I've worked professionally as a developer/software engineer/product architect/technical prime my entire professional career and I have no idea what the difference is supposed to be. The work has been more or less the same regardless of what the title is.
The one to be careful about is manager because that will usually involve having to babysit other people and if that's not your thing you'd do best to avoid it.
As a long time H1B holder I am a bit offended by the article and there are quite a lot of inaccuracies.
* The people that I know who have H1B visas both at my company and others are definitely not scraping the bottom of the barrel wage wise. * To get an H1B visa you generally have to find a company in the US that is willing to go through the hassle of getting you a visa (And the time this takes before you can actually come over and start working). * H1B is a "dual intent" visa, meaning you are legally allowed to aspire for permanent residence while you are here. It takes forever though and during this time you have to stay at your company (It usually takes at least 8 years). While you are applying for a green card you can extend your H1B indefinitely (I'm just about to extend my own for 3 years and I have already been here for 9). * O might not be attainable even if you have a exceptional talent. To get one for working in IT you are pretty much required to have a masters degree. I would contend that exceptional talent in the IT field have fairly little to do with official schooling. * Some of the H1B visas that are "fraudulent" are also people who have gotten promoted while here and the company didn't refile the proper paperwork indicate their new job titles. This usually means that they have a more qualified job and are paid a higher salary. I am not saying actual fraud doesn't happen, just that I doubt it is as prevalent as the statistics might show.
And finally, on a macro economical note, why would you not take as many people as you could that are skilled earn a good wage, can't be unemployed and generally use social resources (If I loose my job I have 30 days to get out).
I've worked developing cell phone operator software for almost a decade on 3 different continents (Not in the US though) and many different countries and as far as I know every single cell phone operator that I have worked for use the GSM standard practice of blocking the EMEI number which will cause the phone to be bricked on any GSM network in the world (AT&T & T-Mobile base their network on the GSM standard in the USA) and I was flabbergasted when a few months ago my 2 week old iPhone 4S was stolen AT&T would not do the same here.
Normally the procedure in other countries is that you just bring your cell phone operator the police report and they will immediately block the phone, basically turning it into a big media player (Assuming it is a smart phone). I can't understand how the operators here claim that they need to investigate technical solutions. This was designed and built into the original GSM standard that has been around since the late 1980:s and as far as I know the feature has also been in use since that time.
I totally agree with the article that it is unconscionable that operators here refuse to do this I am assuming to save a few bucks on cell phone subsidies.
Pretty much all the carriers have decent coverage in the metropolitan areas. And pretty much all the carriers have bad to no coverage outside the metropolitan areas.
Buying the device on eBay and then putting in any SIM card you can pretty much forget it since all the major carriers in the US have different and incompatible systems. Sprint & Verizon don't even use SIM cards at all. T-Mobile & AT&T are SIM based but they use different frequencies for their 3G network, 1700MHz for T-Mobile & 850/1900MHz for AT&T (Also notice neither of these are the same as the frequencies used in the rest of the world). In regards to LTE that's an even bigger mess and the coverage is really spotty regardless of what operator you choose so I would just ignore it.
In short it amazes me how bad the cell phone network in the US works compared to most of Europe (I originally come from Sweden where you have interoperability between operators and generally pretty good coverage even in rural areas.
A text message of up to 160 characters cost 10c on AT&T which translates into a cost of $655.36/mb (1024*1024/160*0.10) so Amazon still has a way to go before they are in the same neighborhood. Perhaps I should shut up and not give them any ideas:).
It's interesting that The Economist was the example chosen in the original text because I have personally complained about the pricing for that title. Silly me I complained to The Economist and not to Amazon. It is ridiculous that I currently pay $69/year for the print edition (Which also includes access to a podcast where actual humans read the entire paper to me) but if I want it on the Kindle I have to shell out over $125.
I had my Cox Communications internet connection disabled about 3 years ago because of this. When I called up and asked customer support about (It just seemed like it was down from my end) I was told that they had detected a specific torrent being shared from my network. They also informed me that if they caught this 3 times they would disable my service so I don't see anything new here.
I have also heard from several of my friends that also use Cox Communication that they have had similar experiences.
I'm sorry, but being fairly new to this country (From Sweden originally) the backwardness of the cell phone industry in the country never seizes to amaze me. As it stands now I can either choose fairly open networks (AT&T and T-Mobile) or fairly good coverage (Verizon).
I recall an incident where I lost my cell phone as I just arrived here and tried to go into a store and buy an "unlocked" phone (Because I travel a lot and usually just get a cash card wherever I go instead of roaming which is a lot more expensive). The people in the stores didn't even understand what I was talking about and in the end I just gave up and bought a locked phone so I had something to use.
I break my laptops at least once a year (It seems they aren't really done to be brought everywhere and be on 24/7). Pretty much every time I send it in I have a pretty good grasp at what is wrong and as long as it isn't the HD in particular I always send the laptop in without it so I know that no over eager rep working a script will reformat it without any reason. So far I've never had any problems with that. Just ask if it is ok if you send it in without the HD and they will never know you are running Linux on it.
I currently have Cox service, but since their PVR kind of sucks I still have a Tivo box for my PVR needs. I would definately prefer to use the cable box directly (Especially since you can usually skip one encoding/decoding step by using this now that we have digital TV transmissions).
I have a 36x250gb system running based on SATA running RAID-6 for my TV. I use it to put my DVD:s and CD:s available at the touch of a button on my remote. The whole setup has cost me considerably more than $250 but appart from the costs for the actual discs the cost of the system was very minimal (Not more than a regular desktop I would guess) and the main problem was finding a cheap case and a cheap motherboard with enough PCI sockets to house the SATA controllers needed.
The entire setup is standing in my laundry room so I don't have to hear the noise of the multitude of fans needed to cool the sucker down. Also I can definately recommend using RAID-6 for anything this large since disc:s do fail on an alarming basis and before I moved from RAID-5 to RAID-6 it was always nervewrecking before I managed to sync up the RAID again that no other disks would fail (I have had one multiple disc crash but managed to recover everything but a few blocks through some clever dd tricks).
I was the main developer and copyright holder to the open source project TOra (Still on sourceforge at tora.sf.net) and it was acquired and I was hired by the company Quest Software.
One important aspect was that all code (I was carefull about getting copyright to any patches I applied at the time) was owned by me and I was the only person with CVS write access. Otherwise it probably wouldn't have been posible.
Also, at the time I lived in Sweden (Which is part of the EU) so the talk about this not being posible in the EU is simply not true since I've done it.
What happened with the purchase was that Quest forked the code and the designs and in some parts the code was used in Quests own projects. The original project is still very much alive and active though.
On another note a on misshaps that the totally out of control Swedish APB has made is that they managed to put an interview with their chief legal officer with the Swedish public radio on the front page of their webpage without aquiring the rights to do so from the copyright holder (The radio station).
For you guys who know swedish hereis an interview where the public radio calls Henrik Pontén (The APB lawyer in question previously) and ask him how they could do that. My favourite quote (Liberally translated to English): "We are currently very busy hunting pirates. I don't have time to check our webpage every day".
I have been a VoIP user for about a year now and must say that I don't think it is really ready for prime time by the masses.
For my purposes it's great since I'm a Swede located in California for now and I still have a Stockholm phone number that I can call (And get called) by all my friends from back home. The problem is however that the VoIP traffic is very sensetive to high loads on my cable service. I have no doubt I'm an above average user of my network, but it can't be unheard of that people actually saturate their cable modem.
As long as you don't run a quality of service setup (Which can never saturate the cable modem since they are usually set up with really weird buffers giving you around 3 second ping times if you start filling with both up and downloads at the same time) you can't use your VoIP solution. Pretty much any P2P application will cause your VoIP to go down as soon as you start it for instance.
Setting up QoS is not something that everyone will be able to handle and in that case I think they will be disappointed with their VoIP experience.
Java 1.5 vs c# 2.0?
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 5, Informative
It's a bit unfair to compare the new Java 1.5 release with c# 2.0 since c# 2.0 is not due to be released until sometime Q2 or Q3 next year. But I do agree that before the 1.5 release Java had a lot of catching up to do to c#, but now c# is a bit behind (Mainly because of it's lack of support for generic classes which Java now supports).
I have a Philips ProntoPro NG and am loving it and it's been available for a while. And if Linux is a must have, try the iPronto. If you are really serious about your remote needs check out the RemoteCentral site which have a bunch of info on remotes and also a lot of predefined stuff for most of the Pronto models.
/Mauritz
I haven't subscribed to POTS services for 10 years
on
VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 1
I was one of those people who switched over to cell phone only service almost 10 years ago and have never looked back.
Now I have gotten a VoIP account though because I relocated to California from Sweden and my cellphone bill was consistently over $150 a month. Now I have a VoIP terminated in Sweden so all my friends there can call me paying only for the local call and so do I (Making the call cost go from $0.29 a minute to around $0.01, way lower than even the cheapest calling card solutions). So for people who have migrated there simply is no substitute for VoIP.
Also I can concur with a lot of other posts that setting up Tivo without POTS is no problem./Mauritz
I think quite a lot of other european contries have it also. And it is widely used by most people. It even works with prepaid services etc. There are also plans to extend this to normal land lines as well I seem to remember, but I'm unsure. I have not yet had the chance to use the feature myself since I work for a mobile phone company and have a free mobile phone I haven't had a reason to change to one where I have to pay for calls.
/Mauritz
This isn't the first time for Borland.
on
Borland Backs Down
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· Score: 1
I don't remember the exact details but I remember that back around the time of Borland C++ 4.5 they tried a to sell that with a license that basically said that Borland owned access to all products released using Borland C++ or something like that.
Borland backed down from that license as well. But I think it's alarming that they keep trying stuff like this a second time.
/Mauritz
GlobeCom AB
Some points from using Qt.
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 5, Informative
I have been using Qt for some years now starting with Qt 1.0 some years ago. I have also tried to both patch GTK+ programs and in one instance port one of my Qt applications to GTK+ (I was preferring gnome at the time).
The advantages I can see from using Qt is:
* Superb design. The OO design of Qt is really thought out. There are virtual function to do all the basic things you can think of and if you think of something really clever there are lowlevel routines to do that too.
* Superb documentation. A comprehensive, hypertext help and in Qt3 an included help browser. This is really an advantage since GTK+ not really being supported by a commercial entity suffer from lots of "I'll rather code than document" in the libraries.
* Good migration path to new versions. I have a program consisting of ~100000 lines of code (An Oracle client http://www.globecom.net/tora) which I migrated to Qt3.0 in about 2 hours, some of that time was spent using Qt3 specific features also like docked windows where appropriate.
* Not only a GUI toolkit. It also includes primitives for handling threading, I/O (files and sockets), UNICODE conversions and also some basic template classes made mostly obsolete now that STL is starting to actually work in GCC.
* Truly multiple platform. The application above was ported to Windows in about a day, all of the problems related to the fact that Visual C++ understands a different dialect of C++ than most of us are used to and that took some time write around, none of it was Qt specific. The extra thread and I/O classes really helps here as well.
/Mauritz
GlobeCom AB
Re:QT forces non standard c++ use
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 1
The reason for this as far as I can tell is that Qt has had these classes long before gcc supported a working STL and now keeps them to be binary compatible. I think though in 3.0 that they are STL based. When it comes to QString it is far superior to std::string since it is unicode which is really a boon when writing internationalized application. As long as you keep track of what you write/read to disk you don't have to care about different character encodings etc, it just works.
Since I consider myself being one of the someones you refer to even though I haven't written linux I try to release everything I don't think I can make money on open source (And most of the time it's simply a matter of not having the time to create a new business) I just gotta say you kind of choosen the wrong forum for your opinions.
Anyway, the problem is kind of void since freedb already exists. Someone has already set up the DB, written the OS etc... Thankfully this is not a problem the comunity will have a problem with.
After having ripped my entire CD collection from FreeDB I have to disagree.
I think the FreeDB is actually in excellent condition considering it is made entirely on voluntary effort without any possibility of reward. Codus to you FreeDB guys (And all who have contributed), I think your doing a great job.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked professionally as a developer/software engineer/product architect/technical prime my entire professional career and I have no idea what the difference is supposed to be. The work has been more or less the same regardless of what the title is.
The one to be careful about is manager because that will usually involve having to babysit other people and if that's not your thing you'd do best to avoid it.
As a long time H1B holder I am a bit offended by the article and there are quite a lot of inaccuracies.
* The people that I know who have H1B visas both at my company and others are definitely not scraping the bottom of the barrel wage wise.
* To get an H1B visa you generally have to find a company in the US that is willing to go through the hassle of getting you a visa (And the time this takes before you can actually come over and start working).
* H1B is a "dual intent" visa, meaning you are legally allowed to aspire for permanent residence while you are here. It takes forever though and during this time you have to stay at your company (It usually takes at least 8 years). While you are applying for a green card you can extend your H1B indefinitely (I'm just about to extend my own for 3 years and I have already been here for 9).
* O might not be attainable even if you have a exceptional talent. To get one for working in IT you are pretty much required to have a masters degree. I would contend that exceptional talent in the IT field have fairly little to do with official schooling.
* Some of the H1B visas that are "fraudulent" are also people who have gotten promoted while here and the company didn't refile the proper paperwork indicate their new job titles. This usually means that they have a more qualified job and are paid a higher salary. I am not saying actual fraud doesn't happen, just that I doubt it is as prevalent as the statistics might show.
And finally, on a macro economical note, why would you not take as many people as you could that are skilled earn a good wage, can't be unemployed and generally use social resources (If I loose my job I have 30 days to get out).
I've worked developing cell phone operator software for almost a decade on 3 different continents (Not in the US though) and many different countries and as far as I know every single cell phone operator that I have worked for use the GSM standard practice of blocking the EMEI number which will cause the phone to be bricked on any GSM network in the world (AT&T & T-Mobile base their network on the GSM standard in the USA) and I was flabbergasted when a few months ago my 2 week old iPhone 4S was stolen AT&T would not do the same here.
Normally the procedure in other countries is that you just bring your cell phone operator the police report and they will immediately block the phone, basically turning it into a big media player (Assuming it is a smart phone). I can't understand how the operators here claim that they need to investigate technical solutions. This was designed and built into the original GSM standard that has been around since the late 1980:s and as far as I know the feature has also been in use since that time.
I totally agree with the article that it is unconscionable that operators here refuse to do this I am assuming to save a few bucks on cell phone subsidies.
Pretty much all the carriers have decent coverage in the metropolitan areas. And pretty much all the carriers have bad to no coverage outside the metropolitan areas.
Buying the device on eBay and then putting in any SIM card you can pretty much forget it since all the major carriers in the US have different and incompatible systems. Sprint & Verizon don't even use SIM cards at all. T-Mobile & AT&T are SIM based but they use different frequencies for their 3G network, 1700MHz for T-Mobile & 850/1900MHz for AT&T (Also notice neither of these are the same as the frequencies used in the rest of the world). In regards to LTE that's an even bigger mess and the coverage is really spotty regardless of what operator you choose so I would just ignore it.
In short it amazes me how bad the cell phone network in the US works compared to most of Europe (I originally come from Sweden where you have interoperability between operators and generally pretty good coverage even in rural areas.
Don't live there anymore but I know I saw this at least 2 or 3 years ago when I was visiting then.
It always struck me as really clever and very convenient from the shopping perspective.
A text message of up to 160 characters cost 10c on AT&T which translates into a cost of $655.36/mb (1024*1024/160*0.10) so Amazon still has a way to go before they are in the same neighborhood. Perhaps I should shut up and not give them any ideas :).
Yes, but I live by the beach and I would like to read it outside. Not really possible on the iPad unfortunately.
It's interesting that The Economist was the example chosen in the original text because I have personally complained about the pricing for that title. Silly me I complained to The Economist and not to Amazon. It is ridiculous that I currently pay $69/year for the print edition (Which also includes access to a podcast where actual humans read the entire paper to me) but if I want it on the Kindle I have to shell out over $125.
I had my Cox Communications internet connection disabled about 3 years ago because of this. When I called up and asked customer support about (It just seemed like it was down from my end) I was told that they had detected a specific torrent being shared from my network. They also informed me that if they caught this 3 times they would disable my service so I don't see anything new here.
I have also heard from several of my friends that also use Cox Communication that they have had similar experiences.
I'm sorry, but being fairly new to this country (From Sweden originally) the backwardness of the cell phone industry in the country never seizes to amaze me. As it stands now I can either choose fairly open networks (AT&T and T-Mobile) or fairly good coverage (Verizon).
I recall an incident where I lost my cell phone as I just arrived here and tried to go into a store and buy an "unlocked" phone (Because I travel a lot and usually just get a cash card wherever I go instead of roaming which is a lot more expensive). The people in the stores didn't even understand what I was talking about and in the end I just gave up and bought a locked phone so I had something to use.
I break my laptops at least once a year (It seems they aren't really done to be brought everywhere and be on 24/7). Pretty much every time I send it in I have a pretty good grasp at what is wrong and as long as it isn't the HD in particular I always send the laptop in without it so I know that no over eager rep working a script will reformat it without any reason. So far I've never had any problems with that. Just ask if it is ok if you send it in without the HD and they will never know you are running Linux on it.
I currently have Cox service, but since their PVR kind of sucks I still have a Tivo box for my PVR needs. I would definately prefer to use the cable box directly (Especially since you can usually skip one encoding/decoding step by using this now that we have digital TV transmissions).
I have a 36x250gb system running based on SATA running RAID-6 for my TV. I use it to put my DVD:s and CD:s available at the touch of a button on my remote. The whole setup has cost me considerably more than $250 but appart from the costs for the actual discs the cost of the system was very minimal (Not more than a regular desktop I would guess) and the main problem was finding a cheap case and a cheap motherboard with enough PCI sockets to house the SATA controllers needed.
The entire setup is standing in my laundry room so I don't have to hear the noise of the multitude of fans needed to cool the sucker down. Also I can definately recommend using RAID-6 for anything this large since disc:s do fail on an alarming basis and before I moved from RAID-5 to RAID-6 it was always nervewrecking before I managed to sync up the RAID again that no other disks would fail (I have had one multiple disc crash but managed to recover everything but a few blocks through some clever dd tricks).
I was the main developer and copyright holder to the open source project TOra (Still on sourceforge at tora.sf.net) and it was acquired and I was hired by the company Quest Software.
One important aspect was that all code (I was carefull about getting copyright to any patches I applied at the time) was owned by me and I was the only person with CVS write access. Otherwise it probably wouldn't have been posible.
Also, at the time I lived in Sweden (Which is part of the EU) so the talk about this not being posible in the EU is simply not true since I've done it.
What happened with the purchase was that Quest forked the code and the designs and in some parts the code was used in Quests own projects. The original project is still very much alive and active though.
For you guys who know swedish hereis an interview where the public radio calls Henrik Pontén (The APB lawyer in question previously) and ask him how they could do that. My favourite quote (Liberally translated to English): "We are currently very busy hunting pirates. I don't have time to check our webpage every day".
I have been a VoIP user for about a year now and must say that I don't think it is really ready for prime time by the masses.
For my purposes it's great since I'm a Swede located in California for now and I still have a Stockholm phone number that I can call (And get called) by all my friends from back home. The problem is however that the VoIP traffic is very sensetive to high loads on my cable service. I have no doubt I'm an above average user of my network, but it can't be unheard of that people actually saturate their cable modem.
As long as you don't run a quality of service setup (Which can never saturate the cable modem since they are usually set up with really weird buffers giving you around 3 second ping times if you start filling with both up and downloads at the same time) you can't use your VoIP solution. Pretty much any P2P application will cause your VoIP to go down as soon as you start it for instance.
Setting up QoS is not something that everyone will be able to handle and in that case I think they will be disappointed with their VoIP experience.
It's a bit unfair to compare the new Java 1.5 release with c# 2.0 since c# 2.0 is not due to be released until sometime Q2 or Q3 next year. But I do agree that before the 1.5 release Java had a lot of catching up to do to c#, but now c# is a bit behind (Mainly because of it's lack of support for generic classes which Java now supports).
I was one of those people who switched over to cell phone only service almost 10 years ago and have never looked back.
/Mauritz
Now I have gotten a VoIP account though because I relocated to California from Sweden and my cellphone bill was consistently over $150 a month. Now I have a VoIP terminated in Sweden so all my friends there can call me paying only for the local call and so do I (Making the call cost go from $0.29 a minute to around $0.01, way lower than even the cheapest calling card solutions). So for people who have migrated there simply is no substitute for VoIP.
Also I can concur with a lot of other posts that setting up Tivo without POTS is no problem.
I don't remember the exact details but I remember that back around the time of Borland C++ 4.5 they tried a to sell that with a license that basically said that Borland owned access to all products released using Borland C++ or something like that.
Borland backed down from that license as well. But I think it's alarming that they keep trying stuff like this a second time.
/Mauritz
GlobeCom AB
I have been using Qt for some years now starting with Qt 1.0 some years ago. I have also tried to both patch GTK+ programs and in one instance port one of my Qt applications to GTK+ (I was preferring gnome at the time).
The advantages I can see from using Qt is:
* Superb design. The OO design of Qt is really thought out. There are virtual function to do all the basic things you can think of and if you think of something really clever there are lowlevel routines to do that too.
* Superb documentation. A comprehensive, hypertext help and in Qt3 an included help browser. This is really an advantage since GTK+ not really being supported by a commercial entity suffer from lots of "I'll rather code than document" in the libraries.
* Good migration path to new versions. I have a program consisting of ~100000 lines of code (An Oracle client http://www.globecom.net/tora) which I migrated to Qt3.0 in about 2 hours, some of that time was spent using Qt3 specific features also like docked windows where appropriate.
* Not only a GUI toolkit. It also includes primitives for handling threading, I/O (files and sockets), UNICODE conversions and also some basic template classes made mostly obsolete now that STL is starting to actually work in GCC.
* Truly multiple platform. The application above was ported to Windows in about a day, all of the problems related to the fact that Visual C++ understands a different dialect of C++ than most of us are used to and that took some time write around, none of it was Qt specific. The extra thread and I/O classes really helps here as well.
/Mauritz
GlobeCom AB
The reason for this as far as I can tell is that Qt has had these classes long before gcc supported a working STL and now keeps them to be binary compatible. I think though in 3.0 that they are STL based. When it comes to QString it is far superior to std::string since it is unicode which is really a boon when writing internationalized application. As long as you keep track of what you write/read to disk you don't have to care about different character encodings etc, it just works.
/Mauritz
GlobeCom AB
Since I consider myself being one of the someones you refer to even though I haven't written linux I try to release everything I don't think I can make money on open source (And most of the time it's simply a matter of not having the time to create a new business) I just gotta say you kind of choosen the wrong forum for your opinions.
Anyway, the problem is kind of void since freedb already exists. Someone has already set up the DB, written the OS etc... Thankfully this is not a problem the comunity will have a problem with.
After having ripped my entire CD collection from FreeDB I have to disagree.
I think the FreeDB is actually in excellent condition considering it is made entirely on voluntary effort without any possibility of reward. Codus to you FreeDB guys (And all who have contributed), I think your doing a great job.