...and those high quality Nike shoes were made in a [put your favorite asian country here] for $1.20 USD in a child-labor sweatshop. So any high-quality sweatshop in a underdeveloped country can make good shoes, why then pay Nike 60 bucks for something you could actually get for 5? Because of Nike trademark? That's a pathetic joke.
Given the famous six degrees, you have "some suspected link" to Al-Qaeda, American government, the LHC construction team, some defunct communist party, the Cosa Nostra, any of the Bildenberg conspirators and the Bush Family. All at the same time. So "somewhere" you are pretty suspicious of "something" that can lead to your arrest. In some instances you can simply be detained without warrant or legal representation, kept isolated in an island for any of your links. You have been warned. Go back to your closet.
No client? Where have you been hiding the last year? Have you checked Evolution 2.X? It has mail, calendar and addressbook support for Groupwise, while limited, you can bet it's going to fulfill every GW user needs: wouldn't make sense to sponsor Evo development and not support its own server. GAIM already has GWIM support Red-Carpet already works as a Zenworks for Linux. There's iFolder support.
Whoever leaked the original code now is irrelevant, the consequences are far more bigger than just the leakage itself. FBI and every law enforcement or intelligence agency around the world should be *very* concerned about who is downloading _now_. Why? Let's be prepared now for Windows AQ (Al Qaeda), right from Redmond and a terrorist near you. Given enough code, spyes, terrorists or even corporations (or that jealous cousin you know), can remake core components in Windows and redistribute in order to sniff, crack or destroy whatever they want in Windows computers. This is a far bigger menace than many so toutted terror threats. How will you differenciate a legitimate Windows version from a cracked one, pressed in legitimate looking CDs? No way. Also, component substitution can come in any product that simply substitutes critical Windows files. It will perform the normal functions with whichever 'bonus' the cracker wants. On the other side, on FS, diff is your friend if you're really paranoid about what's running on your computer.
I'm from a developing country: We don't mind about performance, but price.
You can't complain about performance if you *never* touch a PC, right? You can't have a reference frame when you can't simply use a computer.
I need pretty much the same hardware to run Win 2000/Office/MS Development tools, and still pay a few thousand bucks to MS if I want to perform any other action than play solitaire (is solitaire still in XP?). And it's that or use pirated versions...
For being productive as a developer in Windows you need:
- Office Suite: $400 - Programming Suite (VS.NET) $1,000 - Server/Server Edition (at least HTTP server): $650. - Probably a non-toy DB (SQL Server + 5 licences): $1,200
So even 1 GB RAM (About $100 here), a fast processor and a LICENSED distro become peanuts against those licensing prices and I still need decent hardware.
I make a living using an old PII@350 MHz / 256 MB RAM with all of aforementioned software and have some hacking, business and leisure for less than I'd pay for a *single* MS application by only adding RAM and a non-sucking video card.
Performance is a small price tag where a decent programmer hourly rate is around $3. Anyway we can brew some coffee while OOO opens or have time off when compiling Nautilus and still be on the cheap side.
So, no... we don't mind if *anything* is slow on GNOME.
America has a long history of moving operations to sweatshops abroad as soon as American labor becomes too expansive. There are examples enough to make this clear (Mexican maquiladoras for electronic parts/appliances, Central American and Asian apparel industry) where minimum wages are 1/4 to 1/10 of an American wage. There are even some high speciality services both in Mexico and Asian countries where you can get high quality health care for a fraction of the American price.
Don't even dream of "High Quality Education" as a mean to keep labor at home: overseas workers are at least as qualified Americans: a good hacker is a good hacker anywhere. America is simply too expensive. America has been hiding a high inflation rate derived from continuously increasing earnings in wages and salaries by keeping reasonable prices on goods -and achieving this by moving manufacturing and now services abroad, and getting more and more Free Trade agreements with any country who has cheap and reasonably qualified labor. So forget about any probable tariff to mostly anything... and please, please, how do you apply tariffs on a service? Will you close all telecommuting roads? Will you place Customs on Internet hubs? Yeah, right...
It seems sad/funny to me that in the end Free Enterprise behaves a lot as communism: new jobs moving to poor countries will increase life quality of those abroad while impovershing formerly "wealthy" Americans, -seen with poor country eyes- and all in the name of better corporate earnings. The only imaginable remedy is to be a corporate czar somehow (Wow, same as Communist Party leaders, yeeeehaw)... other possible thing to happen is to force other countries to have equivalent wages on professional areas (I can't imagine how, tho, high local taxes in poor countries, maybe?)
This is a long time trend where I can't see any reasonable end for America. You simply CAN'T compete with non-american wages. As a corporation you CAN'T afford a balance sheet with a big payroll when you can get it cheaper, because stockholders will ask for your head... so no way!
To me, being abroad now, this is an opportunity for a decent life, and really, really it saddens me to think of my American colleagues having the same hard time most of my local colleagues have had for a long while now.
Just one year before DMCA was approved, Mexican congress approved a law, that is, paragraph by paragraph, DMCA. So yeah, wait a while and see your own modification to DMCA.
People complained about H1B, now jobs are going abroad with NO control at all. How Americans will compete against same professional-level people that work at 80% discount?
Don't mince words. Please quote when I said idiots. By any means, whatever you want to say, it looks to me that MySQL is a very poor choice as a dbms: an overkill for single user, few table apps and too small for real day to day robust applications.
>BTW, I know some systems that still run dBASE databases - and they are working fine and do what they are expected to do.
After 20 years working with virtually every DBMS in the market I'd simply discarded MySQL in favor of Postgres. MySQL is to Open Software what Access 1.0 was to closed Software. Sorry to say that. Lame, lame "database" that ignores everything except CREATE, UPDATE, INSERT or DELETE. [where]... No joins, no views, no foreign keys, no subqueries, no stored procedures, no transactions, no row locking, no dirty reads, no REAL gain in speed. I don't know what some MySQL supporters call an "application", but I'd really like to see MySQL trying to run a real production environment with a few hundred (oh, preferably around a thousand) concurrent users in a highly transactional environment, using a hundred-table database. Yeah, right. Go ahead. I know people that also tried with dbase III / Clipper on DOS. Some of them even survived.
I've been working with it since early nineties, and my older son began to read on screen before than on paper.
He's now 13. A quote from him, six months ago:
"Internet is no longer carried out by intelligent people. Now it looks too much like TV".
Mexican copyright law was approved in 1996 has very specific entries like:
"
104. The copyright holder of a computing program has the right to authorize or forbid...
V. Decompile, reverse engineering a computer program, or disassembly."
112. Its forbiden to import, fabricate, distribute and use devices or services destinated to circumvent technical protections of computer programs, electromagnetic spectrum transmissions, telecommunication networks and programs of electronic devices as stated in the previous article" (Previous article is about 'Electronic programs that contain visual, sound, 3D or animation elements')
"
Thats sounds pretty much like DMCA. It seems that most media companies experimented first South of the border before lobbyig US Congress.
I can bet that Ford would be succesfull(as it certainly was, just take
a look at any so-called freeway) even if there were no patents at all.
Ford's process succesfuly was copied all over world, and it didn't mean anything but cars for averyone... he had a good cheap product, as opposite to MS.
You have choices when buying cars, from Geos to Ferraris, all made with very similar processes.
MS (future) business model is based on renting. Can you imagine if all cars around the world were rented instad of ownend?
Can you imagine a world where al cars were unsafe at any speed because you could only buy Fords?
You have to think about earthquakes and volcanos: Alaska is not very friendly about that. Winter storms aren't precisely friendly.
Whoever has this plan, also has a very romantic idea of Alaska.
I think there are better places in North Russia, Norway, or Canada.
For one side, Mr. Markof lacks credibility (due to the bunch of lies when
he wrote about Mitnick/Shimomura), but most of the article is related to
M$.
Why should MS act in a different way? It's impossible for a company
like it. Its business model relies precisely on keeping proprietary
as much code as it can.
So the GPL in particular and Open Source in general endangers that
business model. That's no news.
What is really dangerous is to simply say that "potentially undermines
the intellectual property of countries and companies". Thats
simply BS (begining with a simple question: Since when MS cares about companies
or countries? They care for themselves): I'm sure that soon you'll see
a lot of ads comparing Open Source to the worst communism you can think
of. And, of course Open Source is not.
Open Source enriches the common intellectual property for every
company and country that uses it: as more source is available, the knowledge
increases -and then intellectual property does too. The same way
William Shakespeare or Beethoven were paid for their works and now they
are part of the world's intellectual wealth. I'm sure we'll se some
Open Source 'classics'.
When you move, as MS is doing, towards renting software,
the chance of owning it (and from the very source!) endangers
MS, but becomes more attractive to consumers. OS is then a threat for MS
future business. And ownership (altough limited by GPL) is the very base
of capitalism. What really endangers countries and companies is to
depend on a single black box (just think what could happen if Redmond were
wiped by a volcano).
What Open Source does is to create different business models, based
more in services than in ownership of something as intangible as software,
What really surprises me is that if I discover a government agengy spiying me without a warrant, I could sue the hell out of them, however, if a company does the same I can't do anything.
This sounds exactly as the DIVX, so I think the market will decide on it.
It's a idea so stupid as marketing boomboxes without a tape recorder (or with a tape player, with no 'record' button).
I suppose there are some in the market: cheaper, of course.
Anyway, a hardware layer must have a software layer in order to work: it won't take to much time before someone finds a very simple hack to make it work.
Will each and every storage device in the market support this? Of course not! You'll always have the choice of 'old' devices (that *must* be supported for a long while) so even if you can't record in your brand new PC, you still have a chance of using that old box in the attic. Or brand new devices not intended for end user.
But there's something to do: educate consumers in such a way that they really know what they purchase. Create awareness exactly in the same way that people became aware of that silly trap that DivX was.
Have you Americans ever been aware that if Franklin, Jefferson or any other of your founding fathers were alive today, they would be under continuous surveilance from NSA, FBI and who knows who else? And worst: for a good reason.
Those guys were, you guess it, revolutionaires. With clear ideas about freedom, call it freedom of speech, to innovate or from tyrans.
Do you imagine George Washington being lobbied by RIAA, Microsoft or any other company? Can you imagine his response to those guys?
Do you imagine Jackson taking bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H donations from interest groups?
Wake up!
If they were alive, they'd die again of sadness, just looking what America is now.
It's quite amazing the amount of xenophobia I see whenever./ deals with this particular subject. And I don't refer to morons at -1, but a lot of "Insightful" and "Informative" comments.
I've been working almost 2 years with an American company that complies with Law. From the very first day I arrived I could see my wage posted where any co-worker could complain if it was too low. And if that's the case with some companies, why is nobody filing a complain? If no gringo at all complains... well that's not Congress problem, foreign worker problem, but simply american worker problem. I mean: if your rights are being violated and you don't complain whose problem is?
Phrases like "cheap labor", "foreigners don't understand their rights", "indentured servants", "slaves from Asia"... Please! That reads more as a Goebbels' speech than true concern. It's insulting for skilled and professional people.
I have exactly the same benefits, I have never been abused or exploited in any sense. I have no doubt that there may be some companies that behave poorly, but in these 2 years and a lot of projects I've never seen that neither at my company or at our client's sites. At least for me, it sounds like xenophobic lies.
You never are deported "Instantly" as someone says. You have 90 days to get a new sponsor... if anyone takes more than 90 days to find a new job in America, that person must have a serious problem and deserves to be deported. Period.
The argument about mainframers reconverted to Client/Server or Internet developers is also a lie. It takes quite a lot of effort just to teach them how to use a mouse, not to say anything about TCP/IP, perl, HTML or RDBMS. Early retirement is always an option.
And there's a collateral effect on H1B visas: IT jobs abroad have started to be better payed, since if foreign companies want to keep at least someone to shut down the servers when everybody leaves, they have to pay more.
And a final point: in the Internet era, is quite simple to mount an offshore facility, pay 1/10 of the same salary that even an underpaid foreign worker receives and then really use "cheap slaves" and take jobs abroad. By avoiding this nasty competence, H1B program makes more sense than most people use to see.
Of course that will run on Unix. Most large databases do and only a few clueless DBAs run that kind of DBs on NT.
I'm sure they'll run also on Linux x86, but I'd be concerned about I/O... and other architectures like IBM or Sun can handle that in better ways (and, oh yes, you can still use Linux there).
American Corporate Employee doesn't mean *Universal*. This is self-centrical and absurd. Universal would mean than any (put here any really poor country) family has a computer, a communications device (ie. a phone) and health, food, literacy, etc. enough to connect to Internet. It's really hard to press keys when you're starving, isn't it?
Sigh. Sometimes I become desperate when I realise that even for some cultured Americans the Universe is USA...
Now it happens that Americans have to hide their speech in other countries. I never dreamed I live long enough to see that.
It's funny that most of you Americans think about your liberties as granted, your freedom as a matter of fact and then, as a first reaction, look for assylum in other countries.
You have a judiciary system that allows you to challenge that, so Fight, otherwise just sit down trying to get your first post or pour hot grits down your pants, thank you.
Guy: Excuse me sir... Where's Eighteenth National Bank?
Joe Linker: (Pointing with finger) Right over there. They are an excellent bank, highly recommended...
Guy: Thank you, sir.
Five minutes later, the bank is robbed.
Deep Linking:
Guy: Excuse me sir... Where's Eighteenth National Bank?
Joe Linker: Next corner. And watch out: there's a guard who carries both a automatic.45 gun and a shotgun. He lunches at 12:08 everyday, and finishes at 12:32 and is sleepy after that. Now its 12:12. There are four cameras but cashier #5 is not well covered and images are blurry. There's the automatic alarm if cashier takes out all the money. Money arrives Mondays (today!) at 10:30. They've been robbed twice in the last 3 months so everyone is scared as hell... it can be robbed any day.
Guy: Thank you, sir.
Bank is robbed at 12:34:30
Copyright infringement:
Guy: Excuse me sir... Where's Eighteenth National Bank?
Joe Linker: Open that door, give me that shotgun and let's take all fsking the money from there, it's a piece of cake.
Guy: C'mon buddy!
Bank is robbed at 12:33:32
I think that ruling on deep linking should be based on intention of linker. Freedom of speech doesn't mean taking others work for profit and that's what tickets.com did.
If your friends forgot you, your enemies never will.
Slashdot Mirror
The world should simply accepte that there's a new Master and no longer is called USA.
...and those high quality Nike shoes were made in a [put your favorite asian country here] for $1.20 USD in a child-labor sweatshop. So any high-quality sweatshop in a underdeveloped country can make good shoes, why then pay Nike 60 bucks for something you could actually get for 5? Because of Nike trademark? That's a pathetic joke.
Given the famous six degrees, you have "some suspected link" to Al-Qaeda, American government, the LHC construction team, some defunct communist party, the Cosa Nostra, any of the Bildenberg conspirators and the Bush Family. All at the same time.
So "somewhere" you are pretty suspicious of "something" that can lead to your arrest. In some instances you can simply be detained without warrant or legal representation, kept isolated in an island for any of your links.
You have been warned. Go back to your closet.
I once tried to install Novell Linux Desktop on a 128 MB P6 Celeron and the installer refused to do it. It asked for 256 MB RAM.
No client? Where have you been hiding the last year?
Have you checked Evolution 2.X?
It has mail, calendar and addressbook support for Groupwise, while limited, you can bet it's going to fulfill every GW user needs: wouldn't make sense to sponsor Evo development and not support its own server.
GAIM already has GWIM support
Red-Carpet already works as a Zenworks for Linux.
There's iFolder support.
Am I missing something? Did I understand wrong?
Whoever leaked the original code now is irrelevant, the consequences are far more bigger than just the leakage itself. FBI and every law enforcement or intelligence agency around the world should be *very* concerned about who is downloading _now_.
Why?
Let's be prepared now for Windows AQ (Al Qaeda), right from Redmond and a terrorist near you. Given enough code, spyes, terrorists or even corporations (or that jealous cousin you know), can remake core components in Windows and redistribute in order to sniff, crack or destroy whatever they want in Windows computers. This is a far bigger menace than many so toutted terror threats.
How will you differenciate a legitimate Windows version from a cracked one, pressed in legitimate looking CDs? No way.
Also, component substitution can come in any product that simply substitutes critical Windows files. It will perform the normal functions with whichever 'bonus' the cracker wants.
On the other side, on FS, diff is your friend if you're really paranoid about what's running on your computer.
I'm from a developing country: We don't mind about performance, but price.
.NET) $1,000
You can't complain about performance if you *never* touch a PC, right? You can't have a reference frame when you can't simply use a computer.
I need pretty much the same hardware to run Win 2000/Office/MS Development tools, and still pay a few thousand bucks to MS if I want to perform any other action than play solitaire (is solitaire still in XP?). And it's that or use pirated versions...
For being productive as a developer in Windows you need:
- Office Suite: $400
- Programming Suite (VS
- Server/Server Edition (at least HTTP server): $650.
- Probably a non-toy DB (SQL Server + 5 licences): $1,200
So even 1 GB RAM (About $100 here), a fast processor and a LICENSED distro become peanuts against those licensing prices and I still need decent hardware.
I make a living using an old PII@350 MHz / 256 MB RAM with all of aforementioned software and have some hacking, business and leisure for less than I'd pay for a *single* MS application by only adding RAM and a non-sucking video card.
Performance is a small price tag where a decent programmer hourly rate is around $3. Anyway we can brew some coffee while OOO opens or have time off when compiling Nautilus and still be on the cheap side.
So, no... we don't mind if *anything* is slow on GNOME.
Sadly you have to think both in
a) Final consumer
b) Corporate earnings.
America has a long history of moving operations to sweatshops abroad as soon as American labor becomes too expansive. There are examples enough to make this clear (Mexican maquiladoras for electronic parts/appliances, Central American and Asian apparel industry) where minimum wages are 1/4 to 1/10 of an American wage. There are even some high speciality services both in Mexico and Asian countries where you can get high quality health care for a fraction of the American price.
Don't even dream of "High Quality Education" as a mean to keep labor at home: overseas workers are at least as qualified Americans: a good hacker is a good hacker anywhere.
America is simply too expensive. America has been hiding a high inflation rate derived from continuously increasing earnings in wages and salaries by keeping reasonable prices on goods -and achieving this by moving manufacturing and now services abroad, and getting more and more Free Trade agreements with any country who has cheap and reasonably qualified labor. So forget about any probable tariff to mostly anything... and please, please, how do you apply tariffs on a service? Will you close all telecommuting roads? Will you place Customs on Internet hubs? Yeah, right...
It seems sad/funny to me that in the end Free Enterprise behaves a lot as communism: new jobs moving to poor countries will increase life quality of those abroad while impovershing formerly "wealthy" Americans, -seen with poor country eyes- and all in the name of better corporate earnings. The only imaginable remedy is to be a corporate czar somehow (Wow, same as Communist Party leaders, yeeeehaw)... other possible thing to happen is to force other countries to have equivalent wages on professional areas (I can't imagine how, tho, high local taxes in poor countries, maybe?)
This is a long time trend where I can't see any reasonable end for America. You simply CAN'T compete with non-american wages. As a corporation you CAN'T afford a balance sheet with a big payroll when you can get it cheaper, because stockholders will ask for your head... so no way!
To me, being abroad now, this is an opportunity for a decent life, and really, really it saddens me to think of my American colleagues having the same hard time most of my local colleagues have had for a long while now.
Just one year before DMCA was approved, Mexican congress approved a law, that is, paragraph by paragraph, DMCA.
So yeah, wait a while and see your own modification to DMCA.
People complained about H1B, now jobs are going abroad with NO control at all.
How Americans will compete against same professional-level people that work at 80% discount?
Don't mince words. Please quote when I said idiots.
By any means, whatever you want to say, it looks to me that MySQL is a very poor choice as a dbms: an overkill for single user, few table apps and too small for real day to day robust applications.
>BTW, I know some systems that still run dBASE databases - and they are working fine and do what they are expected to do.
Corrupting every other day?
After 20 years working with virtually every DBMS in the market I'd simply discarded MySQL in favor of Postgres.
MySQL is to Open Software what Access 1.0 was to closed Software. Sorry to say that.
Lame, lame "database" that ignores everything except CREATE, UPDATE, INSERT or DELETE. [where]...
No joins, no views, no foreign keys, no subqueries, no stored procedures, no transactions, no row locking, no dirty reads, no REAL gain in speed. I don't know what some MySQL supporters call an "application", but I'd really like to see MySQL trying to run a real production environment with a few hundred (oh, preferably around a thousand) concurrent users in a highly transactional environment, using a hundred-table database. Yeah, right. Go ahead. I know people that also tried with dbase III / Clipper on DOS. Some of them even survived.
I've been working with it since early nineties, and my older son began to read on screen before than on paper.
He's now 13. A quote from him, six months ago:
"Internet is no longer carried out by intelligent people. Now it looks too much like TV".
'nuff said.
Mexican copyright law was approved in 1996 has very specific entries like:
"
104. The copyright holder of a computing program has the right to authorize or forbid...
V. Decompile, reverse engineering a computer program, or disassembly."
112. Its forbiden to import, fabricate, distribute and use devices or services destinated to circumvent technical protections of computer programs, electromagnetic spectrum transmissions, telecommunication networks and programs of electronic devices as stated in the previous article" (Previous article is about 'Electronic programs that contain visual, sound, 3D or animation elements')
"
Thats sounds pretty much like DMCA. It seems that most media companies experimented first South of the border before lobbyig US Congress.
I can bet that Ford would be succesfull(as it certainly was, just take
a look at any so-called freeway) even if there were no patents at all.
Ford's process succesfuly was copied all over world, and it didn't mean anything but cars for averyone... he had a good cheap product, as opposite to MS.
You have choices when buying cars, from Geos to Ferraris, all made with very similar processes.
MS (future) business model is based on renting. Can you imagine if all cars around the world were rented instad of ownend?
Can you imagine a world where al cars were unsafe at any speed because you could only buy Fords?
You have to think about earthquakes and volcanos: Alaska is not very friendly about that. Winter storms aren't precisely friendly.
Whoever has this plan, also has a very romantic idea of Alaska.
I think there are better places in North Russia, Norway, or Canada.
For one side, Mr. Markof lacks credibility (due to the bunch of lies when he wrote about Mitnick/Shimomura), but most of the article is related to M$.
Why should MS act in a different way? It's impossible for a company like it. Its business model relies precisely on keeping proprietary as much code as it can.
So the GPL in particular and Open Source in general endangers that business model. That's no news.
What is really dangerous is to simply say that "potentially undermines the intellectual property of countries and companies". Thats simply BS (begining with a simple question: Since when MS cares about companies or countries? They care for themselves): I'm sure that soon you'll see a lot of ads comparing Open Source to the worst communism you can think of. And, of course Open Source is not.
Open Source enriches the common intellectual property for every company and country that uses it: as more source is available, the knowledge increases -and then intellectual property does too. The same way William Shakespeare or Beethoven were paid for their works and now they are part of the world's intellectual wealth. I'm sure we'll se some Open Source 'classics'.
When you move, as MS is doing, towards renting software, the chance of owning it (and from the very source!) endangers MS, but becomes more attractive to consumers. OS is then a threat for MS future business. And ownership (altough limited by GPL) is the very base of capitalism. What really endangers countries and companies is to depend on a single black box (just think what could happen if Redmond were wiped by a volcano).
What Open Source does is to create different business models, based more in services than in ownership of something as intangible as software,
What really surprises me is that if I discover a government agengy spiying me without a warrant, I could sue the hell out of them, however, if a company does the same I can't do anything.
Only in America...
This sounds exactly as the DIVX, so I think the market will decide on it.
It's a idea so stupid as marketing boomboxes without a tape recorder (or with a tape player, with no 'record' button).
I suppose there are some in the market: cheaper, of course.
Anyway, a hardware layer must have a software layer in order to work: it won't take to much time before someone finds a very simple hack to make it work.
Will each and every storage device in the market support this? Of course not! You'll always have the choice of 'old' devices (that *must* be supported for a long while) so even if you can't record in your brand new PC, you still have a chance of using that old box in the attic. Or brand new devices not intended for end user.
But there's something to do: educate consumers in such a way that they really know what they purchase. Create awareness exactly in the same way that people became aware of that silly trap that DivX was.
Have you Americans ever been aware that if Franklin, Jefferson or any other of your founding fathers were alive today, they would be under continuous surveilance from NSA, FBI and who knows who else? And worst: for a good reason.
Those guys were, you guess it, revolutionaires. With clear ideas about freedom, call it freedom of speech, to innovate or from tyrans.
Do you imagine George Washington being lobbied by RIAA, Microsoft or any other company? Can you imagine his response to those guys?
Do you imagine Jackson taking bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H donations from interest groups?
Wake up!
If they were alive, they'd die again of sadness, just looking what America is now.
It's quite amazing the amount of xenophobia I see whenever ./ deals with this particular subject. And I don't refer to morons at -1, but a lot of "Insightful" and "Informative" comments.
I've been working almost 2 years with an American company that complies with Law. From the very first day I arrived I could see my wage posted where any co-worker could complain if it was too low. And if that's the case with some companies, why is nobody filing a complain? If no gringo at all complains... well that's not Congress problem, foreign worker problem, but simply american worker problem. I mean: if your rights are being violated and you don't complain whose problem is?
Phrases like "cheap labor", "foreigners don't understand their rights", "indentured servants", "slaves from Asia"... Please! That reads more as a Goebbels' speech than true concern. It's insulting for skilled and professional people.
I have exactly the same benefits, I have never been abused or exploited in any sense. I have no doubt that there may be some companies that behave poorly, but in these 2 years and a lot of projects I've never seen that neither at my company or at our client's sites. At least for me, it sounds like xenophobic lies.
You never are deported "Instantly" as someone says. You have 90 days to get a new sponsor... if anyone takes more than 90 days to find a new job in America, that person must have a serious problem and deserves to be deported. Period.
The argument about mainframers reconverted to Client/Server or Internet developers is also a lie. It takes quite a lot of effort just to teach them how to use a mouse, not to say anything about TCP/IP, perl, HTML or RDBMS. Early retirement is always an option.
And there's a collateral effect on H1B visas: IT jobs abroad have started to be better payed, since if foreign companies want to keep at least someone to shut down the servers when everybody leaves, they have to pay more.
And a final point: in the Internet era, is quite simple to mount an offshore facility, pay 1/10 of the same salary that even an underpaid foreign worker receives and then really use "cheap slaves" and take jobs abroad. By avoiding this nasty competence, H1B program makes more sense than most people use to see.
Of course that will run on Unix. Most large databases do and only a few clueless DBAs run that kind of DBs on NT.
I'm sure they'll run also on Linux x86, but I'd be concerned about I/O... and other architectures like IBM or Sun can handle that in better ways (and, oh yes, you can still use Linux there).
American Corporate Employee doesn't mean *Universal*.
This is self-centrical and absurd. Universal would mean than any (put here any really poor country) family has a computer, a communications device (ie. a phone) and health, food, literacy, etc. enough to connect to Internet. It's really hard to press keys when you're starving, isn't it?
Sigh. Sometimes I become desperate when I realise that even for some cultured Americans the Universe is USA...
Is this Stalin's USSR or USA?
Now it happens that Americans have to hide their speech in other countries. I never dreamed I live long enough to see that.
It's funny that most of you Americans think about your liberties as granted, your freedom as a matter of fact and then, as a first reaction, look for assylum in other countries.
You have a judiciary system that allows you to challenge that, so Fight, otherwise just sit down trying to get your first post or pour hot grits down your pants, thank you.
A guy is driving. Stops and asks directions:
Simple link:
... Where's Eighteenth National Bank?
Guy: Excuse me sir
Joe Linker: (Pointing with finger) Right over there. They
are an excellent bank, highly recommended...
Guy: Thank you, sir.
Five minutes later, the bank is robbed.
Deep Linking:
... Where's Eighteenth National Bank?
.45 gun and a shotgun. He lunches
Guy: Excuse me sir
Joe Linker: Next corner. And watch out: there's
a guard who carries both a automatic
at 12:08 everyday, and finishes at 12:32 and is sleepy after that. Now
its 12:12. There are four cameras but cashier #5 is not well covered and
images are blurry. There's the automatic alarm if cashier takes out
all the money. Money arrives Mondays (today!) at 10:30. They've
been robbed twice in the last 3 months so everyone is scared as hell...
it can be robbed any day.
Guy: Thank you, sir.
Bank is robbed at 12:34:30
Copyright infringement:
... Where's Eighteenth National Bank?
Guy: Excuse me sir
Joe Linker: Open that door, give me that shotgun and let's
take all fsking the money from there, it's a piece of cake.
Guy: C'mon buddy!
Bank is robbed at 12:33:32
I think that ruling on deep linking should be based on intention of
linker. Freedom of speech doesn't mean taking others work for profit
and that's what tickets.com did.
If your friends forgot you, your enemies never will.