You might have a point if corporations had to pay more for H1B Visas.
They typically do. Certainly, I tend to earn more than others in my field.
What you are saying is analagous to the US charging ONLY sales tax on foreign imports. Then that would be fair. However, you must misunderstand tariffs, which is understandable since perhaps english is not your first langauage.
It certainly doesn't appear to be yours. From your original post it was nearly impossible to understand what you were referring to by tariffs. The imperfection is yours.
And yes, my native language *is* English. And guess what? I can spell "language" correctly.
Tariffs are meant to make it prohibitive to buy a foreign good. Nothing that you mention would make it prohibitive to use you instead of an American worker.
Apart from the fact that:
1. Legal fees incurred in hiring me were probably over $3000, possibly reaching $8000 when I was hired, including all associated fees and the retainer.
2. I was being paid more than most americans in my position.
3. Legally, they must pay me at least the prevailing wage for my occupation in that area.
Frankly, the system is set up against hiring H1B's as it is. Certainly it isn't any cheaper for a company (never mind the hassles involved). It just widens the hiring pool.
This is why H1B hiring went down when the job market was tough in my area. It costs more to hire and keep an H1B employee than a regular American employee. The first sign of the recession was companies explicitly declining job applications from H1Bs simply because they were of H1B status.
I'm not saying that some companies don't abuse the system, but that's the same with anything and everything. Some Americans don't pay as much on their taxes as they should either. They are typically in the minority.
When's the last time you've seen a tariff on an H1B Visa worker?
What, you mean other than having to pay federal income tax, state income tax, any property taxes, sales tax, social security tax that you can't even PRETEND is available to them in the future, and Medicaid that they will never ever use either?
33% of my income when I was on an H1B (if not more) went straight out of my pocket and into the hands of the government.
Wow. The same happens now that I hold a greencard.
Funny, that.
Simon
Re:I was making $33,000 a year when I was 19
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 2
I really don't understand this attitude, surely "America" is PRIMARILY a result of what happens in your coast cities. Subtract New York and California from the USA and you'd probably be (economically) smaller than the UK. Give California the credit it deserves - it's the powerhouse that drives not just America's economy, but - to a large extent - the rest of the free world's too. It MATTERS to us in the UK when California suffers rolling blackouts. It's NEWS.
That wasn't the point.
The point is that rent in a west or east coast city is $1100 and up for a reasonable apartment (1 bedroom) in a safe/nice area (and by safe/nice, I mean personal safety - not trees and rosebushes).
Unless, of course, you don't mind an hour or more long commute in the morning, and another similar one in the evening.
And don't even think of buying a house. They're anywhere from $300,000 and up.
The people succeeding now are the ones with solid technical/analytical skills, a personality, and who didn't spend the last 5 years competing in the "I can accumulate the most debt" contest
Tell that to a friend of mine who has been out of work since December last year. The best project manager, analytical thinker, business planner I know. He's charming and personable and treats people right. He also looks for the bottom line in what he's doing, and has a passion for it. He turned a $2MM budget into $30MM of revenue for two years. And what did he get?
Laid off.
And right now, he can't get his foot in the door because in Seattle, everyone's networks are down (everyone who knew someone has suddenly found that the person they knew is out of work too), and resumes are clogging the channels so great people don't get seen over the sea of thousands who apply for EVERY job they see, whether they're qualified or not.
He can't move out of the area, because he has an ex-wife and joint custody of the children. So he's screwed.
"If someone isn't getting a job, it's probably because their skills are a bunch of fantasy or they are anti-social whiners" is just complete and utter BULLSHIT -- at least in Seattle.
The reason people aren't getting jobs is quite simple: there's not enough jobs to go around, and everyone's stampeding after every job that comes up.
Seems like MS is still stuck in the "New Economy".. If you don't want to lose money, don't sell something for less than it costs you. Plain and simple math.
Better tell Sony and Nintendo that... they do the same thing. The reason why Microsoft has to do this is to get price parity with the other players -- who already do this.
IANAL, but isn't Microsoft engaging in illegal monopolistic activity when they enter a market (PVR's ) outside of their traditional business (software) with a product that is sold at or below cost? The idea is that a cash-rich company like MS could corner almost any market they choose by absorbing losses, crushing the competition, then holding customers hostage once the competition is gone. The Xbox is another example of this behavior, except that Sony and Nintendo appear just as willing to accept losses on their game systems and recoup the profits in software (game) sales.
IANAL either, but no, they're not. Leveraging a monopoly in another market is illegal. Using cash from a monopoly to shore up your product in another market is not.
While technically I suppose this is true, in reality I don't know anyone who really does. The fact is that I pay about $30 a month for a block of minutes I couldn't concevably use all of, so I effectivly have flat-rate voice on my phone.
It depends on whether your minutes are 24x7, peak, offpeak... yada yada yada.
I got a plan with 3800 "off-peak" minutes, and 200 peak minutes. Guess what? in a month, 500 peak minutes goes really fast.
I guess New Scientist have not been listening to Neilsen...
Let users control font size [useit.com]:(
New Scientist has amazing control over font size. You can hold it near to your face, or at arm's length. You can even use a magnifying glass if you wish. You can even read it in the bath if you want.
Don't get me started on double-clicking -- one of the stupidest GUI design decisions in Microsoft's less-than-illustrious career. I can't count the number of users I've worked with who just can't -- for whatever reason -- complete a double-click.
Apple invented (or perhaps stole from Xerox): The single click - to position the caret. The double click - to select a word. The triple click - to select a paragraph.
If you think double clicking's bad, then triple clicking must be demonic, right?
Spam is theft? That conflicts with other typical liberterian arguments, such as "theft is depriving someone of property, therefore music/movie piracy isn't theft".
That's not a libertarian argument either. That's a leech's rationalization of their position.
Libertarians are for personal freedoms, with a minimum intervention of the state in their day to day business. But where others' freedoms have to be infringed to make the world work, there's nothing wrong with getting the Government involved.
Intellectual property is a highly libertarian concept. However, not all libertarians agree with this.
Besides: Spam is theft of bandwidth. Who pays for my network connection? I do. What do they pay me for their use of my data pipe, reducing the amount of data I can receive? Nothing. Therefore it's theft of my bandwidth. Not to mention it is an inconvenience, and my time is worth money.
Slashdot: We're libertarians, except when it comes to spam.
What's libertarian about *allowing* spam?
It's not as if the law allows us to take matters into our own hands and take down the spammers personally and permanently. So this is one case where one has to turn to the law.
Personally, if people spammed me, I'd give them one warning, and then start hacking their systems. However, as this is illegal and will end up with me paying fines or in prison, this option is not open to me.
I am thinking here of Ultima Online 2 and Tribes 2, the latter of which was the one game i've looked forward to more than any other in literally years. Tribes 2 will now never reach my platform of choice, and this is as far as i can tell due to administrative mishandling and subsequent shutdown by EA. And from what i hear, the game isn't terribly playable on the PC either, due to EA's policy of "OK, dynamix, we want you to get it to a shippable state NOW. No, don't bother with bugfixing, you can patch that. You're not getting it done quick enough. It doesn't matter if it's in a finished state, just ship it, you can patch it later. Ah, it's ready to ship? Good. You're all fired."
They had 3 fucking YEARS to put the game out. The first patch was 50Mb in size. They wrote it for OpenGL, and wrote a hackjob layer over the top of it for Direct3D support. And they gave away 1/4 of a million freebies.
THAT's why they got shut down. Because they were idiots.
What about the fact that earlier when nvidia wanted to eliminate polygons with using nurbs, and didsome research on the matter and m$ popped up saying "ME NOT LIKE THAT. ME WANT NO NEW THINGS. ME WANT MONEY. YOU WILL MAKE SAME THINGS. ME NOT LIKING NURBS."
Direct3D used triangles. Nearly the entire rest of the world used triangles. The NV1 did not use triangles.
So basically, it's Microsoft's fault that the first nVidia chips were radically different in architecture from the rest of the known world, and as such, couldn't be shoehorned into Direct3D?
nVidia weren't even a key player back then. They were an unknown.
As a past member of that community (over a decade, MCSD, MCT, MCP, etc...) I can tell you that Microsoft counts amongst it's developer community anyone who ever wrote a Word macro, so the numbers DO NOT dwarf the open source community! At least not when you measure skill levels, they're probably about the same.
That's ok; the Open Source community counts among its developers anyone who's ever written a shell or Perl script, so that about evens out.
Have you tried passing it any boot parmameters (Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt)? From the sound of it you could probably work around it.
I did work around it in the end, using VESA drivers (which makes it crawl). But that's not the point; if I wasn't technically literate, then I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting that system up and running with Linux.
Any time you have to resort to the manual, and the manual doesn't contain the information you need -- such that you have to go online and do searches for a few hours to figure out the problem -- Joe Schmoe user is going to be screwed.
Have you played PS2 network games? I have, and it works GREAT...so I don't know WTF ur talking about it being "difficult"...
I'm talking about the fact that (for example) Final Fantasy XI will require an add-on hard-drive for its game play.
Although now you bring it up... are the SOCOM servers still crashing and having major issues?
Simon
Re:If this is not "anti-competitive", then what is
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 1
Except...Naughty Dog is making Xbox games?...So...they WOULDN'T be Sony Exclusive?
Naughty Dog was only acquired last month by Sony.
Simon
Re:If this is not "anti-competitive", then what is
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 5, Informative
not saying that SONY would not, if they had the money to do it -- oh wait, they DO have the money to buy a couple outside developers just for shits and giggles, but didn't.
What kind of crack are you smoking, exactly?
Nintendo bought Rare, as well as a few other houses.
Sony bought Psygnosis (Wipeout), Square (Final Fantasy; major shareholder), Polyphony Digital (the guys who did Gran Turismo), Incog (Twisted Metal), Verant (Everquest), Red Zone (989 Sports), Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot), The Station (Online game center), RTIME Inc. (online game infrastructure company), Millennium (Medievil), Arc Entertainment Inc., Sugar and Rockets Inc. (Kurushi), and Contrail Inc. (Wild Arms).
So, I guess Sony's customers are suffering because of this game buy out thing?
Compare to Vim (default shipped with redhat 7.3), where strings are highlighted magenta/red so if you miss that ending quote (or you mistakenly get the backslashes wrong when using quotes inside your string) a lot of extra code turns red and you instantly know. In the world of Visual Studio, the syntax highlighting won't show you, and the inferior parser in the compiler will spew lots of errors instead of a nice "run away string, possibly beginning at ###"
It's an option. Turn it on. Don't complain because you didn't explore the tool properly.
[Side note/mini-rant, what is your guess as to why it thinks it knows what it is when it actually doesn't? 99% chance - poor standards or lack of standards, which means we _need_ you to report this broken hardware so it can be worked around! Don't expect it to go away on its own.]
Its already been reported, and has been a known issue since 1999. It doesn't appear to be going away any time soon.
Basically, the video card autodetection probes for an S3 card, and in the process, appears to kill the bus on the laptop with the S3 mobile GPU in it. Regular S3 systems work fine; it's only the laptop model that gets killed. But when it goes down, it drops everything else with it.
So replacable save cartriges or a network card, I personally find replacable save cartridges more usefull, can you take your saved games to your friends house on a xbox? Not to mention they can't break when you drop them or run them at angles...
You can get memory cards for the XBox too, if you want to take them from house to house. I have one.
I don't doubt PS3 will have a hard drive, but I have a strong suspicion XBOX has a hard drive because they had trouble running W2k without one
Just like Sony appears to have a lot of problems running network games without one. Oh, and it's not W2K.
Slashdot Mirror
For that one dude it may come down to 'eat' or 'see kids'...
And for any father with any merit, that choice always becomes "see kids".
He's getting interviews right now for a position as an insurance claims investigator. A far cry from what he excels at.
You might have a point if corporations had to pay more for H1B Visas.
They typically do. Certainly, I tend to earn more than others in my field.
What you are saying is analagous to the US charging ONLY sales tax on foreign imports. Then that would be fair. However, you must misunderstand tariffs, which is understandable since perhaps english is not your first langauage.
It certainly doesn't appear to be yours. From your original post it was nearly impossible to understand what you were referring to by tariffs. The imperfection is yours.
And yes, my native language *is* English. And guess what? I can spell "language" correctly.
Tariffs are meant to make it prohibitive to buy a foreign good. Nothing that you mention would make it prohibitive to use you instead of an American worker.
Apart from the fact that:
1. Legal fees incurred in hiring me were probably over $3000, possibly reaching $8000 when I was hired, including all associated fees and the retainer.
2. I was being paid more than most americans in my position.
3. Legally, they must pay me at least the prevailing wage for my occupation in that area.
Frankly, the system is set up against hiring H1B's as it is. Certainly it isn't any cheaper for a company (never mind the hassles involved). It just widens the hiring pool.
This is why H1B hiring went down when the job market was tough in my area. It costs more to hire and keep an H1B employee than a regular American employee. The first sign of the recession was companies explicitly declining job applications from H1Bs simply because they were of H1B status.
I'm not saying that some companies don't abuse the system, but that's the same with anything and everything. Some Americans don't pay as much on their taxes as they should either. They are typically in the minority.
When's the last time you've seen a tariff on an H1B Visa worker?
What, you mean other than having to pay federal income tax, state income tax, any property taxes, sales tax, social security tax that you can't even PRETEND is available to them in the future, and Medicaid that they will never ever use either?
33% of my income when I was on an H1B (if not more) went straight out of my pocket and into the hands of the government.
Wow. The same happens now that I hold a greencard.
Funny, that.
Simon
I really don't understand this attitude, surely "America" is PRIMARILY a result of what happens in your coast cities. Subtract New York and California from the USA and you'd probably be (economically) smaller than the UK. Give California the credit it deserves - it's the powerhouse that drives not just America's economy, but - to a large extent - the rest of the free world's too. It MATTERS to us in the UK when California suffers rolling blackouts. It's NEWS.
That wasn't the point.
The point is that rent in a west or east coast city is $1100 and up for a reasonable apartment (1 bedroom) in a safe/nice area (and by safe/nice, I mean personal safety - not trees and rosebushes).
Unless, of course, you don't mind an hour or more long commute in the morning, and another similar one in the evening.
And don't even think of buying a house. They're anywhere from $300,000 and up.
The people succeeding now are the ones with solid technical/analytical skills, a personality, and who didn't spend the last 5 years competing in the "I can accumulate the most debt" contest
Tell that to a friend of mine who has been out of work since December last year. The best project manager, analytical thinker, business planner I know. He's charming and personable and treats people right. He also looks for the bottom line in what he's doing, and has a passion for it. He turned a $2MM budget into $30MM of revenue for two years. And what did he get?
Laid off.
And right now, he can't get his foot in the door because in Seattle, everyone's networks are down (everyone who knew someone has suddenly found that the person they knew is out of work too), and resumes are clogging the channels so great people don't get seen over the sea of thousands who apply for EVERY job they see, whether they're qualified or not.
He can't move out of the area, because he has an ex-wife and joint custody of the children. So he's screwed.
"If someone isn't getting a job, it's probably because their skills are a bunch of fantasy or they are anti-social whiners" is just complete and utter BULLSHIT -- at least in Seattle.
The reason people aren't getting jobs is quite simple: there's not enough jobs to go around, and everyone's stampeding after every job that comes up.
Seems like MS is still stuck in the "New Economy".. If you don't want to lose money, don't sell something for less than it costs you. Plain and simple math.
Better tell Sony and Nintendo that... they do the same thing. The reason why Microsoft has to do this is to get price parity with the other players -- who already do this.
IANAL, but isn't Microsoft engaging in illegal monopolistic activity when they enter a market (PVR's ) outside of their traditional business (software) with a product that is sold at or below cost? The idea is that a cash-rich company like MS could corner almost any market they choose by absorbing losses, crushing the competition, then holding customers hostage once the competition is gone. The Xbox is another example of this behavior, except that Sony and Nintendo appear just as willing to accept losses on their game systems and recoup the profits in software (game) sales.
IANAL either, but no, they're not. Leveraging a monopoly in another market is illegal. Using cash from a monopoly to shore up your product in another market is not.
P.S. Where did you Brits learn how to spell "privelege"? :)
Probably the same place you learned to spell "privilege"
Simon
While technically I suppose this is true, in reality I don't know anyone who really does. The fact is that I pay about $30 a month for a block of minutes I couldn't concevably use all of, so I effectivly have flat-rate voice on my phone.
It depends on whether your minutes are 24x7, peak, offpeak... yada yada yada.
I got a plan with 3800 "off-peak" minutes, and 200 peak minutes. Guess what? in a month, 500 peak minutes goes really fast.
It's a scam.
The first minute is free with all cellular networks I know of.
It isn't on Sprint.
I guess New Scientist have not been listening to Neilsen...
:(
Let users control font size [useit.com]
New Scientist has amazing control over font size. You can hold it near to your face, or at arm's length. You can even use a magnifying glass if you wish. You can even read it in the bath if you want.
Don't get me started on double-clicking -- one of the stupidest GUI design decisions in Microsoft's less-than-illustrious career. I can't count the number of users I've worked with who just can't -- for whatever reason -- complete a double-click.
Apple invented (or perhaps stole from Xerox):
The single click - to position the caret.
The double click - to select a word.
The triple click - to select a paragraph.
If you think double clicking's bad, then triple clicking must be demonic, right?
Spam is theft? That conflicts with other typical liberterian arguments, such as "theft is depriving someone of property, therefore music/movie piracy isn't theft".
That's not a libertarian argument either. That's a leech's rationalization of their position.
Libertarians are for personal freedoms, with a minimum intervention of the state in their day to day business. But where others' freedoms have to be infringed to make the world work, there's nothing wrong with getting the Government involved.
Intellectual property is a highly libertarian concept. However, not all libertarians agree with this.
Besides: Spam is theft of bandwidth. Who pays for my network connection? I do. What do they pay me for their use of my data pipe, reducing the amount of data I can receive? Nothing. Therefore it's theft of my bandwidth. Not to mention it is an inconvenience, and my time is worth money.
Simon
Slashdot: We're libertarians, except when it comes to spam.
What's libertarian about *allowing* spam?
It's not as if the law allows us to take matters into our own hands and take down the spammers personally and permanently. So this is one case where one has to turn to the law.
Personally, if people spammed me, I'd give them one warning, and then start hacking their systems. However, as this is illegal and will end up with me paying fines or in prison, this option is not open to me.
I am thinking here of Ultima Online 2 and Tribes 2, the latter of which was the one game i've looked forward to more than any other in literally years. Tribes 2 will now never reach my platform of choice, and this is as far as i can tell due to administrative mishandling and subsequent shutdown by EA. And from what i hear, the game isn't terribly playable on the PC either, due to EA's policy of "OK, dynamix, we want you to get it to a shippable state NOW. No, don't bother with bugfixing, you can patch that. You're not getting it done quick enough. It doesn't matter if it's in a finished state, just ship it, you can patch it later. Ah, it's ready to ship? Good. You're all fired."
They had 3 fucking YEARS to put the game out. The first patch was 50Mb in size. They wrote it for OpenGL, and wrote a hackjob layer over the top of it for Direct3D support. And they gave away 1/4 of a million freebies.
THAT's why they got shut down. Because they were idiots.
What about the fact that earlier when nvidia wanted to eliminate polygons with using nurbs, and didsome research on the matter and m$ popped up saying "ME NOT LIKE THAT. ME WANT NO NEW THINGS. ME WANT MONEY. YOU WILL MAKE SAME THINGS. ME NOT LIKING NURBS."
Direct3D used triangles. Nearly the entire rest of the world used triangles. The NV1 did not use triangles.
So basically, it's Microsoft's fault that the first nVidia chips were radically different in architecture from the rest of the known world, and as such, couldn't be shoehorned into Direct3D?
nVidia weren't even a key player back then. They were an unknown.
Simon
As a past member of that community (over a decade, MCSD, MCT, MCP, etc...) I can tell you that Microsoft counts amongst it's developer community anyone who ever wrote a Word macro, so the numbers DO NOT dwarf the open source community! At least not when you measure skill levels, they're probably about the same.
That's ok; the Open Source community counts among its developers anyone who's ever written a shell or Perl script, so that about evens out.
And I expect that this has nothing to do with Max Headroom whatsoever, right?
Have you tried passing it any boot parmameters (Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt)? From the sound of it you could probably work around it.
I did work around it in the end, using VESA drivers (which makes it crawl). But that's not the point; if I wasn't technically literate, then I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting that system up and running with Linux.
Any time you have to resort to the manual, and the manual doesn't contain the information you need -- such that you have to go online and do searches for a few hours to figure out the problem -- Joe Schmoe user is going to be screwed.
Have you played PS2 network games? I have, and it works GREAT...so I don't know WTF ur talking about it being "difficult"...
I'm talking about the fact that (for example) Final Fantasy XI will require an add-on hard-drive for its game play.
Although now you bring it up... are the SOCOM servers still crashing and having major issues?
Simon
Except...Naughty Dog is making Xbox games?...So...they WOULDN'T be Sony Exclusive?
Naughty Dog was only acquired last month by Sony.
Simon
not saying that SONY would not, if they had the money to do it -- oh wait, they DO have the money to buy a couple outside developers just for shits and giggles, but didn't.
What kind of crack are you smoking, exactly?
Nintendo bought Rare, as well as a few other houses.
Sony bought Psygnosis (Wipeout), Square (Final Fantasy; major shareholder), Polyphony Digital (the guys who did Gran Turismo), Incog (Twisted Metal), Verant (Everquest), Red Zone (989 Sports), Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot), The Station (Online game center), RTIME Inc. (online game infrastructure company), Millennium (Medievil), Arc Entertainment Inc., Sugar and Rockets Inc. (Kurushi), and Contrail Inc.
(Wild Arms).
So, I guess Sony's customers are suffering because of this game buy out thing?
Or do you still claim that sony DIDN'T do this?
Compare to Vim (default shipped with redhat 7.3), where strings are highlighted magenta/red so if you miss that ending quote (or you mistakenly get the backslashes wrong when using quotes inside your string) a lot of extra code turns red and you instantly know. In the world of Visual Studio, the syntax highlighting won't show you, and the inferior parser in the compiler will spew lots of errors instead of a nice "run away string, possibly beginning at ###"
It's an option. Turn it on. Don't complain because you didn't explore the tool properly.
[Side note/mini-rant, what is your guess as to why it thinks it knows what it is when it actually doesn't? 99% chance - poor standards or lack of standards, which means we _need_ you to report this broken hardware so it can be worked around! Don't expect it to go away on its own.]
Its already been reported, and has been a known issue since 1999. It doesn't appear to be going away any time soon.
Basically, the video card autodetection probes for an S3 card, and in the process, appears to kill the bus on the laptop with the S3 mobile GPU in it. Regular S3 systems work fine; it's only the laptop model that gets killed. But when it goes down, it drops everything else with it.
So replacable save cartriges or a network card, I personally find replacable save cartridges more usefull, can you take your saved games to your friends house on a xbox? Not to mention they can't break when you drop them or run them at angles...
You can get memory cards for the XBox too, if you want to take them from house to house. I have one.
I don't doubt PS3 will have a hard drive, but I have a strong suspicion XBOX has a hard drive because they had trouble running W2k without one
Just like Sony appears to have a lot of problems running network games without one. Oh, and it's not W2K.