Are IAPs really that transient on Android? I must admit that I don't currently own any Android devices, but on my iOS devices, in-app purchases apply at the iTunes account level and are not only persistent, but also apply (without any extra purchase) to all instances of that app across different devices set to the same account. The iOS behavior where purchases are tied to your account and not to any particular device has made buying both apps and upgrades much more appealing to me than I originally thought would be the case.
You bought a new car via a private sale? That's pretty interesting, do you have more information about how you did that and where your seller got the cars from?
Your #1-4 do certainly match my experience. Your point #5 though doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts.
The notion that engineering majors make less than finance and business majors isn't borne out by the statistics. Law is an unfair comparison since that's an additional 3 years of expensive professional degree tuition, although their new-graduate employment numbers aren't doing that great.
Let's compare stats. Here we have have an undergraduate business program, hyped as being in the top 20 undergraduate business programs (pay close attention to the mean base salary and % employment numbers):
Now, the business degree majors do have their data updated for 2011, the engineers are only at 2010, but take a look at the 8 year trend reports to satisfy yourself that the numbers are relatively stable:
Undergrad CS majors are making 28% more than the undergrad business majors. Electrical engineers are not doing as well as the CS majors, but still better than the business majors.
The majority of business majors end up in just as boring and dead-end jobs as the majority of other majors. You can't look at the high-flying business and finance guys on Wall Street and think that those guys are "typical" for business majors any more than you can look at Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, or any of a whole range of tech company CEOs and execs, and think that they are typical engineers.
If China were simply limiting the amount of rare earths permitted to be dug out of the ground, there would be no WTO issue. The problem is that this is an export cap which has the potential to create different pricing for rare-earths between domestic and foreign purchasers of these materials.
Now if you look at mentions of today's prices of rare earths (by googling for "rare earth prices"), as yet, there is no such disparity. The linked WTO article also doesn't directly talk about price disparities between domestic and foreign purchasers. It turns out that global demand for rare earths went down quite a bit last year, and as a result, only about 60% of the export quota was used up (according to this FT article).
The concern is that as the global economy recovers, if demand is seen to exceed the quota, then a huge price difference between what domestic companies and foreign companies pay will emerge. This would amount to a kind of state subsidy (making prices for domestic producers artificially cheap) and would violate WTO rules.
The two metrics to watch to determine whether or not the claim of environmental protection vs. economic protectionism would be:
(1) Domestic rare earth production volume (e.g. in tons) - If slope of this curve continues unchanged, then there really is no environmental effect. If the slope flattens out, then it could be argued that the quota did slow down the pace of mining and did have an environmental consequence
(2) Domestic (China buyer) vs. Foreign (non-China Buyer) price (e.g. difference $/ton) - If this disparity is big, then there's a stronger case that there is some kind of domestic subsidy occurring, if the disparity is small, then the case that there is a subsidy is weaker.
This is not really a matter of sovereignty since China is a willing party to the WTO and has volunteered to play by those rules.
"News sites" hosted on port 82 set off some alarm bells. That being said, this piece has been picked up by other news sites with more direct citations. Techdirt (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/11014317553/european-parliament-official-charge-acta-quits-denounces-masquerade-behind-acta.shtml) and The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/27/eu_signs_acta/) both have articles that are worth reading.
This problem seems almost too simple, text-only and only up to 500MB per year.
I have a much tougher problem, a mailbox that is growing about 5GB per year that I still need searchable. And, stripping out the attachments is not okay, I need a way to still access them since many of them are receipts in PDF or edits on documents where the e-mail trail is the only record of changes over time. Thus ideally, the attachments should be indexed as well.
I guess you could do what many apache.org sites use: mod_mbox to make a web-accessible version of your your mail folders, possibly pre-processing them with an mbox splitting tool to get them into bit-sized chunks.
Then, overlay a search tool like Lucene Imagination (which is what lucene.apache.org uses) or any other local web indexer of your choosing in order to build searchability.
The owner of the code can do whatever they want with it. Making it GPL doesn't force them to keep making future versions GPL, because they own all the rights. Users of GPL code need to adhere to the terms of the GPL because they don't own the rights, but are rather licensees of the owner.
That being said, if you have a copy of the GPL'd code, you were automatically granted some rights under the GPL which can't be revoked. So you can continue to use the code that you have under the GPL terms for as long as you want.
I don't want to seem like I'm disagreeing with you, because I'm not. My use of the the term "certainly" is not intended to be sarcastic or hyperbole. I just want to convey a practical story.
Among these many international-travelling colleagues are Arabs and Palestinians who are originally from Pakistan and Jordan. One particular Pakistani-American colleague of mine even has the exact same name as a known wanted terrorist. Does he get stopped for secondary screening more often than average? Yes, pretty much every time he travels. Has he ever had his laptop searched and copied at the border? No.
And specifically for the GP's issue, even Moxie Marlinspike (the guy who did get stopped at the border for searches) was less concerned about the data being copied (since it was encrypted) and more that international travel may become unfeasible for him because he has to bake in the potential for 5+ hour searches each time. If you were on such a list, carrying a clean computer dedicated to travelling doesn't really solve this problem, but at the same time, if you're not currently being stopped, the issue is not likely to affect you in the same manner as for Marlinspike, so long as your data is encrypted.
I travel internationally frequently on business as do many of my friends and colleges. Of the over 50 total trips I'm aware of my circle of acquaintances taking, never once has anyone been stopped for a warrantless computer search. While there are certainly personal liberty concerns related to presumption of guilt/innocence or guilt by association, the practical reality is that unless you're a friend of Julian Assange, you're not likely to ever encounter this.
And even this friend of Julian Assange was not forced to divulge his encryption key and had his laptop returned. (http://randomchaos.us/hacking/another-hacker%E2%80%99s-laptop-cell-phones-searched-at-border.html)
So if you are concerned about the potential of these searches, encryption may be a more practical way to feel safer.
I think the real problem is, Americans aren't interested in Science and Technology careers that lead them to a lifetime of poverty for themselves and their families.
Science and Technology careers lead to a lifetime of poverty?
Let's compare stats. Here we have have an undergraduate business program, hyped as being in the top 20 undergraduate business programs:
Sure, if you're a small independent developer at home, you might feel secure about this statement, but in reality, you were never at risk at all. You're just too small for this to matter.
If you're a big company, what really matters is how your own legal department interprets this. But of course, if you're big enough to have your own legal department, perhaps you can just buy a commercially available equivalent or implement your own from scratch. (This does, perhaps, create headaches for people who want open source interoperability, since the big company legal interpretation can cause huge problems if trying to get everyone to standardize on an interface that could be interpreted as being encumbered.)
Where you're really screwed is if you're a small startup company. You feel like a small independent developer at the time and might even feel secure with "RMS said it was okay." But then when it comes time that you need to get acquired in order to have an exit, you find that no buyers will touch you with a 10 foot pole because of a legal consensus that the issue is too vague and exposes the buyer to considerable legal risk. Then, all your years of hard work are down the drain.
Please keep in mind that that is the average salary counting those students who got a M.Eng degree, which is a joke of a degree even at good schools like Cornell. That degree exists soley for the ability to claim to have a master's Degree.
M.Eng's are in the master's bucket, and they actually didn't do as well as the pure undergrads, their average starting salaries seem to have declined markedly from the previous year, and their averages seemed to be lower than for undergrads.
As for the accuracy of the reported salaries, I don't know for this particular year. But looking a the list of companies reported that people went to, the salaries seem pretty much in line with what the salary rates I seem to be competing with when hiring new grads at my company.
In the years where I've personally known sizable numbers of graduating seniors (or been one myself), I've found the reported numbers to be pretty representative of peer experiences. The surveys are anonymous; there's little incentive to inflate results, although even if you were to chop off 10% across the board, I feel the numbers are still pretty decent.
75k isn't by any means an outrageous salary for a qualified engineer, but it's not all that much higher than friends of mine got with degrees from public state schools a few years back.
I'm glad to hear that. It warms my heart to hear that the "myth" of a college education being a doorway to the middle-class isn't dead, but is very much alive. If you can walk into a state university for $7-12K/year for 4 years and then walk out with a $60-$80K/year job, then thankfully it seems like the system is working the way it should.
Back to the OP then, are things really so dire for domestic college grads that there's a need to be so scared about more visas for skilled workers?
My company (a giant company that purveys giant software to giant customers) and my customers have a never-ending thirst for technical candidates who can speak and write good English, in a way that someone who barely passed TOEFL would not be able to handle.
The question is not about how "those damn foreigners" are taking jobs away from "us". It's about how we can re-tool ourselves to consistently stay ahead and take advantage of our own unique abilities.
Think about it, a good programmer isn't just writing code, he or she is also writing specs, writing documentation, and presenting the same. With good communication skills borne of many additional years communicating in English, a domestic candidate has a natural advantage over a foreign candidate. Plus, as people advance in their career and become either engineering managers or architects, what do you think they do more of? Communicating or solo coding?
The irony is that what I see happen a lot is that the foreign colleague is far more eager to take on what might seem as a less desirable job. Nobody really likes to write 50 pages of specs today, even if they know that it's the specs and the author by-line on those specs that will get spread throughout the organization and live on for years, whereas code only gets unburied from source control where there's a bug. A person's brilliance is demonstrated in their English, less so in their C or Java. Somehow, even though everyone sees this, many people willingly give away this opportunity to a few who are eager for it. And it seems that those who should have a natural advantage, inexplicably, more often give away their edge to those who are less suited, but are hungrier and more eager.
Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred.
Do Larry and Sergey really feel this way? It'd certainly be interesting if they did and to hear them describe those opinions. However, it seems like White's article is making uninformed suppositions simply for the purpose of being provocative.
In particular, the underlying article states:
And they condemned as particularly "insidious" the sale of the top spot on search results; a practice Google now champions.
With a link to a Google Answers page which indicates:
Ads from ad groups with keywords can appear on Google and the Google Network:
* Google search results pages: Alongside or above the search results."
This is a practice that has existed on Google pages since the very beginning. Nobody's selling the top search result here. Anyone who's used Google before would see that all the ads are separated from search results and clearly labeled as ads.
But imagine a school in which fights occurred regularly, where unpopular kids were bullied without consequences, where students outright disregarded teachers and did whatever they wanted and never learned anything. No one would suggest more freedom as a solution. Confucius's philosophies in that context were basically a great big "Hey, guys, what if we all just behaved? Maybe if we work together instead of against each other, we can accomplish something great!" And to that end, it worked fairly well.
When I lived in China, the problems I had to deal with were mostly along the lines of companies trying to save money by putting dangerous substances in food, companies subjecting employees to bad working conditions, people spitting and littering everywhere, extremely skilled pickpockets, people trying to scam me out of money - are these really problems that can be solved by less government control?
The only negative consequences of government control most people in China see is that a few websites are blocked. So even if it's true that China needs more freedom and human rights (which I agree they do), it's difficult to convince the average citizen of that, it isn't as clear-cut that that's the most important thing they should be worrying about at the moment.
Someone mod this guy up. I travel on business to China and India, and they present an interesting contrast in how freedom is not necessarily foremost in the minds of everyday locals. As an American traveling in Beijing, I was very aware of web censorship and continually reminded about how I should take care where I surfed when simple things like feedproxy.google.com are blocked (thus making all my freshmeat links in my Slashdot home page useless. No such freedom worries in Bangalore (arguably one of the fastest growing and richest cities in India).
However, in terms of everyday life, compared to burning heaps of trash on street corners, dubious sidewalks with occasional holes or loose slabs that you might fall into (water runoff channels are underneath the sidewalk, covered with stone slabs), and shockingly unsanitary food vendors, there are few people who would prefer to live a "median" life in Bangalore compared to Beijing. Such obviously "less than 1st world" conditions also exist in throughout China, outside of the "global sized" cities.
If you asked an ordinary Beijing resident on the street how important Internet freedom was compared to raising the standard of living of more of the country to be like the big cities, almost no one would pick Internet freedom. Sure, this is a false choice; why does this comparison even matter?
It matters because for each person, there is a certain list of priorities, and we can each only really care about the top 5 or 10, which are all likely to be issues of living standard and not higher level issues like "freedom". If the issues relating to censorship, Google, etc... can't get linked in a clear way to issues that people really prioritize highly, then nobody is going to care.
So my question is, how can censorship (particularly the China type of targeted censorship) be linked to man-on-the-street issues that locals really care about?
Man, ACSL, that really takes me back. I used to submit my solutions in Prograph for the in-school problem sets (couldn't do this at the nationals, where we were using the centrally supplied computers). My peers would submit 2-3 page solutions in Pascal, my solutions would be like 15-20 pages of printed box and line diagrams.
Implementing recursion and linked lists was kind of weird as well, with no variables...
Because you need to be able to fire the workers. State workers operate under terms that rigidly govern the circumstances under which you can lay someone off, which makes doing so extremely impractical. This makes it essentially impossible to use them for IT projects where you need to a large number of developers to build a project, and then ramp that quantity down later when you move to operational mode and need to swap some of them for administrators.
Starting undergrad salary for a CS major going into development at Microsoft is around $80K. In 1994, graduate salary surveys at Cornell put chemical engineering at the top, with CS 2 or 3 behind. If you look at 2008 salaries, CS has pulled ahead, with most graduates indicating something in the $70-90K range: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/student-services/engineering-coop-career-services/statistics/Post-Graduate-Reports.cfm. (One might argue that the school or the students might be lying, but on the hiring side of things, I see the same sorts of rates for recent grads coming in as my coworkers.)
I don't see the data here to support the notion that going into CS is some sort of destitute slavery compared to other engineering majors, or compared to other non-engineering majors. Since when is $80K right out of college a second-class-citizen wage?
It's not really surprising that going to court and going public are really last resort sort of things. Court is expensive, and most people considering them to be a "roll of the dice". Actually negotiating with your counterparty in a contract dispute is always cheaper and more productive.
Going public, even after going to court, also sours the atmosphere, creating emotional contention that makes an actual agreement less likely. Look at out-of-court settlements with undisclosed terms and no party admitting fault. Once you get out of the public light, you can get people to sit down and discuss and actually come to a mutual agreement since the emotions have been toned down. If you're all fury and anger, you're not really in a position to negotiate someone into a corrective action.
In HS and college, I loved participating in programming competitions. Sales engineering is the first time that I've really duplicated that kind of experience, and gotten paid big bucks for it. The work inherently involves working with people. You are introduced to a constant stream of new businesses and problems to solve. And as far as verbal appreciation goes, sales reps can totally dish that out. If you're able to hack it and your deals are closing, your deeds will be widely acclaimed. There is a downside that if you're deals aren't closing, you'll be out of a job.
This is interesting, although by using a quad-rotor helicopter, they seem to have mostly solved computer vision problem rather than a control system problem
Quad rotor and coaxial helicopters are very stable and have gotten pretty popular as entry-level helicopters because they are so easy to fly. The downside is that they don't really have the efficiency characteristics to fly outdoors like collective-pitch (e.g. like real full-size) helicopters.
Since the focus of the challenge was to fly indoors, using a quad-rotor is the natural choice. I'd like to have understood better how other teams failed and what kind of helicopters they used.
Collective-pitch helicopters, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to fly. Until the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter (http://heli.stanford.edu/), I believe no autonomous control system has been able to successfully fly one, even for very simple maneuvers.
The right comparison is not the difference between US e-books and UK e-books, but rather the price differential between print and electronic. Amazon's ability to price and distribute content is still limited by the requirements of publishers. So the question is, is the % difference between print and electronic in the UK larger than the % difference in the US.
I worked for a small company that subscribed to an outsourced BES+Exchange hosting service on a per-user subscription basis.
I have to say, my experience as a user was fabulous. The syncing across calendar, mail, and contacts "just worked". Most sync tools have hidden reset options to clear you local version and restore from remote, clear the remote version and restore from local, or some kind of complex manual conflict reconcilation mechanism.
With BES, there are no such options, and you don't need them. The system just works. Nothing weird happened if I tried to erase a contact from my blackberry and my Outlook at the same time or added a calendar entry from one and then moved it on the other. Everything was push based, so changes got propagated out instantly, rather than on some kind of 1 hour poll interval. I could send out multi-person invites just using the blackberry, and other people would get them just as if I'd sent them from Outlook. In fact, the BB was often more reliable than Outlook since it dealt better with network flakiness/slowness.
But then, my company got acquired by a company that didn't use Exchange, had no BES, but had standardized on BB and iPhone. In this environment, things were radically different. Without the BES+Exchange combo, you need to use a 3rd party clunky app (possibly more than 1 depending on your setup) and you can forget about real-time anything. Everything is on at least 5 minute delay or worse (calendar and contacts are on like, 2 hour delay).
5 minute delay doesn't sound like much, but with the Exchange+BES combo, BB wielders got used to e-mailing each other as if it were IM and having a stream of 1 line conversations with each other. Now, we need to consider what we want to say and switch to SMS if we want to converse with faster turnaround (at the cost of having to cmprss r words to sub 160 chr bites).
Slashdot Mirror
Are IAPs really that transient on Android? I must admit that I don't currently own any Android devices, but on my iOS devices, in-app purchases apply at the iTunes account level and are not only persistent, but also apply (without any extra purchase) to all instances of that app across different devices set to the same account. The iOS behavior where purchases are tied to your account and not to any particular device has made buying both apps and upgrades much more appealing to me than I originally thought would be the case.
You bought a new car via a private sale? That's pretty interesting, do you have more information about how you did that and where your seller got the cars from?
Your #1-4 do certainly match my experience. Your point #5 though doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts.
The notion that engineering majors make less than finance and business majors isn't borne out by the statistics. Law is an unfair comparison since that's an additional 3 years of expensive professional degree tuition, although their new-graduate employment numbers aren't doing that great.
Let's compare stats. Here we have have an undergraduate business program, hyped as being in the top 20 undergraduate business programs (pay close attention to the mean base salary and % employment numbers):
http://dyson.cornell.edu/undergrad/careers.php#placement
Here we have an undergraduate engineering program, also hyped as being highly ranked, at the same university, for the same year:
Computer Science: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=78827
Electrical Engineering: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=78828
Now, the business degree majors do have their data updated for 2011, the engineers are only at 2010, but take a look at the 8 year trend reports to satisfy yourself that the numbers are relatively stable:
http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/postgrad_reports.cfm
Undergrad CS majors are making 28% more than the undergrad business majors. Electrical engineers are not doing as well as the CS majors, but still better than the business majors.
The majority of business majors end up in just as boring and dead-end jobs as the majority of other majors. You can't look at the high-flying business and finance guys on Wall Street and think that those guys are "typical" for business majors any more than you can look at Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, or any of a whole range of tech company CEOs and execs, and think that they are typical engineers.
If China were simply limiting the amount of rare earths permitted to be dug out of the ground, there would be no WTO issue. The problem is that this is an export cap which has the potential to create different pricing for rare-earths between domestic and foreign purchasers of these materials.
Now if you look at mentions of today's prices of rare earths (by googling for "rare earth prices"), as yet, there is no such disparity. The linked WTO article also doesn't directly talk about price disparities between domestic and foreign purchasers. It turns out that global demand for rare earths went down quite a bit last year, and as a result, only about 60% of the export quota was used up (according to this FT article).
The concern is that as the global economy recovers, if demand is seen to exceed the quota, then a huge price difference between what domestic companies and foreign companies pay will emerge. This would amount to a kind of state subsidy (making prices for domestic producers artificially cheap) and would violate WTO rules.
The two metrics to watch to determine whether or not the claim of environmental protection vs. economic protectionism would be:
(1) Domestic rare earth production volume (e.g. in tons) - If slope of this curve continues unchanged, then there really is no environmental effect. If the slope flattens out, then it could be argued that the quota did slow down the pace of mining and did have an environmental consequence
(2) Domestic (China buyer) vs. Foreign (non-China Buyer) price (e.g. difference $/ton) - If this disparity is big, then there's a stronger case that there is some kind of domestic subsidy occurring, if the disparity is small, then the case that there is a subsidy is weaker.
This is not really a matter of sovereignty since China is a willing party to the WTO and has volunteered to play by those rules.
"News sites" hosted on port 82 set off some alarm bells. That being said, this piece has been picked up by other news sites with more direct citations. Techdirt (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/11014317553/european-parliament-official-charge-acta-quits-denounces-masquerade-behind-acta.shtml) and The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/27/eu_signs_acta/) both have articles that are worth reading.
This problem seems almost too simple, text-only and only up to 500MB per year.
I have a much tougher problem, a mailbox that is growing about 5GB per year that I still need searchable. And, stripping out the attachments is not okay, I need a way to still access them since many of them are receipts in PDF or edits on documents where the e-mail trail is the only record of changes over time. Thus ideally, the attachments should be indexed as well.
I guess you could do what many apache.org sites use: mod_mbox to make a web-accessible version of your your mail folders, possibly pre-processing them with an mbox splitting tool to get them into bit-sized chunks.
Then, overlay a search tool like Lucene Imagination (which is what lucene.apache.org uses) or any other local web indexer of your choosing in order to build searchability.
The owner of the code can do whatever they want with it. Making it GPL doesn't force them to keep making future versions GPL, because they own all the rights. Users of GPL code need to adhere to the terms of the GPL because they don't own the rights, but are rather licensees of the owner.
That being said, if you have a copy of the GPL'd code, you were automatically granted some rights under the GPL which can't be revoked. So you can continue to use the code that you have under the GPL terms for as long as you want.
I don't want to seem like I'm disagreeing with you, because I'm not. My use of the the term "certainly" is not intended to be sarcastic or hyperbole. I just want to convey a practical story.
Among these many international-travelling colleagues are Arabs and Palestinians who are originally from Pakistan and Jordan. One particular Pakistani-American colleague of mine even has the exact same name as a known wanted terrorist. Does he get stopped for secondary screening more often than average? Yes, pretty much every time he travels. Has he ever had his laptop searched and copied at the border? No.
And specifically for the GP's issue, even Moxie Marlinspike (the guy who did get stopped at the border for searches) was less concerned about the data being copied (since it was encrypted) and more that international travel may become unfeasible for him because he has to bake in the potential for 5+ hour searches each time. If you were on such a list, carrying a clean computer dedicated to travelling doesn't really solve this problem, but at the same time, if you're not currently being stopped, the issue is not likely to affect you in the same manner as for Marlinspike, so long as your data is encrypted.
I travel internationally frequently on business as do many of my friends and colleges. Of the over 50 total trips I'm aware of my circle of acquaintances taking, never once has anyone been stopped for a warrantless computer search. While there are certainly personal liberty concerns related to presumption of guilt/innocence or guilt by association, the practical reality is that unless you're a friend of Julian Assange, you're not likely to ever encounter this.
And even this friend of Julian Assange was not forced to divulge his encryption key and had his laptop returned. (http://randomchaos.us/hacking/another-hacker%E2%80%99s-laptop-cell-phones-searched-at-border.html)
So if you are concerned about the potential of these searches, encryption may be a more practical way to feel safer.
I think the real problem is, Americans aren't interested in Science and Technology careers that lead them to a lifetime of poverty for themselves and their families.
Science and Technology careers lead to a lifetime of poverty?
Let's compare stats. Here we have have an undergraduate business program, hyped as being in the top 20 undergraduate business programs:
http://dyson.cornell.edu/undergrad/careers.php#placement
Here we have an undergraduate engineering program, also hyped as being highly ranked, at the same university, for the same year:
Computer Science: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/upload/pgcs09.pdf
Electrical Engineering: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/upload/pgece09.pdf
Take a look at the 8-year reports for the different engineering majors:
http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/postgrad_reports.cfm
Undergrad CS majors are making 50% more than the undergrad business majors, and their 8 year trend is upward, not downward.
Sure, if you're a small independent developer at home, you might feel secure about this statement, but in reality, you were never at risk at all. You're just too small for this to matter.
If you're a big company, what really matters is how your own legal department interprets this. But of course, if you're big enough to have your own legal department, perhaps you can just buy a commercially available equivalent or implement your own from scratch. (This does, perhaps, create headaches for people who want open source interoperability, since the big company legal interpretation can cause huge problems if trying to get everyone to standardize on an interface that could be interpreted as being encumbered.)
Where you're really screwed is if you're a small startup company. You feel like a small independent developer at the time and might even feel secure with "RMS said it was okay." But then when it comes time that you need to get acquired in order to have an exit, you find that no buyers will touch you with a 10 foot pole because of a legal consensus that the issue is too vague and exposes the buyer to considerable legal risk. Then, all your years of hard work are down the drain.
Please keep in mind that that is the average salary counting those students who got a M.Eng degree, which is a joke of a degree even at good schools like Cornell. That degree exists soley for the ability to claim to have a master's Degree.
M.Eng's are in the master's bucket, and they actually didn't do as well as the pure undergrads, their average starting salaries seem to have declined markedly from the previous year, and their averages seemed to be lower than for undergrads.
As for the accuracy of the reported salaries, I don't know for this particular year. But looking a the list of companies reported that people went to, the salaries seem pretty much in line with what the salary rates I seem to be competing with when hiring new grads at my company.
In the years where I've personally known sizable numbers of graduating seniors (or been one myself), I've found the reported numbers to be pretty representative of peer experiences. The surveys are anonymous; there's little incentive to inflate results, although even if you were to chop off 10% across the board, I feel the numbers are still pretty decent.
75k isn't by any means an outrageous salary for a qualified engineer, but it's not all that much higher than friends of mine got with degrees from public state schools a few years back.
I'm glad to hear that. It warms my heart to hear that the "myth" of a college education being a doorway to the middle-class isn't dead, but is very much alive. If you can walk into a state university for $7-12K/year for 4 years and then walk out with a $60-$80K/year job, then thankfully it seems like the system is working the way it should. Back to the OP then, are things really so dire for domestic college grads that there's a need to be so scared about more visas for skilled workers?
Is a $76K/year salary in 2009 for the average engineering school computer science undergraduate (up from $72K in 2008, despite the downturn, according to http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/student-services/engineering-coop-career-services/statistics/upload/2009-CS-PGR.pdf) really pissing your money away?
My company (a giant company that purveys giant software to giant customers) and my customers have a never-ending thirst for technical candidates who can speak and write good English, in a way that someone who barely passed TOEFL would not be able to handle.
The question is not about how "those damn foreigners" are taking jobs away from "us". It's about how we can re-tool ourselves to consistently stay ahead and take advantage of our own unique abilities.
Think about it, a good programmer isn't just writing code, he or she is also writing specs, writing documentation, and presenting the same. With good communication skills borne of many additional years communicating in English, a domestic candidate has a natural advantage over a foreign candidate. Plus, as people advance in their career and become either engineering managers or architects, what do you think they do more of? Communicating or solo coding?
The irony is that what I see happen a lot is that the foreign colleague is far more eager to take on what might seem as a less desirable job. Nobody really likes to write 50 pages of specs today, even if they know that it's the specs and the author by-line on those specs that will get spread throughout the organization and live on for years, whereas code only gets unburied from source control where there's a bug. A person's brilliance is demonstrated in their English, less so in their C or Java. Somehow, even though everyone sees this, many people willingly give away this opportunity to a few who are eager for it. And it seems that those who should have a natural advantage, inexplicably, more often give away their edge to those who are less suited, but are hungrier and more eager.
Do Larry and Sergey really feel this way? It'd certainly be interesting if they did and to hear them describe those opinions. However, it seems like White's article is making uninformed suppositions simply for the purpose of being provocative. In particular, the underlying article states:
With a link to a Google Answers page which indicates:
This is a practice that has existed on Google pages since the very beginning. Nobody's selling the top search result here. Anyone who's used Google before would see that all the ads are separated from search results and clearly labeled as ads.
A few choice quotes from the parent:
But imagine a school in which fights occurred regularly, where unpopular kids were bullied without consequences, where students outright disregarded teachers and did whatever they wanted and never learned anything. No one would suggest more freedom as a solution. Confucius's philosophies in that context were basically a great big "Hey, guys, what if we all just behaved? Maybe if we work together instead of against each other, we can accomplish something great!" And to that end, it worked fairly well.
When I lived in China, the problems I had to deal with were mostly along the lines of companies trying to save money by putting dangerous substances in food, companies subjecting employees to bad working conditions, people spitting and littering everywhere, extremely skilled pickpockets, people trying to scam me out of money - are these really problems that can be solved by less government control?
The only negative consequences of government control most people in China see is that a few websites are blocked. So even if it's true that China needs more freedom and human rights (which I agree they do), it's difficult to convince the average citizen of that, it isn't as clear-cut that that's the most important thing they should be worrying about at the moment.
Someone mod this guy up. I travel on business to China and India, and they present an interesting contrast in how freedom is not necessarily foremost in the minds of everyday locals. As an American traveling in Beijing, I was very aware of web censorship and continually reminded about how I should take care where I surfed when simple things like feedproxy.google.com are blocked (thus making all my freshmeat links in my Slashdot home page useless. No such freedom worries in Bangalore (arguably one of the fastest growing and richest cities in India).
However, in terms of everyday life, compared to burning heaps of trash on street corners, dubious sidewalks with occasional holes or loose slabs that you might fall into (water runoff channels are underneath the sidewalk, covered with stone slabs), and shockingly unsanitary food vendors, there are few people who would prefer to live a "median" life in Bangalore compared to Beijing. Such obviously "less than 1st world" conditions also exist in throughout China, outside of the "global sized" cities.
If you asked an ordinary Beijing resident on the street how important Internet freedom was compared to raising the standard of living of more of the country to be like the big cities, almost no one would pick Internet freedom. Sure, this is a false choice; why does this comparison even matter?
It matters because for each person, there is a certain list of priorities, and we can each only really care about the top 5 or 10, which are all likely to be issues of living standard and not higher level issues like "freedom". If the issues relating to censorship, Google, etc... can't get linked in a clear way to issues that people really prioritize highly, then nobody is going to care.
So my question is, how can censorship (particularly the China type of targeted censorship) be linked to man-on-the-street issues that locals really care about?
Man, ACSL, that really takes me back. I used to submit my solutions in Prograph for the in-school problem sets (couldn't do this at the nationals, where we were using the centrally supplied computers). My peers would submit 2-3 page solutions in Pascal, my solutions would be like 15-20 pages of printed box and line diagrams.
Implementing recursion and linked lists was kind of weird as well, with no variables...
Because you need to be able to fire the workers. State workers operate under terms that rigidly govern the circumstances under which you can lay someone off, which makes doing so extremely impractical. This makes it essentially impossible to use them for IT projects where you need to a large number of developers to build a project, and then ramp that quantity down later when you move to operational mode and need to swap some of them for administrators.
Starting undergrad salary for a CS major going into development at Microsoft is around $80K. In 1994, graduate salary surveys at Cornell put chemical engineering at the top, with CS 2 or 3 behind. If you look at 2008 salaries, CS has pulled ahead, with most graduates indicating something in the $70-90K range: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/student-services/engineering-coop-career-services/statistics/Post-Graduate-Reports.cfm. (One might argue that the school or the students might be lying, but on the hiring side of things, I see the same sorts of rates for recent grads coming in as my coworkers.)
I don't see the data here to support the notion that going into CS is some sort of destitute slavery compared to other engineering majors, or compared to other non-engineering majors. Since when is $80K right out of college a second-class-citizen wage?
It's not really surprising that going to court and going public are really last resort sort of things. Court is expensive, and most people considering them to be a "roll of the dice". Actually negotiating with your counterparty in a contract dispute is always cheaper and more productive.
Going public, even after going to court, also sours the atmosphere, creating emotional contention that makes an actual agreement less likely. Look at out-of-court settlements with undisclosed terms and no party admitting fault. Once you get out of the public light, you can get people to sit down and discuss and actually come to a mutual agreement since the emotions have been toned down. If you're all fury and anger, you're not really in a position to negotiate someone into a corrective action.
In HS and college, I loved participating in programming competitions. Sales engineering is the first time that I've really duplicated that kind of experience, and gotten paid big bucks for it. The work inherently involves working with people. You are introduced to a constant stream of new businesses and problems to solve. And as far as verbal appreciation goes, sales reps can totally dish that out. If you're able to hack it and your deals are closing, your deeds will be widely acclaimed. There is a downside that if you're deals aren't closing, you'll be out of a job.
This is interesting, although by using a quad-rotor helicopter, they seem to have mostly solved computer vision problem rather than a control system problem
Quad rotor and coaxial helicopters are very stable and have gotten pretty popular as entry-level helicopters because they are so easy to fly. The downside is that they don't really have the efficiency characteristics to fly outdoors like collective-pitch (e.g. like real full-size) helicopters.
Since the focus of the challenge was to fly indoors, using a quad-rotor is the natural choice. I'd like to have understood better how other teams failed and what kind of helicopters they used.
Collective-pitch helicopters, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to fly. Until the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter (http://heli.stanford.edu/), I believe no autonomous control system has been able to successfully fly one, even for very simple maneuvers.
The right comparison is not the difference between US e-books and UK e-books, but rather the price differential between print and electronic. Amazon's ability to price and distribute content is still limited by the requirements of publishers. So the question is, is the % difference between print and electronic in the UK larger than the % difference in the US.
I worked for a small company that subscribed to an outsourced BES+Exchange hosting service on a per-user subscription basis.
I have to say, my experience as a user was fabulous. The syncing across calendar, mail, and contacts "just worked". Most sync tools have hidden reset options to clear you local version and restore from remote, clear the remote version and restore from local, or some kind of complex manual conflict reconcilation mechanism.
With BES, there are no such options, and you don't need them. The system just works. Nothing weird happened if I tried to erase a contact from my blackberry and my Outlook at the same time or added a calendar entry from one and then moved it on the other. Everything was push based, so changes got propagated out instantly, rather than on some kind of 1 hour poll interval. I could send out multi-person invites just using the blackberry, and other people would get them just as if I'd sent them from Outlook. In fact, the BB was often more reliable than Outlook since it dealt better with network flakiness/slowness.
But then, my company got acquired by a company that didn't use Exchange, had no BES, but had standardized on BB and iPhone. In this environment, things were radically different. Without the BES+Exchange combo, you need to use a 3rd party clunky app (possibly more than 1 depending on your setup) and you can forget about real-time anything. Everything is on at least 5 minute delay or worse (calendar and contacts are on like, 2 hour delay).
5 minute delay doesn't sound like much, but with the Exchange+BES combo, BB wielders got used to e-mailing each other as if it were IM and having a stream of 1 line conversations with each other. Now, we need to consider what we want to say and switch to SMS if we want to converse with faster turnaround (at the cost of having to cmprss r words to sub 160 chr bites).