You're absolutely right. Until two years ago, I was a die-hard Mac fanatic. The release of the OS X public beta prompted me to pick up a Powerbook G3 and a copy of OS X.
I have to say I love the new OS and they've done an amazing amount of work to make Unix Mac-like, but they are not quite there yet. I suppose, like any big change, I'll get used to it. Not only that, but they're practically starting over. MacOS 9 is a rather huge change over System Software 1.0, or even 6.0 for that matter.
I still prefer the OS 9 finder to MacOS X, and I miss the cartoony icons, but it won't be long before I either grow to like the new system better, or someone releases some OS 9 themes.
Anyway, all in all, I can't say I'm disappointed in the least with going back to the Mac. It's a wonderful machine, and OS X is spectacular as a development platform.
But, what good is a war that doesn't hurt. Wars fought like this--without soldiers-- don't inflict the kind of loss that really hurts.
Unless you happen to be the fellows on the ground that were just bombed by the aircraft. Do you honestly believe that these will only be used in air-to-air combat against other unmanned aircraft?
Was just about to write the same thing. Though it was Hemos, not Rob who screwed up. I would have thought that the GNU icon would be used for stories specifically related to GNU or the FSF, not just anything open source related -- that would cover 90% of what's posted here...
funny, but I've only ever heard americans say "abOOt" instead of about
That's because you live in Canada... I'm Canadian and I don't say abOOt, but I realise that I don't say it "abOWWWt" like an American. The Canadian pronunciation of vowel sounds is quite distinctive, and even has a name in linguistics: Canadian Raising.
Americans and others who say "abowt" tend to hear an "oo" sound even though it's not there. Our pronunciation is often much closer to "oo" (from their point of view) than to "ow", so they hear "oo". Americans just don't make the same vowel sounds as we do. It's like an anglophone's pronunciation of the french letter "r".
Think about it. When you hear an American say "about" do you hear an American accent? I do. It sounds like "abowt". Conversely, it makes sense that they should hear just the opposite from us: abOOt.
And yes, I am living in the States right now, but am (as any good Canadian should be) a full-fledged member of the Campaign for Canadian World Domination.
Wasn't Dykstra (sic) responsible for the atrocity known as C++?
No that was Bjorne Stroudstup.
Dijkstra was and is a brilliant computer scientist, a winner of the Turing Award (essentially the highest award in the field), and the Dijkstra in Dijkstra's algorithm that you might have heard of if you had been listening in your Data Structures and Algorithms class. He's one of the founders of the entire field.
I do agree that his comment was a little overboard, as I think many computer programmers got their start on BASIC, but there is no justification for using it these days for anything serious.
I agree. However, the salary listed on my visa application was the median salary my employer offers employees in my job, $67,000 for an entry-level C++ programmer. My salary is higher than that, and my American co-workers average something close to that, so I assume that my company is playing fair. I'm sure some aren't, but from a survey of friends who are also working on visas in the Bay Area, every single one is making a competitive salary.
As I say, I'm sure some companies don't play fair, however, I very much doubt that that's the general rule.
Company tries to find programmer to work for a specified wage (no one in the US will work for that low of a wage, lots of hours, crappy benefits, etc)
Yes, this applies to US and non-US workers.
Company advertizes job in some national publications (the more obscure and unread the better) and requires so many qualifications that an average programmer would not even bother for what salary is being offered.
Great, except you neglected to mention (or didn't realise) that the INS reviews the adverising the company does against the typical requirements for that position in your company and makes a determination of whether the advertisement is reasonable or not. Your resume is included with the application, along with previous employment history, university transcripts etc. It's possible, however illegal, to fake this stuff to meet some sort of exhorbitant requirements, but it's taking a big risk from the company's point of view, since they're also breaking the law by doing this.
While I am not on an H-1B, I am a visa worker, and I am without a doubt being paid higher than most of my US co-workers in the same position. I suppose I'm an exception though? So are the other H-1B workers in my department who are being paid within a few percent of their US counterparts.
Miraculously no one else applies for the job and the non-US person is hired (oh, those qualifications listed in the Ad are re-evaluated and 80% of them are dropped)
Hmmmm... all legal/
Bzzzt! Wrong. Fortunately, this is not legal.
I'm not saying that there aren't any companies out there violating immigration laws on this and paying ridiculously low salaries. Like anywhere there are going to be a few who break the rules. Claiming that the norm is for companies to use H-1B workers as slaves is simply untrue.
If companies just want cheap labour, why would they bother bringing employees over on H-1Bs, it costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees per worker. If companies really wanted dirt cheap labour, they'd hire employees to work remotely from India and Rumania. Either way, if (as you seem to imply) there is no IT worker shortage, an American will be out of a job, however, from a corporate point of view, keeping the worker in India is cheaper.
This does happen in many cases - when companies want cheap labour. However, H-1Bs are not hired because they're cheaper (they're more expensive) they're hired because there aren't enough Americans to fill the jobs.
We're living in a global economy, get used to it. The only reason to be afraid of competition is if you suck at what you do.
Well, first off in any company with an HR department, generally speaking, they're responsible for filtering through the initial glut of resumes and passing on the ones that actually look promising to the individual departments seeking employees. Because the HR guys don't have nearly as much of a clue as software developers as to what skills are required of a programmer, they tend to skim the description and try for a close match in the resumes (ooooh look at all the shiny keywords!!!) a lot of good resumes are filtered out with the crap. A lot of crappy resumes get through because they're loaded with keywords.
We just did some hiring in my department, and yes, every developer in my department interviewed each of the candidates individually, but we only got the guys who were sent to us by HR. And man -- there were some scary ones... but that's another story.
Face it, there is no shortage of programmers, there's just a shortage of cheap programmers.
Absolutely true. There's also a shortage of common sense on software companies' HR departments. They don't seem to have a clue as to hiring -- you're entirely correct that there are a ton of older programmers that could easily adapt to new technologies and be more useful in the long run, but most non-software people don't get that.
Unfortunately, hiring H-1B workers does not solve the problem of cheap labour. INS regulations require that companies pay visa workers as though they were American workers. If there is a consistent discrepancy between the two, the Justice department (the parent of the INS) steps in imposes penalties/prosecution.
So yes, you are correct, companies are looking for cheap labour whether local or imported, but no, visa workers do not solve that problem. That part is a myth.
The issue that comes up every time there's a story about H-1Bs is that many people believe that H-1B workers are simply a source cheap labour for US companies. I'm here as a Canuck on a TN visa (an altogether different beast), but a couple of my co-workers are on H-1Bs and I have read up extensively on both visas.
In any case, this bit about H-1B workers being cheap labour is not entirely true. In fact, INS regulations require that companies pay visa workers equivalently to citizens specifically to ensure that Americans fill the jobs first. Before an H-1B is approved by the INS, a whack of documentation has to be submitted from the company that is petitionning on the worker's behalf. In this documentation is included the salary offered to the visa applicant and the average salary paid to a non-visa worker in the same position. The company must also provide evidence that they could not fill the position with an American worker -- usually this can be done simply by advertising the job, or providing evidence that when the position was advertised, it could not be filled by an American.
If there is a significant discrepancy between what the employer is paying its visa workers and what it is paying American citizens, the company may be found by the INS to be in violation of immigration regulations, and face penalties. I believe Intel may have actually faced an investigation related to this, but don't quote me on that -- I could be totally wrong.
The entire H-1B issue was covered, if I remember correctly, in a past issue of Communications of the ACM. The article was well-balanced (ie. didn't really favour either point of view on H-1Bs) and would be a useful read for anyone considering getting all excited and rabid over this issue. If anyone can provide a link, please post it.
In any case, a sensible long term solution is to put more funding into Computer Science education in the US and crank up the number of American C.Sc. graduates. Bringing in visa workers is a temporary band-aid solution to a much larger problem.
Oddly enough, in 5.5, that option is still there, and enabled by default HOWEVER, instead of being listed as "Enable Page Hit Counting" it is simply a blank field beside a checkbox. If you right-click it and do a "What's this" on it, it lists the same text you just output...
Perhaps this is some kind of "feature" to keep people from turning it off? Who knows, but it's disturbing to know they're trying to hide it.
Why couldn't we write a little script that takes DeCSS and a text document as input. The script generates a new script that, when run, will apply some kind of algorithm to the document to transform it into DeCSS. For example, you feed it DeCSS and the GNU Manifesto, and it generates a script that says "retrieve character 5 and 10 and 12 and 13, then 2 then..." etc.
Of course, that's just the simplest form, optimization is left as an exercise to the reader.
You're left with a script that does not contain DeCSS at all. Hand it out, or post it and you've got DeCSS, but without being DeCSS or linking to it. The ultimate irony would be to feed it the MPAAs homepage as input...
You'd want to make sure this program is random enough that it generates a different script each time, so it's really hard for the MPAAs scouts to scan the web for it. And to make things a little more interesting, it should be able to work with any source code you feed in, not just DeCSS... because from a legal perspective, we wouldn't want this tool to be designed to circumvent CSS would we?
Any takers? I'd do it this instant, but my employer would own it, since I'm at work, and that wouldn't be good...
Actually, this is something I have been looking into for months. The reason being that most elementary/middle/high schools can't afford a decent catalogue system. Several that I have seen have been using software with (no kidding) CGA graphics interfaces, and searching by title only.
Those schools that do have money move to software like Eloquent -- systems that are way more complex than a school library typically needs. Most schools don't need that much power/customisation, and can't afford it anyway. What seems to be needed is a basic system that offers searching on author/title/subject/keyword, and possibly uses MARC records (though for a school library this is not essential).
It would have to be easy to set up, and low maintenance (ie. a basic linux box shoved under a desk somewhere with a UPS and a tape backup). You need to keep in mind that libraries -- and school libraries in particular -- are likely to have a multitude of machines running different OSes, so something like a web interface would be perfect.
Considering the fact that most schools are getting networked these days, it's feasible to have a linux box sitting under a desk somewhere running a database, some library software, and Apache, and a bunch of Mac/PC clients running MacOS and Windows and interfacing to this thing via a web server. The checkout could be the same idea. This could be extended to have non-web clients running on various platforms and talking to the server via CORBA.
In talking with librarians, I've found that you can't just say "dump MacOS/Windows and put Linux on all your machines" because they don't just use them for searching. They use them to run all sorts of stuff -- CD-ROM based educational software, etc. In other words, it's important to remember that for software like this, you can't just get a bunch of developers together and make decisions and write code. There are a ton of assumptions you just can't make when you're dealing with libraries and schools. There's a bunch of research into what people really want that's required. That makes it a little trickier a project than, say, a mahjongg game -- no offense to mahjongg hackers...
Anyway, this is a fantastic opportunity for development, and one that I have been very interested in for a while now. It's also been on the GNU project's list of stuff to do for years now. Contributing a GPLed library system would be great not only for Free Software, but also for schools everywhere who can't afford decent software in their libraries.
actually, this information isn't all that hidden. Try doing "man dpkg". You'll see that you can get a list of all packages by typing "dpkg -l" and a list of all files in a package with "dpkg -L ".
Slashdot Mirror
*sob*
Oh the humanity! I lost several good keys on my keyboard to that game.
You're absolutely right. Until two years ago, I was a die-hard Mac fanatic. The release of the OS X public beta prompted me to pick up a Powerbook G3 and a copy of OS X.
I have to say I love the new OS and they've done an amazing amount of work to make Unix Mac-like, but they are not quite there yet. I suppose, like any big change, I'll get used to it. Not only that, but they're practically starting over. MacOS 9 is a rather huge change over System Software 1.0, or even 6.0 for that matter.
I still prefer the OS 9 finder to MacOS X, and I miss the cartoony icons, but it won't be long before I either grow to like the new system better, or someone releases some OS 9 themes.
Anyway, all in all, I can't say I'm disappointed in the least with going back to the Mac. It's a wonderful machine, and OS X is spectacular as a development platform.
But, what good is a war that doesn't hurt. Wars fought like this--without soldiers-- don't inflict the kind of loss that really hurts.
Unless you happen to be the fellows on the ground that were just bombed by the aircraft. Do you honestly believe that these will only be used in air-to-air combat against other unmanned aircraft?
Was just about to write the same thing. Though it was Hemos, not Rob who screwed up. I would have thought that the GNU icon would be used for stories specifically related to GNU or the FSF, not just anything open source related -- that would cover 90% of what's posted here...
It seems to me that we should conclude that our theory is flawed, since it leads to an absurdity.
I think you misspelled singularity.
On second though, I don't want to know.
DAMN!
As every one knows What is on second, Who is on first and I don't know is on third. Who knows where I don't want to know is.
This grammar trolling stuff is so much harder than it looks.
Actually, my cow-orker [snip]
Pardon my asking, but how exactly do you "ork" a cow? On second though, I don't want to know.
funny, but I've only ever heard americans say "abOOt" instead of about
That's because you live in Canada... I'm Canadian and I don't say abOOt, but I realise that I don't say it "abOWWWt" like an American. The Canadian pronunciation of vowel sounds is quite distinctive, and even has a name in linguistics: Canadian Raising.
Americans and others who say "abowt" tend to hear an "oo" sound even though it's not there. Our pronunciation is often much closer to "oo" (from their point of view) than to "ow", so they hear "oo". Americans just don't make the same vowel sounds as we do. It's like an anglophone's pronunciation of the french letter "r".
Think about it. When you hear an American say "about" do you hear an American accent? I do. It sounds like "abowt". Conversely, it makes sense that they should hear just the opposite from us: abOOt.
And yes, I am living in the States right now, but am (as any good Canadian should be) a full-fledged member of the Campaign for Canadian World Domination.
Wasn't Dykstra (sic) responsible for the atrocity known as C++?
No that was Bjorne Stroudstup.
Dijkstra was and is a brilliant computer scientist, a winner of the Turing Award (essentially the highest award in the field), and the Dijkstra in Dijkstra's algorithm that you might have heard of if you had been listening in your Data Structures and Algorithms class. He's one of the founders of the entire field.
I do agree that his comment was a little overboard, as I think many computer programmers got their start on BASIC, but there is no justification for using it these days for anything serious.
The salary they posted was 37k!
I agree. However, the salary listed on my visa application was the median salary my employer offers employees in my job, $67,000 for an entry-level C++ programmer. My salary is higher than that, and my American co-workers average something close to that, so I assume that my company is playing fair. I'm sure some aren't, but from a survey of friends who are also working on visas in the Bay Area, every single one is making a competitive salary.
As I say, I'm sure some companies don't play fair, however, I very much doubt that that's the general rule.
Company tries to find programmer to work for a specified wage (no one in the US will work for that low of a wage, lots of hours, crappy benefits, etc)
Yes, this applies to US and non-US workers.
Company advertizes job in some national publications (the more obscure and unread the better) and requires so many qualifications that an average programmer would not even bother for what salary is being offered.
Great, except you neglected to mention (or didn't realise) that the INS reviews the adverising the company does against the typical requirements for that position in your company and makes a determination of whether the advertisement is reasonable or not. Your resume is included with the application, along with previous employment history, university transcripts etc. It's possible, however illegal, to fake this stuff to meet some sort of exhorbitant requirements, but it's taking a big risk from the company's point of view, since they're also breaking the law by doing this.
While I am not on an H-1B, I am a visa worker, and I am without a doubt being paid higher than most of my US co-workers in the same position. I suppose I'm an exception though? So are the other H-1B workers in my department who are being paid within a few percent of their US counterparts.
Miraculously no one else applies for the job and the non-US person is hired (oh, those qualifications listed in the Ad are re-evaluated and 80% of them are dropped)
Hmmmm... all legal/
Bzzzt! Wrong. Fortunately, this is not legal.
I'm not saying that there aren't any companies out there violating immigration laws on this and paying ridiculously low salaries. Like anywhere there are going to be a few who break the rules. Claiming that the norm is for companies to use H-1B workers as slaves is simply untrue.
If companies just want cheap labour, why would they bother bringing employees over on H-1Bs, it costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees per worker. If companies really wanted dirt cheap labour, they'd hire employees to work remotely from India and Rumania. Either way, if (as you seem to imply) there is no IT worker shortage, an American will be out of a job, however, from a corporate point of view, keeping the worker in India is cheaper.
This does happen in many cases - when companies want cheap labour. However, H-1Bs are not hired because they're cheaper (they're more expensive) they're hired because there aren't enough Americans to fill the jobs.
We're living in a global economy, get used to it. The only reason to be afraid of competition is if you suck at what you do.
What has the HR department got to do with it?
Well, first off in any company with an HR department, generally speaking, they're responsible for filtering through the initial glut of resumes and passing on the ones that actually look promising to the individual departments seeking employees. Because the HR guys don't have nearly as much of a clue as software developers as to what skills are required of a programmer, they tend to skim the description and try for a close match in the resumes (ooooh look at all the shiny keywords!!!) a lot of good resumes are filtered out with the crap. A lot of crappy resumes get through because they're loaded with keywords.
We just did some hiring in my department, and yes, every developer in my department interviewed each of the candidates individually, but we only got the guys who were sent to us by HR. And man -- there were some scary ones... but that's another story.
Yeah, substuting for Pritchet, no? Or was it Vandenberg's class?
No -- it was for Pritchet. Crazy. That man was craaaaazy!
Face it, there is no shortage of programmers, there's just a shortage of cheap programmers.
Absolutely true. There's also a shortage of common sense on software companies' HR departments. They don't seem to have a clue as to hiring -- you're entirely correct that there are a ton of older programmers that could easily adapt to new technologies and be more useful in the long run, but most non-software people don't get that.
Unfortunately, hiring H-1B workers does not solve the problem of cheap labour. INS regulations require that companies pay visa workers as though they were American workers. If there is a consistent discrepancy between the two, the Justice department (the parent of the INS) steps in imposes penalties/prosecution.
So yes, you are correct, companies are looking for cheap labour whether local or imported, but no, visa workers do not solve that problem. That part is a myth.
The issue that comes up every time there's a story about H-1Bs is that many people believe that H-1B workers are simply a source cheap labour for US companies. I'm here as a Canuck on a TN visa (an altogether different beast), but a couple of my co-workers are on H-1Bs and I have read up extensively on both visas.
In any case, this bit about H-1B workers being cheap labour is not entirely true. In fact, INS regulations require that companies pay visa workers equivalently to citizens specifically to ensure that Americans fill the jobs first. Before an H-1B is approved by the INS, a whack of documentation has to be submitted from the company that is petitionning on the worker's behalf. In this documentation is included the salary offered to the visa applicant and the average salary paid to a non-visa worker in the same position. The company must also provide evidence that they could not fill the position with an American worker -- usually this can be done simply by advertising the job, or providing evidence that when the position was advertised, it could not be filled by an American.
If there is a significant discrepancy between what the employer is paying its visa workers and what it is paying American citizens, the company may be found by the INS to be in violation of immigration regulations, and face penalties. I believe Intel may have actually faced an investigation related to this, but don't quote me on that -- I could be totally wrong.
The entire H-1B issue was covered, if I remember correctly, in a past issue of Communications of the ACM. The article was well-balanced (ie. didn't really favour either point of view on H-1Bs) and would be a useful read for anyone considering getting all excited and rabid over this issue. If anyone can provide a link, please post it.
In any case, a sensible long term solution is to put more funding into Computer Science education in the US and crank up the number of American C.Sc. graduates. Bringing in visa workers is a temporary band-aid solution to a much larger problem.
Exactly... I believe I was in the classroom when he said that... in Elliot 164, IIRC.
Spooky...
RedHat's not saying this, RedHat's marketing is. [...] I keep my stupid opinions to myself...except for here at slashmouth
Apparently so, since RedHat's marketing isn't making this claim, ZDNet is.
And don't even think about anywhere on the north side of the Golden Gate bridge in Marin County; $1600 a month for a one-bedroom in San Rafael.
As soon as my lease is up, I'm moving somewhere cheaper... like Manhattan...
Paint the Slashdot logo on the Space Shuttle
Not as unrealistic as you might have thought... As reported on Slashdot, Pizza Hut's logo appeared on the side of a Proton rocket recently.
Oddly enough, in 5.5, that option is still there, and enabled by default HOWEVER, instead of being listed as "Enable Page Hit Counting" it is simply a blank field beside a checkbox. If you right-click it and do a "What's this" on it, it lists the same text you just output...
Perhaps this is some kind of "feature" to keep people from turning it off? Who knows, but it's disturbing to know they're trying to hide it.
I suppose there are... I can think of at least one. :)
Here's what I'm thinking...
Why couldn't we write a little script that takes DeCSS and a text document as input. The script generates a new script that, when run, will apply some kind of algorithm to the document to transform it into DeCSS. For example, you feed it DeCSS and the GNU Manifesto, and it generates a script that says "retrieve character 5 and 10 and 12 and 13, then 2 then..." etc.
Of course, that's just the simplest form, optimization is left as an exercise to the reader.
You're left with a script that does not contain DeCSS at all. Hand it out, or post it and you've got DeCSS, but without being DeCSS or linking to it. The ultimate irony would be to feed it the MPAAs homepage as input...
You'd want to make sure this program is random enough that it generates a different script each time, so it's really hard for the MPAAs scouts to scan the web for it. And to make things a little more interesting, it should be able to work with any source code you feed in, not just DeCSS... because from a legal perspective, we wouldn't want this tool to be designed to circumvent CSS would we?
Any takers? I'd do it this instant, but my employer would own it, since I'm at work, and that wouldn't be good...
Actually, this is something I have been looking into for months. The reason being that most elementary/middle/high schools can't afford a decent catalogue system. Several that I have seen have been using software with (no kidding) CGA graphics interfaces, and searching by title only.
Those schools that do have money move to software like Eloquent -- systems that are way more complex than a school library typically needs. Most schools don't need that much power/customisation, and can't afford it anyway. What seems to be needed is a basic system that offers searching on author/title/subject/keyword, and possibly uses MARC records (though for a school library this is not essential).
It would have to be easy to set up, and low maintenance (ie. a basic linux box shoved under a desk somewhere with a UPS and a tape backup). You need to keep in mind that libraries -- and school libraries in particular -- are likely to have a multitude of machines running different OSes, so something like a web interface would be perfect.
Considering the fact that most schools are getting networked these days, it's feasible to have a linux box sitting under a desk somewhere running a database, some library software, and Apache, and a bunch of Mac/PC clients running MacOS and Windows and interfacing to this thing via a web server. The checkout could be the same idea. This could be extended to have non-web clients running on various platforms and talking to the server via CORBA.
In talking with librarians, I've found that you can't just say "dump MacOS/Windows and put Linux on all your machines" because they don't just use them for searching. They use them to run all sorts of stuff -- CD-ROM based educational software, etc. In other words, it's important to remember that for software like this, you can't just get a bunch of developers together and make decisions and write code. There are a ton of assumptions you just can't make when you're dealing with libraries and schools. There's a bunch of research into what people really want that's required. That makes it a little trickier a project than, say, a mahjongg game -- no offense to mahjongg hackers...
Anyway, this is a fantastic opportunity for development, and one that I have been very interested in for a while now. It's also been on the GNU project's list of stuff to do for years now. Contributing a GPLed library system would be great not only for Free Software, but also for schools everywhere who can't afford decent software in their libraries.
actually, this information isn't all that hidden. Try doing "man dpkg". You'll see that you can get a list of all packages by typing "dpkg -l" and a list of all files in a package with "dpkg -L ".
Quite right! And of course, Veronica was the aptly-named, gopherised cousin of the Archie service!