I got my case a year and some ago from L.L. Bean's big store in Maine. I was worried about it not being armored like the rest of the 'me too' leather cases (like the Targus ones), but I haven't had any problems in over a year of heavy road warrior duty.
The thing that really attracted me to this case was it didn't scream 'laptop', so you're not as much of a target for airport thieves. It's got lots of storage room too; I carry my laptop, an extra battery, a power adapter, several CDs and three fat O'Reilly books and still have plenty of room.
While H-1B visa holders and other technology workers certainly aren't the only ones waiting for approval, perhaps the situation could be improved by instituting a requirement for H-1B applicants to contribute their skills to improve the process
Now, I understand that some of the issues have nothing to do with pushing paper and everything to do with government workers nearing a pension and 'passing time', as it were. Consider, though, the impact having someone like a Linus Torvalds working on streamlining the process could have.
Having worked with a fair number of government agencies, I can say that there is a marked lack of technological ability within your average Federal department. Most notable are the archaic systems of redemption and approval of things like applications and requests, in large part because no worthwhile systems of automation and reduction of redundancy are in place. A decent team of hackers could cut out a lot of fat (and time) in a pretty short period. Harnessing the talents of those requesting naturalization in this context makes perfect sense to me
Of course, this assumes the INS would be smart enough to tap those resources to fix the problem, instead of doing things because they've 'always been done this way'.
Putting aside the (flamebait) arguments that Perl is or is not a good first language, I've seen several people turn to other languages that were less appropriate for their needs (like sysadmins) because of the lack of a good beginner book for Perl
Until now, it's been relatively easy to find books on C, C++, Java, etc for the non-programmer, but Perl has historically been supported by tomes that double as reference manuals, which are not really the best for first-time language instruction
Even the excellent Llama book (Learning Perl) assumes some familiarity with the use of logic and simple programming concepts (like variables). This makes it doubly difficult for a newcomer who wants to harness the text-processing power of Perl but quickly becomes lost in its (admittedly unique) syntax.
I'm glad to see a better entry point to perl for the programming newbie. Maybe now the c.l.p.m. s/n ratio will improve
I think most would agree that while English remains the de-facto language of technology, a great need for locale support exists.
Many disciplines benefit from contributors who do not speak or read English. Mathematics comes immediately to mind; a significant portion of development in pure mathematic research stems from Russian speaking scientists. I'd hate to think how many advances would be lost to that community if support for that paticular locale wasn't widely available.
Open Source software definitely provides the best avenue for international support - reference the support of the Finnish government for Linux for educational use over Windows due to Microsoft's unwillingness to provide them with the proper langauge support.
Providing non-English speaking developers the power to support their local language is a prime reason for the power and popularity of Open Source. Diversity is often a Good Thing(TM). Open Source empowers that diversity in a big way.
While holding a monopoly is not illegal, using that monopoly advantage to discourage (to put it euphemistically) competition through unfair business practice is.
(Insert ObMSvsDOJref here)
To prove AOL guilty of that, you would have to be able to prove that the behavior encountered after installing their upgrade was coded with the intent of making it difficult to impossible to engage in trade with an AOL competitor (like switching ISPs).
How likely do you think it is that anybody would be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the problems caused by the upgrade were not bugs?
Cue coder-playing-stupid-for-the-media: "Oops! guess we shouldn't have replaced all of those DLLs with ours. That will be fixed in the next release."
The speed of Linux development renders most of these sort of contests invalid before they hit the street in any case. Anyone with a modicum of coding knowledge could tune the Linux TCP stack and SMP threading to smoke NT in those trials (and much has been done since 5.2 toward that end). You just cannot say that about NT (and not be a flaming liar, anyway).
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I got my case a year and some ago from L.L. Bean's big store in Maine. I was worried about it not being armored like the rest of the 'me too' leather cases (like the Targus ones), but I haven't had any problems in over a year of heavy road warrior duty.
The thing that really attracted me to this case was it didn't scream 'laptop', so you're not as much of a target for airport thieves. It's got lots of storage room too; I carry my laptop, an extra battery, a power adapter, several CDs and three fat O'Reilly books and still have plenty of room.
While H-1B visa holders and other technology workers certainly aren't the only ones waiting for approval, perhaps the situation could be improved by instituting a requirement for H-1B applicants to contribute their skills to improve the process
Now, I understand that some of the issues have nothing to do with pushing paper and everything to do with government workers nearing a pension and 'passing time', as it were. Consider, though, the impact having someone like a Linus Torvalds working on streamlining the process could have.
Having worked with a fair number of government agencies, I can say that there is a marked lack of technological ability within your average Federal department. Most notable are the archaic systems of redemption and approval of things like applications and requests, in large part because no worthwhile systems of automation and reduction of redundancy are in place. A decent team of hackers could cut out a lot of fat (and time) in a pretty short period. Harnessing the talents of those requesting naturalization in this context makes perfect sense to me
Of course, this assumes the INS would be smart enough to tap those resources to fix the problem, instead of doing things because they've 'always been done this way'.
Putting aside the (flamebait) arguments that Perl is or is not a good first language, I've seen several people turn to other languages that were less appropriate for their needs (like sysadmins) because of the lack of a good beginner book for Perl
Until now, it's been relatively easy to find books on C, C++, Java, etc for the non-programmer, but Perl has historically been supported by tomes that double as reference manuals, which are not really the best for first-time language instruction
Even the excellent Llama book (Learning Perl) assumes some familiarity with the use of logic and simple programming concepts (like variables). This makes it doubly difficult for a newcomer who wants to harness the text-processing power of Perl but quickly becomes lost in its (admittedly unique) syntax.
I'm glad to see a better entry point to perl for the programming newbie. Maybe now the c.l.p.m. s/n ratio will improve
I think most would agree that while English remains the de-facto language of technology, a great need for locale support exists.
Many disciplines benefit from contributors who do not speak or read English. Mathematics comes immediately to mind; a significant portion of development in pure mathematic research stems from Russian speaking scientists. I'd hate to think how many advances would be lost to that community if support for that paticular locale wasn't widely available.
Open Source software definitely provides the best avenue for international support - reference the support of the Finnish government for Linux for educational use over Windows due to Microsoft's unwillingness to provide them with the proper langauge support.
Providing non-English speaking developers the power to support their local language is a prime reason for the power and popularity of Open Source. Diversity is often a Good Thing(TM). Open Source empowers that diversity in a big way.
While holding a monopoly is not illegal, using that monopoly advantage to discourage (to put it euphemistically) competition through unfair business practice is.
(Insert ObMSvsDOJref here)
To prove AOL guilty of that, you would have to be able to prove that the behavior encountered after installing their upgrade was coded with the intent of making it difficult to impossible to engage in trade with an AOL competitor (like switching ISPs).
How likely do you think it is that anybody would be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the problems caused by the upgrade were not bugs?
Cue coder-playing-stupid-for-the-media: "Oops! guess we shouldn't have replaced all of those DLLs with ours. That will be fixed in the next release."
The speed of Linux development renders most of these sort of contests invalid before they hit the street in any case. Anyone with a modicum of coding knowledge could tune the Linux TCP stack and SMP threading to smoke NT in those trials (and much has been done since 5.2 toward that end). You just cannot say that about NT (and not be a flaming liar, anyway).