The original message in this thread included the key word "cartel". As you seem so informed about these things, I am sure you are also informed what a cartel is, and what cartel pricing is.
Nobody is jumping to conclusions. The original story gave a reason why this can/should be considered FUD (online sales were not taken into account), and there were several comments expanding on that, including this one. I think the whole story should be titled "Study Confirms Cartel Behavior by the Recording Industry."
My comment was neither for nor against the pending trade agreement. I was expressing my belief that equating communism with "different culture" is either condoning Maoist or Stalinist style communism, or (most likely) shows incredible ignorance.
As to the larger issue of restricting trade with countries which don't adhere to the same cultural values as our own, I don't see what good that does anybody.
Calling communism "cultural values" implicitly tries to absolve the murderers of many tens of millions of people all over the world. It also shows a profound lack of education and personal morals.
Try a wrist watch - in a Diners Club catalog I just saw a wrist watch with an USB port which can load up to 33 minutes of MP3 music, and has a head set jack for you to listen to them...
I saw this on PBS (Charlie Rose show). Lars was insisting that the issue is not money, but control. The fact that Napster users had access to "perfect digital copies" of their songs, "undistinguishable" from the master copies (which they own), was supposedly the big deal. Of course, the fact the MP3 are not perfect digital copies (since they employ lossy compression) doesn't seem to have gotten to him.
Either Lars is doing this out of boredom, without informing himself about the issue, or their lawyer is the real "Master of Puppets." (Well, Lars could be simply quite dumb, too).
The article states that gcc was designed with the x86 architecture in mind, and no optimizations are available for RISC chips. This is exactly the opposite to the way the compiler has evolved - gcc was designed with RISC optimizations in mind, and not too many x86-specific features. That is why egcc and pgcc came into being - to add pentium-specific optimizations (egcc and gcc merged, and IIRC include some of the stuff from pgcc).
I wonder if the reason the benchmarks did not compile right was that the compiler itself was not built for the Alpha, or if the Alpha optimizations are different from the other RISC chips because of the 64-bitness of the architecture. Anyone with gcc on Tru64 tried a comparison between the compilers? It is hard to believe that gcc cannot take advantage of the FP registers...
Because the crackers explain how they did it, and how to fix the vulnerabilities, which is of interest to anyone who happens to run an apache web server. Of course, those administering apache servers would presumably check the apache section of Slashdot, where the story was posted...
The GNU project exists (well is so big now) because of the Linux kernel, not the other way around. If the early Linux users had not found GNU they would have hacked out their own tools.
Emacs, gcc, the GNU utilities already existed in 1991. I don't believe Linux would have been anywhere near its current popularity without the already existing GNU tools.
As to the argument that the foreign worker is paid more - maybe that is true in some cases but the general case does not bear that out... take a look at the hardcopy ComputerWorld and look at the careers section - look away from the flashy ads touting all of the big pimps and look at the hordes of little print lines asking for Masters degree, experience, all for 25K a year! Those are there to meet the requirement that the "job cannot be filled by an American".
These ads cannot meet the requirement for issuing an H1B or an employment based green card. The "prevailing wage" is determined by the states, where the job is in, and the recruitment process is checked both at the state and the federal level (it takes currently 6 months to 3 years to complete such a check for employment based green card). If you believe that these ads are used for meeting the Labor Department requirement for employment based visas, you should write to your representative or senator and request an investigation. You will be surprised how well they respond sometimes, especially in an election year!
2. Maybe it does not apply everywhere, but somewhere not only the payment is less for foreign workers. The employer also has to pay some social security, etc. for local workforce, and with a well-written contract it can be legally evaded for foreigners.
Employees on H1B visas have harder time changing jobs, but not much harder than others. How much harder is to wait for 2 months to change jobs, compared to a person, who has for example a house, and needs to sell it.
Also, there is never a requirement for payback. If anyone has agreed to such a requirement, then they deserve the "indentured servitude" position. Even then, if they are competent, they will probably find a different employer who will sponsor them for the H1B transfer, and will cover the payback.
The real problem is not the H1B visas - it's the slow employment based immigration process. Once that process has started, then the foreign national practically cannot leave the company, which is sponsoring him, and they cannot receive significant raises, or be promotted, if that would change the nature of the job.
No, this is not EDS. True, there is dress code - you have to wear clothes, when there are customers around:-). Everyone has their own office (a real office with a real door), half the conference rooms and the commons have fire places... The technology is new and interesting - large client-server systems, web-based applications, right now I am using the Xerces XML processor from Apache to implement prototype data interchange connection...
No pay-back of training costs either - you only need to give a week's notice, or two weeks if you work directly with a customer.
And still, there is shortage of competent people...
What is IT staff? The sysadmins? The technicians who install and maintain the PCs throughout the company? The programmers in a software company? These are all very different jobs, so putting them all in the same bag is not helping anyone.
My company is a software developer, and has strict criterea for hiring programmers - a bachelors degree, a programming test (language is irrelevant, pseudo code is fine), good references. This has earned us a number one software vendor award in the industry we are in (based on user surveys).
And we have a programmer shortage. None of the usual excuses apply to us - we don't require previous exeprience, we don't require particular language or technology, we provide extensive 6-month training for all new hires (as part of the job, not as a prerequisite), we hire programmers of any age, we have competitive pay.
In other words, when demand exceeds suply, there is a shortage. In my experience, there is a severe shortage for capable computer professionals.
Congress is considering legislation to allow more non-immigrants to aleviate the short-term shortage. Note that because of the ineffectiveness of the INS, there were half a million immigrant visas (as allowed by the law), which went unused in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, the industry, and the government are not paying attention the the source of the problem, but are trying to implement short-term solutions.
The article said that her family immigrated from Romania 8 years ago - therefore the bulk of her education must have been in the US. Could it be that her family is paying better attention to her education than most?
While you were asleep in the past few months, the US government published new rules on cryptography. You can find more details on how this affected Mozilla on their their website.
I have been very happy with their service, both for domain name registration, and for hosting. AFAIK, they are the only ones who offer domain parking free, and the registration costs only $30.00 (yep, that's $15 a year).
There are two amendments, which are very significant:
5. Page 40, introduced, after line 35 insert The Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS) shall study the impact of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) on Virginia business, libraries, and consumers. JCOTS shall appoint a subcommittee to advise the Commission on its work. The members of the subcommittee shall include the following: two members of the Senate, two members of the House, a representative of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, a representative of the Virginia Manufacturing Association, a representative of the insurance industry, a representative of the public libraries and a representative of the Richmond Technology Council. JCOTS shall issue a written report to the General Assembly before December 1, 2000.
6. Page 40, introduced, after amendment No. 5 insert 2. That the provisions of this act shall become effective on July 1, 2001.
Now go get to these Senators' phones, and let them know the impact on the consumers before even JCOTS appoints that subcommittee of theirs...
Slashdot Mirror
The original message in this thread included the key word "cartel". As you seem so informed about these things, I am sure you are also informed what a cartel is, and what cartel pricing is.
Nobody is jumping to conclusions. The original story gave a reason why this can/should be considered FUD (online sales were not taken into account), and there were several comments expanding on that, including this one. I think the whole story should be titled "Study Confirms Cartel Behavior by the Recording Industry."
No - flying the confederate flag gives the finger to all those Union soldiers who died in the Civil War.
My comment was neither for nor against the pending trade agreement. I was expressing my belief that equating communism with "different culture" is either condoning Maoist or Stalinist style communism, or (most likely) shows incredible ignorance.
As to the larger issue of restricting trade with countries which don't adhere to the same cultural values as our own, I don't see what good that does anybody.
Calling communism "cultural values" implicitly tries to absolve the murderers of many tens of millions of people all over the world. It also shows a profound lack of education and personal morals.
Try a wrist watch - in a Diners Club catalog I just saw a wrist watch with an USB port which can load up to 33 minutes of MP3 music, and has a head set jack for you to listen to them...
I saw this on PBS (Charlie Rose show). Lars was insisting that the issue is not money, but control. The fact that Napster users had access to "perfect digital copies" of their songs, "undistinguishable" from the master copies (which they own), was supposedly the big deal. Of course, the fact the MP3 are not perfect digital copies (since they employ lossy compression) doesn't seem to have gotten to him.
Either Lars is doing this out of boredom, without informing himself about the issue, or their lawyer is the real "Master of Puppets." (Well, Lars could be simply quite dumb, too).
I am glad they can count correctly... Now if only they would use the metric system...
The article states that gcc was designed with the x86 architecture in mind, and no optimizations are available for RISC chips. This is exactly the opposite to the way the compiler has evolved - gcc was designed with RISC optimizations in mind, and not too many x86-specific features. That is why egcc and pgcc came into being - to add pentium-specific optimizations (egcc and gcc merged, and IIRC include some of the stuff from pgcc).
I wonder if the reason the benchmarks did not compile right was that the compiler itself was not built for the Alpha, or if the Alpha optimizations are different from the other RISC chips because of the 64-bitness of the architecture. Anyone with gcc on Tru64 tried a comparison between the compilers? It is hard to believe that gcc cannot take advantage of the FP registers...
Why is one case more special than another?
Because the crackers explain how they did it, and how to fix the vulnerabilities, which is of interest to anyone who happens to run an apache web server. Of course, those administering apache servers would presumably check the apache section of Slashdot, where the story was posted...
The GNU project exists (well is so big now) because of the Linux kernel, not the other way around. If the early Linux users had not found GNU they would have hacked out their own tools.
Emacs, gcc, the GNU utilities already existed in 1991. I don't believe Linux would have been anywhere near its current popularity without the already existing GNU tools.
I would say, let's hope they only use the metric system...
Since when is misinformation considered "insightful"? Did you even read the responses to this BS?
As to the argument that the foreign worker is paid more - maybe that is true in some cases but the general case does not bear that out ... take a look at the hardcopy ComputerWorld and look at the careers section - look away from the flashy ads touting all of the big pimps and look at the hordes of little print lines asking for Masters degree, experience, all for 25K a year! Those are there to meet the requirement that the "job cannot be filled by an American".
These ads cannot meet the requirement for issuing an H1B or an employment based green card. The "prevailing wage" is determined by the states, where the job is in, and the recruitment process is checked both at the state and the federal level (it takes currently 6 months to 3 years to complete such a check for employment based green card). If you believe that these ads are used for meeting the Labor Department requirement for employment based visas, you should write to your representative or senator and request an investigation. You will be surprised how well they respond sometimes, especially in an election year!
2. Maybe it does not apply everywhere, but somewhere not only the payment is less for foreign
workers. The employer also has to pay some social security, etc. for local workforce, and with a well-written contract it can be legally evaded for foreigners.
This is illegal for H1Bs or permanent residents.
Employees on H1B visas have harder time changing jobs, but not much harder than others. How much harder is to wait for 2 months to change jobs, compared to a person, who has for example a house, and needs to sell it.
Also, there is never a requirement for payback. If anyone has agreed to such a requirement, then they deserve the "indentured servitude" position. Even then, if they are competent, they will probably find a different employer who will sponsor them for the H1B transfer, and will cover the payback.
The real problem is not the H1B visas - it's the slow employment based immigration process. Once that process has started, then the foreign national practically cannot leave the company, which is sponsoring him, and they cannot receive significant raises, or be promotted, if that would change the nature of the job.
No, this is not EDS. True, there is dress code - you have to wear clothes, when there are customers around :-). Everyone has their own office (a real office with a real door), half the conference rooms and the commons have fire places... The technology is new and interesting - large client-server systems, web-based applications, right now I am using the Xerces XML processor from Apache to implement prototype data interchange connection...
No pay-back of training costs either - you only need to give a week's notice, or two weeks if you work directly with a customer.
And still, there is shortage of competent people...
What is IT staff? The sysadmins? The technicians who install and maintain the PCs throughout the company? The programmers in a software company? These are all very different jobs, so putting them all in the same bag is not helping anyone.
My company is a software developer, and has strict criterea for hiring programmers - a bachelors degree, a programming test (language is irrelevant, pseudo code is fine), good references. This has earned us a number one software vendor award in the industry we are in (based on user surveys).
And we have a programmer shortage. None of the usual excuses apply to us - we don't require previous exeprience, we don't require particular language or technology, we provide extensive 6-month training for all new hires (as part of the job, not as a prerequisite), we hire programmers of any age, we have competitive pay.
In other words, when demand exceeds suply, there is a shortage. In my experience, there is a severe shortage for capable computer professionals.
Congress is considering legislation to allow more non-immigrants to aleviate the short-term shortage. Note that because of the ineffectiveness of the INS, there were half a million immigrant visas (as allowed by the law), which went unused in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, the industry, and the government are not paying attention the the source of the problem, but are trying to implement short-term solutions.
Off topic, I know...
The article said that her family immigrated from Romania 8 years ago - therefore the bulk of her education must have been in the US. Could it be that her family is paying better attention to her education than most?
Now I get it! He got the recognition for his future accomplishments ;-)
Good Morning!
While you were asleep in the past few months, the US government published new rules on cryptography. You can find more details on how this affected Mozilla on their their website.
I have been very happy with their service, both for domain name registration, and for hosting. AFAIK, they are the only ones who offer domain parking free, and the registration costs only $30.00 (yep, that's $15 a year).
Check them out at npsis.com.
There are two amendments, which are very significant:
Now go get to these Senators' phones, and let them know the impact on the consumers before even JCOTS appoints that subcommittee of theirs...
I was hoping to find out whether the open-source community was considered significantly large or influential enough to be the reason for the change.