off watches, handbags et al to keep up with the population demanding a better quality of life, which means better wages, better working conditions and all those consumer goodies the rest of us take so much for granted.

As a father with three kids in college and another one one just about there already, I wonder where they're going to make their niche in this world economy where your education and your experience can all be cooped out to some fraud ridden outsourcing firm who brings in a person or outsources your position elsewhere. I've told all of my kids not to follow me into Software and Engineering fields because people employed in those fields are now considered a commodity and subject to too much educational push from an ever increasing wave of immigrants from diploma mills overseas. What people don't really realize is that we've shifted out way of thinking from "value and quality" to "good enough at a low price" because the products and services we use have varying degrees based on those expectations. Entire markets the world over have been shifting in that direction and it's eroding the economic and social landscape of countries everywhere with companies seeking the lowest cost labor they can find that has just enough technical competency to get what they need done.

True, but bringing 100's of thousands of unqualified tech workers into this country to replace those who are already here is a bit much, don't you think? In fact, it's a direct attack on the American tech worker, no matter his/her ethnic origin. There is NO shortage of qualified tech workers in America; there is also no shortage of greed as professed by those in Zuckerberg's cabal of moneyed lobbyists.

Don't believe me? Here's some unbiased research and FACTS for you to peruse.

What's little known is that American corporations are using large-scale outright deception and manipulation in an attempt to displace American Workers.

Some of the information presented in the following links will shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans $10TRILLION dollars, since 1975. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley: http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-about-h-1b-visas-could-hurt-us-all/

Watch this attorney and his consultants teach corporations how to manipulate the law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

Here's more abuse of the L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg http://economyincrisis.org/content/l-visa-programs-brimming-abuses

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

Why would I bother hiring IBM to do that when I can do it myself?

I think more (former) IBM customers are starting to figure that out. Here's an interesting story about IBM losing the contracts for Hilton Hotels and ServiceMaster due to bad service. The ServiceMaster one is particularly interesting. Despite the incredible shortage of good IT people, which necessitates tripling the H-1B quota, they had a job fair one Saturday and were able to hire everybody they needed for their new in-house IT operation. I'd bet they saved money on it too. So the offshoring that IBM does is basically a way of taking money out of the pockets of productive Americans and funneling it to their execs and shareholders. It does not save money, and it certainly doesn't get anything done better.

I hope this trend of seeing that the emperor has no clothes continues. For decades the conventional wisdom was that IBM wasn't cheap, but you always got quality and reliable service. Now the three letters mean nothing.

I set up performance logging and came back 2 weeks later to see, what did I find? 45%. ... I thought "Well yeah, its a quad, surely that older dual core i built for the shop has to be ready for the pasture"...nope, biggest spikes around 70% but only when he is loading something up and after that its nothing, 20s and 30s during background tasks.

So it all comes down to one simple fact...The MHz war was a bubble.

Or, maybe, your father is a relatively undemanding computer user.

It has always been the case that some people just do not stress their computers, so they are happy with what they have. Back in the 1980s, Jean-Louis Gassée bought the Apple engineers a high-end Cray supercomputer to design the next Mac, but Seymour Cray bought a Mac to design his next Cray supercomputer.

I would argue what we are seeing now is NOT "The death of the PC" anymore than the housing bubble popping meant the death of houses, its just a return to a more normal state. before laptops were getting replaced every other year and desktops around every 3

That's not what I remember. It's a major point in Cringely's book, Accidental Empires, that the PC industry comes out with new systems every 18 months. Back then, even ordinary software was so close to the limits of the hardware that we needed new hardware to run new software at acceptable speeds. This era, when basic software runs at acceptable speeds on old computers, is new.

I think the major new frontier is in responsiveness. When you're doing those measurements, with the CPU usage at 40%, how many times was the CPU usage so low because it was waiting for the hard drive? IMHO, people should not ever wait for computers, and as long as they do, then computers are not fast enough. SSDs should replace hard drives. Even without an SSD, I recently set up a Sandy Bridge i7 system, and it was so much faster at booting up and UI responsiveness than any Core 2 system that I've encountered. We should continue to upgrade, if for no other reason, then to wait less on our computers.

As I know people on H1B can't be paid less than their US colleagues because you wouldn't be able to get H1B if they offer you smaller salary than average for this position.

(1) There is literally zero dollars allocated in the federal budget for enforcement of that provision.

(2) That provision is full of loopholes. Like this one:

Note that section (p) requires that the Department of Labor set up four prevailing wage levels based upon skill but section (n) only requires a prevailing wage for occupation and location. There is no statutory requirement that the employer pick the skill level that matches the employee.

Let's see this in action. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the mean wage for a programmer in Charlotte, NC is $73,965. But the level 1 prevailing wage is $50,170. Most prevailing wage claims on H-1B applications use the level 1 wage driving down the cost of labor in this instance by nearly a third.
What Americans don't know about H-1B visas could hurt us all

From the perspective of a friend who lives in Silicon Valley, what is especially upsetting to her about the requested increase in H-1B and other visas (whose blatant goal it is to import more "high-tech" workers) is the support it receives from high profile high-tech leaders like Bill Gates, John Chambers, Eric Schmidt, and other. Those men made billions off the backs of American high tech workers, and they are using deception and outright lies to support their cause to bring in more H-1B workers. This is a pure race to the bottom, for salary, and skill. There is *some* need for H-1B's, but it's a mere fraction of the current 85,000 cap. This is an agregious attempt to displace qualified American workers, period. Read on if you want accurate information about this outrage.

Some of the information presented in the following links would shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans $10TRILLION dollars, since 1975 (fromProfessor Norm Matloff's study (UC Davis).. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley: http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-about-h-1b-visas-could-hurt-us-all/

Watch this attorney and his consultants teach corporations how to manipulate the law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

Here's more abuse of the L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg http://economyincrisis.org/content/l-visa-programs-brimming-abuses

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

Also very interesting in this regard is Robert Cringley's What Americans Don't Know about H-1B Visas Could Hurt Us All.

Program Manager Syndrome
http://www.cringely.com/2009/02/04/microsoft-has-pms/

just wondering, hangning up and listening...ank

The next Japanese nuclear accident (it's inevitable) will be even worse: 'The amount of Cesium 137 in the fuel rods at Fukushima Daiichi is the equivalent of 85 Chernobyls.,,there is a 90 percent chance of a large earthquake in the minimum three years required to remove just the most unstable part of the fuel load at Fukushima Daiichi. The probability of a large earthquake in the 10+ years required to completely defuel the plant is virtually 100 percent. If a big earthquake happens before that fuel is gone there will be global environmental catastrophe with many deaths...The very logic of time and probability that scares the bejesus out of me is being completely ignored, replaced with magical thinking.'

howdy y'all,

take a look at this set of articles by the original Cringely.
- Not your father's IBM (I, Cringely - Cringely on technology)
http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/not-your-fathers-IBM/

it's a very well thot out condemnation of ibm and it's planned 75% north america emloyee count reduction. definitely bean counters doing their usual "forest for the trees" gutting of a company.

take care,
lee