I'd have to agree that the H1B program should be eliminated. It's a training ground for folks who return to their home countries & become the competition.
In addition, the immigration system needs to be overhauled. We do get get a benefit from the influx of bright people with new ideas, but the present system makes immigrants indentured servents for 5 years.
In the past, people who could contibute to building this country could come here, stay, and enter the workforce on an equal footing (yes, there are issues such as language). They didn't have to worry that they'd be deported if they left their job. They could contribute to this country to the best of their abilities.
The only thing that has changed is that we don't need as many strong backs, we need strong minds. The selection process needs to be changed. Letting companies select folks willing to work as indentured servents for 5 years assures that the brightest people, the ones this country needs the most, will not come.
Bandwidth is shared among the connected users. Sharing is based primarily on the number of users, with a necessary secondary limitation being the limitation of the user's equipment.
It sounds like a fair way to share a limited resource. Is this a result of a concsious design decision?
By the time the road is complete there are populations shifts in anticipation of the road's completion. People move to neighborhoods that are now more desirable because better access is on its way. Buildings are renovated or new condos/apartments get put in. Areas that had been filled with people who used public transportation are now filled with folks who are affluent enough to have cars. By the time the new roads/lanes are carrying traffic they have too little capacity for the increased population.
This falls within the experimental aircraft catagory. This includes just about any aircraft that didn't come off of an assembly line including one-of-a-kind or kit-built aircraft as well as aircraft not designed for commercial use like warbirds.
These aircraft are subjected to thorough inspection by certified mechanics and FAA inspectors during their construction or restoration. In addition, owners of this type of aircraft tend to be more knowledgable than your average privat pilot. The result is that aircraft certificated (it's an FAA term, not a typo) as experimental aircraft have an excellent safety record. You can fly them anywhere any other private aircraft may be flown.
I see lots of comparisons to other drive technologies, but is that the competition? With better conenctivity (e.g. mobile/wireless net access, WiFi islands, DSL in hotels) do I really need portable storage? If I can connect to my fixed storage from nearly anywhere, why do I need to carry yet another piece of hardware?
In case of nuclear war information becomes more important, though the type of information needed changes. How to prevent contamination & decontaminate food, water, air and people. Later you'd neeed to know what plants to grow, when to plant, how to fertalize naturally, hunting & gathering skills, food preservation. Information will become truly invaluable because it'll be the diffference between life & death.
Restoring communications & computer networks would go a long way towards helping the survivors. We'd need to share this information, since it is spread thinly across most of modern society. Envision a slashdot cobbled together from bits & pieces of remaining infrastructure, with folks trading information about tilling the soil, reloading ammo, making black powder, traps & snares, skinning game, tanning hides?
All these posts about the need to educate yourself, to keep on the leading edge of technology. That may be true for the long haul, but in the near term the projects that use that technology are being downsized, eliminated completely, or delayed. There just isn't the cash flow to support them, and since the VCs aren't supplying the dollars monetary support must come from continuing operations.
Where you want to be for now is on a mature or maturing project with positive & preferably increasing cash flow -- not last decade's technology but last year's. Maintain the code, fix the bugs, add features, help customers, support sales & marketing and you'll still have a job when times get better and then you can make use of your new skills.
Sometimes recruiter stupidity works for you, sometimes against you.
Recruiters, in general, only know a few buzzwords. They're a filter, and not a very good one. I got my first job out of college because a recruiter saw APL on my resume, and insisted it must be APPL. APPL was a buzzword on his list, a proprietary language for the Staran MPP (talk about obsolete skills!), a language known by only 15-20 people.
It got me an interview with somebody who really was qualified to decide if I should be hired.
Does it take a bit of time to input data. At first, then I got familiar with the handwriting recognition and it takes no more time than scribbling a note on a scrap of paper. Unlike paper I now get an alarm, and the data gets synced to my workstation.
I introduced my wife to one -- she's always been a highly organized person -- and it was amazing what she does with it.
The people that don't think it's worth the time? I've observed that there are two kinds that really can do without: those that are already organized that don't see a great advantage to learning a new method; and those few whose boring lives are so predictably mundane & repeatable that they have nothing to organize. Then there's the other type that think they don't need it -- they're the folks that are late for everything, wasting the valuable time of other people when they aren't ready or forget.
It just takes a tiny bit of effort at the beginning. Even a tool as simple as a hammer has a learning curve!
Vancouver didn't get the surpises thrown at them that Seattle did.
IIRC from the time I lived near Seattle (in the 80s):
There has been a big change in people's lifestyles in the Seattle area. At one time there was only one big employer -- Boeing -- who had major facilities to the north and to the south of the city. If somebody's Boeing job changed to another location they moved to be near work. An economic downturn & a slump in the housing market made it difficult to sell your home at a reasonable price, so people commutted through the city instead of moving closer to work. People who worked in the city tended to live there.
The change was rapid. Miles travelled throug the city soared dramatically, way out of proportion to the poulation increase. If I remember correctly, a period of 15% population growth saw traffic through the city more than double. I think the local government was caught offguard, had to take action rapidly, so added highways and an excellent bus system.
This was followed by an influx of computer companies -- like Microsoft. This brought a large population increase, primarily from the high tech areas of Silicon Valley. these folks had a different attitude about driving & building. They built homes in areas that were once thought unbuildable -- cliffs & bluffs -- changing the traffic patterns through the city yet again, and increasing the miles driven through the city all out of proportion to the population increases.
Again, a rapid and unanticipated increase in population and a cultural change in the population that increased use of cars. Bus service was expanded, more HOV lanes...
Actually, the transition to 3G services is easier & cheaper if you're starting from CDMA than if you're starting from GSM.
GSM is, after all, a TDMA standard, and 3G is CDMA.
Also, IMHO, the fact that providers in the US are switching to GSM means that they don't plan on ubiquitous 3G anytime soon. Phone companies use hardware until it crumbles into dust, so the GSM systems will be in use somewhere for a long long time. Many of those providers are still using their old TDMA & analog systems. They have a second network, selling no-frills service under a different name, or in areas that ccan only support the older service. The hardware is already off the boooks, so the added service is cheap.
This is illegal in a number of countries. The result is that you buy your hardware from the guy who has the best price for what you want... and then you shop around among the service providers to find the best price for the features you are interested in.
So I'm not the only one who thinks this is strange! I'd rather have a seperate phone, PDA, and camera rather than one product that does a mediocre job of all 3 functions.
When my boss saw my Zaurus he asked if it had a camera & cell phone. I told him no... and it didn't wipe my ass either.
135% is way too little. That'd be about the cost of your salary and benefits (not top of the line bennies at that!).
The average cost of supporting an employee in a small to medium sized technical organization is US$200,000 a year. If you take this job on you will be bookkeeper, billing, collections, secretary... all of the functions that are performed for you by somebody else in a corporation. You need to spend time marketing yourself, training so you stay up-to-date. You may be paying taxes that your employer would have payed if you were an employee. You'll also have higher costs for insurance, as you won't be part of a large group. You also will need liability insurance, or will be taking on this risk yourself which is still a "cost".
135% means you're working for less than you were as an employee. 150% might be break-even, 175-200% is realistic.
Depending, of course, by how badly you neeed the work. Several years ago engineers I worked with were getting laid off and then contracting for 75% of what they had made on salary. I moved!
You don't have to learn to drive just to get an ID. Most states have an ID card available. In many states it is a driver's license with a limitation listed stating that it is not to be used for driving.
Social Security cards do not work as identification. They are required to get a job but you must also supply proof of right to work (e.g. proof of citizenship, valid visa), and you also must supply your employer with proof of your identity. So in addition to the social security card you need one or two other documents.
Can a Florida cop check an Alaskan's drivers license? Yes. Almost all cops have access to a database that verifies the validity of the information. Many better equipped forces have cars equipped with terminals that'll return the address, photo, and other pertinent data. Others radio the info in to the dispacher who retrieves the data.
You say you are pretty sure your government does not track your habits. Much of the resistance against a national ID card in the US is that most folks want to be more than pretty sure, they want to be damn sure.
The Aegis example was just that -- an example. So you use an optical sensor instead or RADAR.
Yes, new solutions also generate new problems -- engineering is tradeoffs -- but the post wasn't about Intro Engineering 101.
Yes, you have a boresighting problem in both cases. It exists in just about every targetting application known to man starting with throwing a rock at a rabbit.
Yes, war sucks, people get hurt, sometimes the wrong people. The best weapon to build is the one so damn good that nobody will fuck with you & you don't have to use it -- oh yea, we tried that, several times, I hope we survive.
Yes, you must lead the target by a bit because of the motion of the target, assuming they were moving across your field of view, in 3d it is somewhat more complex. This is a portion of the first part of the problem.
I was considering the two parts to be calculating corrections due to the target's behaviour (part 1) and corrections due to your own weapon's behaviour (part 2).
What you don't have to do is also raise the muzzle of your gun to compensate for your rounds' drop between you & the target. They also have a parabolic path, assuming an unguided round. The LASER is straight line, for all intents, so this second compensation is not necessary.
In actuality, the LASER is rather fast. Since your round is moving at the speed of light, you might be able to neglect the motion of the target -- it's so slow WRT c that it may be neglected.
A daunting task, but one that has been solved by systems such as Aegis. Presently, systems must track an incoming threat which may either be an umguided weapon traveling in an arc such as a mortar round, a guided but unpowered weapon such as a bomb that uses fins to alter it's ground course as it drops, or a powerred guided weapon such as a missile which can turn in any direction at any time.
Present systems not only have to aquire the target, catagorize the target, determine the best weapon to use in response. Then there's the same problem with the weapon you use to retaliate -- it also doesn't travel in a straight line so you must compensate not only for the threat's non-straight-line behaviour but also your own countering weapon's non-straight-line behaviour.
Is you use the LASER, the second half of the problem goes away!
BTW: Aegis solves the problem in a manner that is elegent or brute force, depending on your point of view. It uses an electronically steered RADAR to track incoming targets, shoot a gattling gun in the direction of the target, then tracks both the incoming target & the outgoing rounds, uses this data to modify the direction the guns are pointed. Elegent in the simplicity of its concept, brute force due to the fact it applies massive processing power to allow it to track an enormous number of targets.
The moustache protector looks familiar. My father used to have one. It was issued to him when he was "requested" to join the German Army as it rolled through Hungary at the end of WW2.
The company commander sported a goatee & a long moustache. He made the facial hair a part of the uniform for his men. Troops had to keep the moustaches trained, they had to have the proper upward curve, and protected at night. To accomplish this, they were all given a moustache protector that they were required to wear at night. They were taught during basic training to tie it just right to achieve the proper look.
When my father got back home after the war, he threw his uniform, boots & everything else into the river. Somehow the moustache protector survived, travelling from Germany to Czechoslavakia where he barely survived an ambush, a POW camp in Poland, back home to Hungary, to East Germany, West Germany, and finally to the US.
I signed on to a very small privately held company several years ago. It had survived a number of years, reinventing itself as necessary. A good place to work, interesting engineering, good relationship with customers & suppliers. It was fun.
Then we went public, lots of money burned, but the product didn't fly high, and the grey-haired managers showed up. The VCs & large institutional investors that now controlled the company brought in management to wring as much money out of the company as possible. Since we weren't a high flyer the large investors didn't care about keeping us alive anymore, they just wanted as much money as possible extracted from it.
By this point I had bailed, I didn't like the way things were going. As fate would have it, I jumped from the frying pan into the fire, but that's another story.
It survived for a few more years. Pieces of the company were spun off & sold off. The large investors had gotten a sweet deal on stock, but had to hold it for a several years. A few months after they could legally sell it I noticed the company's stock skyrocket -- then drop.... for 3 days it rachetted up on low volume then dropped on high volume. Several times the outstanding share volume changed hands over those few days.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had a flexible moral compass then I'd be a manager ... or maybe even a CEO by now.
Corporations are virtual people!
I'd have to agree that the H1B program should be eliminated. It's a training ground for folks who return to their home countries & become the competition.
In addition, the immigration system needs to be overhauled. We do get get a benefit from the influx of bright people with new ideas, but the present system makes immigrants indentured servents for 5 years.
In the past, people who could contibute to building this country could come here, stay, and enter the workforce on an equal footing (yes, there are issues such as language). They didn't have to worry that they'd be deported if they left their job. They could contribute to this country to the best of their abilities.
The only thing that has changed is that we don't need as many strong backs, we need strong minds. The selection process needs to be changed. Letting companies select folks willing to work as indentured servents for 5 years assures that the brightest people, the ones this country needs the most, will not come.
It sounds like a fair way to share a limited resource. Is this a result of a concsious design decision?
By the time the road is complete there are populations shifts in anticipation of the road's completion. People move to neighborhoods that are now more desirable because better access is on its way. Buildings are renovated or new condos/apartments get put in. Areas that had been filled with people who used public transportation are now filled with folks who are affluent enough to have cars. By the time the new roads/lanes are carrying traffic they have too little capacity for the increased population.
... but who wants to ski on yellow or brown snow, no matter how germ-free it is?
The Experimental Aircraft Asscociation is a group of people interested in these types of aircraft. There's a large airshow hosted by them in Osh Kosh.
These aircraft are subjected to thorough inspection by certified mechanics and FAA inspectors during their construction or restoration. In addition, owners of this type of aircraft tend to be more knowledgable than your average privat pilot. The result is that aircraft certificated (it's an FAA term, not a typo) as experimental aircraft have an excellent safety record. You can fly them anywhere any other private aircraft may be flown.
I see lots of comparisons to other drive technologies, but is that the competition? With better conenctivity (e.g. mobile/wireless net access, WiFi islands, DSL in hotels) do I really need portable storage? If I can connect to my fixed storage from nearly anywhere, why do I need to carry yet another piece of hardware?
Restoring communications & computer networks would go a long way towards helping the survivors. We'd need to share this information, since it is spread thinly across most of modern society. Envision a slashdot cobbled together from bits & pieces of remaining infrastructure, with folks trading information about tilling the soil, reloading ammo, making black powder, traps & snares, skinning game, tanning hides?
Where you want to be for now is on a mature or maturing project with positive & preferably increasing cash flow -- not last decade's technology but last year's. Maintain the code, fix the bugs, add features, help customers, support sales & marketing and you'll still have a job when times get better and then you can make use of your new skills.
Recruiters, in general, only know a few buzzwords. They're a filter, and not a very good one. I got my first job out of college because a recruiter saw APL on my resume, and insisted it must be APPL. APPL was a buzzword on his list, a proprietary language for the Staran MPP (talk about obsolete skills!), a language known by only 15-20 people.
It got me an interview with somebody who really was qualified to decide if I should be hired.
Does it take a bit of time to input data. At first, then I got familiar with the handwriting recognition and it takes no more time than scribbling a note on a scrap of paper. Unlike paper I now get an alarm, and the data gets synced to my workstation.
I introduced my wife to one -- she's always been a highly organized person -- and it was amazing what she does with it.
The people that don't think it's worth the time? I've observed that there are two kinds that really can do without: those that are already organized that don't see a great advantage to learning a new method; and those few whose boring lives are so predictably mundane & repeatable that they have nothing to organize. Then there's the other type that think they don't need it -- they're the folks that are late for everything, wasting the valuable time of other people when they aren't ready or forget.
It just takes a tiny bit of effort at the beginning. Even a tool as simple as a hammer has a learning curve!
IIRC from the time I lived near Seattle (in the 80s):
There has been a big change in people's lifestyles in the Seattle area. At one time there was only one big employer -- Boeing -- who had major facilities to the north and to the south of the city. If somebody's Boeing job changed to another location they moved to be near work. An economic downturn & a slump in the housing market made it difficult to sell your home at a reasonable price, so people commutted through the city instead of moving closer to work. People who worked in the city tended to live there.
The change was rapid. Miles travelled throug the city soared dramatically, way out of proportion to the poulation increase. If I remember correctly, a period of 15% population growth saw traffic through the city more than double. I think the local government was caught offguard, had to take action rapidly, so added highways and an excellent bus system.
This was followed by an influx of computer companies -- like Microsoft. This brought a large population increase, primarily from the high tech areas of Silicon Valley. these folks had a different attitude about driving & building. They built homes in areas that were once thought unbuildable -- cliffs & bluffs -- changing the traffic patterns through the city yet again, and increasing the miles driven through the city all out of proportion to the population increases.
Again, a rapid and unanticipated increase in population and a cultural change in the population that increased use of cars. Bus service was expanded, more HOV lanes ...
Also, IMHO, the fact that providers in the US are switching to GSM means that they don't plan on ubiquitous 3G anytime soon. Phone companies use hardware until it crumbles into dust, so the GSM systems will be in use somewhere for a long long time. Many of those providers are still using their old TDMA & analog systems. They have a second network, selling no-frills service under a different name, or in areas that ccan only support the older service. The hardware is already off the boooks, so the added service is cheap.
This is illegal in a number of countries. The result is that you buy your hardware from the guy who has the best price for what you want ... and then you shop around among the service providers to find the best price for the features you are interested in.
When my boss saw my Zaurus he asked if it had a camera & cell phone. I told him no ... and it didn't wipe my ass either.
The average cost of supporting an employee in a small to medium sized technical organization is US$200,000 a year. If you take this job on you will be bookkeeper, billing, collections, secretary ... all of the functions that are performed for you by somebody else in a corporation. You need to spend time marketing yourself, training so you stay up-to-date. You may be paying taxes that your employer would have payed if you were an employee. You'll also have higher costs for insurance, as you won't be part of a large group. You also will need liability insurance, or will be taking on this risk yourself which is still a "cost".
135% means you're working for less than you were as an employee. 150% might be break-even, 175-200% is realistic.
Depending, of course, by how badly you neeed the work. Several years ago engineers I worked with were getting laid off and then contracting for 75% of what they had made on salary. I moved!
You don't have to learn to drive just to get an ID. Most states have an ID card available. In many states it is a driver's license with a limitation listed stating that it is not to be used for driving.
Social Security cards do not work as identification. They are required to get a job but you must also supply proof of right to work (e.g. proof of citizenship, valid visa), and you also must supply your employer with proof of your identity. So in addition to the social security card you need one or two other documents.
Can a Florida cop check an Alaskan's drivers license? Yes. Almost all cops have access to a database that verifies the validity of the information. Many better equipped forces have cars equipped with terminals that'll return the address, photo, and other pertinent data. Others radio the info in to the dispacher who retrieves the data.
You say you are pretty sure your government does not track your habits. Much of the resistance against a national ID card in the US is that most folks want to be more than pretty sure, they want to be damn sure.
The Aegis example was just that -- an example. So you use an optical sensor instead or RADAR.
Yes, new solutions also generate new problems -- engineering is tradeoffs -- but the post wasn't about Intro Engineering 101.
Yes, you have a boresighting problem in both cases. It exists in just about every targetting application known to man starting with throwing a rock at a rabbit.
Yes, war sucks, people get hurt, sometimes the wrong people. The best weapon to build is the one so damn good that nobody will fuck with you & you don't have to use it -- oh yea, we tried that, several times, I hope we survive.
I was considering the two parts to be calculating corrections due to the target's behaviour (part 1) and corrections due to your own weapon's behaviour (part 2).
What you don't have to do is also raise the muzzle of your gun to compensate for your rounds' drop between you & the target. They also have a parabolic path, assuming an unguided round. The LASER is straight line, for all intents, so this second compensation is not necessary.
In actuality, the LASER is rather fast. Since your round is moving at the speed of light, you might be able to neglect the motion of the target -- it's so slow WRT c that it may be neglected.
Present systems not only have to aquire the target, catagorize the target, determine the best weapon to use in response. Then there's the same problem with the weapon you use to retaliate -- it also doesn't travel in a straight line so you must compensate not only for the threat's non-straight-line behaviour but also your own countering weapon's non-straight-line behaviour.
Is you use the LASER, the second half of the problem goes away!
BTW: Aegis solves the problem in a manner that is elegent or brute force, depending on your point of view. It uses an electronically steered RADAR to track incoming targets, shoot a gattling gun in the direction of the target, then tracks both the incoming target & the outgoing rounds, uses this data to modify the direction the guns are pointed. Elegent in the simplicity of its concept, brute force due to the fact it applies massive processing power to allow it to track an enormous number of targets.
The company commander sported a goatee & a long moustache. He made the facial hair a part of the uniform for his men. Troops had to keep the moustaches trained, they had to have the proper upward curve, and protected at night. To accomplish this, they were all given a moustache protector that they were required to wear at night. They were taught during basic training to tie it just right to achieve the proper look.
When my father got back home after the war, he threw his uniform, boots & everything else into the river. Somehow the moustache protector survived, travelling from Germany to Czechoslavakia where he barely survived an ambush, a POW camp in Poland, back home to Hungary, to East Germany, West Germany, and finally to the US.
Then we went public, lots of money burned, but the product didn't fly high, and the grey-haired managers showed up. The VCs & large institutional investors that now controlled the company brought in management to wring as much money out of the company as possible. Since we weren't a high flyer the large investors didn't care about keeping us alive anymore, they just wanted as much money as possible extracted from it.
By this point I had bailed, I didn't like the way things were going. As fate would have it, I jumped from the frying pan into the fire, but that's another story.
It survived for a few more years. Pieces of the company were spun off & sold off. The large investors had gotten a sweet deal on stock, but had to hold it for a several years. A few months after they could legally sell it I noticed the company's stock skyrocket -- then drop .... for 3 days it rachetted up on low volume then dropped on high volume. Several times the outstanding share volume changed hands over those few days.
By the end of that year the company was dissolved
Not when it's executing in memory. I've yet to see RAM with clusters.
There is an optional "Pekee Expert Programming Kit" with these features:
* Reprogram the Pekee motherboard's Mitsubishi micro-controller
* Programming card
* Serial cable
* Flash application (updates, direct access to M16C)
* Mitsubishi M16 compiler (4 month evaluation version)
Though I found nothing that says you get source code or documentation about interfacing to the hardware.
Anybody up to porting a linux kernel? You have 4 months to get it done!