You're wrong, of course. Maybe some companies do that, but MS doesn't.
Though I hate MS as much as the next man, they seem to pay their H1B visa employees great salaries (starting salary of the H1B holders I know seems to be around $75K - $80K), and they're essentially standard employees. Yes, even those from India.
[FWIW, I'm american, and my sole personal experience with work visas is working in other countries -- which all seem to have much more reasonable immigration policies than the U.S. does. As far as I can tell, U.S. immigration policies are designed mainly by politicians looking for easy votes from an insecure populace -- non-citizens, after all, can't vote...]
Even Dawkins admits that, strictly speaking, he's an agnostic. He doesn't know that God doesn't exist. But there's any number of things that could just as easily apply to. No one says they're an agnostic with respect to unicorns.
Yup. A nice quote about this:
"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question. -- John McCarthy
It was a discovery they said on Tuesday that could usher in a wave of convenient, spit-based diagnostic tests
Oh, sure, that's what they told the funding bodies, but let's be honest: they did this research simply so they could publish papers with titles like "A Comprehensive Analysis of Spit."
This all sounds like wishful thinking on Don Reisinger's part.
Among people I know, Microsoft has been despised since the early '80s -- mostly because they've been turning out crap software since the early '80s, but increasingly (in the last couple of decades) because of their complete lack of ethics and contempt for their users.
It's likely that the Google lovefest will dim somewhat in the future, but there are some notable differences: in particular, Bill Gates has always been essentially amoral in his approach, whereas the Google founders have at least attempted to set a different tone. I known cynics scoff at that sort of thing, but it makes a difference.
yah it's a memory hog, but that's compositing window managers for you, including Compiz.
Er, Compiz isn't a memory hog though. I just measured it, and with all the standard features turned on it seems to use about 8MB more than a standard non-compositing window manager (e.g. metacity). It's also very fast and responsive with even minimal hardware acceleration (I'm using a machine with built-in intel 845G graphics, and compiz works very nicely).
I don't know what MS did to fuck up Vista so much, but you can't lay it at the feet of "compositing window managers."
Except that's not how H1B works in practice. What happens is...companies bring in all the H1B's they can, feigning that they can't find US workers to fill the spots. There are plenty of US workers for the spots, but, just not at substandard wages. They bring in the H1B's at much lower salaries
Maybe that's how the companies you're familiar with work, but don't pretend it's some universal rule.
The H1Bs I know all make pretty damn good salaries.
A basic problem seems to be that U.S. immigration laws are basically designed with low-wage low-skill workers in mind, and don't reflect the realities of skilled and professional workers (it's kind of understandable why they're this way, as low-skill workers have historically been the majority of voters). If "Joe Blow" graduated from Harvard and is clearly tops in his field, companies want to hire him, and don't care whether he's from Bangladesh or Chicago; immigration law, however, treats him as if he's just another warm body swarming across the border trying to undercut our factory workers.
[In my (somewhat limited) experience, other developed countries seem to handle things better: employers can almost always get visas for skilled foreign workers if they push hard enough; either they don't have the hard limits the U.S. has, or the limits are not reached as often.]
Avril Lavigne is essentially a product created by a marketing team and her music is written in just the way that it will appeal to a label afraid of risks
What I want to know is, who on the team is responsible for her mascara?!?
It sounds like the fundamental problem is your employer having stupid rules about when you work, not what the clock happens to say.
Instead of having the government mandate bizarre screwing around with clocks, why not focus on getting your employer to be a bit more flexible about working hours? Then everybody at your workplace would win, not just those who happen to share your preferences...
They need to have something better then integrated video at $2500+ and even at the $1500+ price range.
Designing a machine is all about picking the appropriate compromises. "Integrated graphics" has its issues, but is often pretty good these days, and certainly powerful enough for running compiz and other blingerific GUIs, opengl-based stuff (blender or whatever), etc. The memory hit can be annoying, but then you can just bump up your system RAM, which is generally more useful and cheaper than dedicated memory [I don't know how much the speed it is due to bus contention or whatever... anybody have a clue?]
Maybe not the first choice for the insane FPSes, but then very little that doesn't require liquid-nitrogen on tap for cooling is.
It's only when you start talking about either research OSes (Mach, L4, Singularity)
Even then, it's pretty much a given that any modern research OS has as a design-goal that it be at least able to support an efficient unix-like layer of some sort (even if they prefer some other interface). So in some sense, these systems are much closer to "unix-like" in practice than Windows/NT.
It's not the minor differences between NT/windows and unix that cause problems, after all, but the fundamental differences that make it very hard to implement a feature of one on top of the other (e.g. the "can't rename/delete a file while its in use" bogosity in windows, or the super heavyweight windows processes).
I rather hope HD photo is better (or even, dare to dream, good), but knowing MS, I have nagging feeling they just put a pretty wrapper around the same old crappy scRGB format, made a spiffy logo, and increased their lobbying budget...
Unfortunately, what google has turned up does seem to suggest that the HDR representation in HD photo is indeed just (crappy) scRGB....:-(
My main complaints about emacs nowadays is how it can't use anti-aliased fonts and it has no good support for distributed version control systems.
You might want to try the development Emacs (from CVS), which supports both of those things. Several major branches were recently merged into the trunk, so it might be a wee bit flaky at times though (lots of people use it anyway, of course).
I think the latest stable releases also support various distributed VCSes. I can at least verify that the current stable branch (the next minor update of the stable branch will probably be released within the next few weeks) has some support for arch, git, bzr, hg, and monotone, among others.
Agreed, upstart doesn't seem like news, but I'd be curious to hear a bit of back-and-forth as to the benefits of the various initscript replacements. Ubuntu makes a case for upstart on their site; it would be nice to known what others think.
Similarly for kvm vs. xen: xen is on roll these days, with everybody and their dog using it, but it seems like the company behind it is moving in an increasingly proprietary direction, so it would be good to hear what's up with that, and how kvm compares.
I wouldn't characterize Linus as a brilliant programmer. A brilliant software manager perhaps, but no more than a strong programmer. Most of the Linux kernel has been written be people other than Linux, and the Linux operating system owes 1000% more to Stallman as a driving force than Linus.
I don't know where you draw the line between a "strong programmer" and a "brilliant programmer", and it's surely true that at this point, the Linux kernel is much more other peoples' code than Linus's... but if you spend any time at all reading the mailing lists he posts on, Linus just gets things faster than almost everybody else, and clearly has a deep understanding of vast swaths of the system, even if most of the code was written by others. When there's an issue at hand, he'll say "oh, you could do blah blah" -- and then follow up 2 hours later with a prototype implementation almost as an offhand remark (and it's usually a clean, efficient, implementation too).
No slight intended against RMS -- I think he's far more visionary than Linus, and will have had a much bigger effect on society and computing -- and RMS is no slouch at programming (especially when compared to wannabes like ESR), but in the end, I think Linus is a better programmer.
Which registrars are good, BTW (for reasonably low cost "individual" service)?
Seems like the only comment I ever hear about domain registrars is of the "Scum-sucking hell-parasite! Damn you, damn you forever!" variety...
But that's the really scary thing: though Apple pulls stupid, short-sited, and user-hostile, stunts like this with some regularity, Microsoft is much, much, worse.
Of course, you don't always get your choice of seats. Airlines are notorious for not giving you the seat you picked, and then saying, "It's just a request--we don't have to honor it."
Not to mention, sometimes there's simply not much choice of seats available, because the flight's full and you're one of the last people to reserve.
[Nonetheless, I don't quite understand all the bitching and moaning about the Mac Air... a wired external battery doesn't seem a huge deal on an airplane.]
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You're wrong, of course. Maybe some companies do that, but MS doesn't.
Though I hate MS as much as the next man, they seem to pay their H1B visa employees great salaries (starting salary of the H1B holders I know seems to be around $75K - $80K), and they're essentially standard employees. Yes, even those from India.
[FWIW, I'm american, and my sole personal experience with work visas is working in other countries -- which all seem to have much more reasonable immigration policies than the U.S. does. As far as I can tell, U.S. immigration policies are designed mainly by politicians looking for easy votes from an insecure populace -- non-citizens, after all, can't vote...]
Yup. A nice quote about this:
"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question. -- John McCarthyOh, sure, that's what they told the funding bodies, but let's be honest: they did this research simply so they could publish papers with titles like "A Comprehensive Analysis of Spit."
This all sounds like wishful thinking on Don Reisinger's part.
Among people I know, Microsoft has been despised since the early '80s -- mostly because they've been turning out crap software since the early '80s, but increasingly (in the last couple of decades) because of their complete lack of ethics and contempt for their users.
It's likely that the Google lovefest will dim somewhat in the future, but there are some notable differences: in particular, Bill Gates has always been essentially amoral in his approach, whereas the Google founders have at least attempted to set a different tone. I known cynics scoff at that sort of thing, but it makes a difference.
Er, Compiz isn't a memory hog though. I just measured it, and with all the standard features turned on it seems to use about 8MB more than a standard non-compositing window manager (e.g. metacity). It's also very fast and responsive with even minimal hardware acceleration (I'm using a machine with built-in intel 845G graphics, and compiz works very nicely).
I don't know what MS did to fuck up Vista so much, but you can't lay it at the feet of "compositing window managers."
Maybe that's how the companies you're familiar with work, but don't pretend it's some universal rule.
The H1Bs I know all make pretty damn good salaries.
A basic problem seems to be that U.S. immigration laws are basically designed with low-wage low-skill workers in mind, and don't reflect the realities of skilled and professional workers (it's kind of understandable why they're this way, as low-skill workers have historically been the majority of voters). If "Joe Blow" graduated from Harvard and is clearly tops in his field, companies want to hire him, and don't care whether he's from Bangladesh or Chicago; immigration law, however, treats him as if he's just another warm body swarming across the border trying to undercut our factory workers.
[In my (somewhat limited) experience, other developed countries seem to handle things better: employers can almost always get visas for skilled foreign workers if they push hard enough; either they don't have the hard limits the U.S. has, or the limits are not reached as often.]
What I want to know is, who on the team is responsible for her mascara?!?
It sounds like the fundamental problem is your employer having stupid rules about when you work, not what the clock happens to say.
Instead of having the government mandate bizarre screwing around with clocks, why not focus on getting your employer to be a bit more flexible about working hours? Then everybody at your workplace would win, not just those who happen to share your preferences...
Designing a machine is all about picking the appropriate compromises. "Integrated graphics" has its issues, but is often pretty good these days, and certainly powerful enough for running compiz and other blingerific GUIs, opengl-based stuff (blender or whatever), etc. The memory hit can be annoying, but then you can just bump up your system RAM, which is generally more useful and cheaper than dedicated memory [I don't know how much the speed it is due to bus contention or whatever... anybody have a clue?]
Maybe not the first choice for the insane FPSes, but then very little that doesn't require liquid-nitrogen on tap for cooling is.
Hmm, for how many decades has MS been saying the tablet pc is the next big thing...?
Never seems to happen though.
Even then, it's pretty much a given that any modern research OS has as a design-goal that it be at least able to support an efficient unix-like layer of some sort (even if they prefer some other interface). So in some sense, these systems are much closer to "unix-like" in practice than Windows/NT.
It's not the minor differences between NT/windows and unix that cause problems, after all, but the fundamental differences that make it very hard to implement a feature of one on top of the other (e.g. the "can't rename/delete a file while its in use" bogosity in windows, or the super heavyweight windows processes).
So is HD photo any good or not? I've done some google searching, but it seems kind of hard to find good technical discussion of it.
The Microsoft attempt at an HD format called "scRGB", discussed in Greg Ward's nice write up on HDR encodings from a few years ago, was truly awful.
I rather hope HD photo is better (or even, dare to dream, good), but knowing MS, I have nagging feeling they just put a pretty wrapper around the same old crappy scRGB format, made a spiffy logo, and increased their lobbying budget...
Unfortunately, what google has turned up does seem to suggest that the HDR representation in HD photo is indeed just (crappy) scRGB.... :-(
I think it has more to do with Emacs refusing to get off the OP's lawn...
You might want to try the development Emacs (from CVS), which supports both of those things. Several major branches were recently merged into the trunk, so it might be a wee bit flaky at times though (lots of people use it anyway, of course).
I think the latest stable releases also support various distributed VCSes. I can at least verify that the current stable branch (the next minor update of the stable branch will probably be released within the next few weeks) has some support for arch, git, bzr, hg, and monotone, among others.
Ah-hah! He's clearly using the "Serial-Killer-Sex-Freak Defense" strategy!
Agreed, upstart doesn't seem like news, but I'd be curious to hear a bit of back-and-forth as to the benefits of the various initscript replacements. Ubuntu makes a case for upstart on their site; it would be nice to known what others think.
Similarly for kvm vs. xen: xen is on roll these days, with everybody and their dog using it, but it seems like the company behind it is moving in an increasingly proprietary direction, so it would be good to hear what's up with that, and how kvm compares.
I don't know where you draw the line between a "strong programmer" and a "brilliant programmer", and it's surely true that at this point, the Linux kernel is much more other peoples' code than Linus's ... but if you spend any time at all reading the mailing lists he posts on, Linus just gets things faster than almost everybody else, and clearly has a deep understanding of vast swaths of the system, even if most of the code was written by others. When there's an issue at hand, he'll say "oh, you could do blah blah" -- and then follow up 2 hours later with a prototype implementation almost as an offhand remark (and it's usually a clean, efficient, implementation too).
No slight intended against RMS -- I think he's far more visionary than Linus, and will have had a much bigger effect on society and computing -- and RMS is no slouch at programming (especially when compared to wannabes like ESR), but in the end, I think Linus is a better programmer.
And ed is the standard *nix text editor.
Which registrars are good, BTW (for reasonably low cost "individual" service)? Seems like the only comment I ever hear about domain registrars is of the "Scum-sucking hell-parasite! Damn you, damn you forever!" variety...
Does anybody actually use epiphany?
But that's the really scary thing: though Apple pulls stupid, short-sited, and user-hostile, stunts like this with some regularity, Microsoft is much, much, worse.
Not to mention, sometimes there's simply not much choice of seats available, because the flight's full and you're one of the last people to reserve.
[Nonetheless, I don't quite understand all the bitching and moaning about the Mac Air... a wired external battery doesn't seem a huge deal on an airplane.]
Hint: Set up a tunnelling proxy using ssh etc.
Kills those access restrictions and logs, fast!
Does anybody actually use mono anyway?
Isn't all of humanity of "African descent" when you get right down to it?