Sabre was one of the original mainframe transaction processing systems. I can run OS/MVS under the Hercules System/370 emulator on one of the old junk Pentium 166 boxes sitting over in the corner and it would still out-perform the original Sabre computers by a considerable margin.
On the plus side, programs back then didn't have to deal with 16 different UI controls (menu, popup menu, toolbar, command keys, etc) so the source code base was much smaller. And you never rebooted a mainframe unless the world was coming to an end, almost literally. Certainly not for application bugs.
On the minus side, that stuff was never intended to interface in all the myriad ways that systems routinely do now. Which means that support for Internet users and modern GUIs was all bolted on as after-the-fact stuff. Probably by cheap outsourced labor.
This isn't the first recent Sabre problem, just one of the more severe ones.
Oh, they realize that alright. But the thing is, Microsoft has never been about finding the technically best solution. They are trying to find the best "business" solution.
And that's what's killing them. Every businessman's nightmare is that his (her) product becomes a commodity. No longer a one-of-a-kind product that can be priced arbitrarily, but one that has to compete against an open market, where the lowest price is often the determining factor.
OS's have been trending towards commodification for years. With each release of each OS, the reasons for upgrading have become less and less compelling as the core featureset has become more and more complete. This is why "killer apps" are so important to OS's. Because the OS dream app is one that requires features unavailable except by upgrading the OS. Here, too, there are problems, since fewer and fewer killer apps make demands that the present-day OS's cannot fulfill. In fact, with the webification of apps, they're actually pretty much required to be that way. The days when a webapp could demand ActiveX controls and IE6 are fading into history.
So Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, unless they can come up with some startling new "must-have" ability to re-prime the pump, people are going to be resistant to paying for upgrades. On the other, their latest attempt to "must-have" is something that almost nobody thinks that they "must have". Quite the contrary. And, in fact, they've further damaged themselves in that for the first time ever, it's less traumatic for users to move to a competing OS than it is to stay comfortingly locked in to the MS Way.
I have tried very hard by 2 times to use Dojo to develop a web application (1st try in the 1.2 era and the 2nd try with 1.9 since a week).
I get it somehow working with the 1.2 version with some workarounds (eg: I can't get it to insanciate a message box on demand. I have to have one hidden in my page, replace its content and display it when needed).
With 1.9, I can't even get it to load some HTML to put an horizontal menu in a content panel. And all the examples I find on internet are from older versions of dojo.
If I could just find some kind of template application with a login screen and a master/detail screen with the basic ADD/UPDATE/DELETE sub screens all done within one html page. I could start from that. But for now the examples are not enough to start using dojo has it should be used. And the available examples are diluted in the google results in a way that they are nearly impossible to find:/
I contrast jQuery is simpler to use, get a lot of plugins to add what you need it to do and 'lighter' that you can split your application on multiple page without having a loading time betwwen user intercation too long making the application feel unresponsive...
I like really the design of Dojo. But the step is too high for me to use it:( I should stick to jQuery:/
Consider yourself lucky. I had to refund 2 months worth of billing because my attempts to use dojo/dijit were such an abject failure that the client rejected it outright.
Dojo was really hot when it was new, but I had the misfortune to try it when it was at a low spot. It also didn't help that I was attempting to plug it into someone else's DIY JS framework and they had mis-redefined core JS functions.
I think you mistook "Red Hat will commit updates weekly or faster" with "You have to install updates weekly or faster".
While you can set up machines for auto-update in the Red Hat Universe, I don't and never have. If I did, I'd probably go more for selecting downloading on schedule, manual review and manual update of only the components I wanted to change. YUM will help me do that pretty well.
I don't have actual hard numbers, but I'm figuring on it taking at least 2-3 seconds to eject a magazine and slot another one in. If the weapon is capable of firing 10 rounds/second, that ought to slow down the total number of deliverable bullets/second. Plus, even with the best of practice, Joe Whacko is going to be distracted by changing magazines to the detriment of tracking - or shooting at - anything else going on. Which is why I think probably most people are concerned more about the legal magazine size than almost anything else.
Scary-looking weapons may make good press for legislators who want to hold them up and look like they're doing something, but that just means that the next nut that comes along with something that didn't look scary enough will set the pot boiling all over again. It's ultimately not how the gun looks that's at fault, it's how much real damage it can do in the hands of the incompetent.
If a 20-round magazine is illegal locally but easily obtainable in a day trip to another county or state, it really doesn't matter where it's illegal. For Whacko's purposes, it's practically on the table already. That's where Federal controls come in, by making it equally difficult to obtain everywhere. It cannot be made impossible to keep Joe's greasy little mitts off those high-capacity magazines, but if you make it hard enough, it ups the odds that someone will catch on before it's too late. Especially since most of these guys are already showing malfunctions to begin with.
Wouldn't KVM be the most natural fit for a Linux virtualization project? Or are we talking about something other than Xen virtualization project here?
Xen has been around longer, as I understand it, and at one time I used it in para-virtualization mode because running Linux VMs on the non-assist hardware I had at the time was very painful, performance-wise. I still have 1 VM host running para-virtualized.
For a while it appeared that Red Hat - one of Xen's initial promoters - was going to drop Xen for KVM, but they seem to have been retreating from that. At any rate, recent RHEL kernels are easier for me to work with using Xen than KVM, for the most part. Don't take that as meaning much, however, since Xen is where I have a lot more practice.
Guess it's too soon to make points that, if someone wants to kill other people, they can do it no matter what is legal or illegal?
Only an idiot or a legislator would think otherwise. But I repeat myself, to quote Mark Twain.
Realistically - not that being realistic has anything to do with politics or ide(ot)ology - it would be useful to be able to use the law to limit the amount of damage that people can do without making it impossible to function as a creative, productive, and free society. An all-or-nothing approach is worse than useless, regardless of which pole you adhere to. We'll never be 100% safe, regardless.
The point is that in todays political climate, we spend SOO much time looking at "assault weapons" (a gun that looks scary in other words) we are trying to disarm america and acts like this just prove that banning guns, will not stop crazy people from being crazy.
Don't be so rational. Guns shoot bullets out of cartridges containing explosives, they're like a million little bombs you can carry in your pocket! Ban guns, ban machinery, ban tools, ban explosives, ban books, ban freedom
Actually, some of us are less worried about how scary guns look as we are in how many rounds they let loose before someone can get to them.
An assault rifle is like a bomb in that it allows one person to wound or kill a lot of people in seconds. In fact, the main difference, functionally speaking, is that rifle spray is more unidirectional.
Still, the NRA only considers guns to be "arms" protected by the 2nd Amendment, so expect the upshot of this is that you will be eventually cuffed and sent to guantanamo if you are found in possession of anything more chemically dangerous than it takes to make a chocolate milkshake. But who needs science if you have enough bullets?
Oh, you are so archaically 20th-Century. Next thing we know you'll be demanding the right to apply for a job without taking a drug test. Or citizenship papers. Or all of those other pre-Reagan ideas.
... But I can assure you that the appearance of my CV make a big impact.
No it doesn't.
The reason they want a Word-format document is because your résumé and countless others more often than not will never reach human eyes unless it passes the automated buzzword filters. The hardest part of getting accepted these days is often getting a human involved, because the robots are guarding the door.
Seeing as how I'm rarely willing to bend the truth enough (we want 10 years DB2, I have 7 years DB2 + 12 years Oracle, etc.) and specialize in "edge" technology, my best chances of getting an interview come from having someone in the target area (NOT HR!) invite me in. At that point, the beauty of my CV is immaterial; it's not like they were planning to frame it and hang it on the wall.
I appreciate a well-laid-out document. One of my edge specialities is computer-assisted typography. But outside of places like the Marketing Department, the æsthetic appeal of a document isn't given much weight. Although I don't recommend going out of your way to make ugly ones.
Maybe instead of a strong federal government the better idea is a weak federal government, and weak corporations? Bring about an end to the era of strong corporations. Break them up. Forbid them to own property in more than five states. Forbid them to operate in more than five states. Forbid them from colluding, and actually enforce competition laws. Forbid foreign companies from operating more than three subsidiaries in the country. Enforce the law.
And the states are now powerful enough to fuck with the corporations, and you don't have a strong federal government that is fucking with everyone.
You seem to be voicing a common Libertarian misconception. That potentially everyone is equally strong. That is no more realistic than saying that everyone is equally a genius. Corporations, the Federal government and state governments actually have certain properties in common with bandit gangs, and when you're dealing with bandit gangs, the gang with the most members and best weapons is the one most likely to prevail. So be careful what you wish for. Some corporations have more power than entire nations already.
The USA is a federation of States. The intended purpose of the federal government was to provide a unified nation in the face of threats from other nations and to facilitate the interactions between states without each state having to take on the full duties - and costs - of an independent nation. We both know that that ideal isn't how it always works out, but it's the ideal.
One of the more important functions of the Federal government has been to facilitate inter-state commerce. It is the reason why a company can incorporate in Delaware and still do business in Georgia. We're having enough trouble trying to come up with an equitable Internet sales tax plan to replace lost state revenue, so I don't think the idea of having each state have a different set of rules for corporate interaction is likely to gain many fans.
As long as the Federal government is the body responsible for corporate interstate commerce, weakening it would only exacerbate the situation, not remedy it.
You cannot because of the regulations (sport's rules). On a deregulated stadium you would see dozens of 110 pound Chinese guys.
Damn requlations. Let the Free Market take care of it!
Seriously, quite a few very successful movies have been made by using cheap nobodies instead of George Clooneys. In some cases, these cheap nobodies become George Cloonies as a result.
In fact, there's no reason why a "Kumar Kluni" (so to speak) from Hyderabad should not be able to demand just as high a salary as anyone else.
One of the main reasons why Clooneys are so popular, though, is that they can compensate for lower quality in the rest of the production. If you make a cheap production with cheap actors, don't expect a blockbuster.
"Agent" is just a rebranding of "head hunter", which up to now has been used to describe both the people representing companies, and the engineers and programmers looking for work. I suppose "agent" just means the head hunters who pitch talent to companies. It's clever. Athletes and movie stars have agents, not head hunters, so why not programmers?
There is a difference, and this isn't the first time I've seen people try to make the distinction.
A headhunter is making a one-shot attempt to place you at a client, typically for a (ha-ha) "permanent" position. They are working for the client.
An agent is someone who works for you and is constantly on the lookout for your next big gig.
Why employ an agent? Same reason actors do. Apparently a lot of actors aren't nearly as sociable as you'd think. I can't count the number of times an actor has confessed that they took up the career because offstage they are shy and retiring or insecure. So they hire someone with social skills to handle the social aspects. And offload the time-consuming and tedious job of finding new gigs and making the pitch.
Although in the early days companies hired programmers directly, and headhunters were a reasonable option, the dynamics have changed as virtually all jobs are now episodic exactly the same way that acting jobs are. From that standpoint, having an agent makes a great deal of sense.
Elitist crap. If you write program code, you're a programmer. Doesn't matter how much or who you collaborate with.
Most working programmers today don't have control over all the code "from the inception phase all the way to the completion." If you do, you're a lone wolf and you're in the minority.
OK, you started out by claiming that I have to "prove I am worth my salary". Now suddenly we have a whole group of people who don't have to prove much of anything because owners of the company (i.e. the shareholders) "feel it is necessary to pay them that much." Many of these people come in with fat signing bonuses, leave with golden parachutes and have assorted various other perks whose relationship to demonstrated performance is virtually nil.
If the Law of Supply and Demand was the only thing operating here - as you assert it is for ordinary workers - then yes, I should be able to bid my services as a CEO lower, expect to be fired with only severance pay if I don't deliver, and end up having to drop out of the CEO game if I don't measure up. Instead, we see almost the opposite. CEOs have been demanding - and getting - higher and higher salaries, but not because they're getting more and more productive. It's virtually the only job where you can steer the business into the ground and be let go with a check worth more than the lifetime incomes of a dozen or more line workers. And - worse yet - show up at or near the top of another business afterwards.
Just because the CEO's salary may be a "pittance" relative to the revenues of the company is no justification for an inflated paycheck. Most of the other employess will be paid a far smaller pittance, and by your standards, they should have to make massive exertions to even justify that.
As for H1-Bs giving the companies an unfair control over workers, you are definitely not going to persuade anyone that being able to import cheaper foreign labor isn't doing exactly that. If the H1-B really filled the need it allegedly fills, those workers would be receiving more money than similar domestic workers, not less. Supply and Demand, remember?
Incidentally, what is this "US corporation" we're all supposed to love and cherish. Many of the biggest consumers of H1-Bs are multinationals, and only nominally "US-based". And, in fact, some of the largest employers of H1-Bs are not even truly US corporations at all. They're US subsidiaries of foreign corporations.
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
Sandy gruel just means "stone ground".
Why do people think this is funny? People have been using millstones and similar devices to grind grain since long before Ötzi. "Stone ground" isn't just some sort of trendy elitist affectation, it was basically all you had until the development of milling equipment that didn't shed parts of itself into the grain.
Value is what people give to things, not what things inherently have.
So modern economists claim. And yet, a litre of drinkable water is still a litre of drinkable water in every human civilisation from ancient Ur to the International Space Station, and has kept exactly the same intrinsic value to the human body over 10,000 years.
Does your economic model account for physical and biological reality? Because physics and biology don't care about economics.
You don't make sense. The topic was the value of money. With emphasis on the US Dollar. How much money would you pay for a liter of drinkable water:
A) If you live next to a Perrier spring (Perrier literally "mines" water from a place not all that far from me).
B) In the middle of the desert at mid-day
C) On a raft with a tiger in the middle of the ocean.
OK, forget the tiger.
Water is water. But how much people are willing to exchange for it (which is the very essence of value) is not an absolute. In fact, Perrier - among others - makes a business out of that difference.
The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google.
That's what it says: Bing is better than Google for people who want to find malware.
And what's really scary is that "followed by Bing" implies that other engines returned even more, starting from a point 5 times as high!
I can't help but notice that you're attacking a technical field of which you don't seem to be a member. It's pretty noble of you to sell out that job sector because you seem to have chosen an engineering field with less demand. It is quite apparent that you are envious of their demand. You'd think that when demand outstrips supply that the wages should actually increase. It would be a worker's market. The corporations are undercutting that market by importing cheap labor.
Also if it was true that your 8-year old could perform the same job then you'd think these same corporations would lower the educational requirements and pay them a much lower salary appropriate for their low-skill position. Of course, we all know this isn't the case. The corporations are asking for "highly skilled" labor with educational requirements therefore they should pay market price for that labor especially to makeup the out-of-pocket investment that the worker made when he or she took the risk in seeking an education without a guarantee of a job.
Anyway I don't think the salaries being asked for are too out-of-line. These corporations are asking for more H-1Bs so they can take advantage advantage of cheaper education subsidized by foreign nations.
I find it telling that you would sell out your own country because of some professional jealousy.
Actually, I think the reason that companies don't hire 8 year olds is that their hiring requirements typically demand 10 years experience in a 2-year old technology. And it's simply amazing how many outsourcing companies say they can deliver that. And how many employers will immediately put in an order based on that assertion.
Let me start with, so we're clear, I'm an american engineer.
.. my 8 year old can probably code you under the table (and me too for that matter).
And how many major systems are offline and/or compromised this week?
The problem with hiring "8 year olds" is that you get 8-year olds quality. You can learn enough to create pretty web sites in a week or so, but an industrial-scale system is quite another thing. To actually be a master of a profession requires thousands of hours of work and education.
People have argued for years as to whether software engineering is "real" engineering, but one advantage that "real" engineering has is that nobody ever mistook a model of the Golden Gate Bridge for something you could drive heavy traffic over. In IT, we design a model of a website and people expect it to be fully functional less than 2 weeks later because the shell is the the only part that they see and the shell looks virtually identical to the finished product with no cardboard cars or bits of sponge for trees. They don't see the gnarly SQL, the error checking, optimizations, the security code, or the stuff that has to be put in to make it handle world-wide levels of traffic and repel increasingly nasty intrusion and interruption attempts. Nor do they see all the shortcuts that the modern crop of scripting languages allow you to take that can hide serious errors because they don't slow down the initial prototyping with rigorous coding requirements such as design-time automated error checking. That's the part that takes a lot longer than 2 weeks, and what credit do we get? "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."
Just like in every other profession, only 10-20% of the people in IT are really outstanding, and there aren't so many of them that you can hire them at starvation wages. And India is not the panacea. They may have a billion people, but most of those are subsistence farmers, not tech workers, many of the rest of them are in the business not because they are good at the business, but because it's an accepted track for their societal group, quite a few of them have communications or cultural difficulties when doing US business, and only a tiny fraction are as good or better than the best the USA can field. And they're not stupid enough to work for starvation wages either; you can no longer get decent talent for a few lakhs a year over.
If all of that were true, then CEOs wouldn't be able to extort incomes hundreds of times greater than the average workers even when they are proven failures. Such people aren't "more productive", they simply have better friends.
I think that if you try and do a reverse H1-B to India, you'll find that they aren't quite as welcoming to people who would displace domestic workers.
In short, "true value" is a myth. Wage demands versus what employers offer is a tug-of-war. Where positions (so-called value) continually change, but most of the strength is usually on the employer side. Programs such as H1-B are generally viewed as handing yet one more advantage to the stronger side, which is why emotion is so high.
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
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Sabre was one of the original mainframe transaction processing systems. I can run OS/MVS under the Hercules System/370 emulator on one of the old junk Pentium 166 boxes sitting over in the corner and it would still out-perform the original Sabre computers by a considerable margin.
On the plus side, programs back then didn't have to deal with 16 different UI controls (menu, popup menu, toolbar, command keys, etc) so the source code base was much smaller. And you never rebooted a mainframe unless the world was coming to an end, almost literally. Certainly not for application bugs.
On the minus side, that stuff was never intended to interface in all the myriad ways that systems routinely do now. Which means that support for Internet users and modern GUIs was all bolted on as after-the-fact stuff. Probably by cheap outsourced labor.
This isn't the first recent Sabre problem, just one of the more severe ones.
Oh, they realize that alright. But the thing is, Microsoft has never been about finding the technically best solution. They are trying to find the best "business" solution.
And that's what's killing them. Every businessman's nightmare is that his (her) product becomes a commodity. No longer a one-of-a-kind product that can be priced arbitrarily, but one that has to compete against an open market, where the lowest price is often the determining factor.
OS's have been trending towards commodification for years. With each release of each OS, the reasons for upgrading have become less and less compelling as the core featureset has become more and more complete. This is why "killer apps" are so important to OS's. Because the OS dream app is one that requires features unavailable except by upgrading the OS. Here, too, there are problems, since fewer and fewer killer apps make demands that the present-day OS's cannot fulfill. In fact, with the webification of apps, they're actually pretty much required to be that way. The days when a webapp could demand ActiveX controls and IE6 are fading into history.
So Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, unless they can come up with some startling new "must-have" ability to re-prime the pump, people are going to be resistant to paying for upgrades. On the other, their latest attempt to "must-have" is something that almost nobody thinks that they "must have". Quite the contrary. And, in fact, they've further damaged themselves in that for the first time ever, it's less traumatic for users to move to a competing OS than it is to stay comfortingly locked in to the MS Way.
The absolute minimum a developer needs to know in order to create a web application these days is: ....
Don't be silly. Web development is easy. Just this week a wise person right here on /. told me an 8-year old child can do it.
I have tried very hard by 2 times to use Dojo to develop a web application (1st try in the 1.2 era and the 2nd try with 1.9 since a week).
I get it somehow working with the 1.2 version with some workarounds (eg: I can't get it to insanciate a message box on demand. I have to have one hidden in my page, replace its content and display it when needed).
With 1.9, I can't even get it to load some HTML to put an horizontal menu in a content panel. And all the examples I find on internet are from older versions of dojo.
If I could just find some kind of template application with a login screen and a master/detail screen with the basic ADD/UPDATE/DELETE sub screens all done within one html page. I could start from that. But for now the examples are not enough to start using dojo has it should be used. And the available examples are diluted in the google results in a way that they are nearly impossible to find :/
I contrast jQuery is simpler to use, get a lot of plugins to add what you need it to do and 'lighter' that you can split your application on multiple page without having a loading time betwwen user intercation too long making the application feel unresponsive...
I like really the design of Dojo. But the step is too high for me to use it :( I should stick to jQuery :/
Consider yourself lucky. I had to refund 2 months worth of billing because my attempts to use dojo/dijit were such an abject failure that the client rejected it outright.
Dojo was really hot when it was new, but I had the misfortune to try it when it was at a low spot. It also didn't help that I was attempting to plug it into someone else's DIY JS framework and they had mis-redefined core JS functions.
jQuery has been a lot friendlier to me.
I think you mistook "Red Hat will commit updates weekly or faster" with "You have to install updates weekly or faster".
While you can set up machines for auto-update in the Red Hat Universe, I don't and never have. If I did, I'd probably go more for selecting downloading on schedule, manual review and manual update of only the components I wanted to change. YUM will help me do that pretty well.
I don't have actual hard numbers, but I'm figuring on it taking at least 2-3 seconds to eject a magazine and slot another one in. If the weapon is capable of firing 10 rounds/second, that ought to slow down the total number of deliverable bullets/second. Plus, even with the best of practice, Joe Whacko is going to be distracted by changing magazines to the detriment of tracking - or shooting at - anything else going on. Which is why I think probably most people are concerned more about the legal magazine size than almost anything else.
Scary-looking weapons may make good press for legislators who want to hold them up and look like they're doing something, but that just means that the next nut that comes along with something that didn't look scary enough will set the pot boiling all over again. It's ultimately not how the gun looks that's at fault, it's how much real damage it can do in the hands of the incompetent.
If a 20-round magazine is illegal locally but easily obtainable in a day trip to another county or state, it really doesn't matter where it's illegal. For Whacko's purposes, it's practically on the table already. That's where Federal controls come in, by making it equally difficult to obtain everywhere. It cannot be made impossible to keep Joe's greasy little mitts off those high-capacity magazines, but if you make it hard enough, it ups the odds that someone will catch on before it's too late. Especially since most of these guys are already showing malfunctions to begin with.
Wouldn't KVM be the most natural fit for a Linux virtualization project? Or are we talking about something other than Xen virtualization project here?
Xen has been around longer, as I understand it, and at one time I used it in para-virtualization mode because running Linux VMs on the non-assist hardware I had at the time was very painful, performance-wise. I still have 1 VM host running para-virtualized.
For a while it appeared that Red Hat - one of Xen's initial promoters - was going to drop Xen for KVM, but they seem to have been retreating from that. At any rate, recent RHEL kernels are easier for me to work with using Xen than KVM, for the most part. Don't take that as meaning much, however, since Xen is where I have a lot more practice.
Guess it's too soon to make points that, if someone wants to kill other people, they can do it no matter what is legal or illegal?
Only an idiot or a legislator would think otherwise. But I repeat myself, to quote Mark Twain.
Realistically - not that being realistic has anything to do with politics or ide(ot)ology - it would be useful to be able to use the law to limit the amount of damage that people can do without making it impossible to function as a creative, productive, and free society. An all-or-nothing approach is worse than useless, regardless of which pole you adhere to. We'll never be 100% safe, regardless.
The point is that in todays political climate, we spend SOO much time looking at "assault weapons" (a gun that looks scary in other words) we are trying to disarm america and acts like this just prove that banning guns, will not stop crazy people from being crazy.
Don't be so rational. Guns shoot bullets out of cartridges containing explosives, they're like a million little bombs you can carry in your pocket! Ban guns, ban machinery, ban tools, ban explosives, ban books, ban freedom
Actually, some of us are less worried about how scary guns look as we are in how many rounds they let loose before someone can get to them.
An assault rifle is like a bomb in that it allows one person to wound or kill a lot of people in seconds. In fact, the main difference, functionally speaking, is that rifle spray is more unidirectional.
Still, the NRA only considers guns to be "arms" protected by the 2nd Amendment, so expect the upshot of this is that you will be eventually cuffed and sent to guantanamo if you are found in possession of anything more chemically dangerous than it takes to make a chocolate milkshake. But who needs science if you have enough bullets?
Banning guns won't prevent mass murder because then people will just use bombs?
Yes, but if all those runners had been armed then, uh ... uh ... uh ...
They are **INNOCENT** until PROVEN guilty!!
If you can't (constitutionally) prove their guilt then let them go!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence
Oh, you are so archaically 20th-Century. Next thing we know you'll be demanding the right to apply for a job without taking a drug test. Or citizenship papers. Or all of those other pre-Reagan ideas.
I will be able to water ski from North America to Russia, always wanted to do this.
You already can. And Sarah Palin might even wave as you go by!
Seriously, check the map. You don't actually need to cross the Pole to reach Russia from Alaska.
... But I can assure you that the appearance of my CV make a big impact.
No it doesn't.
The reason they want a Word-format document is because your résumé and countless others more often than not will never reach human eyes unless it passes the automated buzzword filters. The hardest part of getting accepted these days is often getting a human involved, because the robots are guarding the door.
Seeing as how I'm rarely willing to bend the truth enough (we want 10 years DB2, I have 7 years DB2 + 12 years Oracle, etc.) and specialize in "edge" technology, my best chances of getting an interview come from having someone in the target area (NOT HR!) invite me in. At that point, the beauty of my CV is immaterial; it's not like they were planning to frame it and hang it on the wall.
I appreciate a well-laid-out document. One of my edge specialities is computer-assisted typography. But outside of places like the Marketing Department, the æsthetic appeal of a document isn't given much weight. Although I don't recommend going out of your way to make ugly ones.
Maybe instead of a strong federal government the better idea is a weak federal government, and weak corporations? Bring about an end to the era of strong corporations. Break them up. Forbid them to own property in more than five states. Forbid them to operate in more than five states. Forbid them from colluding, and actually enforce competition laws. Forbid foreign companies from operating more than three subsidiaries in the country. Enforce the law.
And the states are now powerful enough to fuck with the corporations, and you don't have a strong federal government that is fucking with everyone.
You seem to be voicing a common Libertarian misconception. That potentially everyone is equally strong. That is no more realistic than saying that everyone is equally a genius. Corporations, the Federal government and state governments actually have certain properties in common with bandit gangs, and when you're dealing with bandit gangs, the gang with the most members and best weapons is the one most likely to prevail. So be careful what you wish for. Some corporations have more power than entire nations already.
The USA is a federation of States. The intended purpose of the federal government was to provide a unified nation in the face of threats from other nations and to facilitate the interactions between states without each state having to take on the full duties - and costs - of an independent nation. We both know that that ideal isn't how it always works out, but it's the ideal.
One of the more important functions of the Federal government has been to facilitate inter-state commerce. It is the reason why a company can incorporate in Delaware and still do business in Georgia. We're having enough trouble trying to come up with an equitable Internet sales tax plan to replace lost state revenue, so I don't think the idea of having each state have a different set of rules for corporate interaction is likely to gain many fans.
As long as the Federal government is the body responsible for corporate interstate commerce, weakening it would only exacerbate the situation, not remedy it.
You cannot because of the regulations (sport's rules). On a deregulated stadium you would see dozens of 110 pound Chinese guys.
Damn requlations. Let the Free Market take care of it!
Seriously, quite a few very successful movies have been made by using cheap nobodies instead of George Clooneys. In some cases, these cheap nobodies become George Cloonies as a result.
In fact, there's no reason why a "Kumar Kluni" (so to speak) from Hyderabad should not be able to demand just as high a salary as anyone else.
One of the main reasons why Clooneys are so popular, though, is that they can compensate for lower quality in the rest of the production. If you make a cheap production with cheap actors, don't expect a blockbuster.
"Agent" is just a rebranding of "head hunter", which up to now has been used to describe both the people representing companies, and the engineers and programmers looking for work. I suppose "agent" just means the head hunters who pitch talent to companies. It's clever. Athletes and movie stars have agents, not head hunters, so why not programmers?
There is a difference, and this isn't the first time I've seen people try to make the distinction.
A headhunter is making a one-shot attempt to place you at a client, typically for a (ha-ha) "permanent" position. They are working for the client.
An agent is someone who works for you and is constantly on the lookout for your next big gig.
Why employ an agent? Same reason actors do. Apparently a lot of actors aren't nearly as sociable as you'd think. I can't count the number of times an actor has confessed that they took up the career because offstage they are shy and retiring or insecure. So they hire someone with social skills to handle the social aspects. And offload the time-consuming and tedious job of finding new gigs and making the pitch.
Although in the early days companies hired programmers directly, and headhunters were a reasonable option, the dynamics have changed as virtually all jobs are now episodic exactly the same way that acting jobs are. From that standpoint, having an agent makes a great deal of sense.
Elitist crap. If you write program code, you're a programmer. Doesn't matter how much or who you collaborate with.
Most working programmers today don't have control over all the code "from the inception phase all the way to the completion." If you do, you're a lone wolf and you're in the minority.
(Howls)
OK, you started out by claiming that I have to "prove I am worth my salary". Now suddenly we have a whole group of people who don't have to prove much of anything because owners of the company (i.e. the shareholders) "feel it is necessary to pay them that much." Many of these people come in with fat signing bonuses, leave with golden parachutes and have assorted various other perks whose relationship to demonstrated performance is virtually nil.
If the Law of Supply and Demand was the only thing operating here - as you assert it is for ordinary workers - then yes, I should be able to bid my services as a CEO lower, expect to be fired with only severance pay if I don't deliver, and end up having to drop out of the CEO game if I don't measure up. Instead, we see almost the opposite. CEOs have been demanding - and getting - higher and higher salaries, but not because they're getting more and more productive. It's virtually the only job where you can steer the business into the ground and be let go with a check worth more than the lifetime incomes of a dozen or more line workers. And - worse yet - show up at or near the top of another business afterwards.
Just because the CEO's salary may be a "pittance" relative to the revenues of the company is no justification for an inflated paycheck. Most of the other employess will be paid a far smaller pittance, and by your standards, they should have to make massive exertions to even justify that.
As for H1-Bs giving the companies an unfair control over workers, you are definitely not going to persuade anyone that being able to import cheaper foreign labor isn't doing exactly that. If the H1-B really filled the need it allegedly fills, those workers would be receiving more money than similar domestic workers, not less. Supply and Demand, remember?
Incidentally, what is this "US corporation" we're all supposed to love and cherish. Many of the biggest consumers of H1-Bs are multinationals, and only nominally "US-based". And, in fact, some of the largest employers of H1-Bs are not even truly US corporations at all. They're US subsidiaries of foreign corporations.
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
Sandy gruel just means "stone ground".
Why do people think this is funny? People have been using millstones and similar devices to grind grain since long before Ötzi. "Stone ground" isn't just some sort of trendy elitist affectation, it was basically all you had until the development of milling equipment that didn't shed parts of itself into the grain.
But thanks for the votes, anyway!
Value is what people give to things, not what things inherently have.
So modern economists claim. And yet, a litre of drinkable water is still a litre of drinkable water in every human civilisation from ancient Ur to the International Space Station, and has kept exactly the same intrinsic value to the human body over 10,000 years.
Does your economic model account for physical and biological reality? Because physics and biology don't care about economics.
You don't make sense. The topic was the value of money. With emphasis on the US Dollar. How much money would you pay for a liter of drinkable water:
A) If you live next to a Perrier spring (Perrier literally "mines" water from a place not all that far from me).
B) In the middle of the desert at mid-day
C) On a raft with a tiger in the middle of the ocean.
OK, forget the tiger.
Water is water. But how much people are willing to exchange for it (which is the very essence of value) is not an absolute. In fact, Perrier - among others - makes a business out of that difference.
The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google.
That's what it says: Bing is better than Google for people who want to find malware.
And what's really scary is that "followed by Bing" implies that other engines returned even more, starting from a point 5 times as high!
I can't help but notice that you're attacking a technical field of which you don't seem to be a member. It's pretty noble of you to sell out that job sector because you seem to have chosen an engineering field with less demand. It is quite apparent that you are envious of their demand. You'd think that when demand outstrips supply that the wages should actually increase. It would be a worker's market. The corporations are undercutting that market by importing cheap labor.
Also if it was true that your 8-year old could perform the same job then you'd think these same corporations would lower the educational requirements and pay them a much lower salary appropriate for their low-skill position. Of course, we all know this isn't the case. The corporations are asking for "highly skilled" labor with educational requirements therefore they should pay market price for that labor especially to makeup the out-of-pocket investment that the worker made when he or she took the risk in seeking an education without a guarantee of a job.
Anyway I don't think the salaries being asked for are too out-of-line. These corporations are asking for more H-1Bs so they can take advantage advantage of cheaper education subsidized by foreign nations.
I find it telling that you would sell out your own country because of some professional jealousy.
Actually, I think the reason that companies don't hire 8 year olds is that their hiring requirements typically demand 10 years experience in a 2-year old technology. And it's simply amazing how many outsourcing companies say they can deliver that. And how many employers will immediately put in an order based on that assertion.
Let me start with, so we're clear, I'm an american engineer.
.. my 8 year old can probably code you under the table (and me too for that matter).
And how many major systems are offline and/or compromised this week?
The problem with hiring "8 year olds" is that you get 8-year olds quality. You can learn enough to create pretty web sites in a week or so, but an industrial-scale system is quite another thing. To actually be a master of a profession requires thousands of hours of work and education.
People have argued for years as to whether software engineering is "real" engineering, but one advantage that "real" engineering has is that nobody ever mistook a model of the Golden Gate Bridge for something you could drive heavy traffic over. In IT, we design a model of a website and people expect it to be fully functional less than 2 weeks later because the shell is the the only part that they see and the shell looks virtually identical to the finished product with no cardboard cars or bits of sponge for trees. They don't see the gnarly SQL, the error checking, optimizations, the security code, or the stuff that has to be put in to make it handle world-wide levels of traffic and repel increasingly nasty intrusion and interruption attempts. Nor do they see all the shortcuts that the modern crop of scripting languages allow you to take that can hide serious errors because they don't slow down the initial prototyping with rigorous coding requirements such as design-time automated error checking. That's the part that takes a lot longer than 2 weeks, and what credit do we get? "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."
Just like in every other profession, only 10-20% of the people in IT are really outstanding, and there aren't so many of them that you can hire them at starvation wages. And India is not the panacea. They may have a billion people, but most of those are subsistence farmers, not tech workers, many of the rest of them are in the business not because they are good at the business, but because it's an accepted track for their societal group, quite a few of them have communications or cultural difficulties when doing US business, and only a tiny fraction are as good or better than the best the USA can field. And they're not stupid enough to work for starvation wages either; you can no longer get decent talent for a few lakhs a year over.
If all of that were true, then CEOs wouldn't be able to extort incomes hundreds of times greater than the average workers even when they are proven failures. Such people aren't "more productive", they simply have better friends.
I think that if you try and do a reverse H1-B to India, you'll find that they aren't quite as welcoming to people who would displace domestic workers.
In short, "true value" is a myth. Wage demands versus what employers offer is a tug-of-war. Where positions (so-called value) continually change, but most of the strength is usually on the employer side. Programs such as H1-B are generally viewed as handing yet one more advantage to the stronger side, which is why emotion is so high.
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
Sandy gruel just means "stone ground".