WTF are you posting about? US immigration, and trade, policies are way beyond lavishly generous, they are outright insane. I openly defy you to name another industrialized nation that is more generous.
For the most part, other nations complaining about US immigration and trade policies is like Al-Qaeda complaining about terrorism.
About the "IBM U.S. labor force" numbers. Are those workers all US citizens? Or, do those numbers also include guest workers and/or green card workers?
A lot of posters are saying "IBM should be able to hire whoever" and "IBM should not have to give any information that IBM is not legally required to give."
Okay fine. But, if IBM wants to enjoy all the lavish benefits of being a US company, such as: stimulus money, tax breaks, and preferential treatment in obtaining government contracts; then shouldn't IBM actually be a US company?
IBM is saying "the US government should be especially kind to us, because we provide all these jobs for US citizens" and "helping IBM is a good value for US taxpayers because those tax dollars come back to help the US."
But, are those assertions true? Should the US taxpayers be forced to give IBM special treatment if those assertions are not true? And how do we really know what is, or is not, true; if IBM refuses to tell us?
Seems to me that if IBM wants special treatment from the US taxpayers, then IBM needs to tell the taxpayers what is really going on.
But why should IBM be given special favors, like stimulus money, from the US taxpayers, when IBM is not really a US company? Less than 30% of IBM employees were born in the USA.
How is that US-tax-payer-provided stimulus money benefiting the US tax payers, if all that money is going offhsore?
I hate to say it, but parents have been known to murder their young children, and I have to doubt that a three year old could easily operate a real gun. As another poster pointed out: the gun would not only have to be loaded, and within easy reach of a 3 year old, but most likely: the safety would have to be off, a round would have to chambered, and the the gun would have to be cocked as well.
The Wii is relevant because the kid thought she was going for a control
Is that not a bit presumptuous? Does anybody know for sure what the child thought? Maybe the article is being written by somebody is against violent video games.
> But perhaps the biggest problem is that BASIC doesn't really mean anything because there are so many wildly incompatible, and poor quality implementations.
Ignore those implemenations. Stick with a major version. BTW: that is the same argument that linux bashers use. Also, if you are creating a GUI app with python you have all kinds of incompatible libraries to fight with.
> For that alone it doesn't resemble Python at all. You get Python, you basically get Python. BASIC you have to re-learn it every time (and never like what you hear.)
You may have some points, but you are all over the map. First you compare python to 45 year old BASIC. Then you dismiss widely used VB.NET with no explaination. In many ways, Visual BASIC compares very well to Python. For creating a quick GUI app on Windows, VB is much easier and faster.
BASIC allows practices that bad because they can make programs unmaintainable; and the limitations in the language mean that you are more or less forced to code that way.
I'm sorry, but that has not been true for decades now. In fact, for many versions of BASIC, the opposite is true. By the 1980s (or earlier) versions of BASIC such as TurboBASIC, and MS-Professional BASIC, all but did away with the line number model. Even the free QBASIC does not use line numbers by default. I suppose it is still possible to use line numbers, but you would have to go out of your way to do so.
Also, practically all computer languages allow bad practises. The worst spaghetti code I have ever seen was written in Pascal.
Maybe you were using the wrong version of BASIC? If you had used MS-Profressional BASIC, or many other versions of BASIC, you would not have had to use line numbers.
I get the feeling that a lot of posters think of BASIC as 1964 Dartmouth BASIC, or GW-BASIC. But is that entirely fair? Various versions of BASIC have, pretty much, abandoned the "GOTO LINE NUMBER" model decades ago. BASIC may still support the GOTO statement, but I think most languages have some form of "goto." There have also been compiled versions of BASIC for several decades.
BASIC was not originally designed to be an object-oriented language. But, neither was C, and C led to C++, Objective-C, and Java. Other languages not originally designed to be object oriented include: Perl, PHP, Pascal, and - I'm sure - several others.
How many mega-disasters have we read about here on slashdot that go like this: some government wanted to upgrade their outdated system, so they hired some ultra-expensive contracting company. The project went way over-budget and took way longer than estimated. By the time it was done, it was obsolete. Besides being obsolete, nothing worked correctly. The government spent insane mega-bucks to try and fix the borked project, but everything was too horridly broken to fix. So they decided to spend more mega-bucks to go back to the old system.
Although MS is hugely profitable, MS prefers have the taxpayers pay MS bills.
For example:
Critics slam Microsoft bridge as waste of stimulus money Critics of using stimulus money for the bridge say it would give the software giant a break on a pet project.
Microsoft To Get $100M Annual Tax Cut and Amnesty "Despite a $2.8 billion deficit, Washington State's House Bill 3176 would provide Microsoft with an effective $100 million tax cut annually and possible amnesty on its $1.27 billion Nevada tax maneuverings. Under current law, all of Microsoft's worldwide licensing revenues of approximately $20.7 billion annually are taxable at.484 percent. Under the new law, only the portion of software licenses sold to Washington state customers would be taxable. Ironically, after slashing Microsoft's tax burden, HB3176 directs the Department of Revenue to crack down on 'abusive tax transactions' like those in Nevada -- except for a loophole that may provide Microsoft amnesty on its twelve year practice. The bill's lead sponsor is Ross Hunter of Medina, home to Bill Gates and a number of current and former Microsoft billionaires and multi-millionaires, and other areas around Microsoft's corporate campus."
Isn't it obvious? Msft financed the entire scox-scam. The entire thing is just a msft PR stunt. It is supposed to scare people away from using Linux, and it's supposed to scare companies away from contributing to Linux.
Think about it: how did scox intend to finance the mega-expensive lawsuit? Scox did not have that kind of money - not even close. Then in jumps msft with tens of millions of dollars, how convenient.
And why sue IBM? IBM was never even a Linux distributor. Hint: IBM had just contributed a file system to Linux, and that p!ssed msft off. If scox thought there was infringing IP in Linux, scox would have sued Redhat. The lawsuit is not supposed to be "won" in the conventional sense. The lawsuit is supposed to be dragged on and on. BTW: I think it's the 7 year anniversary of the original lawsuit.
Anybody who is familiar with how msft operates should recognize the MO right away. Has anybody noticed that thy usual msft shills - like Enderle - have been championing the scox since day one?
Darl, and his brother Kevin, are just a couple of Utah hicks who got lucky. They were never the brains behind anything.
Microsoft had a really bullying culture back in the day
WTF? How does Microsoft have less a bullying culture now? Try reading groklaw.net or boycottnovell.com, hardly a day goes by that msft has not started some new scam. Msft is all about astroturfing, patent trolling, bribing government officials, fake "studies" or other such "Tonya Harding" tactics (those are words of US federal judge.
It sounds like Amazon got caught violating one or more of Microsoft's patents, and this deal was arranged to avoid a lawsuit.
Exactly what patent was that? Why is it a secret?
Is it possible that msft's "patent" was just another one of msft's bogus patents, but it was cheaper for amazon to sign an agreement, rather than spend the next ten years in court?
This patent stuff has got to be a gold mine for msft. IP extortion seems to be a brilliant business model.
February 22, 2010 Microsoft, Amazon strike patent deal covering Kindle and Linux
As would be expected, the actual patents that were supposedly violated are not disclosed. For many years msft claimed that Linux violates msft patents, but msft absolutely refuses to disclose which patents.
Microsoft says the deal grants Amazon patent-related "coverage" for its use of open-source and proprietary technologies in its Kindle e-reader, and its use of Linux-based computer servers.
At the same time, the deal has the potential to stir new controversy in the tech industry, if it's interpreted as Amazon implicitly endorsing Microsoft's claims that Linux and other open-source technologies violate its patents.
February 19, 2010 Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures Could be Biggest Racketeering Operation in the United States and Beyond
Patent thug Nathan Myhrvold turns out to have over 1,000 patent proxies with which to potentially attack and extort those who do not pay "protection money"; he also spent over $1 million lobbying his government
THE New York Times has published this report about Microsoft's patent troll Nathan Myhrvold, who is backed by his colleague Bill Gates, his former employer Microsoft, and even Apple. He already terrorises the industry using patents that it spent literally billions of dollars acquiring (not actually working to invent anything of substance).
I suppose using the US legal system for patent extortion is especially cost effective since msft uses offshore labor for the legal work.
February 18, 2010 Microsoft to outsource general legal work to India
Software giant Microsoft will begin outsourcing general legal work to India after signing a deal with legal process outsourcing (LPO) company CPA Global. The news comes as CPA outlined plans to expand its Indian workforce from 600 to 1,000 by the end of 2011, and hinted at opening another outsourcing centre.
Sure am glad I have a gas guzzler. I paid for that full tank of gas I want to use it.
Tell me again why vista/win7 is supperior to XP? Just because vista/win7 consume more system resources does not mean the end user gets anything out of it.
Seems to me people are sending their money to Redmond for no good reason.
Now go ahead an tell me I'm a luddite because I don't buy everything that msft shills tell me to buy.
About two years ago, I worked on IT team where everybody was over 45, except one guy who was 26. If the 26 year old came in 30 minutes late, it was practically like he was early, Two hours to four late was more typical. We were all amused by his daily excuses, like "my roommate's cat was sick."
Just in the last year, Microsoft has laid off thousands of Americans, and hired thousands of Indian guest workers. Microsoft is also offshoring jobs to India as fast as they possibly can.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF are you posting about? US immigration, and trade, policies are way beyond lavishly generous, they are outright insane. I openly defy you to name another industrialized nation that is more generous.
For the most part, other nations complaining about US immigration and trade policies is like Al-Qaeda complaining about terrorism.
About the "IBM U.S. labor force" numbers. Are those workers all US citizens? Or, do those numbers also include guest workers and/or green card workers?
A lot of posters are saying "IBM should be able to hire whoever" and "IBM should not have to give any information that IBM is not legally required to give."
Okay fine. But, if IBM wants to enjoy all the lavish benefits of being a US company, such as: stimulus money, tax breaks, and preferential treatment in obtaining government contracts; then shouldn't IBM actually be a US company?
IBM is saying "the US government should be especially kind to us, because we provide all these jobs for US citizens" and "helping IBM is a good value for US taxpayers because those tax dollars come back to help the US."
But, are those assertions true? Should the US taxpayers be forced to give IBM special treatment if those assertions are not true? And how do we really know what is, or is not, true; if IBM refuses to tell us?
Seems to me that if IBM wants special treatment from the US taxpayers, then IBM needs to tell the taxpayers what is really going on.
But why should IBM be given special favors, like stimulus money, from the US taxpayers, when IBM is not really a US company? Less than 30% of IBM employees were born in the USA.
How is that US-tax-payer-provided stimulus money benefiting the US tax payers, if all that money is going offhsore?
I hate to say it, but parents have been known to murder their young children, and I have to doubt that a three year old could easily operate a real gun. As another poster pointed out: the gun would not only have to be loaded, and within easy reach of a 3 year old, but most likely: the safety would have to be off, a round would have to chambered, and the the gun would have to be cocked as well.
The Wii is relevant because the kid thought she was going for a control
Is that not a bit presumptuous? Does anybody know for sure what the child thought? Maybe the article is being written by somebody is against violent video games.
> Not the one I use at work.
But that is just *you* not really "BASIC"
> And VB .Net doesn't count as a BASIC.
Why not?
> But perhaps the biggest problem is that BASIC doesn't really mean anything because there are so many wildly incompatible, and poor quality implementations.
Ignore those implemenations. Stick with a major version. BTW: that is the same argument that linux bashers use. Also, if you are creating a GUI app with python you have all kinds of incompatible libraries to fight with.
> For that alone it doesn't resemble Python at all. You get Python, you basically get Python. BASIC you have to re-learn it every time (and never like what you hear.)
You may have some points, but you are all over the map. First you compare python to 45 year old BASIC. Then you dismiss widely used VB.NET with no explaination. In many ways, Visual BASIC compares very well to Python. For creating a quick GUI app on Windows, VB is much easier and faster.
BASIC allows practices that bad because they can make programs unmaintainable; and the limitations in the language mean that you are more or less forced to code that way.
I'm sorry, but that has not been true for decades now. In fact, for many versions of BASIC, the opposite is true. By the 1980s (or earlier) versions of BASIC such as TurboBASIC, and MS-Professional BASIC, all but did away with the line number model. Even the free QBASIC does not use line numbers by default. I suppose it is still possible to use line numbers, but you would have to go out of your way to do so.
Also, practically all computer languages allow bad practises. The worst spaghetti code I have ever seen was written in Pascal.
Python has scoping, functions, good control structures, and a usable set of data structures.
BASIC has had all that for decades. Clue: there are many versions of BASIC which have progressed since 1964.
Maybe you were using the wrong version of BASIC? If you had used MS-Profressional BASIC, or many other versions of BASIC, you would not have had to use line numbers.
I get the feeling that a lot of posters think of BASIC as 1964 Dartmouth BASIC, or GW-BASIC. But is that entirely fair? Various versions of BASIC have, pretty much, abandoned the "GOTO LINE NUMBER" model decades ago. BASIC may still support the GOTO statement, but I think most languages have some form of "goto." There have also been compiled versions of BASIC for several decades.
BASIC was not originally designed to be an object-oriented language. But, neither was C, and C led to C++, Objective-C, and Java. Other languages not originally designed to be object oriented include: Perl, PHP, Pascal, and - I'm sure - several others.
Another reason that BASIC is good for non-programmers is that BASIC syntax is used in applications like spreadsheets.
How many mega-disasters have we read about here on slashdot that go like this: some government wanted to upgrade their outdated system, so they hired some ultra-expensive contracting company. The project went way over-budget and took way longer than estimated. By the time it was done, it was obsolete. Besides being obsolete, nothing worked correctly. The government spent insane mega-bucks to try and fix the borked project, but everything was too horridly broken to fix. So they decided to spend more mega-bucks to go back to the old system.
I am seeing some well reasoned responses to this topic. Some posters seem to believe that it may be wise to be an MS only shop.
Could you please cite all this anti-msft hate and fud to which you are referring?
Although MS is hugely profitable, MS prefers have the taxpayers pay MS bills.
For example:
Critics slam Microsoft bridge as waste of stimulus money
Critics of using stimulus money for the bridge say it would give the software giant a break on a pet project.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/31/bridge.microsoft/index.html
Here's another example:
Microsoft To Get $100M Annual Tax Cut and Amnesty .484 percent. Under the new law, only the portion of software licenses sold to Washington state customers would be taxable. Ironically, after slashing Microsoft's tax burden, HB3176 directs the Department of Revenue to crack down on 'abusive tax transactions' like those in Nevada -- except for a loophole that may provide Microsoft amnesty on its twelve year practice. The bill's lead sponsor is Ross Hunter of Medina, home to Bill Gates and a number of current and former Microsoft billionaires and multi-millionaires, and other areas around Microsoft's corporate campus."
"Despite a $2.8 billion deficit, Washington State's House Bill 3176 would provide Microsoft with an effective $100 million tax cut annually and possible amnesty on its $1.27 billion Nevada tax maneuverings. Under current law, all of Microsoft's worldwide licensing revenues of approximately $20.7 billion annually are taxable at
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/15/1957205/Microsoft-To-Get-100M-Annual-Tax-Cut-and-Amnesty
And now, again, msft is asking the US taxpayer to pick up the bill for what should be msft's expense.
Isn't it obvious? Msft financed the entire scox-scam. The entire thing is just a msft PR stunt. It is supposed to scare people away from using Linux, and it's supposed to scare companies away from contributing to Linux.
Think about it: how did scox intend to finance the mega-expensive lawsuit? Scox did not have that kind of money - not even close. Then in jumps msft with tens of millions of dollars, how convenient.
And why sue IBM? IBM was never even a Linux distributor. Hint: IBM had just contributed a file system to Linux, and that p!ssed msft off. If scox thought there was infringing IP in Linux, scox would have sued Redhat. The lawsuit is not supposed to be "won" in the conventional sense. The lawsuit is supposed to be dragged on and on. BTW: I think it's the 7 year anniversary of the original lawsuit.
Anybody who is familiar with how msft operates should recognize the MO right away. Has anybody noticed that thy usual msft shills - like Enderle - have been championing the scox since day one?
Darl, and his brother Kevin, are just a couple of Utah hicks who got lucky. They were never the brains behind anything.
Microsoft had a really bullying culture back in the day
WTF? How does Microsoft have less a bullying culture now? Try reading groklaw.net or boycottnovell.com, hardly a day goes by that msft has not started some new scam. Msft is all about astroturfing, patent trolling, bribing government officials, fake "studies" or other such "Tonya Harding" tactics (those are words of US federal judge.
It's all about the apps and drivers - mostly the apps.
It does not matter how fast, secure, reliable, or inexpensive an OS may be; if it doesn't run the apps, it's not of much use.
Since msft got away with doing the same thing to TomTom, I suppose these deals are effectively legal.
Msft seems to love extortion rackets. The "Business Software Alliance" is another example.
It sounds like Amazon got caught violating one or more of Microsoft's patents, and this deal was arranged to avoid a lawsuit.
Exactly what patent was that? Why is it a secret?
Is it possible that msft's "patent" was just another one of msft's bogus patents, but it was cheaper for amazon to sign an agreement, rather than spend the next ten years in court?
This patent stuff has got to be a gold mine for msft. IP extortion seems to be a brilliant business model.
February 22, 2010
Microsoft, Amazon strike patent deal covering Kindle and Linux
As would be expected, the actual patents that were supposedly violated are not disclosed. For many years msft claimed that Linux violates msft patents, but msft absolutely refuses to disclose which patents.
Microsoft says the deal grants Amazon patent-related "coverage" for its use of open-source and proprietary technologies in its Kindle e-reader, and its use of Linux-based computer servers.
At the same time, the deal has the potential to stir new controversy in the tech industry, if it's interpreted as Amazon implicitly endorsing Microsoft's claims that Linux and other open-source technologies violate its patents.
February 19, 2010
Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures Could be Biggest Racketeering Operation in the United States and Beyond
Patent thug Nathan Myhrvold turns out to have over 1,000 patent proxies with which to potentially attack and extort those who do not pay "protection money"; he also spent over $1 million lobbying his government
THE New York Times has published this report about Microsoft's patent troll Nathan Myhrvold, who is backed by his colleague Bill Gates, his former employer Microsoft, and even Apple. He already terrorises the industry using patents that it spent literally billions of dollars acquiring (not actually working to invent anything of substance).
http://boycottnovell.com/2010/02/19/nathan-myhrvold-exposed-again/
And here is the NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/technology/18patent.html
I suppose using the US legal system for patent extortion is especially cost effective since msft uses offshore labor for the legal work.
February 18, 2010
Microsoft to outsource general legal work to India
Software giant Microsoft will begin outsourcing general legal work to India after signing a deal with legal process outsourcing (LPO) company CPA Global. The news comes as CPA outlined plans to expand its Indian workforce from 600 to 1,000 by the end of 2011, and hinted at opening another outsourcing centre.
http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/microsoft-outsource-general-legal-work-india
Sure am glad I have a gas guzzler. I paid for that full tank of gas I want to use it.
Tell me again why vista/win7 is supperior to XP? Just because vista/win7 consume more system resources does not mean the end user gets anything out of it.
Seems to me people are sending their money to Redmond for no good reason.
Now go ahead an tell me I'm a luddite because I don't buy everything that msft shills tell me to buy.
I think Ubuntu may have the best community. And I think the community may be a big deal to a new user.
Also, I think Mint may be based on Ubuntu. As I understand it, Mint looks a bit more like Windows, and Mint offers more "out of the box."
I use debian lenny and xfce4 myself.
About two years ago, I worked on IT team where everybody was over 45, except one guy who was 26. If the 26 year old came in 30 minutes late, it was practically like he was early, Two hours to four late was more typical. We were all amused by his daily excuses, like "my roommate's cat was sick."
Just in the last year, Microsoft has laid off thousands of Americans, and hired thousands of Indian guest workers. Microsoft is also offshoring jobs to India as fast as they possibly can.