If there really is a labor shortage than we should pay a premium in salary to recruit and retain these workers. Instead what is happening is that we're paying less salary for these workers on average. Sure there are some great people that are recruited from overseas. But these numbers are not being raised in order to recruit more of the best but to just get more.
But that is the sort of thinking you get from the free market true believer.
Spend some time in these countries and it's not long before you see a wage disparity far greater than in the US, the haves are literally stepping over the have nots. They absolutely need to fix things up over there rather than for us to voluntarily give up our jobs as charity (or have congress give away our jobs in our behalf).
What is happening is that we are also artificially lowering the labor cost by importing workers from developing countries to do the jobs for which we already have qualified workers.
Work and charity can be kept separate. I'm not going to voluntarily relinquish my job just so that some worker from a poorer country can have it. Similarly I don't think people are going to stop feeding their own childrenso that they can invite poor children to the dinner table instead. Everyone looks after their own first and foremost, that's very natural.
The big problem here is that companies are LYING when they fill out paperwork to say that there are no resident workers able to do these jobs. We all know the numbers are being raised to get cheap labor, it's an open secret with a lot of nudging and winking going on. It's the sheer hypocrisy of it all that's so infuriating, the insulting of American workers by claiming they don't have the necessary skills when in reality they're just trying to cut wages.
What it looks like from the 3rd world, from the labor broker perspective, is that America is being governed by amazing idiots so let's try to exploit it.
The problem is not necessarily foreign workers, but foreign workers that we don't actually need. Corporations are lying through their teeth when they say they can't find local workers to do the same work here. These are not all foreign workers showing up to do advanced R&D, most of them are doing very basic grunt work much of the time only they do it a lot cheaper. These are basic mainstream jobs, but the rationale being used to push this is that these are highly specialized jobs that are so arcane and rare that we need to import an additional 195,000 of them or else the economy will collapse.
If it really is so very difficult to find American workers then one would logically expect the corporations to pay MORE than the prevailing wage in an attempt to find these amazing workers. Everything would be fine I think if the person next to you who's entering data into ActiveDirectory is paid double your salary because there was no one anywhere in the country who is skilled enough to do that job. But that's not at all what happens. Congress is not raising the numbers because there are so many above average workers who are so good that we're willing to pay a premium in salary to recruit, they're raising the numbers because on average they'll be cheaper than local workers.
Of course there are exceptions. But foreign workers should be the cream of the crop, above average, for jobs requiring actual skills that are proven to be in short supply, and paid at *least* the average prevailing wage and benefits. There should be severe penalties for any company which falsely states that they can not find workers already within the country who are able to do these jobs.
Many of those H1-B workers however are also here through technical fudging of the documentation - not strictly illegal but definitely a lot of cheating going on when someone signs on the dotted line that they couldn't find a single tech worker locally who could do the low skilled computer work. Yes, many of these jobs are for basic entry level IT support jobs, I'm happy to have immigrants come here for the high skilled jobs requiring lots of experience, but do we really need to import people who only do things like install Windows or infest web pages with Javascript?
A lot of systems are going with a traditional general purpose CPU for the control system, but DSP CPUs for the hard core or time critical calculations. DSPs already have a lot of SIMD features.
What's interesting is that DSPs are also adding more and more general purpose capabilities.
8 bit was not the most popular back then. And 64 bit is not the most popular today. This may be true back then if you consider only the newly created microcomputer segment, and it may be true today if you consider only the PC & Mac segment.
When 8 bit CPUs were new and thus few in number we had lots of computers already with 16 bits and more. The 8 bit CPUs were primarily used by hobbyists at the time, or as support for larger computers.
Today the x86-64 is not the most common chip, because the majority of chips out there are on embedded systems rather than PCs and Macs. Count up all those phones which probably have more than one CPU on them, the CPU controllling your fuel system in the car, the CPU in your microwave, television, router, etc. The most common word width for embedded systems are 16 and 32 bits, and I think even 8 bit embedded systems out number the 64 bit ones.
The article does not feel like it's been written by a junior high school student, I agree. But it does feel like it's written by an undergraduate student in the middle of the curve.
You can have a memory bus interfaces a wider than 64 bits. This has nothing to do with word size or address space size, but the fact that reading and writing more bits at once is a big speed increase. Ie, DIMM memory with a 64 bit interface (more if you count ECC) was common long before there were 64-bit PCs.
There are also floating point representations in common use with 80 bits, and a 128 bit format is in use but less common.
It's not that we're all crotchety though. But these articles are like going to a history class where you're taught that everything before 1960 isn't relevant, so just assume that JFK was the first president. There a monoculture out there with the PC, but it's not a representative of the state of the art, in the past or the present. It's not the most common chip, it's not the best designed chip, it's not a good chip for learning architecture with, there's nothing much to recommend it for except that it's compatible with Windows and Mac OS and the volume chipped makes it relatively inexpensive.
If you don't learn history you're doomed to repeat it.
There is some interesting stuff. But it mostly boils down to ways to optimize code. The older chips may have had the idea for something but didn't implement it due to the enormous cost. Sometimes it's handy to have just a couple of instructions to help out rather than add a giant feature; is in having no floating point or multiplication (early RISC machines) but having an instruction to find first or last bit set which makes the software library to do this much faster.
There are instructions to help out cryptography, which I don't think any computer in the 60s was concerned enough about to devote expensive hardware to it. Instructions to support atomic operations even within a multiprocessor environment is present in many modern CPUs too, whereas in the past if there were multiprocessors there would usually be some round-about way to do this. As processors got more complex with out of order execution and delayed writes, there was a need for instructions to synchronize operations, such as the "EIEIO" instruction on the PowerPC. Possibly some of this was present on early supercomputers but today these are present in mainstream processors.
True. The one article linked is every specifically x86 oriented (all hail to the monoculture). There really are far far too many people out there still who act as if microcomputers were the beginning of computer history.
Trampoline can mean many things. Often it's used to switch some context in between function calls, so in a sense a system call can be seen as a trampoline between the application and the kernel,
Mmm, it made sense to me, but then I work at low levels of code. I do find it somewhat strange though that the criticism is basically that it's too nerdy. I'm quite happy to see more nerd postings and fewer Dice fluff. Stories that go over the heads of the masses is what Slashdot should be about.
This is nothing new, there have been articles with absolutely impenetrable jargon and ideas before when discussing high level web oriented stuff or scripting, but since so many readers these days work in such areas that they don't complain. So I have to look up what jquery is, it's not a problem, so others who call themselves nerds should be content to look up with W^X means.
Einstein was a huge celebrity though. What I think is interesting is how society decides who is or isn't the celebrity. Sure, Einstein was a genius with groundbreaking theory, but then so were many of his peers. What about the other Nobel prize winners? Ok, those who didn't live in America weren't going to be easy for be famous to Americans, or elsewhere in the world if not on the movie reels; some cooperated with the Nazis; some were on top secret projects; etc. But overall it's like American decided that it needed one and only one celebrity genius. The finger of fate is fickle.
Hawking though probably would never be a celebrity if he was able bodied. The overcoming adversity aspect I think is what makes the public interested. The general public hasn't even heard of the prizes he's won.
Some of these are like other celebrities, they're famous because they're already famous. Ie, why do people know who Hawking is? Because he appeared on ST:TNG and Big Bang Theory, but why did he appear on those shows except that he was already famous.. Why did Tyson get the Cosmos spot, because he was already well known.
Except that I like Windows 8 and 8.1 better than Windows 7 in many ways, if ignoring the metro stuff. It takes less memory and feels faster on the same machine. I like the task manager better. I like the flat UI look better than aero. The explorer window is half slightly better and half slightly worse. The backup of course is crap, but every windows release has screwed up by having yet another incompatible backup. I like having a thin task bar without the round Windows 7 logo popping up taller than the task bar.
Of course there are things screwed up too in other places. Like always they removed some customization features (can't change window border width without using registry for example). But overall I like it, and I'm not a microsoft fan by any means.
But you rarely needed those shortcuts. The most commonly used applications were either on the desktop, were pinned, or had popped to the stop of the start menu. It was relatively rare to use the start menu to go searching for the infrequently used stuff. The snag though is that when you do need to go looking for that stuff the start menu made it easy, whereas typing the name to search for something wasn't going to work if you couldn't remember the name.
The point of a good UI is that it should be highly usable to both the novice and the power user. The power user will learn the shortcuts, the novice however won't know they exist. So the start menu may have been unnecessary to many power users but it was absolutely essential to the novices.
I have a coworker with a Windows phone, and he loves it, and he's certainly no fan of Microsoft. I can see why too, because the tile interface is pretty good on a phone. iOS is stuck with the uniformly sized icons which I never liked, and Android improves on that with gadgets but not enough of them which can be configured well. Whereas the live tiles just work well; if you like one of them you make it a bigger rectangle so that it's easier to see and make the less frequently used tiles smaller, etc.
I don't buy extra apps, only an occasional free one, and I do need a new phone, so... But I'm certain there's a lot of ugly stuff behind the scenes, even uglier than the Google and Apple stuff that's behind the scenes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm crazy 'bout a Mercury.
I think it's an imposter. This article was only about 1200 words long. The True Bennet Hasselton would have made it longer.
If there really is a labor shortage than we should pay a premium in salary to recruit and retain these workers. Instead what is happening is that we're paying less salary for these workers on average. Sure there are some great people that are recruited from overseas. But these numbers are not being raised in order to recruit more of the best but to just get more.
But that is the sort of thinking you get from the free market true believer.
Spend some time in these countries and it's not long before you see a wage disparity far greater than in the US, the haves are literally stepping over the have nots. They absolutely need to fix things up over there rather than for us to voluntarily give up our jobs as charity (or have congress give away our jobs in our behalf).
What is happening is that we are also artificially lowering the labor cost by importing workers from developing countries to do the jobs for which we already have qualified workers.
Work and charity can be kept separate. I'm not going to voluntarily relinquish my job just so that some worker from a poorer country can have it. Similarly I don't think people are going to stop feeding their own childrenso that they can invite poor children to the dinner table instead. Everyone looks after their own first and foremost, that's very natural.
The big problem here is that companies are LYING when they fill out paperwork to say that there are no resident workers able to do these jobs. We all know the numbers are being raised to get cheap labor, it's an open secret with a lot of nudging and winking going on. It's the sheer hypocrisy of it all that's so infuriating, the insulting of American workers by claiming they don't have the necessary skills when in reality they're just trying to cut wages.
What it looks like from the 3rd world, from the labor broker perspective, is that America is being governed by amazing idiots so let's try to exploit it.
The problem is not necessarily foreign workers, but foreign workers that we don't actually need. Corporations are lying through their teeth when they say they can't find local workers to do the same work here. These are not all foreign workers showing up to do advanced R&D, most of them are doing very basic grunt work much of the time only they do it a lot cheaper. These are basic mainstream jobs, but the rationale being used to push this is that these are highly specialized jobs that are so arcane and rare that we need to import an additional 195,000 of them or else the economy will collapse.
If it really is so very difficult to find American workers then one would logically expect the corporations to pay MORE than the prevailing wage in an attempt to find these amazing workers. Everything would be fine I think if the person next to you who's entering data into ActiveDirectory is paid double your salary because there was no one anywhere in the country who is skilled enough to do that job. But that's not at all what happens. Congress is not raising the numbers because there are so many above average workers who are so good that we're willing to pay a premium in salary to recruit, they're raising the numbers because on average they'll be cheaper than local workers.
Of course there are exceptions. But foreign workers should be the cream of the crop, above average, for jobs requiring actual skills that are proven to be in short supply, and paid at *least* the average prevailing wage and benefits. There should be severe penalties for any company which falsely states that they can not find workers already within the country who are able to do these jobs.
Many of those H1-B workers however are also here through technical fudging of the documentation - not strictly illegal but definitely a lot of cheating going on when someone signs on the dotted line that they couldn't find a single tech worker locally who could do the low skilled computer work. Yes, many of these jobs are for basic entry level IT support jobs, I'm happy to have immigrants come here for the high skilled jobs requiring lots of experience, but do we really need to import people who only do things like install Windows or infest web pages with Javascript?
Wait, where can I sign up for this free healthcare?
They'd first need to add a Quake game emulator to SystemD to make it complete.
Yes, but I said in my comment that I just don't use a lot of apps. A browser, a mail reader, and a map maybe if I get lost.
A lot of systems are going with a traditional general purpose CPU for the control system, but DSP CPUs for the hard core or time critical calculations. DSPs already have a lot of SIMD features.
What's interesting is that DSPs are also adding more and more general purpose capabilities.
8 bit was not the most popular back then. And 64 bit is not the most popular today. This may be true back then if you consider only the newly created microcomputer segment, and it may be true today if you consider only the PC & Mac segment.
When 8 bit CPUs were new and thus few in number we had lots of computers already with 16 bits and more. The 8 bit CPUs were primarily used by hobbyists at the time, or as support for larger computers.
Today the x86-64 is not the most common chip, because the majority of chips out there are on embedded systems rather than PCs and Macs. Count up all those phones which probably have more than one CPU on them, the CPU controllling your fuel system in the car, the CPU in your microwave, television, router, etc. The most common word width for embedded systems are 16 and 32 bits, and I think even 8 bit embedded systems out number the 64 bit ones.
The article does not feel like it's been written by a junior high school student, I agree. But it does feel like it's written by an undergraduate student in the middle of the curve.
You can have a memory bus interfaces a wider than 64 bits. This has nothing to do with word size or address space size, but the fact that reading and writing more bits at once is a big speed increase. Ie, DIMM memory with a 64 bit interface (more if you count ECC) was common long before there were 64-bit PCs.
There are also floating point representations in common use with 80 bits, and a 128 bit format is in use but less common.
It's not that we're all crotchety though. But these articles are like going to a history class where you're taught that everything before 1960 isn't relevant, so just assume that JFK was the first president. There a monoculture out there with the PC, but it's not a representative of the state of the art, in the past or the present. It's not the most common chip, it's not the best designed chip, it's not a good chip for learning architecture with, there's nothing much to recommend it for except that it's compatible with Windows and Mac OS and the volume chipped makes it relatively inexpensive.
If you don't learn history you're doomed to repeat it.
There is some interesting stuff. But it mostly boils down to ways to optimize code. The older chips may have had the idea for something but didn't implement it due to the enormous cost. Sometimes it's handy to have just a couple of instructions to help out rather than add a giant feature; is in having no floating point or multiplication (early RISC machines) but having an instruction to find first or last bit set which makes the software library to do this much faster.
There are instructions to help out cryptography, which I don't think any computer in the 60s was concerned enough about to devote expensive hardware to it. Instructions to support atomic operations even within a multiprocessor environment is present in many modern CPUs too, whereas in the past if there were multiprocessors there would usually be some round-about way to do this. As processors got more complex with out of order execution and delayed writes, there was a need for instructions to synchronize operations, such as the "EIEIO" instruction on the PowerPC. Possibly some of this was present on early supercomputers but today these are present in mainstream processors.
True. The one article linked is every specifically x86 oriented (all hail to the monoculture). There really are far far too many people out there still who act as if microcomputers were the beginning of computer history.
Hmm, haven't kept up on Linux, but on most embedded systems I've worked with the read-only data is lumped together in the text (executable) section.
Trampoline can mean many things. Often it's used to switch some context in between function calls, so in a sense a system call can be seen as a trampoline between the application and the kernel,
Mmm, it made sense to me, but then I work at low levels of code. I do find it somewhat strange though that the criticism is basically that it's too nerdy. I'm quite happy to see more nerd postings and fewer Dice fluff. Stories that go over the heads of the masses is what Slashdot should be about.
This is nothing new, there have been articles with absolutely impenetrable jargon and ideas before when discussing high level web oriented stuff or scripting, but since so many readers these days work in such areas that they don't complain. So I have to look up what jquery is, it's not a problem, so others who call themselves nerds should be content to look up with W^X means.
Acorns: slingshot fuel
Blackberries: yummy things with nasty stickers
Minnows: Gilligan fish
Einstein was a huge celebrity though. What I think is interesting is how society decides who is or isn't the celebrity. Sure, Einstein was a genius with groundbreaking theory, but then so were many of his peers. What about the other Nobel prize winners? Ok, those who didn't live in America weren't going to be easy for be famous to Americans, or elsewhere in the world if not on the movie reels; some cooperated with the Nazis; some were on top secret projects; etc. But overall it's like American decided that it needed one and only one celebrity genius. The finger of fate is fickle.
Hawking though probably would never be a celebrity if he was able bodied. The overcoming adversity aspect I think is what makes the public interested. The general public hasn't even heard of the prizes he's won.
Some of these are like other celebrities, they're famous because they're already famous. Ie, why do people know who Hawking is? Because he appeared on ST:TNG and Big Bang Theory, but why did he appear on those shows except that he was already famous.. Why did Tyson get the Cosmos spot, because he was already well known.
Except that I like Windows 8 and 8.1 better than Windows 7 in many ways, if ignoring the metro stuff. It takes less memory and feels faster on the same machine. I like the task manager better. I like the flat UI look better than aero. The explorer window is half slightly better and half slightly worse. The backup of course is crap, but every windows release has screwed up by having yet another incompatible backup. I like having a thin task bar without the round Windows 7 logo popping up taller than the task bar.
Of course there are things screwed up too in other places. Like always they removed some customization features (can't change window border width without using registry for example). But overall I like it, and I'm not a microsoft fan by any means.
But you rarely needed those shortcuts. The most commonly used applications were either on the desktop, were pinned, or had popped to the stop of the start menu. It was relatively rare to use the start menu to go searching for the infrequently used stuff. The snag though is that when you do need to go looking for that stuff the start menu made it easy, whereas typing the name to search for something wasn't going to work if you couldn't remember the name.
The point of a good UI is that it should be highly usable to both the novice and the power user. The power user will learn the shortcuts, the novice however won't know they exist. So the start menu may have been unnecessary to many power users but it was absolutely essential to the novices.
I have a coworker with a Windows phone, and he loves it, and he's certainly no fan of Microsoft. I can see why too, because the tile interface is pretty good on a phone. iOS is stuck with the uniformly sized icons which I never liked, and Android improves on that with gadgets but not enough of them which can be configured well. Whereas the live tiles just work well; if you like one of them you make it a bigger rectangle so that it's easier to see and make the less frequently used tiles smaller, etc.
I don't buy extra apps, only an occasional free one, and I do need a new phone, so... But I'm certain there's a lot of ugly stuff behind the scenes, even uglier than the Google and Apple stuff that's behind the scenes.
That's like saying Ebola is OK but it's the debilitating pain and high chance of death that annoys me.
What which does not kill you makes you as weak as a kitten.