I'm glad you've had a positive experience. I wasn't speaking for absolutely everyone, just from what I've witnessed, which I'm sure is not unique to where I've worked. I don't want to name the companies, but I'll say they're medium to large financial firms based in the NYC metro area. For one I worked in HR and witnessed these practices first-hand.
Regarding the legal fees, I agree they're relatively small on a per-employee bases. But that's not what HR told the employees who were on visas.
I guess you've never worked in human resources for a medium or large company. I don't know about Microsoft specifically, but it's very common to pay H1B employees far less than other employees. When asked why, the employees are typically told it's due to legal fees to support the H1B. I've seen people threatened to have their work visa revoked when asking for a raise that was common to all other IT workers in the company. I've also seen HR turn away every qualified citizen for a position so they could fill it with a cheaper employee on an H1B. Meanwhile the H1B was specifically created to fill positions for which no local workers qualify.
It's not xenophobia. These are things discussed openly with HR departments. It's no secret that many companies use work visas to get cheaper labor.
I spent 10 years working for large financial companies. Everyone I knew outside work thought I had the most stable job, while a few times I was very close to being part of large layoffs. It was very hard to advance because of competition and politics with coworkers.
Now I work for a small company where I'm valued on a more personal level. As the company grows so does my position within the company. There's no room for politics. I'm not saying I'm completely loyal and will never leave, but my job is stable and generally more enjoyable. My family is no longer impressed, but they don't understand that I'm actually better off.
Ever drive a car near its top speed? For long drives you don't want to run the car near its extremes. You'll wear out the car very quickly and you probably won't enjoy the ride.
I imagine it must be regular gas. The car must be production-ready and "consumer friendly." It's also race cross-country, so refueling with anything but regular gas every few hundred miles would be quite a hassle.
carry four or more passengers and have climate control, an audio system and 10 cubic feet of cargo space. They also must have four or more wheels, hit 60 miles per hour in less than 12 seconds and have a minimum top speed of 100 miles per hour and a range of 200 miles.
My car does that now. The summary left out the most important piece of information: the car must get 100 MPG or more.
For me the X11 requirement on OS X is a real nuisance. I can't tell if 3.0 is now truly native on Macs, although I know they are working on it. Until it's native I'll stick with NeoOffice, which is effectively the same but sometimes a little behind in versions.
My guess is geographic location of IPs, since they're not just talking hops, but distance. If the hops are all geographically local the data likely transfers between less ISPs and backbones. I don't know much about the details, so this is just my interpretation of the claims.
But wouldn't a protocol that learns and adjusts to the number of hops be nearly as efficient? If preferential treatment were given to connections with fewer hops and the same subnet I bet they'd see similar improvements.
- that they don't believe they need new laws to "fight" in cyberspace. - "People don't have to enlist or take a pay cut to help us out." - "Within the Department of Defense, we are careful not to speculate about what would be considered an act of war."
He wasn't implying it's odd. He's implying it's bad.
And it potentially is. Instead of a small set of local security officers monitoring activity, a much larger set of people, further from the scene, can watch everything. That opens up much more potential abuse and misinterpretations.
You always have to question measurements of time in creation stories.
Maybe in Genensis one day is 2 billion of our current years. That would mean the Biblical time period is correct. Maybe the creationists are right, just their precision is off!
Very good ones are. It's not unlike any other popular platform: plenty of developers know enough to get by, but very good developers are often hard to find. I worked in MS-centric IT departments for 10 years and I'd say maybe 10% of the staff were what I would call great developers. It was amazing how many candidates we turned away just trying to find mediocre developers.
It does sound crazy and expensive, but it's actually a popular trend today. Hire someone that's too far to commute, but not too far for the occasional face-to-face. Let them work from home, or if you find a few people in the same area open a small satellite office. It's usually worth the extra expense and inconvenience of communications if the staff is highly qualified.
I have worked on large software projects that lasted years. You apparently haven't. If the security and driver models were designed and tested from the start, as they should be for such a project, it would not take 5 years to find a major flaw. Apparently the flaws were big enough that they had to change the design at the last minute. Again, we're not talking about one poorly implemented function call, but the fundamental model upon which everything else is built. Part of the project manager's job is to make sure nothing big like this slips through the cracks.
I also suspect that if MS did nothing and a vulnerability was discovered you'd be bitching how they did nothing as well.
Of course it's preferable to fix the flaws. But letting those flaws go unnoticed until just before release is a sure sign of incompetence. And then blaming 3rd parties for not conforming to the recently changed model is disingenuous.
If you don't notice a significant flaw in the security or driver model during 5+ years of development and testing then yes, you are incompetent. At the very least your testing is incompetent.
We're not talking about a broken link on a web site. We're talking about an OS that goes on hundreds of millions of computers. Make a few mistakes in the some of the details, but don't fsck up the model.
Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.
When rebuilding a system from the ground up for security, these issues need to be hashed out first. The fact that the security and driver models were changing significantly shortly before launch is a sign of bad design. Or at the very least horrible project management. If Vista was in the works for over 5 years, and it was designed properly from the start, 3rd parties should have had plenty of time (years) to conform to new models.
When broken down by age group, an unexpected trend emerges: teenagers are generally more likely to change their behavior than older Internet users.
Because teenagers are more likely to feel they can't live without the internet. Older internet users may have been on it longer, but can remember a time when they easily lived without it.
It's funny that the vice president of consumer marketing was surprised by something taught in economics 101. Lower the price and the number of sales go up. Shocking!
They were actually surprised to learn they were charging too much. Unbelievable.
Gartner analyst Michael Silver said the move... is puzzling... [He] noted that the market for such upgrades is fairly limited. Those who bought XP in the fourth quarter of 2006 got a coupon for a free Vista upgrade, while most of those who have bought systems since then have gotten Vista. Machines purchased prior to 2006 probably aren't all that attractive as candidates for a Vista upgrade...
And that's why it makes sense. Dropping the price will not affect Microsoft's revenue. Yet they'll sell a few extra copies. They're hoping to sell it to people who are otherwise upgrading with unlicensed copies. Plus they probably think it'll help their public image.
Of course they could have just made a better product in the first place and not dropped the price, but we'll leave that discussion to other threads.
Possibly confirming your post is this comment on TFA:
The programmatic disabling of coalesced updates should not be public API. It's actually a very dangerous thing to do. We aren't really happy with that code in WebKit, but we had to do it to avoid performance regressions in apps that embedded WebKit. Technically it's wrong though, since we turn off the coalesced updates for any app that uses WebKit! This includes drawing they do that doesn't even use WebKit.
As for the window display throttling, that was a pref designed for Safari (that we don't even use any more). It's not private or magic. It's nothing more than a pref that we can examine from Safari-land, so linking to that is just silly.;)
Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can't be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed. WebKit subclasses several private NSView methods for example, and it cost us many many man hours to deal with the regressions caused by the internal changes that were made to NSViews in Leopard.
As you yourself blogged, there was a totally acceptable public way of doing what you needed to do.
For any private methods we use that we think should be public, we (the WebKit team) file bugs on the appropriate system components. Many of these methods have become public over time (CG stuff in Leopard for example). Be careful when you dig into WebKit code, since we may continue to use the WK method even though it's not public API just because we need to work on Tiger.
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I'm glad you've had a positive experience. I wasn't speaking for absolutely everyone, just from what I've witnessed, which I'm sure is not unique to where I've worked. I don't want to name the companies, but I'll say they're medium to large financial firms based in the NYC metro area. For one I worked in HR and witnessed these practices first-hand.
Regarding the legal fees, I agree they're relatively small on a per-employee bases. But that's not what HR told the employees who were on visas.
I guess you've never worked in human resources for a medium or large company. I don't know about Microsoft specifically, but it's very common to pay H1B employees far less than other employees. When asked why, the employees are typically told it's due to legal fees to support the H1B. I've seen people threatened to have their work visa revoked when asking for a raise that was common to all other IT workers in the company. I've also seen HR turn away every qualified citizen for a position so they could fill it with a cheaper employee on an H1B. Meanwhile the H1B was specifically created to fill positions for which no local workers qualify.
It's not xenophobia. These are things discussed openly with HR departments. It's no secret that many companies use work visas to get cheaper labor.
I spent 10 years working for large financial companies. Everyone I knew outside work thought I had the most stable job, while a few times I was very close to being part of large layoffs. It was very hard to advance because of competition and politics with coworkers.
Now I work for a small company where I'm valued on a more personal level. As the company grows so does my position within the company. There's no room for politics. I'm not saying I'm completely loyal and will never leave, but my job is stable and generally more enjoyable. My family is no longer impressed, but they don't understand that I'm actually better off.
Actually I'm completely wrong.
My guess is they want something consumers will easily accept. The closer to today's common vehicle, the more likely people will buy it.
Ever drive a car near its top speed? For long drives you don't want to run the car near its extremes. You'll wear out the car very quickly and you probably won't enjoy the ride.
I imagine it must be regular gas. The car must be production-ready and "consumer friendly." It's also race cross-country, so refueling with anything but regular gas every few hundred miles would be quite a hassle.
carry four or more passengers and have climate control, an audio system and 10 cubic feet of cargo space. They also must have four or more wheels, hit 60 miles per hour in less than 12 seconds and have a minimum top speed of 100 miles per hour and a range of 200 miles.
My car does that now. The summary left out the most important piece of information: the car must get 100 MPG or more.
but this is just plain ridiculous
And hopefully criminally negligent. I'd like to see more people go to jail for these mistakes, intentional or otherwise.
For me the X11 requirement on OS X is a real nuisance. I can't tell if 3.0 is now truly native on Macs, although I know they are working on it. Until it's native I'll stick with NeoOffice, which is effectively the same but sometimes a little behind in versions.
Sequoia seems to be claiming that no one can make a "report" regarding their "software" without their permission.
I "beg" to "differ".
My guess is geographic location of IPs, since they're not just talking hops, but distance. If the hops are all geographically local the data likely transfers between less ISPs and backbones. I don't know much about the details, so this is just my interpretation of the claims.
But wouldn't a protocol that learns and adjusts to the number of hops be nearly as efficient? If preferential treatment were given to connections with fewer hops and the same subnet I bet they'd see similar improvements.
I learned:
- that they don't believe they need new laws to "fight" in cyberspace.
- "People don't have to enlist or take a pay cut to help us out."
- "Within the Department of Defense, we are careful not to speculate about what would be considered an act of war."
He wasn't implying it's odd. He's implying it's bad.
And it potentially is. Instead of a small set of local security officers monitoring activity, a much larger set of people, further from the scene, can watch everything. That opens up much more potential abuse and misinterpretations.
You always have to question measurements of time in creation stories.
Maybe in Genensis one day is 2 billion of our current years. That would mean the Biblical time period is correct. Maybe the creationists are right, just their precision is off!
MS-abled developers aren't difficult to come by.
Very good ones are. It's not unlike any other popular platform: plenty of developers know enough to get by, but very good developers are often hard to find. I worked in MS-centric IT departments for 10 years and I'd say maybe 10% of the staff were what I would call great developers. It was amazing how many candidates we turned away just trying to find mediocre developers.
It does sound crazy and expensive, but it's actually a popular trend today. Hire someone that's too far to commute, but not too far for the occasional face-to-face. Let them work from home, or if you find a few people in the same area open a small satellite office. It's usually worth the extra expense and inconvenience of communications if the staff is highly qualified.
Surely it should also run better on all windows servers so why just 2008?
Changes to IIS, with related changes by Zend. Sounds like the two coordinated changes improve performance.
I have worked on large software projects that lasted years. You apparently haven't. If the security and driver models were designed and tested from the start, as they should be for such a project, it would not take 5 years to find a major flaw. Apparently the flaws were big enough that they had to change the design at the last minute. Again, we're not talking about one poorly implemented function call, but the fundamental model upon which everything else is built. Part of the project manager's job is to make sure nothing big like this slips through the cracks.
I also suspect that if MS did nothing and a vulnerability was discovered you'd be bitching how they did nothing as well.
Of course it's preferable to fix the flaws. But letting those flaws go unnoticed until just before release is a sure sign of incompetence. And then blaming 3rd parties for not conforming to the recently changed model is disingenuous.
If you don't notice a significant flaw in the security or driver model during 5+ years of development and testing then yes, you are incompetent. At the very least your testing is incompetent.
We're not talking about a broken link on a web site. We're talking about an OS that goes on hundreds of millions of computers. Make a few mistakes in the some of the details, but don't fsck up the model.
Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.
When rebuilding a system from the ground up for security, these issues need to be hashed out first. The fact that the security and driver models were changing significantly shortly before launch is a sign of bad design. Or at the very least horrible project management. If Vista was in the works for over 5 years, and it was designed properly from the start, 3rd parties should have had plenty of time (years) to conform to new models.
When broken down by age group, an unexpected trend emerges: teenagers are generally more likely to change their behavior than older Internet users.
Because teenagers are more likely to feel they can't live without the internet. Older internet users may have been on it longer, but can remember a time when they easily lived without it.
It's funny that the vice president of consumer marketing was surprised by something taught in economics 101. Lower the price and the number of sales go up. Shocking!
They were actually surprised to learn they were charging too much. Unbelievable.
And that's why it makes sense. Dropping the price will not affect Microsoft's revenue. Yet they'll sell a few extra copies. They're hoping to sell it to people who are otherwise upgrading with unlicensed copies. Plus they probably think it'll help their public image.
Of course they could have just made a better product in the first place and not dropped the price, but we'll leave that discussion to other threads.