Seems to be the case, given Microsoft's and Amazon's application. If Somalis and Yemenis are who have been key to Microsoft lately, that might explain why Windows has gone down the toilet since 8.
I regret using Amazon as my channel for buying things: will look at the alternatives going forward. Any good suggestions of companies that are not dedicated to bringing in people from Jihadist countries?
You want irony? Check this out - Kuwait has done exactly the same thing: only that they added 2, and didn't include 4 of the countries in question. Syria, Iran and Iraq are common, Kuwait added Pakistan and Afghanistan (which some critics in the US have been asking about) while they didn't include Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya.
Luckily for Kuwait, there are no Bush appointed judges acting at the behest of Bozos or Nadella to help those companies not only continue to undermine the US economy, but also seriously endanger us. And for those Leftist pooh-baahs who 'point out' that nobody from these 7 countries have killed anyone, they've not followed anything about the Somalis in Minneapolis, nor that Somali who did that Ohio State attack. Yeah, technically, nobody got 'killed', but that doesn't mean that no terror attack happened!!!
I'm fine w/ US citizens who are stupid enough to go to those 7 countries get vetted to make sure that they indeed do suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Only thing - they should be kept there as citizens, and never return
Do they have broadband in these countries - Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, et al? They'd need that to run Skype. I support the ban - our safety comes ahead of their convenience, but they could have relocated them to Turkey or Dubai and continued from there
In fact, iPhones had the same marketshare as the Lumia. In fact, in India, when apps are advertized, one sees as many that are available on Windows Phone as are on Android or iOS
It means that they are totally lost in this country, and that other than work, they're totally at sea. They don't assimilate, and more likely than not, are part of their mini ghettos
Actually, studies of the minimum wage over the years has shown that when minimum wage is increased, it results in an upward pressure on wages across the board, which is why unions traditionally have supported it. It's not just the entry level or bottom rung people whose wages increase: it's everybody's, in order to maintain the status and keep entry level workers from overtaking their superiors in terms of earnings. The end result of minimum wages is to discourage hiring people at that level, whose worth may actually be less, but are artificially clamped up by law
It's a different case w/ the H1B minimum wage that's been proposed, since here, the consequence is intended i.e. discourage companies from going for H1Bs and look first at local talent.
The problem w/ all these employers is that they are excessively picky, and want people who have 'domain knowledge' i.e. if they're wanted in a company like Verisign, then they want somebody from a company in the same sector. So if they are looking for programmers in say, Securities, then they'll look at Wells, BofA, Chase, et al, tossing in requirements like familiarity w/ Bond Math. When they don't get them, they'll start looking for people w/ visas, and asking to import them. It's hard for the Department of Labor to tell them to accept someone w/ some of the qualifications and train them or get them experienced in the segment that's wanting
Interestingly, the Left likes isolation when it comes to Americans staying out of other countries, but hates it when it comes to keeping foreigners out of the US
Foreign students are there because they pay full bore tuition. Replacing them with American citizens means you also need to replace that revenue.
Uh, no, foreign students don't pay full tuition, particularly if they are from countries like India or China, which do not have a freely convertible currency. More often than not, they get some sort of assistantship or scholarship, and once they qualify for that, they get paid instate tuitions - the same as local students, and better than out of state students. So revenue-wise, there's no advantage to keeping them
However, the summary seems to conflate F1 graduates w/ H1B imports. The two are different, even if their process of naturalization may converge. F1 students are those who study in the US, get a degree and armed w/ that degree, get a job in the US. Since the only work environment they are familiar w/ is the US work environment, for them work is an apples to apples comparison w/ local graduates who take the same jobs. Only thing: their OPT is good only for 2 years, and after that, they have to get an H1B if they wanna continue.
The H1B imports that one sees from Infosys or Mahindra or those other Indian companies is different. They hire somebody in India who was used to Indian work conditions - much worse than here, then train them their way, and then when the reqs open, apply for whatever visa works - H1B, L1, B1.... and bring them here. These are people who are not culturally compatible w/ the culture here - be it the work culture or the culture in general, and where there is a good argument to be made that the only thing they do is depress wages. This is where they need to reform the program and separate out the specialists category from those who are better off as temporary workers.
Actually, how many employees does Microsoft have from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya? I thought that most of their foreign employees would be people from Europe, China and India, who are untouched by this order (which applies only from the above countries)
Okay, I get you. Although I tend to use my phone more indoors - be it in the house or car or somewhere inside. Usually, if I'm outdoors, I have to put the phone on speaker due to the ambient noise, which creates problems for the person at the other end of the call. Hence, I'm rarely affected by the phone getting wet - even had I lived in Seattle
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D. The Macs started on Motorola, but switched to PowerPC when they started to fall behind Intel. Unfortunately the Macs (home and office PCs) accounted for something like 1% of PowerPC sales, so IBM didn't give a damn what Apple wanted. Their meat and potatoes was in the server market so that's what they tuned the PowerPC CPUs for, when the PC market was clearly moving towards low-power consumption laptops. That's what drove Apple to Intel in the first place.
That was THEN - before even the iPod era, let alone iPad or iPhone. Apple was floundering and didn't have the volumes to justify Motorola or IBM rigging the tweaks they needed to improve power consumption. Since then, Apple acquired PA-Semi, a chipmaker who then went on to create the A series of microprocessors - all based on ARM. Today, the sheer volume of iPhones is enough to justify that line, and once you toss in iPads and iPod touches, that makes it even better. If Apple can get that on the Macs, then they have their entire ecosystem built around their own CPUs
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs. That could happen, but I'm not convinced it will. The tablet market is already floundering after reaching saturation. I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years). In a saturated marketplace, the Mac commands so little of the PC market it wasn't able to keep Motorola competitive nor sway IBM. And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
I'm not convinced that ARM itself would be a magic bullet, so Apple may need to explore another CPU - maybe based on Power, maybe based on RISC V or something else, that can scale to Xeon levels that power Mac Pros, for instance. You are right - that iPad sales have slowed down, and iPhones could well be next: there is little reason to go from iPhone 6 to 7, and since the iPhone 7 I got has 128GB of storage in it, I'm not gonna need another phone, unless this one dies on me, or gets stolen, and even then, it'll more likely be a replacement than an upgrade. However, it remains more popular than the most popular Android, and so the A series CPUs which it's based on will likely be the platform on which to build the Macs
On the CISC vs RISC wars, the advantage Intel had in the past was its volumes. While that's not gone away, the RISC side of the market has pretty much consolidated behind ARM in general, and Qualcomm in particular. And in this battle, Intel has not been winning: it pretty much had to abandon plans to make the Atom their flagship in the cellphone market. And while Windows may be locked to the Intel platform, other OSs are not, since they either don't have a legacy base like Wintel, or when they do, they are FOSS. The market is a lot more open for any alternative CPU architectures today than it ever was, given the penetration of Linux or BSD based OSs
Intel (and Microsoft) is successful because they managed to find a market with consistently large annual sales (and profit margins) even after reaching saturation. So far Apple has been riding a growing mobile market to success - basically coasting downhill. It remains to be seen whether they can continue that momentum once the hill levels out, people stop upgrading every 2 years, and they're forced to really, truly innovate to create demand to sustain their sales.
Both Intel and Microsoft have been stagnating, which is why Intel had their layoffs, and Microsoft has been reducing a lot
Is there any serious advantage to buying Mac at this point except looking hip ?
I would say the OS. Windows 10 - the future looks really unstable. Linux and BSD - there is always something missing (in my case, TrueOS, the fact that the WiFi is still not supported.)
For Apple, the main reason not to buy them is the expense, since they build in the cost of maintaining OS X into the price. But if they had a range of computers from $200 to $2000, they'd be the ones I'd recommend, since they have BSD underpinnings, if one wants an established OS when it comes to dealing w/ firewalls, routers and the like, while having a far more refined UI than almost anything else out there - Windows, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, et al
No need to pressure Intel. Apple makes a whole line of processors for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch: they can leverage that in building the newer macs. In fact, I've long argued that they should drop the Intel line and build computers from the A10: they already have a chipset infrastructure around it, and can leverage this to drive up volumes, and maybe even justify having their own fab
My understanding is a significant percentage of Intel dies are supporting ancient x86 instructions.
Apple doesn't care about backward compatibility If they can deliver a next gen chip with zero support of existing apps, they may have the money to pull it off.
If Intel could write off the x86 instruction set I'm guessing it's benchmarks would at least double..
Last point first - Intel made THREE attempts to write off the x86 instruction set - the i960, the i860 and finally, the Itanium. While the first 2 found use in embedded devices and some high performance computing, the last one ended up as a fiasco: you know it's bad when even Linux and BSD don't wanna support it. Also, the point you made about a significant part of the die supporting x86 microcode is dated: that percentage has fallen significantly in the core architecture
But the other point I was wondering was - why doesn't Apple just reuse the A10 and the chipset around it? Where's the compelling need to reinvent this wheel? As it is, they have been making OS X increasingly like iOS: it's nothing like NEXTSTEP, which is what it derived from. It also would help them drive up volumes for this, and enable them to sink more cash into future generations of such CPUs.
That's not how it works. I had the first or second generation of iPod touch and had some neat apps on it. Unfortunately, that thing could only upgrade upto iOS 4.3, so after a while, there were no apps in the app store that would work w/ that version. Best one can do is back it up on iTunes, which I did.
TVs, Blue Ray players, cars and jets may have interesting embedded devices that use some amount of Linux in operating, but that hardly makes them contain more technology than in Apple products
Apple products of today have some combination of an XNU kernel w/ various implementations of Quartz on the top, and an ecosystem that's gone out of its way to be extremely intuitive. So it uses a combination of mature technology (I'm not using 'mature' to mean EOLed here) and UI research to come up w/ outstanding products, whose only shortcomings are perhaps in their hardware combinations, where they may use less memory or a less powerful CPU than less expensive products in the market.
So yeah, there are some areas where they should improve, like allowing for SD cards in their products, but by no means does that make them cease to be a tech company. No matter how well they brand themselves as a quasi-fashion company along the lines of Prada, Gucci, Porsche, Ray Bans et al
Not disagreeing w/ you, but I can identify an Apple Watch by sight: Fitbit, or Garmin, or even the Microsoft Band are nothing like it. They have those exotic bands that look very attractive in their own right, even if the computer didn't work. In fact, that'd be a part of the reason why they are so pricey
This!!! Absolutely this. It's interesting that they compared its sales w/ Rolex. Do Rolex watches cost anywhere near as much? If not, then Rolex would certainly have beaten Apple in terms of number of units, even if Apple may have come close to them in revenue
How much of storage does that thing have? Can I watch my music videos on it using the Video app?
Another point I forgot to mention in my earlier mail just above - Trump's immigration plans - both legal and illegal - have been written by Jeff Sessions, who preferred him over Ted Cruz. While Trump does have Indian business associates, they are in India's real estate sector, not in IT, so they're not gonna push him to make these changes
It's the customization capabilities and preferences for each user. If you prefer not to use it, you can either use only a single wallpaper, or use something else altogether, like LX/QT
If they supported such a feature in one version, they should have the capability to enable that in all subsequent versions
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to be the case, given Microsoft's and Amazon's application. If Somalis and Yemenis are who have been key to Microsoft lately, that might explain why Windows has gone down the toilet since 8.
I regret using Amazon as my channel for buying things: will look at the alternatives going forward. Any good suggestions of companies that are not dedicated to bringing in people from Jihadist countries?
You want irony? Check this out - Kuwait has done exactly the same thing: only that they added 2, and didn't include 4 of the countries in question. Syria, Iran and Iraq are common, Kuwait added Pakistan and Afghanistan (which some critics in the US have been asking about) while they didn't include Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya.
Luckily for Kuwait, there are no Bush appointed judges acting at the behest of Bozos or Nadella to help those companies not only continue to undermine the US economy, but also seriously endanger us. And for those Leftist pooh-baahs who 'point out' that nobody from these 7 countries have killed anyone, they've not followed anything about the Somalis in Minneapolis, nor that Somali who did that Ohio State attack. Yeah, technically, nobody got 'killed', but that doesn't mean that no terror attack happened!!!
I'm fine w/ US citizens who are stupid enough to go to those 7 countries get vetted to make sure that they indeed do suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Only thing - they should be kept there as citizens, and never return
Do they have broadband in these countries - Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, et al? They'd need that to run Skype. I support the ban - our safety comes ahead of their convenience, but they could have relocated them to Turkey or Dubai and continued from there
In fact, iPhones had the same marketshare as the Lumia. In fact, in India, when apps are advertized, one sees as many that are available on Windows Phone as are on Android or iOS
If they are building them just for India, why do their QA levels have to be the same as that in the US?
It means that they are totally lost in this country, and that other than work, they're totally at sea. They don't assimilate, and more likely than not, are part of their mini ghettos
Actually, studies of the minimum wage over the years has shown that when minimum wage is increased, it results in an upward pressure on wages across the board, which is why unions traditionally have supported it. It's not just the entry level or bottom rung people whose wages increase: it's everybody's, in order to maintain the status and keep entry level workers from overtaking their superiors in terms of earnings. The end result of minimum wages is to discourage hiring people at that level, whose worth may actually be less, but are artificially clamped up by law
It's a different case w/ the H1B minimum wage that's been proposed, since here, the consequence is intended i.e. discourage companies from going for H1Bs and look first at local talent.
The problem w/ all these employers is that they are excessively picky, and want people who have 'domain knowledge' i.e. if they're wanted in a company like Verisign, then they want somebody from a company in the same sector. So if they are looking for programmers in say, Securities, then they'll look at Wells, BofA, Chase, et al, tossing in requirements like familiarity w/ Bond Math. When they don't get them, they'll start looking for people w/ visas, and asking to import them. It's hard for the Department of Labor to tell them to accept someone w/ some of the qualifications and train them or get them experienced in the segment that's wanting
Interestingly, the Left likes isolation when it comes to Americans staying out of other countries, but hates it when it comes to keeping foreigners out of the US
Foreign students are there because they pay full bore tuition. Replacing them with American citizens means you also need to replace that revenue.
Uh, no, foreign students don't pay full tuition, particularly if they are from countries like India or China, which do not have a freely convertible currency. More often than not, they get some sort of assistantship or scholarship, and once they qualify for that, they get paid instate tuitions - the same as local students, and better than out of state students. So revenue-wise, there's no advantage to keeping them
However, the summary seems to conflate F1 graduates w/ H1B imports. The two are different, even if their process of naturalization may converge. F1 students are those who study in the US, get a degree and armed w/ that degree, get a job in the US. Since the only work environment they are familiar w/ is the US work environment, for them work is an apples to apples comparison w/ local graduates who take the same jobs. Only thing: their OPT is good only for 2 years, and after that, they have to get an H1B if they wanna continue.
The H1B imports that one sees from Infosys or Mahindra or those other Indian companies is different. They hire somebody in India who was used to Indian work conditions - much worse than here, then train them their way, and then when the reqs open, apply for whatever visa works - H1B, L1, B1.... and bring them here. These are people who are not culturally compatible w/ the culture here - be it the work culture or the culture in general, and where there is a good argument to be made that the only thing they do is depress wages. This is where they need to reform the program and separate out the specialists category from those who are better off as temporary workers.
In that case, why was Obama's ban 6 months, and Trump's ban 3-4 months?
Actually, how many employees does Microsoft have from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya? I thought that most of their foreign employees would be people from Europe, China and India, who are untouched by this order (which applies only from the above countries)
Okay, I get you. Although I tend to use my phone more indoors - be it in the house or car or somewhere inside. Usually, if I'm outdoors, I have to put the phone on speaker due to the ambient noise, which creates problems for the person at the other end of the call. Hence, I'm rarely affected by the phone getting wet - even had I lived in Seattle
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D. The Macs started on Motorola, but switched to PowerPC when they started to fall behind Intel. Unfortunately the Macs (home and office PCs) accounted for something like 1% of PowerPC sales, so IBM didn't give a damn what Apple wanted. Their meat and potatoes was in the server market so that's what they tuned the PowerPC CPUs for, when the PC market was clearly moving towards low-power consumption laptops. That's what drove Apple to Intel in the first place.
That was THEN - before even the iPod era, let alone iPad or iPhone. Apple was floundering and didn't have the volumes to justify Motorola or IBM rigging the tweaks they needed to improve power consumption. Since then, Apple acquired PA-Semi, a chipmaker who then went on to create the A series of microprocessors - all based on ARM. Today, the sheer volume of iPhones is enough to justify that line, and once you toss in iPads and iPod touches, that makes it even better. If Apple can get that on the Macs, then they have their entire ecosystem built around their own CPUs
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs. That could happen, but I'm not convinced it will. The tablet market is already floundering after reaching saturation. I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years). In a saturated marketplace, the Mac commands so little of the PC market it wasn't able to keep Motorola competitive nor sway IBM. And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
I'm not convinced that ARM itself would be a magic bullet, so Apple may need to explore another CPU - maybe based on Power, maybe based on RISC V or something else, that can scale to Xeon levels that power Mac Pros, for instance. You are right - that iPad sales have slowed down, and iPhones could well be next: there is little reason to go from iPhone 6 to 7, and since the iPhone 7 I got has 128GB of storage in it, I'm not gonna need another phone, unless this one dies on me, or gets stolen, and even then, it'll more likely be a replacement than an upgrade. However, it remains more popular than the most popular Android, and so the A series CPUs which it's based on will likely be the platform on which to build the Macs
On the CISC vs RISC wars, the advantage Intel had in the past was its volumes. While that's not gone away, the RISC side of the market has pretty much consolidated behind ARM in general, and Qualcomm in particular. And in this battle, Intel has not been winning: it pretty much had to abandon plans to make the Atom their flagship in the cellphone market. And while Windows may be locked to the Intel platform, other OSs are not, since they either don't have a legacy base like Wintel, or when they do, they are FOSS. The market is a lot more open for any alternative CPU architectures today than it ever was, given the penetration of Linux or BSD based OSs
Intel (and Microsoft) is successful because they managed to find a market with consistently large annual sales (and profit margins) even after reaching saturation. So far Apple has been riding a growing mobile market to success - basically coasting downhill. It remains to be seen whether they can continue that momentum once the hill levels out, people stop upgrading every 2 years, and they're forced to really, truly innovate to create demand to sustain their sales.
Both Intel and Microsoft have been stagnating, which is why Intel had their layoffs, and Microsoft has been reducing a lot
Is there any serious advantage to buying Mac at this point except looking hip ?
I would say the OS. Windows 10 - the future looks really unstable. Linux and BSD - there is always something missing (in my case, TrueOS, the fact that the WiFi is still not supported.)
For Apple, the main reason not to buy them is the expense, since they build in the cost of maintaining OS X into the price. But if they had a range of computers from $200 to $2000, they'd be the ones I'd recommend, since they have BSD underpinnings, if one wants an established OS when it comes to dealing w/ firewalls, routers and the like, while having a far more refined UI than almost anything else out there - Windows, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, et al
How much of that would be the choice of CPU, vs the fact that today's OS X is nothing like what it was in the day of the Power Macs?
No need to pressure Intel. Apple makes a whole line of processors for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch: they can leverage that in building the newer macs. In fact, I've long argued that they should drop the Intel line and build computers from the A10: they already have a chipset infrastructure around it, and can leverage this to drive up volumes, and maybe even justify having their own fab
My understanding is a significant percentage of Intel dies are supporting ancient x86 instructions. Apple doesn't care about backward compatibility If they can deliver a next gen chip with zero support of existing apps, they may have the money to pull it off. If Intel could write off the x86 instruction set I'm guessing it's benchmarks would at least double. .
Last point first - Intel made THREE attempts to write off the x86 instruction set - the i960, the i860 and finally, the Itanium. While the first 2 found use in embedded devices and some high performance computing, the last one ended up as a fiasco: you know it's bad when even Linux and BSD don't wanna support it. Also, the point you made about a significant part of the die supporting x86 microcode is dated: that percentage has fallen significantly in the core architecture
But the other point I was wondering was - why doesn't Apple just reuse the A10 and the chipset around it? Where's the compelling need to reinvent this wheel? As it is, they have been making OS X increasingly like iOS: it's nothing like NEXTSTEP, which is what it derived from. It also would help them drive up volumes for this, and enable them to sink more cash into future generations of such CPUs.
That's not how it works. I had the first or second generation of iPod touch and had some neat apps on it. Unfortunately, that thing could only upgrade upto iOS 4.3, so after a while, there were no apps in the app store that would work w/ that version. Best one can do is back it up on iTunes, which I did.
TVs, Blue Ray players, cars and jets may have interesting embedded devices that use some amount of Linux in operating, but that hardly makes them contain more technology than in Apple products
Apple products of today have some combination of an XNU kernel w/ various implementations of Quartz on the top, and an ecosystem that's gone out of its way to be extremely intuitive. So it uses a combination of mature technology (I'm not using 'mature' to mean EOLed here) and UI research to come up w/ outstanding products, whose only shortcomings are perhaps in their hardware combinations, where they may use less memory or a less powerful CPU than less expensive products in the market.
So yeah, there are some areas where they should improve, like allowing for SD cards in their products, but by no means does that make them cease to be a tech company. No matter how well they brand themselves as a quasi-fashion company along the lines of Prada, Gucci, Porsche, Ray Bans et al
Not disagreeing w/ you, but I can identify an Apple Watch by sight: Fitbit, or Garmin, or even the Microsoft Band are nothing like it. They have those exotic bands that look very attractive in their own right, even if the computer didn't work. In fact, that'd be a part of the reason why they are so pricey
This!!! Absolutely this. It's interesting that they compared its sales w/ Rolex. Do Rolex watches cost anywhere near as much? If not, then Rolex would certainly have beaten Apple in terms of number of units, even if Apple may have come close to them in revenue
How much of storage does that thing have? Can I watch my music videos on it using the Video app?
Another point I forgot to mention in my earlier mail just above - Trump's immigration plans - both legal and illegal - have been written by Jeff Sessions, who preferred him over Ted Cruz. While Trump does have Indian business associates, they are in India's real estate sector, not in IT, so they're not gonna push him to make these changes
It's the customization capabilities and preferences for each user. If you prefer not to use it, you can either use only a single wallpaper, or use something else altogether, like LX/QT
If they supported such a feature in one version, they should have the capability to enable that in all subsequent versions
By now, it's time to go all 64-bit. 32-bit should be just for embedded - maybe the Raspberry Pi's, Beaglebones, Arduinos, et al