People keep missing this point: you can't just pick up a green card and start working. It takes years (3-4 at least) to get an employment-based PR, thanks to INS' incompetence. For many of us, the H1B is a temporary measure that allows us to stay and work while waiting for the immigration visa to go through. Unlike most nonimmigrant visas, H1Bs allow dual intent: you can enter as a temporary worker while simultaneously seeking permanent residence. Until INS is fixed, would-be immigrants will have to use H1Bs as a band-aid to get by.
Many people seem to think H1Bs are for temporary work. This may be what it seems on paper, but the opposite is true. The INS is severely backlogged in processing green card cases. Even if a foreigner wants to settle down permanently and pursue the "American dream", it would take years to gain permanent residence. Instead, foreigners have to apply for H1Bs to stay during that period. This is why, unlike other nonimmigration visas, H1Bs allow "dual intent": you can enter the country with the dual intent of working as a temporary worker while simultaneously pursuing permanent residence. In other words, whether the foreigner wants to work temporarily to gain work experience or wants to stay permanently, he should be applying for a H1B.
I don't understand this "we have enough immigrants" mentality, which is by no means limited to the US. All developed countries (and many developing nations) have birthrates below replacement rate, and none have succeeded in reversing their declines. Without immigrants, the US will die as a society and as a nation. The rational thing to do is to import warm bodies, preferably those who have significant economic value to the country.
I would like to address responses of the form: if they were smart, they should have know that they were getting a temporary visa. They knew what they were getting into.
No.
This is probably the sort of thing they were told: "We want you. Bad. It takes ages to get a green card for you, and we want you to start working right away. Why don't we bring you over on a H1B, and apply for permanent residence for you as you work?" This is neither misrepresentation nor a lie. An honest employer could easily give this offer without intending to fleece the worker nor the INS. And H1B allows "dual intent": you may enter with the intent of being a temporary worker, but also with the simultaneous intent to gain permanent residence.
So what was the problem? The INS. The backlog grew until even the H1B period was insufficient. The "Adjustment of Status" part (Linus Torvald's current status when he testified) used to take 60-90 days in the early 80s. Now it takes 2-3 years for that part ALONE. Those from highly represented countries (India in particular, China too) had it worst. This appears to be what happened to those interviewed in the article.
The bottom line is that many entered the country with the intention of becoming permanent residents, as allowed by the law. Unfortunately, their country quotas and INS' backlog are now wrecking that original plan, and their green card applications are still stuck in the deep dungeons of the INS, still waiting.
That's a good point: let the market moderate demand. If people were held financially accountable for the volume of traffic they generate, they would voluntarily adjust their traffic on their own. Then again, metered network access is long advocated by Ethernet inventor, Bob "Open Sores" Metcalfe, who is not exactly the most popular guy here. Would Slashdot readers be willing to admit that he is right on this point?
One of the supposed advantages of Gnome over KDE was language independence. Now it looks like core modules must be in C. It sounds like "language independence" means "Gnome is language independent, unless you are writing anything significant, in which case you must use C".
Does anyone have actual statistics to go with the article? There is nothing empirically verifiable about the article's claims: all I see is a lot of hand-waving. Surely techies of any religious affiliation would appreciate some hard numbers here.
Earlier, I see the KDE folks get jerked around by the GPL chain. Now this. It looks like major licensing issues these days center around GPL compatibility. I wonder if the GPL is really worth all that grief, with all its viral restrictions.
Simple solution for those who can do it: stop releasing your software under GPL. It causes way too much grief.
Poor KDE. They probably feel like they are being yanked around by the ol' GPL leash. No matter what they do -- Free QT Foundation, QPL, GPLed Qt -- they get beat up upon over licensing. My sympathies: as a largely European effort, they probably do not comprehend the litigatious environment of the US.
But I can also guess at why RMS is being such a pain. Open Source has superceded Free Software as the current buzzword, and has gained far more acceptance and success than RMS ever could. Pragmatism has triumphed over ideology, and he cannot be too happy about that. The FSF is getting increasingly irrelevant. Whatever his own technical and public achievements of the past, RMS is largely obsolete. He is still fighting the good fight, though, and is trying to recapture publicity. He can get attention by annoying a lot of people, generating controversy, and otherwise being a pain in the neck. He will continue to do so as long as folks pay attention and respond.
"Smart-cards" aka SIMs have always been available on GSM cellphones, even in the US. When I went on vacation last year, I pulled out my SIM card from my Omnipoint (now Voicestream) phone, stuffed it into a rented dual band cellphone, and used it in Germany, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. US customers who want this feature can have it, provided they subscribe to a GSM network. They can switch cellphones as much as they like while keeping the SIM card and their account.
Size. That's all. You can get the thing only so thin if you use AAA batteries. Sony wanted to make something the size of a Palm V, so LiIon is the way to go. Battery wear is not an issue. You don't need to recharge a Palm-type device as often as a cellphone, so the battery will have a longer life. I believe that with your light usage (AAAs on my lightly used IIIx only last 4 weeks) the Sony will be obsolete long before the battery wears out.
With so much flaming going on about the editorial, I have trouble finding any comments here about the new beta. How does it look to you brave beta testers, especially Konqueror? Their release schedule indicated that release candidate 1 would be out about now. Since we have instead something labelled a beta, I have trouble interpreting the events. Either an extra beta cycle has been inserted into the schedule, or this beta is indeed the release candidate but was not tagged as such. My impression is that it is the former, which means the final release will probably be delayed another month or so (not bad for a project this size). Would someone care to clarify?
Not bad, except that these do not show shared memory use. You should use "top", which has a "SHARE" column to indicate how much of that footprint is shared libs, otherwise a one-time library size difference gets counted for every app. KDE makes heavy use of shared libs.
It would help if you would specify which JVMs you were talking about. Otherwise, you experience may no longer be relevant. Under Linux, our full-blown options include Blackdown's JDK 1.2.2 port, Sun's JDK 1.2.2 with Borland JIT, Sun's JDK 1.3 with Hotspot and IBM's JDK 1.3 with IBM JIT. The posting was primarily about IBM's JDK.
I don't think GCJ is very usable right now. It is probably not appropriate to extrapolate from the performance of a very immature compiler to make assumptions about more mainstream and mature JVM solutions.
Why do people only mention speed when evaluating Java? Memory footprint should enter the discussion too. And unfortunately, Java on Linux seems to suffer from bloatitis.
A Swing app I am developing under JDK 1.2.2 for Linux uses about 20MB of RAM without JIT. It's not really that big a program. When I tested it under IBM's JDK 1.3 (prerelease), it ate about 30MB of RAM. With Sun's JDK 1.3 with Hotspot, it still uses about 20MB of RAM. Sun's JDK 1.3 tries to reduce memory footprint, but I am guessing that the additional overhead of Hotspot and native threading tends to erase this gain. It does start faster though.
When writing a Java GUI app, speed may no longer be relevant. Most of the time, the application is waiting on user input. My app runs just fine on a P166 on a JVM in interpreted mode only (no JIT). Any speed advantage in the JVM is not noticeable. But the memory footprint is noticeable, and this also translates to a long startup time.
I wonder if a large part of the Gnome/KDE divide is ethnic or geographical? KDE, after all, is European in origin and it looks like the main movers are still European. The development meetings are in Europe. On the other hand, Gnome has been associated with Red Hat for a long time. It may be significant that all the companies associated with the Gnome Foundation announcement are American. Logistical and comfort issues may contribute to making KDE a less appealing choice for those on the "wrong" side of the Atlantic puddle.
It is hard to make a strong footprint argument without real numbers, but I believe I will see a drastic drop in memory use when I upgrade to KDE2. Why? It depends on what you have running. Many of us have a web browser running all the time. On my machine, that means running Netscape -- memory leaks and all -- alongside kfm in KDE 1. That's a lot of memory. If Konqueror is as good as they claim, I should see a leaner KDE 2 desktop with Konqueror than my current KDE 1 desktop or a Gnome desktop with Mozilla.
Those who read the WSJ will be amused by this, seeing a case of WSJ vs WSJ opinions. The August 2nd edition of the WSJ Europe (available to online subscribers) had an editorial with just the opposite conclusion:
European enterprises are generally two years behind their American rivals in taking advantage of the Web, says Pradip Banerjee, a partner at Andersen Consulting and the author of a provocative new study that found a technological time lag between American and European pharmaceutical firms. And it's not just Europe's drug makers that are slow on the uptake of new technology. Across industries, European firms lag their overseas
competitors in adapting to the Web, Mr. Banerjee says. "The mobile phone is an aberration," he says, "the Europeans are behind everywhere else."
Government intervention and regulation had the advantage in European wireless telephony, enforcing a uniform wireless standard and increasing the size of the market. But regulation has not offered an advantage elsewhere. This is not just a simplistic debate of regulation vs competition. Internet access an adoption is one crucial area where Europe falls behind, especially in businesses.
Some 42% of European research and development executives at leading drug firms think that the business benefits of the Web are "hype," compared with 3% of their American counterparts, according to the Andersen study.
The larger picture is more complicated, and not limited to the wireless world. With adoption of future wireless standards, this advantage may well disappear.
Thanks for posting the numbers. That is a rarity, and I appreciate the trouble. It also saves me from doing the download myself. Unfortunately, it also pretty much confirms my previous experience: Mozilla is still about twice as big as Netscape 4. NS 4.73 takes about 15MB RAM on my Linux box:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 10169 chris 2 0 15348 13M 6092 S 0 0.0 21.6 6:26 netscape-com
You know, there was a time when I might have eagerly downloaded the latest Mozilla build based on your positive remarks. Alas, months of downloading nightlies and milestones have made me cynical. It begins to strike me how evasive Mozilla defenders can be. "Oooooh, wait til you try the latest milestone! It's fast! It slices! It dices!" Every time, I am appalled by the performance and size of this monstrosity. "Never mind the milestone! Just wait til you try the current nightly builds! They are oh-so-much-better!" Yeah, right. Lean and mean? Not on my machine. Whoops, they meant only Gecko. They did not tell me that the UI and (non) caching made the browser overall feel slow as a banana slug. The bloat issue is brushed aside ("RAM is cheap", "get a real machine, loser", "it will get smaller, trust me") or ignored. Or something totally irrelevant is thrown in: "you have no right to criticize! Contribute or shut up!"
I also notice how positive remarks are subjective and not falsifiable ("I don't think Mozilla is slow..."). No one posts a "top" output to illustrate how small its memory footprint is. No one posts quantitative numbers to show how much faster it is than the last version. And of course, there is that relabelling of bloat as "features" (non-functional, of course). An IRC client? Good grief.
And what is the deal with calling it "good code"? Again, a non-falsifiable statement. Why is it good? Does it give you warm fuzzy feelings? If the code performs badly, it is bad code. If it hogs my RAM, I don't want it.
The easy way to judge performance is to compare Mozilla to that other bloated, slow monstrosity that it is supposed to make obsolete: Netscape 4.x. Even by that easy measure, Mozilla feels significantly slower and has a much bigger footprint.
The fact is, there is no empirical, rational reason to believe that Mozilla will have good performance. It feels slow. It is quantitatively fat. It has tons of reported bugs. Folks defend Mozilla, it seems, based on blind faith. Sorry, I am not going to give the hype the benefit of a doubt anymore. You think they'll "eventually produce a kick-ass browser"? I do not believe you. I have no reason to.
Unfortunately, the nit-picking rebuttal does not address the central issue: the poor performance of the Mozilla project. After an eternity, nothing has shipped that can be considered stable or useful. What we have is a bloated, buggy, slow monstrosity that makes open source look bad. How did it get this way? It is still twice as big (RAM footprint), buggier and feels much slower than the program it is meant to replace. All the flames and posturing in the world will not change those basic facts.
Mozilla does not have what the Linux kernel has: a chief who knows when to say NO (well, mostly). Without tight editorial control, the Mongolian Horde (aka the Bazaar) approach to development leaves us with what we see in Mozilla: featuritis, bloat and no shipping product. The release-often mantra is followed, but only nominally: we never had a usable and useful release. Heck, even KDE's old kfm (not Konqueror) is more usable than this bloated, buggy, lumbering monster.
I say we should plunder the carcass for parts. Of course, someone is already doing that (Galeon). I wish them well.
It could still be a case of collinearity. Interest in new music does not remain static. I certainly don't buy as many albums as I used to. People whose music interest are increasing would be likely both to buy more AND to try alternative music sources like Napster. Would these people have purchased more or less had Napster not been available? This question remains unanswered.
Lands End pants (slacks and jeans) all have fairly big, deep pockets. Problem solved.
I recall seeing in an old computer magazine a company offering shirts with pockets big enough for 8" (or maybe it was just 5.25") floppies, to cure 3.5" envy. If there is demand, they'll build it.
Slashdot Mirror
People keep missing this point: you can't just pick up a green card and start working. It takes years (3-4 at least) to get an employment-based PR, thanks to INS' incompetence. For many of us, the H1B is a temporary measure that allows us to stay and work while waiting for the immigration visa to go through. Unlike most nonimmigrant visas, H1Bs allow dual intent: you can enter as a temporary worker while simultaneously seeking permanent residence. Until INS is fixed, would-be immigrants will have to use H1Bs as a band-aid to get by.
Many people seem to think H1Bs are for temporary work. This may be what it seems on paper, but the opposite is true. The INS is severely backlogged in processing green card cases. Even if a foreigner wants to settle down permanently and pursue the "American dream", it would take years to gain permanent residence. Instead, foreigners have to apply for H1Bs to stay during that period. This is why, unlike other nonimmigration visas, H1Bs allow "dual intent": you can enter the country with the dual intent of working as a temporary worker while simultaneously pursuing permanent residence. In other words, whether the foreigner wants to work temporarily to gain work experience or wants to stay permanently, he should be applying for a H1B.
I don't understand this "we have enough immigrants" mentality, which is by no means limited to the US. All developed countries (and many developing nations) have birthrates below replacement rate, and none have succeeded in reversing their declines. Without immigrants, the US will die as a society and as a nation. The rational thing to do is to import warm bodies, preferably those who have significant economic value to the country.
There is bound to be some confusion here: you say that glibc 2.2 is in, but
your web page says version 2.1.92 instead.
Chris
I would like to address responses of the form: if they were smart, they should have know that they were getting a temporary visa. They knew what they were getting into.
No.
This is probably the sort of thing they were told: "We want you. Bad. It takes ages to get a green card for you, and we want you to start working right away. Why don't we bring you over on a H1B, and apply for permanent residence for you as you work?" This is neither misrepresentation nor a lie. An honest employer could easily give this offer without intending to fleece the worker nor the INS. And H1B allows "dual intent": you may enter with the intent of being a temporary worker, but also with the simultaneous intent to gain permanent residence.
So what was the problem? The INS. The backlog grew until even the H1B period was insufficient. The "Adjustment of Status" part (Linus Torvald's current status when he testified) used to take 60-90 days in the early 80s. Now it takes 2-3 years for that part ALONE. Those from highly represented countries (India in particular, China too) had it worst. This appears to be what happened to those interviewed in the article.
The bottom line is that many entered the country with the intention of becoming permanent residents, as allowed by the law. Unfortunately, their country quotas and INS' backlog are now wrecking that original plan, and their green card applications are still stuck in the deep dungeons of the INS, still waiting.
That's a good point: let the market moderate demand. If people were held financially accountable for the volume of traffic they generate, they would voluntarily adjust their traffic on their own. Then again, metered network access is long advocated by Ethernet inventor, Bob "Open Sores" Metcalfe, who is not exactly the most popular guy here. Would Slashdot readers be willing to admit that he is right on this point?
One of the supposed advantages of Gnome over KDE was language independence. Now it looks like core modules must be in C. It sounds like "language independence" means "Gnome is language independent, unless you are writing anything significant, in which case you must use C".
Does anyone have actual statistics to go with the article? There is nothing empirically verifiable about the article's claims: all I see is a lot of hand-waving. Surely techies of any religious affiliation would appreciate some hard numbers here.
Earlier, I see the KDE folks get jerked around by the GPL chain. Now this. It looks like major licensing issues these days center around GPL compatibility. I wonder if the GPL is really worth all that grief, with all its viral restrictions.
Simple solution for those who can do it: stop releasing your software under GPL. It causes way too much grief.
Poor KDE. They probably feel like they are being yanked around by the ol' GPL leash. No matter what they do -- Free QT Foundation, QPL, GPLed Qt -- they get beat up upon over licensing. My sympathies: as a largely European effort, they probably do not comprehend the litigatious environment of the US.
But I can also guess at why RMS is being such a pain. Open Source has superceded Free Software as the current buzzword, and has gained far more acceptance and success than RMS ever could. Pragmatism has triumphed over ideology, and he cannot be too happy about that. The FSF is getting increasingly irrelevant. Whatever his own technical and public achievements of the past, RMS is largely obsolete. He is still fighting the good fight, though, and is trying to recapture publicity. He can get attention by annoying a lot of people, generating controversy, and otherwise being a pain in the neck. He will continue to do so as long as folks pay attention and respond.
I believe we call such a person a troll.
"Smart-cards" aka SIMs have always been available on GSM cellphones, even in the US. When I went on vacation last year, I pulled out my SIM card from my Omnipoint (now Voicestream) phone, stuffed it into a rented dual band cellphone, and used it in Germany, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. US customers who want this feature can have it, provided they subscribe to a GSM network. They can switch cellphones as much as they like while keeping the SIM card and their account.
Size. That's all. You can get the thing only so thin if you use AAA batteries. Sony wanted to make something the size of a Palm V, so LiIon is the way to go. Battery wear is not an issue. You don't need to recharge a Palm-type device as often as a cellphone, so the battery will have a longer life. I believe that with your light usage (AAAs on my lightly used IIIx only last 4 weeks) the Sony will be obsolete long before the battery wears out.
With so much flaming going on about the editorial, I have trouble finding any comments here about the new beta. How does it look to you brave beta testers, especially Konqueror? Their release schedule indicated that release candidate 1 would be out about now. Since we have instead something labelled a beta, I have trouble interpreting the events. Either an extra beta cycle has been inserted into the schedule, or this beta is indeed the release candidate but was not tagged as such. My impression is that it is the former, which means the final release will probably be delayed another month or so (not bad for a project this size). Would someone care to clarify?
Or Godzilla?
Not bad, except that these do not show shared memory use. You should use "top", which has a "SHARE" column to indicate how much of that footprint is shared libs, otherwise a one-time library size difference gets counted for every app. KDE makes heavy use of shared libs.
It would help if you would specify which JVMs you were talking about. Otherwise, you experience may no longer be relevant. Under Linux, our full-blown options include Blackdown's JDK 1.2.2 port, Sun's JDK 1.2.2 with Borland JIT, Sun's JDK 1.3 with Hotspot and IBM's JDK 1.3 with IBM JIT. The posting was primarily about IBM's JDK.
I don't think GCJ is very usable right now. It is probably not appropriate to extrapolate from the performance of a very immature compiler to make assumptions about more mainstream and mature JVM solutions.
Why do people only mention speed when evaluating Java? Memory footprint should enter the discussion too. And unfortunately, Java on Linux seems to suffer from bloatitis.
A Swing app I am developing under JDK 1.2.2 for Linux uses about 20MB of RAM without JIT. It's not really that big a program. When I tested it under IBM's JDK 1.3 (prerelease), it ate about 30MB of RAM. With Sun's JDK 1.3 with Hotspot, it still uses about 20MB of RAM. Sun's JDK 1.3 tries to reduce memory footprint, but I am guessing that the additional overhead of Hotspot and native threading tends to erase this gain. It does start faster though.
When writing a Java GUI app, speed may no longer be relevant. Most of the time, the application is waiting on user input. My app runs just fine on a P166 on a JVM in interpreted mode only (no JIT). Any speed advantage in the JVM is not noticeable. But the memory footprint is noticeable, and this also translates to a long startup time.
I wonder if a large part of the Gnome/KDE divide is ethnic or geographical? KDE, after all, is European in origin and it looks like the main movers are still European. The development meetings are in Europe. On the other hand, Gnome has been associated with Red Hat for a long time. It may be significant that all the companies associated with the Gnome Foundation announcement are American. Logistical and comfort issues may contribute to making KDE a less appealing choice for those on the "wrong" side of the Atlantic puddle.
It is hard to make a strong footprint argument without real numbers, but I believe I will see a drastic drop in memory use when I upgrade to KDE2. Why? It depends on what you have running. Many of us have a web browser running all the time. On my machine, that means running Netscape -- memory leaks and all -- alongside kfm in KDE 1. That's a lot of memory. If Konqueror is as good as they claim, I should see a leaner KDE 2 desktop with Konqueror than my current KDE 1 desktop or a Gnome desktop with Mozilla.
Thanks for posting the numbers. That is a rarity, and I appreciate the trouble. It also saves me from doing the download myself. Unfortunately, it also pretty much confirms my previous experience: Mozilla is still about twice as big as Netscape 4. NS 4.73 takes about 15MB RAM on my Linux box:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
10169 chris 2 0 15348 13M 6092 S 0 0.0 21.6 6:26 netscape-com
You know, there was a time when I might have eagerly downloaded the latest Mozilla build based on your positive remarks. Alas, months of downloading nightlies and milestones have made me cynical. It begins to strike me how evasive Mozilla defenders can be. "Oooooh, wait til you try the latest milestone! It's fast! It slices! It dices!" Every time, I am appalled by the performance and size of this monstrosity. "Never mind the milestone! Just wait til you try the current nightly builds! They are oh-so-much-better!" Yeah, right. Lean and mean? Not on my machine. Whoops, they meant only Gecko. They did not tell me that the UI and (non) caching made the browser overall feel slow as a banana slug. The bloat issue is brushed aside ("RAM is cheap", "get a real machine, loser", "it will get smaller, trust me") or ignored. Or something totally irrelevant is thrown in: "you have no right to criticize! Contribute or shut up!"
I also notice how positive remarks are subjective and not falsifiable ("I don't think Mozilla is slow..."). No one posts a "top" output to illustrate how small its memory footprint is. No one posts quantitative numbers to show how much faster it is than the last version. And of course, there is that relabelling of bloat as "features" (non-functional, of course). An IRC client? Good grief.
And what is the deal with calling it "good code"? Again, a non-falsifiable statement. Why is it good? Does it give you warm fuzzy feelings? If the code performs badly, it is bad code. If it hogs my RAM, I don't want it.
The easy way to judge performance is to compare Mozilla to that other bloated, slow monstrosity that it is supposed to make obsolete: Netscape 4.x. Even by that easy measure, Mozilla feels significantly slower and has a much bigger footprint.
The fact is, there is no empirical, rational reason to believe that Mozilla will have good performance. It feels slow. It is quantitatively fat. It has tons of reported bugs. Folks defend Mozilla, it seems, based on blind faith. Sorry, I am not going to give the hype the benefit of a doubt anymore. You think they'll "eventually produce a kick-ass browser"? I do not believe you. I have no reason to.
Unfortunately, the nit-picking rebuttal does not address the central issue: the poor performance of the Mozilla project. After an eternity, nothing has shipped that can be considered stable or useful. What we have is a bloated, buggy, slow monstrosity that makes open source look bad. How did it get this way? It is still twice as big (RAM footprint), buggier and feels much slower than the program it is meant to replace. All the flames and posturing in the world will not change those basic facts.
Mozilla does not have what the Linux kernel has: a chief who knows when to say NO (well, mostly). Without tight editorial control, the Mongolian Horde (aka the Bazaar) approach to development leaves us with what we see in Mozilla: featuritis, bloat and no shipping product. The release-often mantra is followed, but only nominally: we never had a usable and useful release. Heck, even KDE's old kfm (not Konqueror) is more usable than this bloated, buggy, lumbering monster.
I say we should plunder the carcass for parts. Of course, someone is already doing that (Galeon). I wish them well.
It could still be a case of collinearity. Interest in new music does not remain static. I certainly don't buy as many albums as I used to. People whose music interest are increasing would be likely both to buy more AND to try alternative music sources like Napster. Would these people have purchased more or less had Napster not been available? This question remains unanswered.
I recall seeing in an old computer magazine a company offering shirts with pockets big enough for 8" (or maybe it was just 5.25") floppies, to cure 3.5" envy. If there is demand, they'll build it.
Chris