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Sounds cool. I'm here at UC Davis; that's about 20 minutes away by car for you non-locals ;), and the only 802.11b we have is in the library. That's changing. The Mech/Aero Engr bldg is getting 802.11 and all the profs are getting laptops. It'd be even more cool if UCD/City of Davis were to install some 802.11 routers and repeaters throughout the city. That would be bad-ass. Since my SDSL is getting turned off due to the NorthPoint thing.

Sounds cool. I'm here at UC Davis; that's about 20 minutes away by car for you non-locals ;), and the only 802.11b we have is in the library. That's changing. The Mech/Aero Engr bldg is getting 802.11 and all the profs are getting laptops. It'd be even more cool if UCD/City of Davis were to install some 802.11 routers and repeaters throughout the city. That would be bad-ass. Since my SDSL is getting turned off due to the NorthPoint thing.

You have it backwards. The reason Open Source is doing so well is all the programmers sitting around bored because "real" work has been hard to get for a couple of years. (Matloff mentions ways in which the industry's been shooting itself in the foot with H-1Bs but this is one he missed. Or at least he had in October; I haven't read it lately.)

'fraid I've no grand advice other than to suggest you take the myth of a SW labout shortage into account.

Metropoli have human population density distributions akin to the fairy ring fungus.

So, while city dwellers in the dead core have buildings to block their lasers, they are consoled by the relative lower cost of installing wire for the last mile, be it cable or a separate DSL connection.

I live in the pleasant semi-rural `burbs where my phone monopoly's C.O. doesn't provide DSL and where the cable TV stops about 1 km from my house. I'd love to have broadband access and can't get it under the current business model.

I'm willing to pay up to about US$100/month to get that access, but I doubt this technology satisfies that criterion yet.

Does anyone know if RF wireless technology, such as 2.4 GHz that is used in cordless phones, can be adapted to provide such access, say if enough neighbors installed them so a P2P net reached to someplace with a wire connection?

Pfah. Industries rise and fall, always have, always will. Software will fall one day, replaced by something else. What's really damaging, to the economy and to the industry, is all the H1-B visas.

Actually, one programmer can make all the difference. Studies have shown that some star programmers are ten times as productive as other programmers.

Follow this link to check out a class offered at UC Davis. Btw, my roommate is an undergrad research assistant to Prof. Chong. I've seen some of the lectures, pretty crazy stuff. My advise is to take lots of EE, CS, math and physics coursed, esp. Quantum.

I used to work on a project called Remote TA. The project is run by Professor Walters of the UC Davis Computer Science Department. It includes all of the features that you are looking for. Drop Dr. Walters a line and let him know that you are interested.

Bullshit. It's not an "urban legend", it is a documented fact.

--

... replace older working American programmers with cheaper H1-B Visa programmers ...

Yes, it is happening ... the shop I work for is now evaluating proposals from several bodyshops - some offshore, some on-shore but still comprised mostly of H1-B imported foreign programmers ... the employees are urged to seek "management" path careers as the trend is to farm out the coding (both support and development to "bodyshops") ... and this has already occurred for many of the departments of the very large company I work for ... it is getting hard to communicate in English - for a global firm that predominately does mostly U.S. business ...

How is it these clowns (the US House/Senate think they are doing high-tech industry good by this action? They are pandering to the lords of industry ... it sucks ... I will find work - even now, my management is urging the bodyshop to retain some of the "professionals" who know the system well to enable a smooth transition and ensure the same quality support ...

Make no mistake about it - this is not about a shortage of programmers - it is 100%, absolutely about cheap labor ... and the management in my company makes no bones about it - as their #1 goal is to reduce costs 10% per year in providing systems support/development for the business units ...

I am so angry ... I have nothing against the talented professionals that wish to perform their craft ... but call a spade a spade ... this charade is infuriating ... I wish there was something I could do - I am only one voice, but as it happens to others, they will feel the same way though most of the country probally could give a rat's ass ...

These people (US House/Senate, lords of industry, etc ...) are taking the bread out of my children's mouth ... I urge all to read Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Labor Shortage

And I'll sign off with some words from Phillip Greenspun in his famous book on web publishing ...

My personal theory requires a little bit of history. Grizzled old hackers tell of going into insurance companies in the 1960s. The typical computer cost at least $500,000 and held data of great value. When Cromwell & Jeeves Insurance needed custom software, they didn't say, "Maybe we can save a few centimes by hiring a team of guys in India." They hired the best programmers they could find from MIT and didn't balk at paying $10,000 for a week of hard work. Back in those days, $10,000 was enough to hire a manager for a whole year, a fact not lost on managers who found it increasingly irksome.

Managers control companies, and hence policies that irk managers tend to be curtailed. Nowadays, companies have large programming staffs earning, in real dollars, one-third of what good programmers earned in the 1960s. When even that seems excessive, work is contracted out to code factories in India. Balance has been restored. Managers are once again earning three to ten times what their technical staff earn. The only problem with this arrangement is that most of today's working programmers don't know how to program. Companies turn over projects to their horde of cubicle-dwelling C-programming drones and then are surprised when, two years later, they find only a tangled useless mess of bugs and a bill for $3 million. This does not lead companies to reflect on the fact that all the smart people in their college class went to medical, law, or business school. Instead, they embark on a quest for tools that will make programming simpler. Consider the case of Judy CIO who is flying off to meet with the executives at Junkware Systems. Judy will book her airplane ticket using a reliable reservation system programmed by highly-paid wizards in the 1960s. There is no middleware in an airline reservation system. There is no Microsoft software. There is no code written by C drones. Just one big IBM mainframe.

Judy changes planes in the new Denver airport. She could reflect on the fact that the airport opened a couple of years late because the horde of C programmers couldn't make the computerized baggage handling system work (it was eventually scrapped). She could reflect on the fact that the air traffic controllers up in the tower are still using software from the 1960s because the FAA can't get their new pile of C code to work--billions of dollars, 15 years, and acres of cubicles stuffed with $50,000-per-year programmers wasn't good for much besides a lot of memory allocation bugs. She could compare the high programmer salaries of the past and their still-working software to the low programmer salaries of the present and their comprehensive collection of bloated bug-ridden ready-any-year-now systems. However, these kinds of reflections aren't very productive for a forward-looking CIO. Judy uses her time at the airport to catch up on what passes for literature among MBAs: The Road Ahead and Dollar Signs : An Astrological Guide to Personal Finance.

More information on H-1Bs here

Hi, I was studying in UCDavis two years ago, and my very good OS teacher Matt Bishop (see here) gave us Hackers as a reading (along with "The mythical man-month"). I remember getting it in the bookstore, paperback edition with a revised intro from the author and a couple more chapters with RMS and all the news on it. It was 12.95$

For some enlightening reading, check out Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage, UCDavis' Dr. Matloff's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.

Some salient quotes,

Question: The industry claims that H-1Bs are paid the fair ``prevailing wage.'' Is this true?

No, it is not true.

In October 1999, Susan deFife, CEO of womenConnect.com of McLean, VA, testified to the Senate in support of higher H-1B quotas. She gave the example of a new graduate she had hired in 1998 as a system administrator, a Mexican national who had just graduated from a U.S. school. Ms. deFife emphasized that she found this worker only after months of exhaustive searching. Yet a subsequent inquiry under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Robert Sanchez showed that deFife was only paying this person $35,000 per year-when the national average for new graduates was $45,000.

Similarly, John Harrison, CEO of Ecutel in Alexandria, Virginia, testified to the House in March 1999 in support of an H-1B increase. He issued a press release which said,

Something is wrong when you put an ad in the Washington Post for a software engineer and the only qualified applicants you receive are from non-U.S. Citizens, said John Harrison, CEO and co-founder of Ecutel, one of the nation's most promising high-tech companies.

Sanchez's FOIA request later revealed that Ecutel had hired several H-1B programmers at a salary of $35,000, again far below average for new graduates (and these workers may not have even been new graduates).

and...

Question: Rather than H-1Bs being a source of cheap labor, the industry claims that legal fees make the H-1Bs actually more expensive than American workers. Is that true?

The legal paperwork needed to sponsor an H-1B costs only about $1,000.

It does cost more to sponsor a worker for a green card, around $10,000, but often the employers have the foreign employees pay the legal fees for green cards themselves. And even when employers foot the bill, the cost is usually less than they save in salary, accumulated over the five years or more it now takes to get the green card.

Furthermore, if an H-1B is sponsored for a green card, he/she is in a de facto sense in a state of ``indentured servitude'' for that five-year period, so the employer knows that the worker will be ``loyal,'' not suddenly leaving a project in the lurch by going to another firm. (An organization of H-1Bs from India, the Immigrant Support Network, www.isn.org, has arisen to lobby Congress to remedy the H-1Bs de facto indentured status.) This is of tremendous value to employers.

Note also that an employer who rents an H-1B from an agency avoids the fee a recruiter would charge in a regular hire, which is considerably more than $10,000.

The article is long, and just about every screenful is just as enlightening. It's not just about H1B's, but about age discrimination (at age 35!), race targetting, and common HR tactics to weed out the overexperienced.

Sobering.

There is an interesting essay by Dr Norman Matloff of the University of California at Davis called Debunking the myth of a desparate software labor shortage.

... how about hiring an "American" for the job! Replacing American workers with "indentured servants" who, for the most part, have no bargaining power, thus emasculating the capitalist motto of "free markets", put a downward spiral on wages and billing rates that a talented programmer can receive ...

Why are many of our best and brightest students in the U.S. opting for medical school or law school over a tech field? Well, one concern is the rate of compensation ... I have nothing against the importing of talented professionals - if they are given the same "rights" as me to switch jobs that would be O.K. ... but the current H1-B situation is unacceptable ...

As for the notion of a "shortage of programmers", I urge everyone to read Debunking the myth of a desperate labor shortage - and I can witness, first hand, the disposal of American programmers - many veteran programmers I have worked with have recently opted for (a) early retirement, (b) accepting a job at lower rate of pay or (c) choosing a different career line ... as they have been "replaced" for those of the H1-B visa variety ... Sure, if you are talented, and confident of your abilities, you will always find work - the issue is at what price - when the labor market is artificially hampered by a not so free labor supply ...

Perform this simple five-minute experiment:

Just call any firm which hires programmers-a large firm, a small one, new, old, any location-and talk to the HR Department. Ask them if it is true that they reject the vast majority of their programming applicants without even an interview. After they confirm this, ask them why they do this, and they will say that the vast majority of the applicants don't have some new software skill set the employer wants, even though the applicants have years of programming experience

Even the highly pro-business Wall Street Journal, in an article (January 8, 1998) which had claimed that H-1Bs do not adversely affect job opportunities for American programmers, stated that American firms recruit abroad because ``recruiting foreign talent is cheaper than hiring Americans,'' quoting an American recruiter of foreign programmers as saying that he pays them $20,000 to $25,000 less than Americans with the same skills.

Since people who cannot find programming work leave the field, unemployment statistics for programmers are meaningless. Twenty years after graduation from college, only 19% of computer science majors are still employed as programmers.

• The economy is good now, but it won't always be.
• The Internet gold rush is, for the most part, over. Your chances of making millions from stock options, after working only a couple years, are very slim. So take a long term view of your career.
• If you're interested in programming, understand this: the software industry is incredibly ageist. Unless you're exceptionally brilliant, you may be unable to find work as a programmer past the age of 40!

• Too old to write code? on USNews.
• Questioning the Labor Shortage , the New York times piece referred to in an earlier Slashdot article
• Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage, Dr. Norman Matloff's testimony to the House Subcommittee on Immigration

I think this is the natural extension of the "financial havens" with which most of us have at least a passing knowledge. I do not think that these principles are solely the refuge of those who are doing things that they know are "questionable", but they provide a way for those without enough power to usurp the draconian nature of the state without resorting to violence or sedition.

I haven't read thru all the comments yet, but just want to relay personal XP with the H-1B visa program - and the fraud being committed by American companies ...

First off, it is a bad thing for American workers - regardless of the "lip service" paid that there is a "labor shortage" - yada, yada, yada - it ain't true - fact is, it is about cheap labor - I have nothing against fellow brotherhood of programmers doing the best they can for themselves, but in reality, the majority of these "imported" programmers are merely indentured servants, with no control or power to switch jobs ... consequently, the notion of a "free labor market" is turned upside down ... and even if you are not affected directly, it has a downward effect on every programmer's wages and rates that they can bill out ...

The company I currently contract for (a large charge card processing company ... you can figure out which one ...) is committed to this form of "outsourcing" (or as one exec chided - it is "out-tasking", not outsourcing) - our facilities in the U.S. resemble New Delhi or Bombay ... and it is amazing how the company can be so hypocritical in its flaunting of the law - the H-1B visa workers are, to the letter of the law, only supposed to be used if "there is no American worker to fill the slot ..." - well, here is the trick - company A hires company B (which also may be a USA company, but is comprised of 80% H-1B visa programmer staff - see Syntel for a vivid example ... meanwhile, there are many talented programmers, allbeit older, that face blatant age discrimination, and either (1) go into another line of work or (2) accept lower wages ...

I urge everyone to give a read to someone who has investigated and analyzed this matter into detail - Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Labor Shortage by Dr. Matloff ...

Some points to ponder ...

• Employers flooded with resumes, but are extremely pickly - only 2% of applicants are granted interviews ...
• H1-B visa workers are primarily programmers - by a 15-1 ratio, not a lot of engineers, mostly programmers ...
• Age discrimination is rampant ... when you are over 35, a firm would rather hire someone cheaper than to use a "skilled, competent, experienced" programmer that has XP in platform A, language B, language C, but not platform D, language E ...
• Increasing CS enrollments blow the myth of "shortage" out of the water ...
• problems with the "prevailing wage"
• false claims of high legal fees

Sure, if you are good you will always have work - but it still has an effect on all as the wages/rates fall with the market ... I have no objection to importing of talented professionals - but make them citizens - give them the power of a "free labor market" - funny how companies cry for deregulation and free markets but when it comes to labor, it is a different story entirely ...

Dr. Norman Matloff's web site, giving a great deal of information and opinion on the matter, is here, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.rea l.html.

I work with M daily - all the things you talk about are inherent to old implementations. The newest implementations from Intersystems (called Cache) have none of these problems, include object additions, and they support Linux. There are two open-source or free implementation efforts: FreeM and Mumps V1.

For more information you can visit the M Technology web site.

You can build very large and very fast systems with M/Mumps, and I hope to see more implementations of the free kind.

The Veterans Administration created a package called VISTA on Mumps. The Indian Health Service (in which my employer is a participant) used the VISTA package to create their own specialized version of the software-- RPMS.

Based on ANSI-standard MUMPS, RPMS isn't a bad alternative. It has a complete patient management system (one of the best in the industry), a pharmacy package, a lab package which interfaces to most common lab equipment, scheduling, diabetes, a couple of third-part (read: non-free) billing package, and a great ad-hoc query tool.

The issue is finding a MUMPS (M) environment. All the good M vendors were gobbled up by Intersytems. They created a product called Cache.

Cache is available for Linux, though. And I understand RPMS has run on Cache. I think. Although you could probably get RPMS under the freedom of information act, and the source is available (which means it's a government-sponsered open-source project, essentially), Cache is rather expensive. But they do have a free Linux download.

There is a Free Software version of Mumps in the works. Although it is not ready to run RPMS or VISTA, it would be easier to get FreeM working for RPMS than it would to write a free medical package from scratch.

Anyway, that's my $.02.

Tony

... ship the systems overseas, or contract out to a "usa" based company that the majority of technical staff (80%) is comprised of h-1b visa indians ... insidious exploitment by company A that doesn't have to defend it's violation of "not hiring an american available" because company B that is doing the "outsource-ed" work acts as the shield ... my current work site resembles Bombay or New Delhi and the edict is to hire only these firms, while skilled veteran programmers are compelled to (a) retire early, (b) adopt a career change in a different line of business, or (c) accept a lower salary ... granted, most of my business xp has been as a long time mainframe hack, but it gonna happen soon in the pee cee weenie world too ...

look for china to be more than a bit player now that that trade agreement deal passed ...

let me say that i have nothing against fellow geeks and geekettes seizing gainful employment/contract opportunities, but when the acts are done (either outsourcing to foreign country, or "temporary" workers brought to usa ...) ... it affects the market rate for programmer salaries as those individuals either here or abroad often times are placed in the role of indentured servant, and not quite the capitalistic model of a "free" labor market ... for more information, facts and detailed research, read Dr. Norman Matloff's Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage ... funny how large corporate interests crow about free markets and deregulation when it comes to taxes, property rights, etc ... but when it comes to a free "labor" market, a different tune is heard ...

Instead of knocking out the cobwebs, I will give you the links that I learned from.
bezier patches

Bezier curves

Nurbs

What it boils down to is an easy way to store a curved data set. The display part is trickier... and that is where the acceleration would be nice.
If you had a curved object, you could break it into poly's and have all the triangle points stored in memory or you can have the control points (and the weights if used) stored in memory.

Obviously the math for the poly's are faster but the display isn't as smooth (Such as Quake 2). With bezier patches, the display takes more math but is smoother because you are representing curves and not lines.
When it is all said and done, the math isn't too bad, it is just additional math that needs to be done at 30+ fps.

First of all, I have been working on MicroMouse for the last two years, and one of the things I have been really been hunting around for is a microcontroller that has enough memory (both flash and RAM) as well as enough processing horsepower to do motor control, navigation, etc. We needed something with built-in serial interfaces, timers, interrupts, I/O ports, etc. because we wanted to make this thing as small as possible. I have looked at many different parts including PICs, the SX, various 80186 processors, the Hitachi H8 and SuperH, ARM, and many others that I'm not thinking of right now. The first thing I've learned about these devices is that the newest ones (and the ones we wanted to use) use either insanely small pin spacings (which requires a custom PCB) or they are of the BGA type (which requires a minimum 4-layer PCB with soldermask as well as special mounting equipment). We finally settled on the Hitachi H8S/2357 even though it was a 128 pin QFP with 0.5 mm pin spacing.

The things I don't like like about these newer, highly integrated processors are that they are more expensive, they tend to be a pain to mount, and chances are, you probably don't need that much processing capacity anyway. While our current versoin of the MicroMouse uses an H8 as the main processor, it also uses a couple of SXs to operate the sensor array. While these SOC's will certainly have a market, it will certainly not eliminate devices like PICs and other smaller microcontrollers from the industry.

I'm a computer security researcher. This is sort of a variation on one of the problems that I have been researching for a long time. There are several trust models which have been proposed, which handle part or all of this problem in different ways. Some of them are: The Biba trust model (multilevel, single domain) The Bell-Lapadula trust model (multilevel, single domain) The PEM certificate hierarchy (hierarchical trust domains requiring trust of a top level authority) The PGP/X.509 certificate web of trust (transitive application of trust relationships, which is more like what you were talking about). The Solar Trust Model (user-centric multilevel interpretive model with dynamicly generated trust relationships) I would suggest reading the paper on The Solar Trust Model. It goes into great depth on these issues, and suggests possible solutions.

I'm a computer security researcher. This is sort of a variation on one of the problems that I have been researching for a long time. There are several trust models which have been proposed, which handle part or all of this problem in different ways. Some of them are: The Biba trust model (multilevel, single domain) The Bell-Lapadula trust model (multilevel, single domain) The PEM certificate hierarchy (hierarchical trust domains requiring trust of a top level authority) The PGP/X.509 certificate web of trust (transitive application of trust relationships, which is more like what you were talking about). The Solar Trust Model (user-centric multilevel interpretive model with dynamicly generated trust relationships) I would suggest reading the paper on The Solar Trust Model. It goes into great depth on these issues, and suggests possible solutions.

Of course there is age discrimination in engineering-- especially in software engineering. This is a well documented fact.You can find an in-depth study here . Why would a company hire a very expensive, very experienced engineer when they can source the project to a consultancy (Andersen et. al.) which will simply human wave the problem with indentured H1-B visa employees? Even if the project management is really bad, the programmers totally demoralized, and the project majorly screwed up, they can usually produce something that pretends to work. For internet software, that's all you need.
According to the Programmer's Guild (PG), U.S. industry has already reached its quota of H1-B visas (a program that allows non-resident/non-greencard foreign nationals to work in the U.S. for 6 years). This, despite having last year doubled the size of the program to 115,000 visas annually.Because IT salaries are totally out of control now, having risen to a whopping $54,000, U.S. industry has put the full court press on congress to dramatically increase the quota or eliminate it altogether.Congress, responding appropriately to the huge campaign contributions from big biz, will most likely pass such an increase, according to the IEEE One particularly interesting point about the leading bill winding its way through the senate is the name: "American Competitiveness in the 21st Century act". I guess that congress does not think the current crop of American born programmers are very competitive.

I'd like to know what people here think. Will a million new "guest workers" in the next 5 years help the quality of U.S. software engineering, thus expanding the pie for everyone? Or will 1 million new indentured servants allow IT management to continue many of their screwed up practices because they know that engineering can't complain.

I started doing some research about the I.T. jobs shortage, and found that on the surface there was almost universal agreement that yes there was a shortage and anyone who could put their pants on the right way could get a job in software. Then I went a bit deeper, and came across the work of one Dr.Norman Matloff. In his presentation that went before the U.S. House Judiciary Comittee he argues very convincinly that the only shortage is of young and relatively cheap programmers who are willing to work insane hours. Industry heavy-weights lobby government to allow them to "import" more cheap labour from India, eastern europe etc. It seems that (for once) when the laws of supply and demand are stacked in favour of the prospective employee the prospective employers out there felt they had to get together and change the rules.

http://bastille-linux.sourceforge.net/

http://dwheeler.com/ secure-programs/Secure-Programs-HOWTO.html

http://i30www.ira.uka.de/SawMill/index. html

http://immunix.org/

http://medusa.fornax.sk/

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ob1/index.ht ml

http://soledad.cs.ucdavis.edu/

http://users.ox.ac.uk /~mbeattie/linux/ANNOUNCE.mac30-20000214

http://www.data.slu.se/bifrost/index.en .htm

http://www.guug.de/~winni/posix.1e/

http://www.lids.org/

http://www.rsbac.de/rsbac/

http:// www.securecomputing.com/archive/press/2000/nsa_faq _secure_linux.html

http://www.trinix.org

My partner and I are the people working on the Linux BSM. Our goal is to build a Solaris compatible auditing system that will be C2 compliant. Our page is at: http://soledad.cs.ucdavis.edu/
please cc any email to:
holmlund@cs.ucdavis.edu
banford@cs.ucdavis.edu
Jeremy Banford
Co-Chief BSM Monkey

The second project you may want to consider is that SGI is building an "orange book" Linux, with a goal of C2 by October, and B1 by next spring.

Note that this question was posted to Slashdot last year so you probably want to go check out the responses there.

Finally, while I'm here, I'll plug my own security-hardened Linux distro: Immunix. Immunix is not TCSEC compliant or anything like that. Rather, it is designed to be extremely difficult to break into, while preserving a high degree of Linux compatibility. Currently, it is just Red Hat hardened with StackGuard, but we will be releasing additional security technologies shortly.

Crispin
-------
CTO, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Free hardened Linux

The second project you may want to consider is that SGI is building an "orange book" Linux, with a goal of C2 by October, and B1 by next spring.

Note that this question was posted to Slashdot last year so you probably want to go check out the responses there.

Finally, while I'm here, I'll plug my own security-hardened Linux distro: Immunix. Immunix is not TCSEC compliant or anything like that. Rather, it is designed to be extremely difficult to break into, while preserving a high degree of Linux compatibility. Currently, it is just Red Hat hardened with StackGuard, but we will be releasing additional security technologies shortly.

Crispin
-------
CTO, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Free hardened Linux

However, politically... those of us who actually work in the industry rather than own it (realizing that some folks do both), have very little influence. Politically, we are all over the map with a general spirit of libertarian ethics with a distrust of the megacorporation ingrained into our psyche by personal expierence and cyberpunk literature we have been gobbling for the last two decades.

And, if we formed our own party in the single member-district system of the U.S (sorry, I know the rest of the world is more democratic with parlimentary systems) such would be a third party which would never gain any influence outside of local elections in California and the Pacific North West. We also, as workers, don't have the money to buy...er...lobby politicans. Easy example... if you and AOL/Time-Warner lobby congress about MP3s, who do you think is going to win?

No, fellow workers... we get paid so much because we have power. Power, untapped and unrealized. Middle-management was gutted through downsizing and our network connections have given rise to more "just-in-time" capitalism. Our skills , if you believe the Software Labor Shortage Myth are in such short supply that we can not train and import workers fast enough. Imagine if we can collectively come to agreements in which we decide what things we will work for and will not. Not only can we have influence over technology, but a host of other things that need geeks to be accomplished.

Our power is in action, not the ballot box. We can vote with our feet. We can strike (here is the source. We can slack and slow down. We can sick-in. We can boycott. We can Direct Action. We can be as Electornically Civilly Disobedient, and we can be... it works like we did with Low Power FM through an organized political campaign of radio piracy, we were able to sieze part of the spectrum from corporate monoplization for community interests. We can break mass media blackouts of information, by making our own media, like we did in Seattle, and like we'll do again in DC.

Are you tired of 60-hour work weeks? Of corporations making deals with politicans to undermine over-time pay and encourage permatemping? We don't have to be slaves.

Are you tired of technology developing that penalizes both the worker and the consumer, to the benfit of a handful of the rich and power... anybody remember the Java Class War? Where was our class in that? Complaining about how the standards needed to be independent of propietary control, and largely doing nothing about it! We need to take control of training and make it clear that it is those of us work in the industry that can figure out who knows what, rather than some profiteering third party or a way for leading software companies to gouge folks for certification!

We need non-profit employment services (or hiring halls) so we can dump our contracting companies (ie. pimps, job sharks, etc... ) once and for all.

We need to organize, and organize in a way that maintains our autonomy and democratic values. We don't need any union bosses, telling us what we can and can't do... but we do need to be in solidarity with our fellow workers so we can support each other in struggle. Who among you wouldn't strike to help the workers in hardware manufacture to get a better shake? Some more pay, a safer environment, etc... Who among you wouldn't refuse to work, if you knew by refusing for a short time you could bring in ecological sound practices. We can bring on the Viridian revolution, but innovation won't be enough... we have to force the issue and force companies to clean up their mess.

We have to become responsible, or we have noone to blame for how bad work is but ourselves.

Solid,

Flint

Baltimore IWW Telecommunications and Computer Workers IU560

(San Francisco, Toronto)

Also check out: Syndicat de l'Industrie Informatique, Washington Technical Workers Alliance, FACE Intel, Alliance@IBM, BITE Division of NWU (Business - Instructional - Techincal - Electronic).

We Can Win! No Nerds, No Birds!

Two simple reasons.

• IE5 cannot handle 100% html compliant gzipped postscript files. See this page from xxx.lanl.gov, which is the premier repository for preprints in mathematics and physics.
• ie5 isn't available for enough operating systems.

Yes, for browsing web pages in any of the Windows operating systems, ie5 is much better than Netscape 4.x. You'd be crazy to say otherwise. But, the way it is now, I have to close ie5 and open Netscape in order to view research papers. I know I can use ftp and gzip and a postscript viewer to do it, but it's easier with a browser, now that the preprint servers have nice front ends.

I know people say Mozilla is open source and therefore better. I agree, abstractly, but most people ain't gonna read it anyway. It does give a kind of confidence that nothing sneaky is going on (like personal information being tranmitted to web sites) and that is important to me. But when it comes to performance, the inability to handle gzipped postscript is absolutely unacceptable. I have heard of workarounds, but haven't been able to carry them out.

That's my honest opinion.

here. Whenever I need to check devices I usually do it via the command line w/ the UCD SNMP package. and i automate the checking of devices via shell scripts and just have it page me if things go wrong..

The ucd-snmp package can produce the information you're looking for. Someone else has already mentioned mrtg, etc, which can be used to create graphs of the data that you want to collect from the ucd-snmp snmp agent...

For those who just can't concieve of a 256 byte computer, read here

There is no desperate software labor shortage. This can be
seen in the low hiring rates and mild rates of increase in wages
in the industry.

The only ``shortage'' is one of cheap labor, especially in the
form of foreign nationals, who in their first few years in the U.S. make
on average 15-30% less than comparable natives.

Age discrimination is rampant in the industry. Younger
programmers with 3-7 years of experience who have the latest software
skills, may find themselves in high demand, but programmers in their
40s, most of whom lack those latest skills, have great difficulty
finding programming work.

The skills issue is central. Insincere employers use the skills
issue as a pretext for not hiring older programmers. Sincere employers
genuinely believe they need to hire a programmer with specific skills,
but they are misinformed, because any competent veteran programmer can
become productive in a new programming language in a couple of weeks on
the job.

Since software technology will continue to change extremely rapidly,
and since employers are not willing to hire a veteran programmer who
learns a new software skill via coursework, employers have set up a
system which guarantees that the claimed/perceived labor ``shortage''
will be permanent.

There is no shortage of computer science majors in U.S.
universities; on the contrary, enrollment has been skyrocketing.

The H-1B program for importing foreign-national programmers
is demonstrably broken. The number of visas granted has been rising
10 times faster than the growth rate in jobs.

Contrary to claims made by lobbyists, the vast majority of
H-1B computer professionals are ordinary people doing ordinary jobs,
not the ``best and the brightest.'' Typical H-1B salaries are in the
$40,000-50,000 range, hardly what one would expect ``geniuses'' to be paid.

The peer review process is, I think, very effective at picking out the good from the bad. Even if one wants to put all ones journals on the internet, you would still want peer review. Actually, the main reason is more self serving, in that you get a lot more credit for publishing in peer reviewed journals, and you need to publish if you want promotion, tenure, or salary raises.

That being said, the main problem with paper journals is that subscription costs are very high. Actually, in many cases a lot higher than one would think the costs are. There has been a lot of noise about this in the math community.

So switching to internet journals seems like a good idea. In fact, a several established journals are also putting their stuff on the internet, for example, the American Math Society, and those journals published by Springer Verlag. However, you still have to pay the subscription costs. (Springer Verlag's are particularly high.)

Recently, there have been new, internet only, journals. Two that I know of are The Electronic Journal of Probability, and The Electronic Journal of Differential Equations. But I know that there are a lot more. These still employ peer review to look at papers, and have the same standards as regular journals.

If you just want to put your paper on the internet for anyone to look at, there is the Mathematics Archive, which anyone can contribute to. (Actually, it is part of a much larger archive where there are physics papers, etc.) Many many mathematicians, including many prominant ones, put there papers there, as well as sending their papers to journals. This is really a preprint archive.

And of course, you can always make your own web page and put your papers there, just as I have at http://math.missouri.edu/~stephen/prep rints/. Actually, many mathematicians do this.

In the end, I think that this open source idea of publishing is important to reduce costs of publishing. But I don't think that we should get rid of peer review.

Sharing of signal/slot implementations would benifit KDE by removing the MOC preprocessor and improve the flexiblity of their signal/slots. GNOME will get the benifit that KDE libraries and applications will be less tied to Qt and thus more easily reused. Since libsigc++, the Gtk-- signal system, is a close translation of the capablities of gtk+ signal system, this should also reduce the burden of programmers trying to understand the two kits. For projects with multiple frontends, this would be a great help.

Unfortunately, this development is not set to be planned until after the summer when the KDE people start a developers cut of Qt. Assuming that people are interested I can give some directions as to how the translation can be made, but I don't have time to work on it heavily myself. (Preliminary specifications have already been sent to Mosfet.) I can mail more info to other interested programmers.

--Karl

Second, we have a large number of users so obviously it does stink all that much. The reason for writing free software is in general dissatisaction with what is currently available, something the first author was obviously expressing. Or because writting code is fun and enjoyable hobby, certainly that is my reason. Or perhaps that not everyone is going to stop using gtk+ tomorrow and some people would just as well use C++ with the gnome framework.

Personally, I find the Qt signal system to be poor compaired to what is possible. It lacks the flexibly of a full callback system and requires a code generator to parse the code. Both of which are definite drawbacks. And if you for some reason think that I don't know what I am talking about go visit my comparison between Qt's signal system and my own. Qt's system may be nice but one can do far better. (Of course one peice does not the whole make.) They can certainly turn arround tomorrow and use libsigc++ in Qt, of course that only proves my point that people should always be working on alternatives.

--Karl

If you feel that Gtk-- is immature and poor, why don't you stop by and help mature it. We are currently in a major overhaul mode which makes much of our code autogenerated (improving the maintainablity which is the downfall of so many wrappers.) We are reintegrating it with the recently released libsigc++ library, which is a very modern C++ callback frame. It can use a lot of grunt work converting over procedures and improving the code generator.

If you can't see that the underlying language that the code is written in is irrelevent (if though is given how to make wrappers easily), then I don't see what will convince you. By the way much of the berlin code I have looked at is wrappers on the C OpenGL API. So saying things that use C are inferior hits a lot more than you know.

--Karl Nelson

MRTG is kinda a bear to work with for monitoring stuff other than a router, but it can be done. For an example you can check out my suso.org stats page. Look on the left side.

My comparison is completely fair as I was comparing a signal/slot implementation with another signal/slot implementation from the Gtk--. Both have multi-callbacks. Both have signal concept. Gtk-- skips the slot concept, but any function can be used as a slot. One just happens to be 30 times faster. Since they do the exact same thing, I can definately say although Qt is a very nice library, it is not the most efficient C++ library out there.

For independent confirmation of what I have said please read this usenet post. That user found a 25 times difference between template based (gtk--) and string based (Qt) signal/slot implementations. We have improved since then.

But you are quite capable of testing it out for yourself. Grab my library, libsigc++. I think you will be surprised by exactly how much a callback system can do. Qt was only scratching the surface.

--Karl

My comparison is completely fair as I was comparing a signal/slot implementation with another signal/slot implementation from the Gtk--. Both have multi-callbacks. Both have signal concept. Gtk-- skips the slot concept, but any function can be used as a slot. One just happens to be 30 times faster. Since they do the exact same thing, I can definately say although Qt is a very nice library, it is not the most efficient C++ library out there.

For independent confirmation of what I have said please read this usenet post. That user found a 25 times difference between template based (gtk--) and string based (Qt) signal/slot implementations. We have improved since then.

But you are quite capable of testing it out for yourself. Grab my library, libsigc++. I think you will be surprised by exactly how much a callback system can do. Qt was only scratching the surface.

--Karl

Don't get your hopes up to see this any time soon. Mollers been working on it for 30 years...

Cheers

ps. Moller International is a company that many of us (the aeronautical engineering grad students here in Davis) poke fun at.

I know that I was bagged at high school for being geeky, but who cares? Do other people opinions _really_ make that much difference to how you think about yourself? I certinaly didn't give myself an ulcer over it.

There's more involved than simply being unpopular. As a kid, I was bullied and beat up; I can remember being literally spit on by other boys. My family was often a target of minor vandalism. There were times I was afraid to leave the house because I might get into a fight. (I'm doing much better now; besides being a reasonably successful hacker (in the Jargon File sense), I hold a nidan (second degree black belt) in karate. Nobody bothers me B->; and I teach a lot of kids, some of whom have a bit of the geek in them.)

The Voice article just doesn't get it. We're not talking about being unpopular, about not getting a date for the dance; we're talking about being physically and mentally abused.

So what if these geeks are mostly white suburbaners? I'm reminded of Repo Man:

Duke: The lights are growing dim. I know a life of crime led me to this sorry fate. And yet I...I blame society. Society made me what I am.

Otto: That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me.

Duke: But it still...hurts....

Geeks may not be experiencing the level of oppression undergone by various racial and religious groups.

But it still hurts.