Office 10 is slated to work on Windows 98/98 SE, Windows Millennium Edition, NT 4.0, and Windows 2000. It will not be backward-compatitble with earlier versions of Windows, company officials have said.
It appears to me that this is yet another way of trying to make people upgrade. At work, we still use win95 (with a few NT, Win2K, & Linux desktops) as the standard desktop. I can't see management forking over the cash required to upgrade all the PCs just to run Office 10. IMHO, if MS does this, it would be a perfect opportunity for Sun & StarOffice to come in and pick up a lot of ex-Office customers and very well cause Office and OS sales to slow down even further.
From the slashdot explaination, I was somewhat expecting something like your examples, not the 'pop-history with a political bent' scenes. I guess that all depends on what one classifies as historical events. I did like a couple of them, though...
Yeah...the same people who watch Oprah, Jerry Springer, and the other crap that's passed off as entertainment these days. Big deal. Turn off the boob tube and go do something productive.
That's funny...the social conservatives are the ones pulling their kids out of public schools and enrolling them in private schools or homeschooling them so they will get a good education. It's the teacher's unions and bureaucrats that want to keep shoveling money into the current broken system.
That's highly annoying when you just want a bunch of followers who you can lead around by their noses, or expect them to keep out of trouble when you don't have anything for them to do.
Actually, that sounds more like the core Democratic party to me. Get people dependant on the Govt and use them to deliver votes. Ken Hamblin has a nice colorful term for these people: Poverty Pimps.
My 175MHz R10000 (1MB L2 cache) manages to crunch a SETI@Home packet in only 9 hours.
My celeron 450 will crunch a seti packet in about 8 1/2 hrs, so they are roughly equivalent with this test even though the mips is running at less than 1/2 the clock speed. I would certainly like to see SGIs with 1GHz chips. I certainly couldn't afford to buy one, but I can always dream.
I haven't been in the market for them, but I believe that GM does still make full sized station wagon (an Oldsmobile). I would also consider many other vehicles in GM's line-up to be full-sized also. I know a couple people that recently bought a Crown Vic, and they certainly through fleet purchases.
But why is hauling a 4x8 sheet of plywood so important? Is this something that you do every week? If so, then yes, a truck may be in order. Better yet, go down to U-Haul have them put a trailer hitch on your car. Then you can rent or buy a small trailer that would carry the occasional 4x8 sheets of plywood. IMHO, way too many people buy vehicles in order to satisfy some psychological urge (to look cool, status, etc) and/or to be able to do a particular task that they might do once or twice a year instead of what they are going to use it for every day. A friend of mine bought an Explorer because he is an HVAC engineer and has lots of equipment that he needs to carry to contruction sites that may or may not be accessible by a regular car. For him it's a necessity. For the suburban soccer mom, it's a huge waste.
The CAFE exemption is another pet peeve. When they came up with the CAFE regs, the only people who bought light trucks were those who needed them (farmers, people hauling heavy tools & equipment, etc). Then trucks became fashionable and urbanites started buying them for the above stated reasons (and drove up the prices for the people who actually need them). The car makers got clued into this and started pitching vehicles that could technically be considered light trucks. They make far more profit from these vehicles and can skirt the regs at the same time. For crying out loud, the PT Cruiser (the same car that Andover is giving away) is classified as a light truck. Remove the retro panel-van body, and it's the same as a Neon! IMHO, CAFE should be expanded to include these 'light duty trucks'. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be made, because some people certainly need them.
I have a Hyundai Excel and a Mistubishi Precis (same car different year & badges). Both are hatchbacks and I can carry a hell of a lot with them. They can certainly carry four (five if squeezed) people and a playpen + other stuff. The list of stuff I've hauled in them include: wood for bookshelves (2x8 plywood, 2x4s, etc), twin mattresses & corresponding box springs, a 12 cu ft freezer, dressers, disassembled swing set (w/ slide, monkey bars, & swinging bench for two -- all in one trip w/ hatch closed) and lots of other stuff that I've forgotten about. The Excel even has a U-haul trailer hitch that was used to pull a packed 5x8 enclosed U-haul trailer over the Rocky Mountains (via I-80 & through the Eisenhower Tunnel) and across the plains in 90+ heat, without a complaint (well not from the car..lots of complaints from some of the passengers). It's still used to haul big pieces of furniture, refrigerators, etc. with an inexpensive U-haul trailer. So you can kinda see why I don't believe most people when they say they need a SUV or minivan. Unless, they have four+ kids and/or haul lots of equipment, they don't need it, they want it to satisfy some urge. My wife has tried to get me buy a small minivan or SUV over the years. The ones we've looked at usually flunk the 'does it carry as much as the Hyundai' test. If not, they flunk the 'cost to operate' tests.
I'm not an enviromentalist, just a cheap bastard who doesn't like to waste resources. It's no wonder I run Linux! =)
Why do I need an SUV, when a station wagon would suffice?
I'm beginning to view SUVs as a combination status-mobile and station wagon for the macho with more money than common sense. CBS Marketwatch had a story about how SUV buyers are paying at least $250 per month more compared to a normal car after the higher price, extra fuel costs, and higher insurance were taken into account. In their opinion, it would be better to invest this for retirement. Given that most people use them just like a station wagon, IMHO, owning a SUV is a waste of resources.
You've got to be kidding. Or maybe you have a different definition than 'fine' than I do. I don't like having to take 'coffee breaks' every time I start something on my computer. I had to configure some software on some PII machines w/ about 64M of ram running NT4 and they seemed slow to me (compared to my P166 w/ 32M running Win95). I can only imagine NT4 on a 486/33 would be like running Win95 on a 386-20.
Windows NT will run on a 486 or Pentium with 16M of RAM, but it is so slow that you will slit your wrists while waiting for a program to load and start running.
Now that's an understatement if I've ever read one! We have NT 4.0 on some PII machines (233 or 300) with 64M of ram at work, and they are still slow for doing simple things like bringing up the file manager. They weren't as bad as the 386s running Win95 that we used to have in the training lab, but it still was slower that I would have imagined given the hardware.
When ever I try to open a file that's been gzipped, Netscape (4.75 on linux) automatically prompts me with a file dialog box. This is even if I'm reading it straight from the file system. Thanks
We never wished for Mozilla to be anything more than a browser.
So what. Mozilla was never about just providing an open source browser for Linux. Netscape/AOL have much bigger plans for it. Believe it or not, a lot of people use the current netscape communicator for browsing, email, news, etc. Mozilla/Netscape 6 still needs to at least support that feature set, or a lot of people that are current users are going to be pissed. It will be the basis for AOL 6 for Windows, MacOS, and the linux based set-top boxes. Hmmm...the people cutting the paychecks for most of the developers have different goals than some anonymous coward on Slashdot. It's not too difficult to see who's goals they decided to go with! If you just want the browser, you can build it without all the other stuff if you want, so what's the big deal?
Maybe you should look into rechargable batteries, then. Or just plug stuff in to the wall sockets.
If you sign up for their Battery Club, the batteries are free. IIRC, you used to be able to get a free 9V or small blister pack of RS brand batteries every month. It's one way of getting people into the store and having them actually buy something else. Grocery stores do it all the time. They advertise products with prices that are below cost and hope that you buy something else once you are in the store. When I picked up a RS catalog + CueCat, I bought a few other things. Wal-Mart is a master at this. I don't know how many times I've gone into a WM to get a package of diapers or something else for the kids and end up buying $50 of other stuff. My wife say's it is due to a chemical they put in the Sam's brand drinks and food that makes one addicted to shopping at Wal-Mart. Along with floride, it's a standard additive in the tap water in Bentonville, Ark. =)
For crypto support, you have to download the PSM from iplanet. There is a link to it in the Mozilla release notes. Once installed, crypto works just fine. I've never had any problems with M17 and cookies (using it right now to auto login to Slashdot and post this message). Also, if Mozilla is slow on your machine, you need to get more memory. I added an extra 16M of ram (48 to 64) to a P233 machine and Mozilla became very responsive, almost like it was a entirely different program. Hopefully, someone will include the ability to launch an external client for mail from Mozilla like Muttzilla can do now with netscape 4.7x.
I've tried Galeon, but the version I had tried did not work with proxies or sites requiring user authentication. Since about 100% of the pages that I view at work fall into either of those categories, it's of no use to me. The nightly mozilla builds are supposed to consume less memory and the new mozilla skin looks much better than the original. It's far from being dead, so why do you want to carve it up?.
Given that it's at best beta quality, I wouldn't think that any corporations would be letting their employees use it for anything other than experimentation or testing it to see how it deals with production web pages. I wouldn't say IE has conquered all corporate environments. Netscape is the standard browser where I work. The only way anyone uses IE is if they download and install it themselves or they access it via a COM object in bLotus Notes. Considering that several desktops use Linux and Linux is beginning to be used for an intranet station, I don't think we will be switching to IE soon, either.
I thought that the NS 6.0 installer is supposed to only install the pieces of the application that you want. If that's not the case, I'm sure someone will correct me. Now, on the Unix side of things, there already is something called Muttzilla
that does exactly what you describe: launch your favorite email program. In my case, it uses gnudoit to send a message telling emacs to create a mail buffer with the given email address, subject, etc. I would expect something similar will be available for Mozilla.
I guess I should have been more specific: Chinese & a few Koreans. The TA in question was Chinese.
There's nothing racist about being mad that you have to meet a certain requirement only to see that another group of people who are supposed to meet the same requirement, obviously don't. Nor do I believe it is racist to expect people that are going to school or working in a country to learn the predominant language of that country. If I were to live in Germany, Brazil, or Japan. I would work my ass off to become fluent in the languages of those countries. It's in my best interest to do so and of course out of respect for the people living there. The TAs in question could never really help anyone because they couldn't really understand the students and the students couldn't understand them. It really pissed me off when people start crying racism over stupid things that aren't.
So do Filipinos speak better English than the English too? =) Seriously, I'm not surprised that Filipinos are fluent in English. The country was a US possession for quite a long time and the home to major US military bases.
According to the VNC web site, The WinVNC server is slow period. I use it mainly with x2vnc to control my windows machine from my linux machine. When I move my mouse to the edge of the screen in X, it starts moving the mouse in windows and linux keyboard input goes to the current windows program. I've tried using the X vnc client with the WinVNC and it is painfully slow. The X VNC server is much faster.
Good for you. I don't know the specific dollar amount, just that I was told that they are much less expensive salary-wise. Most web pages on the subject also more or less say the same thing. Given that changing jobs is supposedly much more difficult and the companies hold that over the person's head, that sounds pretty shady to me.
People didn't want to go there because the place gets winter? Where the hell is that and who are the idiots that are turning it away? I could care less about walking on the beach at any time of the year. Actually, I prefer cold winters (-15 or -20F or less). At least in those areas, people don't freak out over a few snowflakes and mob the stores to buy groceries.
I don't know anything about it given that I've never worked there. The people that I know there haven't said anything about it other than 'Oh, that's with Company/Division X, and I'm in Division Y, so you know as much as I do.'
Actually, I guess that means that the Pakistanis and Indians must be even more racist, because it actually bugged them more than the European that pulled the prank. I certainly wouldn't say that this was a racist act.
No, their communication skills were/are pretty good and while they had an accent it was certainly not bad and certainly not bad enough to make the phrase 'are the lights on?' that garbled.
I would also agree with the point about the Asian complaining about spelling & English skills of some Americans. It wasn't difficult to spot the foreign students that went through British-styled prep schools because they had a much better grasp of the English language than many American students (givent the state of education in some areas, that's not a difficult feat, unfortunately.).
In theory, that's how it's supposed to be. But it certainly wasn't the case. I knew the TAs in question and absolutely no-one could understand them. It wasn't just the American and Europeans either. Friends of mine that were from the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Africa (no..I wasn't put in the 'international dorm' was I? =) couldn't understand them either (in writing or verbally). They were the ones that were pissed because they knew that the requirements were and couldn't believe these Chinese guys got in. Hell, the Polish guy that pulled the prank, would often say that some of the Pakistani guys were 'more Americanized than the Americans'. Heck, one of my best friends from college could only read/write English and German. He was illiterate in his native language (Bangali?)...enough of this rambling.
And no, he wasn't speaking Swahili, Polish, or anything other than standard English. Yes, he had an accent, but it wasn't very bad at all.
Actually, from what I've read, it's the opposite. FedEx has always been griping that they can't attract enough competent tech talent into the area and that the local schools can't produce enough. I'm certain that they probably don't want to pay what they do in CA or other places. so recent grads thinking that they are going to land a $60-80K job are in for a shock. Memphis also isn't known for having a lot of high-tech companies either. Most of the hi-tech people that I know work at a handful of big corps and that's it. It has been said that FedEx built their new tech center in Collierville to get away from Memphis' 'problems' in order to help it recruit people. That being said, when I moved here 5 years ago, I got in on a Saturday, looked through the Sunday paper, interviewed with a contracting company on Monday, and was working on Wednesday. I was hired by the company I worked at a few months later and I've been there ever since. For a period of time it seemed that the company would go through periods where a lot of tech people would quit for better paying jobs across town or other places in the country. They have since re-evaluated the compensation scheme to shore up the turnover rate =) (I really like my job, especially when they keep giving me raises. However, given what I know about the Memphis area now, I wouldn't have moved here, even though I'm making 2.5x what I used to before).
Yes the H1B people are a lot cheaper. Why would any company go through the trouble of importing people and put up with the communication problems if they weren't cheaper. My manager would like to hire more permanent US employees, but due to budget reasons, he has to get Indians.
Slashdot Mirror
According to http://www.zdnet.com /zd nn/stories/news/0,4586,2644039,00.html, the next release of Office (Office 10) will only work on Win98 or later.
It appears to me that this is yet another way of trying to make people upgrade. At work, we still use win95 (with a few NT, Win2K, & Linux desktops) as the standard desktop. I can't see management forking over the cash required to upgrade all the PCs just to run Office 10. IMHO, if MS does this, it would be a perfect opportunity for Sun & StarOffice to come in and pick up a lot of ex-Office customers and very well cause Office and OS sales to slow down even further.From the slashdot explaination, I was somewhat expecting something like your examples, not the 'pop-history with a political bent' scenes. I guess that all depends on what one classifies as historical events. I did like a couple of them, though...
Yeah...the same people who watch Oprah, Jerry Springer, and the other crap that's passed off as entertainment these days. Big deal. Turn off the boob tube and go do something productive.
That's funny...the social conservatives are the ones pulling their kids out of public schools and enrolling them in private schools or homeschooling them so they will get a good education. It's the teacher's unions and bureaucrats that want to keep shoveling money into the current broken system.
That's highly annoying when you just want a bunch of followers who you can lead around by their noses, or expect them to keep out of trouble when you don't have anything for them to do.
Actually, that sounds more like the core Democratic party to me. Get people dependant on the Govt and use them to deliver votes. Ken Hamblin has a nice colorful term for these people: Poverty Pimps.
My 175MHz R10000 (1MB L2 cache) manages to crunch a SETI@Home packet in only 9 hours.
My celeron 450 will crunch a seti packet in about 8 1/2 hrs, so they are roughly equivalent with this test even though the mips is running at less than 1/2 the clock speed. I would certainly like to see SGIs with 1GHz chips. I certainly couldn't afford to buy one, but I can always dream.
I haven't been in the market for them, but I believe that GM does still make full sized station wagon (an Oldsmobile). I would also consider many other vehicles in GM's line-up to be full-sized also. I know a couple people that recently bought a Crown Vic, and they certainly through fleet purchases.
But why is hauling a 4x8 sheet of plywood so important? Is this something that you do every week? If so, then yes, a truck may be in order. Better yet, go down to U-Haul have them put a trailer hitch on your car. Then you can rent or buy a small trailer that would carry the occasional 4x8 sheets of plywood. IMHO, way too many people buy vehicles in order to satisfy some psychological urge (to look cool, status, etc) and/or to be able to do a particular task that they might do once or twice a year instead of what they are going to use it for every day. A friend of mine bought an Explorer because he is an HVAC engineer and has lots of equipment that he needs to carry to contruction sites that may or may not be accessible by a regular car. For him it's a necessity. For the suburban soccer mom, it's a huge waste.
The CAFE exemption is another pet peeve. When they came up with the CAFE regs, the only people who bought light trucks were those who needed them (farmers, people hauling heavy tools & equipment, etc). Then trucks became fashionable and urbanites started buying them for the above stated reasons (and drove up the prices for the people who actually need them). The car makers got clued into this and started pitching vehicles that could technically be considered light trucks. They make far more profit from these vehicles and can skirt the regs at the same time. For crying out loud, the PT Cruiser (the same car that Andover is giving away) is classified as a light truck. Remove the retro panel-van body, and it's the same as a Neon! IMHO, CAFE should be expanded to include these 'light duty trucks'. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be made, because some people certainly need them.
I have a Hyundai Excel and a Mistubishi Precis (same car different year & badges). Both are hatchbacks and I can carry a hell of a lot with them. They can certainly carry four (five if squeezed) people and a playpen + other stuff. The list of stuff I've hauled in them include: wood for bookshelves (2x8 plywood, 2x4s, etc), twin mattresses & corresponding box springs, a 12 cu ft freezer, dressers, disassembled swing set (w/ slide, monkey bars, & swinging bench for two -- all in one trip w/ hatch closed) and lots of other stuff that I've forgotten about. The Excel even has a U-haul trailer hitch that was used to pull a packed 5x8 enclosed U-haul trailer over the Rocky Mountains (via I-80 & through the Eisenhower Tunnel) and across the plains in 90+ heat, without a complaint (well not from the car..lots of complaints from some of the passengers). It's still used to haul big pieces of furniture, refrigerators, etc. with an inexpensive U-haul trailer. So you can kinda see why I don't believe most people when they say they need a SUV or minivan. Unless, they have four+ kids and/or haul lots of equipment, they don't need it, they want it to satisfy some urge. My wife has tried to get me buy a small minivan or SUV over the years. The ones we've looked at usually flunk the 'does it carry as much as the Hyundai' test. If not, they flunk the 'cost to operate' tests.
I'm not an enviromentalist, just a cheap bastard who doesn't like to waste resources. It's no wonder I run Linux! =)
Why do I need an SUV, when a station wagon would suffice?
I'm beginning to view SUVs as a combination status-mobile and station wagon for the macho with more money than common sense. CBS Marketwatch had a story about how SUV buyers are paying at least $250 per month more compared to a normal car after the higher price, extra fuel costs, and higher insurance were taken into account. In their opinion, it would be better to invest this for retirement. Given that most people use them just like a station wagon, IMHO, owning a SUV is a waste of resources.
Or emacs' hideshow-mode.
You've got to be kidding. Or maybe you have a different definition than 'fine' than I do. I don't like having to take 'coffee breaks' every time I start something on my computer. I had to configure some software on some PII machines w/ about 64M of ram running NT4 and they seemed slow to me (compared to my P166 w/ 32M running Win95). I can only imagine NT4 on a 486/33 would be like running Win95 on a 386-20.
Windows NT will run on a 486 or Pentium with 16M of RAM, but it is so slow that you will slit your wrists while waiting for a program to load and start running.
Now that's an understatement if I've ever read one! We have NT 4.0 on some PII machines (233 or 300) with 64M of ram at work, and they are still slow for doing simple things like bringing up the file manager. They weren't as bad as the 386s running Win95 that we used to have in the training lab, but it still was slower that I would have imagined given the hardware.
When ever I try to open a file that's been gzipped, Netscape (4.75 on linux) automatically prompts me with a file dialog box. This is even if I'm reading it straight from the file system. Thanks
We never wished for Mozilla to be anything more than a browser.
So what. Mozilla was never about just providing an open source browser for Linux. Netscape/AOL have much bigger plans for it. Believe it or not, a lot of people use the current netscape communicator for browsing, email, news, etc. Mozilla/Netscape 6 still needs to at least support that feature set, or a lot of people that are current users are going to be pissed. It will be the basis for AOL 6 for Windows, MacOS, and the linux based set-top boxes. Hmmm...the people cutting the paychecks for most of the developers have different goals than some anonymous coward on Slashdot. It's not too difficult to see who's goals they decided to go with! If you just want the browser, you can build it without all the other stuff if you want, so what's the big deal?
Maybe you should look into rechargable batteries, then. Or just plug stuff in to the wall sockets.
If you sign up for their Battery Club, the batteries are free. IIRC, you used to be able to get a free 9V or small blister pack of RS brand batteries every month. It's one way of getting people into the store and having them actually buy something else. Grocery stores do it all the time. They advertise products with prices that are below cost and hope that you buy something else once you are in the store. When I picked up a RS catalog + CueCat, I bought a few other things. Wal-Mart is a master at this. I don't know how many times I've gone into a WM to get a package of diapers or something else for the kids and end up buying $50 of other stuff. My wife say's it is due to a chemical they put in the Sam's brand drinks and food that makes one addicted to shopping at Wal-Mart. Along with floride, it's a standard additive in the tap water in Bentonville, Ark. =)
For crypto support, you have to download the PSM from iplanet. There is a link to it in the Mozilla release notes. Once installed, crypto works just fine. I've never had any problems with M17 and cookies (using it right now to auto login to Slashdot and post this message). Also, if Mozilla is slow on your machine, you need to get more memory. I added an extra 16M of ram (48 to 64) to a P233 machine and Mozilla became very responsive, almost like it was a entirely different program. Hopefully, someone will include the ability to launch an external client for mail from Mozilla like Muttzilla can do now with netscape 4.7x.
I've tried Galeon, but the version I had tried did not work with proxies or sites requiring user authentication. Since about 100% of the pages that I view at work fall into either of those categories, it's of no use to me. The nightly mozilla builds are supposed to consume less memory and the new mozilla skin looks much better than the original. It's far from being dead, so why do you want to carve it up?.
Given that it's at best beta quality, I wouldn't think that any corporations would be letting their employees use it for anything other than experimentation or testing it to see how it deals with production web pages. I wouldn't say IE has conquered all corporate environments. Netscape is the standard browser where I work. The only way anyone uses IE is if they download and install it themselves or they access it via a COM object in bLotus Notes. Considering that several desktops use Linux and Linux is beginning to be used for an intranet station, I don't think we will be switching to IE soon, either.
I thought that the NS 6.0 installer is supposed to only install the pieces of the application that you want. If that's not the case, I'm sure someone will correct me. Now, on the Unix side of things, there already is something called Muttzilla that does exactly what you describe: launch your favorite email program. In my case, it uses gnudoit to send a message telling emacs to create a mail buffer with the given email address, subject, etc. I would expect something similar will be available for Mozilla.
I guess I should have been more specific: Chinese & a few Koreans. The TA in question was Chinese.
There's nothing racist about being mad that you have to meet a certain requirement only to see that another group of people who are supposed to meet the same requirement, obviously don't. Nor do I believe it is racist to expect people that are going to school or working in a country to learn the predominant language of that country. If I were to live in Germany, Brazil, or Japan. I would work my ass off to become fluent in the languages of those countries. It's in my best interest to do so and of course out of respect for the people living there. The TAs in question could never really help anyone because they couldn't really understand the students and the students couldn't understand them. It really pissed me off when people start crying racism over stupid things that aren't.
So do Filipinos speak better English than the English too? =) Seriously, I'm not surprised that Filipinos are fluent in English. The country was a US possession for quite a long time and the home to major US military bases.
According to the VNC web site, The WinVNC server is slow period. I use it mainly with x2vnc to control my windows machine from my linux machine. When I move my mouse to the edge of the screen in X, it starts moving the mouse in windows and linux keyboard input goes to the current windows program. I've tried using the X vnc client with the WinVNC and it is painfully slow. The X VNC server is much faster.
Why the heck would they have programmers working at the hub? That doesn't make a damn bit of sense.
Good for you. I don't know the specific dollar amount, just that I was told that they are much less expensive salary-wise. Most web pages on the subject also more or less say the same thing. Given that changing jobs is supposedly much more difficult and the companies hold that over the person's head, that sounds pretty shady to me.
People didn't want to go there because the place gets winter? Where the hell is that and who are the idiots that are turning it away? I could care less about walking on the beach at any time of the year. Actually, I prefer cold winters (-15 or -20F or less). At least in those areas, people don't freak out over a few snowflakes and mob the stores to buy groceries.
I don't know anything about it given that I've never worked there. The people that I know there haven't said anything about it other than 'Oh, that's with Company/Division X, and I'm in Division Y, so you know as much as I do.'
Actually, I guess that means that the Pakistanis and Indians must be even more racist, because it actually bugged them more than the European that pulled the prank. I certainly wouldn't say that this was a racist act.
No, their communication skills were/are pretty good and while they had an accent it was certainly not bad and certainly not bad enough to make the phrase 'are the lights on?' that garbled.
I would also agree with the point about the Asian complaining about spelling & English skills of some Americans. It wasn't difficult to spot the foreign students that went through British-styled prep schools because they had a much better grasp of the English language than many American students (givent the state of education in some areas, that's not a difficult feat, unfortunately.).
In theory, that's how it's supposed to be. But it certainly wasn't the case. I knew the TAs in question and absolutely no-one could understand them. It wasn't just the American and Europeans either. Friends of mine that were from the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Africa (no..I wasn't put in the 'international dorm' was I? =) couldn't understand them either (in writing or verbally). They were the ones that were pissed because they knew that the requirements were and couldn't believe these Chinese guys got in. Hell, the Polish guy that pulled the prank, would often say that some of the Pakistani guys were 'more Americanized than the Americans'. Heck, one of my best friends from college could only read/write English and German. He was illiterate in his native language (Bangali?)...enough of this rambling.
And no, he wasn't speaking Swahili, Polish, or anything other than standard English. Yes, he had an accent, but it wasn't very bad at all.
Actually, from what I've read, it's the opposite. FedEx has always been griping that they can't attract enough competent tech talent into the area and that the local schools can't produce enough. I'm certain that they probably don't want to pay what they do in CA or other places. so recent grads thinking that they are going to land a $60-80K job are in for a shock. Memphis also isn't known for having a lot of high-tech companies either. Most of the hi-tech people that I know work at a handful of big corps and that's it. It has been said that FedEx built their new tech center in Collierville to get away from Memphis' 'problems' in order to help it recruit people. That being said, when I moved here 5 years ago, I got in on a Saturday, looked through the Sunday paper, interviewed with a contracting company on Monday, and was working on Wednesday. I was hired by the company I worked at a few months later and I've been there ever since. For a period of time it seemed that the company would go through periods where a lot of tech people would quit for better paying jobs across town or other places in the country. They have since re-evaluated the compensation scheme to shore up the turnover rate =) (I really like my job, especially when they keep giving me raises. However, given what I know about the Memphis area now, I wouldn't have moved here, even though I'm making 2.5x what I used to before).
Yes the H1B people are a lot cheaper. Why would any company go through the trouble of importing people and put up with the communication problems if they weren't cheaper. My manager would like to hire more permanent US employees, but due to budget reasons, he has to get Indians.