Re:This is all about PROJECT MONTEREY!!!
on
Analysis of SCO vs. IBM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The question is: how much of SCO's supposed intellectual property in the Monterrey project was the result of IBM's expertise in the field of high performance computing?
It also means that those on the low-end of the skillset will have a harder time finding jobs, because the more highly-skilled people will be forced to crowd the low-end.
Once the recession is over, however, it'd be a very good thing for jobs to be created overseas...this will increase global wealth, and as long as the foreign markets are open to U.S. exports, will create more demand for local labor. It just does not follow that *moving* jobs is a great benefit.
You miss the bigger culture. There is certainly an employment fear, but more often than not it is just that employers cease to compete for scarce local labor and fill their new positions elsewhere.
I don't miss the big picture here. The reality is not that employers are choosing not to compete for supposedly "scarce" labor (the employment picture during the recession does not bear this out), but that they are taking highly-paid jobs and moving them overseas, displacing workers (not forcing them to work for less wages). These people will wind up having to take jobs that are beneath their skill level. That is not a social or economic benefit, because that means those people are going to be contributing to society in a capacity that is less than what they're capable of contributing.
Not so fast, cowboy... when you say impoverished, you show you have no idea about what is poverty. Just pay a visit to India, or even to Guatemala which is so much nearer to you. Anyway, the net effect is always towards the common good, because the money that does not get paid you goes to poorer, not reacher, people than you. Even the money companies save ultimately enable them to hire two people instead of one, diminishing global (not local) unemployment.
When I say impoverished, I'm not talking about degrees of poverty. Just because someone is grossly more impoverished than someone else does not diminish the fact that someone else is living in poverty. I don't need to pay a visit to Guatemala or Ethiopia or India to know that their poverty goes much deeper (although I'd have to say that in India's case, finding a way to control population growth is just as important as bringing money into their economy).
As for the mathematics behind your economics, I'd argue that it's not a good thing for any company to displace workers to move the jobs overseas, unless it is the result of two few workers in the job pool. If there are plenty of workers in the job pool, then it doesn't help the local economy out of a recession to have those people drawing unemployment and not spending their money on product. In the end, it becomes a zero sum game, where instead of growing the economy, you've relocated part of it. That's not to the common good. To the common good would mandate that the global economy grows.
Right. I wasn't speaking to definite vs. indefinite wrt this ruling, but stating that if it were a matter of definite vs. indefinite, the Supreme Court would be duty-bound to overhand.
-----Point #2: The law amounts to an infinite extension of copyrights. On the face of it, this is simply not the case. One cannot prove that copyrights are infinite from this law or previous laws. It just isn't factual. Furthermore, there is nothing in the constitution to prevent infinite copyrights! The constitution requires congress to enact copyrights, but it doesn't limit that right (the commerce clause, for example, can be read to also allow copyrights, with no such limitation). -----
The problem here is that the Supreme Court often uses *intent* as a measure of how to interpret the Constitution, and the intent was clearly to establish protection for a limited time in exchange for the material eventually entering the public domain. Note that the clause said that Congress has the power to provide for "securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive rights..." to their stuff. Indefinite extension is clearly beyond the reach of this clause. One would hope that the justices wouldn't interpret the commerce clause, as you have suggested, in a way that contradicts the copyright clause.
How about the guy who has to pay for his own education, and then spend the next 10 years saddled with the student loans? This requires a salary difference of that student loan payment per month.
On the other side, we have a bunch of Indian imported programmers who were trained by their government as part of a program to improve the technical skills in India. The big employer where I live hires tons of these Indian programmers, such that nowadays you can't hardly turn around without bumping into an Indian family.
As far as the effects of me getting lower pay, you're underestimating the macroeconomic effects of that. If I get paid less, I have to spend less. If I spend less, producers will have to produce less. If they produce less, they will employ less people, resulting in many more impoverished families who would have need of the deflated prices.
Additionally, with what money am I to pay for training and certification if I have to take a pay cut? I'm all for studying...I've taught myself a bunch of languages and technologies, but in the end, it's the certifications that carry the day, and they're not cheap.
Just to be clear, this is more the result of the media trying to make it appear like this was a slight towards Mozilla/Gecko (in some ways it maybe was, but it was clear they had different priorities, leading KHTML to be a better fit). It was NOT Mozilla complaining about the slight.
I didn't say it was definitely more about economics than performance. What I said follows from the state of the economy right now, and fact that corporations are hurting and are more likely to make decisions based on economics than performance. Their #1 priority is driving shareholder value.
hence the use of the conjunction "IF". However, since H1B is supposed to be a *temporary* program, if used by itself. You can't attain permanent residency on the merit of the H1B itself...you have to file other paperwork, which extends buyond the H1B paperwork and as such, pushes the matter outside the context of this discussion.
That's not a fair assessment of what I said. The harm comes if/when you leave, transferring the experience you have gained and the finances you've earned with you. The H1B's primary purpose isn't to be a route to immigration. Its purpose is to fill in a skills gap on a temporary basis. If it's being used for other purposes, then it's a misuse of the program.
That's not xenophobia...that's a desire to hold the government to follow through on what it's supposed to be doing. If the current (mis)use of the H1B's is acceptable to the government and the people of the U.S., then the purpose should be changed. My problem is that purpose and practice don't match up.
...but the fees the sponsor pays are supposed to be put into training programs for American nationals. This is supposed to offset the skills shortage and make it so the H1B's are no longer necessary. Is this what's happening? No.
I'm not concerned with other types of visas. I have no problem with foreign workers in this country, as long as they're productive contributing members of society. The H1B program is different. It's not serving the purpose it was intended to serve, and that is why I support reforming it.
>Alright, if you're an American, with a 4-year degree from an >American college, and some guy from India, overcoming all of the >inherent obstacles in India, can do your job better than you do, >he deserves your job. You started with all the advantages.
India has a government-paid technology training program, and I've just paid for 4 years of college. Who's *really* got the obstacles?
H1B's are supposed to be temporary, not permanent workers. They live here for a few years, doing work and earning money and contributing to the tax pool. During this time, many are transferring part of their income to their family overseas and will take whatever they've saved with them when they leave.
The H1B doesn't create a permanent contribution to the social framework. It creates a lost opportunity when foreign workers are chosen over qualified Americans (who are drawing unemployment/welfare instead of contributing to the tax pool). As temporary workers, H1B's are only appropriate when they are really needed. Otherwise, they harm the economy by transferring wealth and experience outside the U.S.
This isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not these people are good candidates for the jobs currently held by H1B's. The answer to that one isn't so clear, but consider that there are a number of companies holding onto H1B's and laying off U.S. workers from the same job.
You couldn't make a compelling argument that this is based on ability over the relatively meager salary the employer gets to pay the H1B. The corporations are beholden to their shareholders, after all, so it's their job to reduce expenses. This makes it much more likely that such layoffs are a decision of economics rather than performance.
>If Americans want their jobs back, they should stop acting like >IT'S SOVIET RUSSIA and get used to the global economy - get used >to working for $10 an hour - IF you're lucky.
It's not anti-Capitalism because it's not as simple as you're making it out to be. The problem goes much, much deeper. The economic foundation of America is spending, which is largely built on consumer debt, and it is the need to service that debt that drives our need for higher salary. If the higher salaries go away, two things will happen FAST: 1) bankruptcies will go through the roof, and 2) consumers will stop leveraging lines of credit. This simple thing is enough to topple the house of cards.
In the worst case, these things happening leads to a VERY VERY bad result. Consumers slow down their spending, leading employers to reduce their production (and payrolls), and the country is plunged into a prolonged recession or even a depression.
In the best case, the economy continues at its meager growth rate until the next landscape-shaping product comes along.
They gave a lot of money to the Clinton administration, too. FWIW, the FTC and DOJ have moved to stop some mergers/acquisitions that have had the spectre of antitrust issues around them.
If Microsoft acquires Flash and Dreamweaver, it will substantially increase its influence in the web authoring market. Given the antitrust troubles Microsoft's been in, and the fed's recent aversion to approving deals that might create antitrust headaches that Microsoft (if it were sane) wouldn't want to deal with.
Not likely....a Sun/Oracle/Borland combination would be a viable IBM competitor, but not a Microsoft killer. The sheer complexity and mass of the resulting organization would sidetrack it for years, while IBM and Microsoft continue on their merry ways.
Besides, culturally I don't think it would be a good fit, unless Sun and Oracle could get off their ego trips and adopt Borland's management style (which is something I admire about Fuller), but we all know how likely McNeely and Ellison are to stop being arses.
-------------------- Add to this the fact that the original software was still in use and was written by RPG programmers who wanted to learn to program on PC's. The typical methodology in the program was to call a subroutine, use a GOSUB statement to jump to some other portion of the program and then use a GOTO to jump back to the line following the original subroutine call. Needless to say, the stack was totally hosed after a few minutes of running this type of code. --------------------
If the RPG programmers coded this way, then the reason for the badness of the code isn't that the programmers were steeped in the RPG way of doing things...it's that they were bad programmers. Period.
So either these consultants are really incompetent on the Java platform, or there really is a significant performance difference.
You forgot the third option: the consultants were too lazy to actually rewrite the Sun version of the PetStore, from scratch, to achieve optimal performance. They basically took the Sun code and tweaked it -- this is like putting lipstick on a pig.
The problem is that LOC was apples to oranges. Microsoft used the bundled.net libraries that take most of the grunt work out, but the J2EE version didn't even use the Java Standard Tag Libraries, Struts, or any of the other Java analogs to core.net functions.
It'd be different if the 14K was considering use of those tools, but it's not.
You have that backwards. The Java version required 14K lines, while the.net version required 2K. (This has a lot to do with differences in how exception-handling was done, as well as not using frameworks, such as Struts, for the J2EE version when.net includes a frameworks that was utilized).
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The question is: how much of SCO's supposed intellectual property in the Monterrey project was the result of IBM's expertise in the field of high performance computing?
The Delaware equivalent in Europe is Switzerland. Income taxes are a lot less there.
It also means that those on the low-end of the skillset will have a harder time finding jobs, because the more highly-skilled people will be forced to crowd the low-end.
Once the recession is over, however, it'd be a very good thing for jobs to be created overseas...this will increase global wealth, and as long as the foreign markets are open to U.S. exports, will create more demand for local labor. It just does not follow that *moving* jobs is a great benefit.
I don't miss the big picture here. The reality is not that employers are choosing not to compete for supposedly "scarce" labor (the employment picture during the recession does not bear this out), but that they are taking highly-paid jobs and moving them overseas, displacing workers (not forcing them to work for less wages). These people will wind up having to take jobs that are beneath their skill level. That is not a social or economic benefit, because that means those people are going to be contributing to society in a capacity that is less than what they're capable of contributing.
When I say impoverished, I'm not talking about degrees of poverty. Just because someone is grossly more impoverished than someone else does not diminish the fact that someone else is living in poverty. I don't need to pay a visit to Guatemala or Ethiopia or India to know that their poverty goes much deeper (although I'd have to say that in India's case, finding a way to control population growth is just as important as bringing money into their economy).
As for the mathematics behind your economics, I'd argue that it's not a good thing for any company to displace workers to move the jobs overseas, unless it is the result of two few workers in the job pool. If there are plenty of workers in the job pool, then it doesn't help the local economy out of a recession to have those people drawing unemployment and not spending their money on product. In the end, it becomes a zero sum game, where instead of growing the economy, you've relocated part of it. That's not to the common good. To the common good would mandate that the global economy grows.
Right. I wasn't speaking to definite vs. indefinite wrt this ruling, but stating that if it were a matter of definite vs. indefinite, the Supreme Court would be duty-bound to overhand.
-----Point #2:
The law amounts to an infinite extension of copyrights. On the face of it, this is simply not the case. One cannot prove that copyrights are infinite from this law or previous laws. It just isn't factual. Furthermore, there is nothing in the constitution to prevent infinite copyrights! The constitution requires congress to enact copyrights, but it doesn't limit that right (the commerce clause, for example, can be read to also allow copyrights, with no such limitation).
-----
The problem here is that the Supreme Court often uses *intent* as a measure of how to interpret the Constitution, and the intent was clearly to establish protection for a limited time in exchange for the material eventually entering the public domain. Note that the clause said that Congress has the power to provide for "securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive rights..." to their stuff. Indefinite extension is clearly beyond the reach of this clause. One would hope that the justices wouldn't interpret the commerce clause, as you have suggested, in a way that contradicts the copyright clause.
How about the guy who has to pay for his own education, and then spend the next 10 years saddled with the student loans? This requires a salary difference of that student loan payment per month.
On the other side, we have a bunch of Indian imported programmers who were trained by their government as part of a program to improve the technical skills in India. The big employer where I live hires tons of these Indian programmers, such that nowadays you can't hardly turn around without bumping into an Indian family.
As far as the effects of me getting lower pay, you're underestimating the macroeconomic effects of that. If I get paid less, I have to spend less. If I spend less, producers will have to produce less. If they produce less, they will employ less people, resulting in many more impoverished families who would have need of the deflated prices.
Additionally, with what money am I to pay for training and certification if I have to take a pay cut? I'm all for studying...I've taught myself a bunch of languages and technologies, but in the end, it's the certifications that carry the day, and they're not cheap.
Just to be clear, this is more the result of the media trying to make it appear like this was a slight towards Mozilla/Gecko (in some ways it maybe was, but it was clear they had different priorities, leading KHTML to be a better fit). It was NOT Mozilla complaining about the slight.
I didn't say it was definitely more about economics than performance. What I said follows from the state of the economy right now, and fact that corporations are hurting and are more likely to make decisions based on economics than performance. Their #1 priority is driving shareholder value.
hence the use of the conjunction "IF". However, since H1B is supposed to be a *temporary* program, if used by itself. You can't attain permanent residency on the merit of the H1B itself...you have to file other paperwork, which extends buyond the H1B paperwork and as such, pushes the matter outside the context of this discussion.
That's not a fair assessment of what I said. The harm comes if/when you leave, transferring the experience you have gained and the finances you've earned with you. The H1B's primary purpose isn't to be a route to immigration. Its purpose is to fill in a skills gap on a temporary basis. If it's being used for other purposes, then it's a misuse of the program.
That's not xenophobia...that's a desire to hold the government to follow through on what it's supposed to be doing. If the current (mis)use of the H1B's is acceptable to the government and the people of the U.S., then the purpose should be changed. My problem is that purpose and practice don't match up.
...but the fees the sponsor pays are supposed to be put into training programs for American nationals. This is supposed to offset the skills shortage and make it so the H1B's are no longer necessary. Is this what's happening? No.
I'm not concerned with other types of visas. I have no problem with foreign workers in this country, as long as they're productive contributing members of society. The H1B program is different. It's not serving the purpose it was intended to serve, and that is why I support reforming it.
>Alright, if you're an American, with a 4-year degree from an
>American college, and some guy from India, overcoming all of the
>inherent obstacles in India, can do your job better than you do,
>he deserves your job. You started with all the advantages.
India has a government-paid technology training program, and I've just paid for 4 years of college. Who's *really* got the obstacles?
H1B's are supposed to be temporary, not permanent workers. They live here for a few years, doing work and earning money and contributing to the tax pool. During this time, many are transferring part of their income to their family overseas and will take whatever they've saved with them when they leave.
The H1B doesn't create a permanent contribution to the social framework. It creates a lost opportunity when foreign workers are chosen over qualified Americans (who are drawing unemployment/welfare instead of contributing to the tax pool). As temporary workers, H1B's are only appropriate when they are really needed. Otherwise, they harm the economy by transferring wealth and experience outside the U.S.
This isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not these people are good candidates for the jobs currently held by H1B's. The answer to that one isn't so clear, but consider that there are a number of companies holding onto H1B's and laying off U.S. workers from the same job.
You couldn't make a compelling argument that this is based on ability over the relatively meager salary the employer gets to pay the H1B. The corporations are beholden to their shareholders, after all, so it's their job to reduce expenses. This makes it much more likely that such layoffs are a decision of economics rather than performance.
>If Americans want their jobs back, they should stop acting like
>IT'S SOVIET RUSSIA and get used to the global economy - get used
>to working for $10 an hour - IF you're lucky.
It's not anti-Capitalism because it's not as simple as you're making it out to be. The problem goes much, much deeper. The economic foundation of America is spending, which is largely built on consumer debt, and it is the need to service that debt that drives our need for higher salary. If the higher salaries go away, two things will happen FAST: 1) bankruptcies will go through the roof, and 2) consumers will stop leveraging lines of credit. This simple thing is enough to topple the house of cards.
In the worst case, these things happening leads to a VERY VERY bad result. Consumers slow down their spending, leading employers to reduce their production (and payrolls), and the country is plunged into a prolonged recession or even a depression.
In the best case, the economy continues at its meager growth rate until the next landscape-shaping product comes along.
They gave a lot of money to the Clinton administration, too. FWIW, the FTC and DOJ have moved to stop some mergers/acquisitions that have had the spectre of antitrust issues around them.
If Microsoft acquires Flash and Dreamweaver, it will substantially increase its influence in the web authoring market. Given the antitrust troubles Microsoft's been in, and the fed's recent aversion to approving deals that might create antitrust headaches that Microsoft (if it were sane) wouldn't want to deal with.
Not likely....a Sun/Oracle/Borland combination would be a viable IBM competitor, but not a Microsoft killer. The sheer complexity and mass of the resulting organization would sidetrack it for years, while IBM and Microsoft continue on their merry ways.
Besides, culturally I don't think it would be a good fit, unless Sun and Oracle could get off their ego trips and adopt Borland's management style (which is something I admire about Fuller), but we all know how likely McNeely and Ellison are to stop being arses.
--------------------
Add to this the fact that the original software was still in use and was written by RPG programmers who wanted to learn to program on PC's. The typical methodology in the program was to call a subroutine, use a
GOSUB statement to jump to some other portion of the program and then use a
GOTO to jump back to the line following the original subroutine call. Needless to say, the stack was totally hosed after a few minutes of running this type of code.
--------------------
If the RPG programmers coded this way, then the reason for the badness of the code isn't that the programmers were steeped in the RPG way of doing things...it's that they were bad programmers. Period.
I'm not an "environmentalist", but this is just plain ridiculous. Sheesh, it's bad enough that AOL sends out gazillions of CD coasters every year.
The ironic thing is that a lot of the people who are producing these are in Hollywoold.
So either these consultants are really incompetent on the Java platform, or there really is a significant performance difference.
You forgot the third option: the consultants were too lazy to actually rewrite the Sun version of the PetStore, from scratch, to achieve optimal performance. They basically took the Sun code and tweaked it -- this is like putting lipstick on a pig.
The problem is that LOC was apples to oranges. Microsoft used the bundled .net libraries that take most of the grunt work out, but the J2EE version didn't even use the Java Standard Tag Libraries, Struts, or any of the other Java analogs to core .net functions.
It'd be different if the 14K was considering use of those tools, but it's not.
You have that backwards. The Java version required 14K lines, while the .net version required 2K. (This has a lot to do with differences in how exception-handling was done, as well as not using frameworks, such as Struts, for the J2EE version when .net includes a frameworks that was utilized).