In normal times, most of us would not object if the companies were required to pay the sort of top-end pay that not being able to hire a domestic worker should dictate. The problem is that the H1B has frequently been used as a tool to bring in lower-paid workers foreign temps to drive-down labor rates. H1Bs are frequently hired for positions where there are plenty of American workers competing, they just want to be paid the market rate. I would be surprised if more than 10% of the H1Bs are used to fill positions where there really is no one with the required skills available.
Stigma? I think some of the people here need to get off thier high horses and live in the real world. Come on guys, the tech economy has really sucked for the past two years, and it has not shown any significant signs of improvement lately. I bet most of the technical staff as SCO is just happy to have a job. I doubt any of them will just jump ship without their next job in hand. I know I sure wouldn't.
A splinter group that resorted to violence... You mean like that Boston Rable 270 years later?
Personally, I've celebrated Guy's heroism every year for as long as I can remember. Then again, I was able to trace my ancestry back to a name-sake who had his death sentence for being a Jacobite set asside. Ok, so the fact that today is my birthday may have something to do with my celebration of the day.
Greets all, I'm actually one of those lucky folks in Tacoma who gets their internet access from the City owned cable utility. That's right, here in Tacoma we can get high-speed internet from our municipal power company. Both the price and performance beat Comcast's product by a mile. I pay $29 a month (+$5 for an extra IP address) and get 1M down, usually clocks at around 1.5M, and 128K up. If I wanted to spend another $20 a month I could get 2M down and 256K up, static IP, and the right to run my own servers over the connection. A friend uses the higher capacity service for his computer gaming parlor. He's never complained of a lack of bandwidth.
It was interesting, before our power utility proposed building a City owned cable system. The then franchisee TCI was projecting that Tacoma would be one of the last of their cities to get upgraded to digital cable. At that time at least five years away. It was funny to watch all the spin that TCI's flacks and lobbyists put out trying to convince the voters of Tacoma that a Municiple cable system would bankrupt our power utility in short order. Well, the system has cost us more than was originally projected, but everyone agrees that Click! is the only reason that TCI moved Tacoma to the top of the upgrade schedule. The article somepody else referred to that quoted the Comcast exec is the only time I've ever heard something from TCI/ATT/ComCast that was different than their standard CLick! will bankrupt Tacoma.
Let's see, I've got an old Celeron 333 I'd been planning to mount on a board and hang on the wall. That,an old 4X CD-ROM, floppy and zip drives, and a removable HD unit that's only rated to ATA-33. Oh, and an old 20G ATA-33 drive to go in it. But hey, why not a window too? Use a ventilated piece of plexyglass for the air intake and then everybody could take a peek inside. And with the removable drive one could set it up for both Windoze and BSD. Man, this is so sick I've got to give it a shot.
I've said it here before, it is great to live in Tacoma. You see, our city power utility built a city wide fiber optic network to enable communications between elements of the power grid, but when they designed the system they did it the smart way. They realized from the start that the most expensive part of buildin a network is laying the cable itself. So they layed a lot of fiber. The plan from the start was to build a city owned digital cable system and to provide high speed internet access to the public. So now I've got a FO cable running down the alley behind my house that the city owns, and that several competing ISPs can use to sell me high speed internet access, my old ISP being one of them. I get a fairly consistant 1.5Mbps and a very reliable connection. I've been with them for six months now without any down time. And all that for a total charge of $26.95 a month.
Yes! The price of a used, and still usable, Sparcstation 20 has fallen to the point that they make good machines to learn Solaris on. Ultra5's are not too expensive either. That's why I have a Sparc20 on my desk here at home. And I would much rather have Gnome or KDE, then CDE. And I rather like the apps in KDE. Either would allow me to get more use out of my 20.
My generation grew up in Tacoma really hating being the butt of all the jokes about the famous Aroma of Tacoma from all the pulp and paper mills. And we hated the fact that there was absolutely no local music scene. Oh, there were some great Tacoma bands, but once a band got their act together they'd stop playing in Tacoma and you'd have to drive to Seattle to see them. And we had one of the worst, most outdated cable systems in the entire country.
Then our city power utility, Tacoma City Light, convinced our City Councile to pay to wire the entire city with a fiber-optic network. The seed of the network was to allow better management of electricity, but the spin-off benifit would be that for just a little more money the city could have a cable company that was a public utility.
Before the City started debating the idea of a municipal cable service our cable franchisee, TCI, said that we wouldn't be seeing more channels or broadband until at least 2004. They certainly moved us up on their schedule when the City deceided to lay fiber.
And when the City of Tacoma went into the cable business and started to offer cable Internet access they did so in a way that anyone in the open source community has to love. Click Network, our municiple cable company, is not the ISP. To get Internet service over the Click cable you sign up for service with one of several competing ISPs. It gives you the best of both worlds. Competition keeps prices a lot lower, and the service a lot better, then any other broadband offering in the area. And because the fiber is owned by the City, they can demand minimum levels of service from the ISPs.
Now a few other cities are looking at the success our system has had and are debating doing the same. And AT&T, Qwest, and all to other major broadband providers are doing their best to convince them that it is not a good idea to compete with private enterprise. If they win in Tacoma, then I will agree that Broadband is Dead.
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In normal times, most of us would not object if the companies were required to pay the sort of top-end pay that not being able to hire a domestic worker should dictate. The problem is that the H1B has frequently been used as a tool to bring in lower-paid workers foreign temps to drive-down labor rates. H1Bs are frequently hired for positions where there are plenty of American workers competing, they just want to be paid the market rate. I would be surprised if more than 10% of the H1Bs are used to fill positions where there really is no one with the required skills available.
Stigma? I think some of the people here need to get off thier high horses and live in the real world. Come on guys, the tech economy has really sucked for the past two years, and it has not shown any significant signs of improvement lately. I bet most of the technical staff as SCO is just happy to have a job. I doubt any of them will just jump ship without their next job in hand. I know I sure wouldn't.
A splinter group that resorted to violence...
You mean like that Boston Rable 270 years later?
Personally, I've celebrated Guy's heroism every year for as long as I can remember. Then again, I was able to trace my ancestry back to a name-sake who had his death sentence for being a Jacobite set asside. Ok, so the fact that today is my birthday may have something to do with my celebration of the day.
Greets all,
I'm actually one of those lucky folks in Tacoma who gets their internet access from the City owned cable utility. That's right, here in Tacoma we can get high-speed internet from our municipal power company. Both the price and performance beat Comcast's product by a mile. I pay $29 a month (+$5 for an extra IP address) and get 1M down, usually clocks at around 1.5M, and 128K up. If I wanted to spend another $20 a month I could get 2M down and 256K up, static IP, and the right to run my own servers over the connection. A friend uses the higher capacity service for his computer gaming parlor. He's never complained of a lack of bandwidth.
It was interesting, before our power utility proposed building a City owned cable system. The then franchisee TCI was projecting that Tacoma would be one of the last of their cities to get upgraded to digital cable. At that time at least five years away. It was funny to watch all the spin that TCI's flacks and lobbyists put out trying to convince the voters of Tacoma that a Municiple cable system would bankrupt our power utility in short order. Well, the system has cost us more than was originally projected, but everyone agrees that Click! is the only reason that TCI moved Tacoma to the top of the upgrade schedule. The article somepody else referred to that quoted the Comcast exec is the only time I've ever heard something from TCI/ATT/ComCast that was different than their standard CLick! will bankrupt Tacoma.
Let's see, I've got an old Celeron 333 I'd been planning to mount on a board and hang on the wall. That,an old 4X CD-ROM, floppy and zip drives, and a removable HD unit that's only rated to ATA-33. Oh, and an old 20G ATA-33 drive to go in it. But hey, why not a window too? Use a ventilated piece of plexyglass for the air intake and then everybody could take a peek inside. And with the removable drive one could set it up for both Windoze and BSD. Man, this is so sick I've got to give it a shot.
I've said it here before, it is great to live in Tacoma. You see, our city power utility built a city wide fiber optic network to enable communications between elements of the power grid, but when they designed the system they did it the smart way. They realized from the start that the most expensive part of buildin a network is laying the cable itself. So they layed a lot of fiber. The plan from the start was to build a city owned digital cable system and to provide high speed internet access to the public. So now I've got a FO cable running down the alley behind my house that the city owns, and that several competing ISPs can use to sell me high speed internet access, my old ISP being one of them. I get a fairly consistant 1.5Mbps and a very reliable connection. I've been with them for six months now without any down time. And all that for a total charge of $26.95 a month.
Yes! The price of a used, and still usable, Sparcstation 20 has fallen to the point that they make good machines to learn Solaris on. Ultra5's are not too expensive either. That's why I have a Sparc20 on my desk here at home. And I would much rather have Gnome or KDE, then CDE. And I rather like the apps in KDE. Either would allow me to get more use out of my 20.
My generation grew up in Tacoma really hating being the butt of all the jokes about the famous Aroma of Tacoma from all the pulp and paper mills. And we hated the fact that there was absolutely no local music scene. Oh, there were some great Tacoma bands, but once a band got their act together they'd stop playing in Tacoma and you'd have to drive to Seattle to see them. And we had one of the worst, most outdated cable systems in the entire country.
Then our city power utility, Tacoma City Light, convinced our City Councile to pay to wire the entire city with a fiber-optic network. The seed of the network was to allow better management of electricity, but the spin-off benifit would be that for just a little more money the city could have a cable company that was a public utility.
Before the City started debating the idea of a municipal cable service our cable franchisee, TCI, said that we wouldn't be seeing more channels or broadband until at least 2004. They certainly moved us up on their schedule when the City deceided to lay fiber.
And when the City of Tacoma went into the cable business and started to offer cable Internet access they did so in a way that anyone in the open source community has to love. Click Network, our municiple cable company, is not the ISP. To get Internet service over the Click cable you sign up for service with one of several competing ISPs. It gives you the best of both worlds. Competition keeps prices a lot lower, and the service a lot better, then any other broadband offering in the area. And because the fiber is owned by the City, they can demand minimum levels of service from the ISPs.
Now a few other cities are looking at the success our system has had and are debating doing the same. And AT&T, Qwest, and all to other major broadband providers are doing their best to convince them that it is not a good idea to compete with private enterprise. If they win in Tacoma, then I will agree that Broadband is Dead.