I might be wrong about the size, but these were the original "Winchester" models, now that you mention it I don't recall if they were 10, 20 or 30Mb, all I remember is that they were so huge (to us then) and that they took goddam forever to back up to floppies. The drives were big grey boxes with a translucent plastic lid, you could see the heads move across the platter. Then those were placed inside a Corvus white box. My understanding is that these Winchester drives were originally produced for IBM mainframes but IBM didn't like them so the limited production went to OEMs like Corvus. These were the first commercially available hard drives for microcomputers like the Apple II, and ran Omninet for multiuser storage networking. That worked like crap, because the Apple DOS system (and the Apple/// SOS system we were helping develop) didn't have robust file and record locking.
Yeah, the 10Gb was a typo, it's hard to believe that at one time hard drives with 10 or 20 megs was considered huge.
Please do not project your hardware neuroses onto me, I'm not using cheapshit white box PeeCees loaded with Windoze malware, I use pro Macs.
Your backup system isn't a procedure, it is a fetish. You claim your "rework window" is only 24 hours. How many 24-hour time slots have you wasted over the past few years, doing unnecessary backups?
You weren't paying attention. I specifically said that due to my diligent maintenance, I have a 0% hard drive failure rate over the last 20 years. I just retired a server with an Atlas 10K SCSI drive that ran 24/7/365 for over 5 years without a single problem, not even a soft error. That's what happens when you buy quality products, like high-end SCSI drives instead of cheapshit IDE drives.
Yes, I am invulnerable. My OS and apps are backed up on their original distribution discs. My handmade data is archived almost as fast as I create it. Backups are useless. Maintenance and archiving is a better approach. I don't need to hear lectures from someone like you who sells backup systems by slinging FUD and scary statistics.
I never NEVER backup. It is futile, a huge waste of time, and a monumental risk. The only time I have ever lost data was while performing backups. Let me give you an example.
Way back around 1979, it was my first serious development job, and as the junior programmer in the shop I had the onerous duty of performing the weekly backups of our production drive, containing all the code for our accounting software development. We had a big 10Gb Corvus hard drive (the original Winchester) networked to our Apple IIs and pre-release Apple/// machines, and it took a whole case of floppy disks to back up the system, IIRC something like 180 floppies. It took goddam forever, so I usually started early in the morning on Fridays, and the network was unusable during the backup, so everyone (except ME) got to sleep in on Fridays (usually they didn't show up at all). So I spent all morning doing the backup, shuffling floppies in and out of the stupid disk drive, then when it was all done, doing a verification pass, which took just as long as the backup. All was well, I turned the hard drive back to network usage, verified it was operational, and went for a long lunch and a haircut. Nobody was around when I left, so I locked the door and left. I came back to the office at about 2PM, everyone was there and they all started yelling at me immediately. The moment I left the office for lunch, the Corvus hard drive died. It was totally not my fault, it was a random hardware failure, at least it was a good thing it happened AFTER the backup was finished. The only problem was, it was the only unit we had, it would take 2 weeks to get a replacement drive shipped and installed (hard drives were very hard to obtain back then). Of course everyone jumped to the conclusion that I killed the drive, I protested that it was working correctly when I left, and I tried to reassure them that the backup was verified so no work was lost. Everyone assumed that since I had taken 2 hours for lunch (I had scheduled the haircut a week earlier with my boss, who wasn't in the office that Friday) that I had killed the hard drive, then fled in a panic. No matter what I said, nobody believed me. I got fired that day. Since that day, I have never performed backups, and I have never lost ANY data. I have a totally different strategy.
System and app backups are totally useless. Sys configs and apps can be replaced easily by a fresh install, and much quicker than doing a restore, and you don't have to waste time doing repetitive, useless, time-wasting backups every week/month/etc. The only data worth saving is irreplaceable data. This should not be backed up, but instead, archived. For the most precious data, for example, photo and graphic design jobs I created from scratch for customers, those are archived immediately upon delivery (I usually work on short deliverable cycles, like a week or two at most). Routine archiving of each job to CDs or DVDS makes it easy to create an extra copy as a deliverable, and one for my archives. Other major file stores, for example, my mp3 collection, is archived each time I acquire a full DVD worth of new data. It is better to archive as you go, than to waste time in full system backups.
Rather than wasting time with backups, it is preferable to make sure your disks don't NEED restoration, by scrupulously maintaining them in optimal condition. Maintenance is better than backups. I buy only high quality hard drives, I monitor their performance and integrity continuously, and as a result, I've never had a single hard drive failure in any system I've owned, and that goes back almost 20 years. I have never lost any data.
You are the only person I know of (besides me) who ever HEARD of Mark Sense cards, let alone USED them. I still have vivid memories of scratching away on these cards with a #2 pencil. But we still used coding forms before committing to cards.
One of these days, some asshole is going to take down the entire net, just to prove that it can be done.
I keep thinking about the old saying, "what isn't prohibited, is required." Because the net doesn't prohibit these massive DDoS attacks, someone WILL do them, over and over, either because they are into extortion, or just because they're evil fucks and like creating mayhem. I almost believe that someone ought to just do it and break the net permanently so everyone will have to come to grips with this. So maybe the solution will mean that nobody with an insecure OS will be allowed back on the net. Maybe we need a catastrophic failure to force a total revamp of network protocols, and an excuse to exile all the lusers like people still using Win98. I dunno, it would probably be faster, cheaper, and ultimately more satisfying if we could just assassinate spamming assholes like PharmaMaster/Eran Reshef.
This is a GREAT idea! The chemical and biological industry should welcome coders that dropped out of college after a single semester. Our medical and pharmaceutical industries are always ready to risk the public's lives on the unskilled, untrained code geeks who learned how to sling together a few Visual Basic routines.
Ferchrissake man, do you really think that coding gives you insights into other areas of scientific knowledge? Do you actually think coding could make you a better chemist or biologist, even if you have no training in chemistry or biology? This is the one thing about computer geeks that just drives me crazy, some of them think that since they can code well, they can do ANYTHING well. It's arrogance of the highest degree.
Go back to school if you want to work in a specialized field. I went back to school at age 38 and got 2 degrees, it's not as hard as you think. Get the training you need. Get your degree. Being a self-taught code geek without a degree means you're on the same level as high-school graduates. Finishing a college degree means you can finish something serious, something that requires persistent effort despite obstacles. Dropping out of college means you did NOT have the persistence to finish something important, and that you are a loser who can't be trusted with serious projects. Don't think I'm being harsh here, this is really how employers think, I know, I've been there.
...I have seen exactly zero animations from India.
Actually, if you've watched any American cartoons, you've seen animation from India. Most of the gruntwork in the US cartoon industry is outsourced to India and Korea.
Yeah, that Crumpler is more like what I'm looking for. But man it's HUGE. I wonder if there isn't a bag that is a bit smaller, just enough for a 15" PowerBook and a DSLR, I don't want to carry much more than that. I suppose almost any small messenger bag would work, if I separate the lens from the camera for transport, but hell, then your camera is never ready to shoot when you need it.
You know, I was thinking about the general practice of PC magazines trolling Mac users for hits. It occurs to me that the PC magazines' advertisers are getting the shaft. Mac users aren't the target market for PC-specific ads, but the PC advertisers pay for those page views by Mac users anyway. I suspect that on an extreme troll, the proportion of Mac users might be as high as 90%, with tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of page views. And the PC advertisers are paying for all those hits, and it's all for nothing, Mac users aren't interested in buying PC products. It is time for the PC advertisers to send a clear message to the Dvoraks, Louderbecks, and other trolls, to stop wasting their advertising dollars by trolling Mac users.
Remember that screed was written by Jim Louderbeck, one of the more notorious anti-Mac PeeCee trolls. I still remember him doing the commentary on a Stevenote carried on ZDTV a few years back, he nitpicked on everything, for no good reasons. Note that his employer, Ziff-Davis, has a major investment from Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen). Loudermouth knows he has to cater to his owner's financial interests. Nice little doggie, sit up and beg, little Loudermouth!
I have a different problem, I need a bag for traveling, something big enough to carry the gear that's too precious to check in during an airline flight, specifically my laptop and a big digital SLR camera. There are plenty of good laptop bags, but none of them seem to be large enough to carry an SLR too. And I hate backpacks.
Also, the grandparent post is technically inaccurate -- AOL bought Time Warner, not the other way around.
This would mean AOL/TW is ineligible for the Gigalapse award. AOL lost money acquiring old tech (TV, publishing), where I'm looking for a money lost on an internet investment.
You see, it isn't easy getting a clear winner on this bet.
I considered Time Warner as a candidate for the "Gigalapse" but I could not identify $1billion in real cash money that evaporated. It was all stock swaps, just paper money that evaporated.
These guys are penny ante losers. I want to know the REALLY BIG losers.
I remember seeing some TV show back around 1992, some analysts from Bolt Beranek & Newman said they had a bet in their office about what company would be the first to lose $1 Billion in cash by investing it in the Internet. He called it by some stupid name like "a Gigalapse."
I've remembered that bet for quite a few years, and whenever I hear a big loss, I always see if it comes up to a billion. I've seen a few companies lose hundreds of millions, but nobody's come close to a billion that I know of. But surely it will happen someday, sooner than we think. For all we know, Microsoft or Google might have lost a billion in some bad internet investment and buried it somewhere in their P&L where nobody is looking.
You obviously didn't read US v. Reynolds. The plaintiffs were seeking federal data to support their CIVIL lawsuit. The case established the Government's right to invoke Executive Privilege to stop disclosure in a tort.
The EFF case is entirely different. The government claims that Executive Privilege is a higher power than the 4th Amendment in the Bill of Rights. And the EFF, in the process of losing their lawsuit, will permanently erode the 4th Amendment, and place the Executive Branch beyond the reach of the courts.
The problem is not just that the EFF loses cases. The problem is that for every lost case, a new legal precedent is established that permanently reduces our civil rights. In this case, the EFF has given the government an opportunity to use a new legal theory, that they are immune from lawsuits to prevent illegal violations of the Fourth Amendment (i.e. illegal search and seizure) merely by invoking Executive Privilege with a National Security Letter.
With their ill-conceived, poorly planned and poorly executed lawsuit, the EFF will permanently establish that the President and the Executive Branch is above the law and can violate the Bill of Rights at their whim, and that citizens have no redress. Thanks a lot, EFF!
OK, I can see the need to make sense out of the abysmal state of Linux video device drivers. But this is hardly a multimedia platform. Sure you can do cool stuff with multimedia once you've got your hardware configuration sorted out, but the demos look like mere stunts. Do I really need to stretch a picture across two laptops, one Linux and one Windows? I could just email the Wintel laptop half the picture. Show me something PRACTICAL and USEFUL.
Well thanks for the support, but I don't think I quite got my point across. The intent of H1-B was not to just import talent that is not found in the US, but to import talent that could NEVER be found in the US. Foreign languages were specifically raised as a reason for implementing H1-B visas, you must have native speakers educated in a foreign land to teach the native accents and expressions properly. Of course this could equally apply to any specific technology that is exclusive to another country, say for example, if Latvia had a worldwide monopoly on some specific machining technique to make some device, then you'd need trained Latvian machinist immigrants if you want to make those devices in the US.
But this does NOT apply to IT skills. Anyone in any land can learn the same programming languages and concepts, and besides, most computer systems are designed (if not built) in the US anyway, we have a headstart on the technology. Importing C++ and Oracle programmers from Bangalore makes as much sense as the fabled importation of coals to Newcastle.
The original intent of the H1-B program is still encoded into its operational law. It was originally intended for the sole purpose of importing unique talent that could ONLY be found outside the US, specifically, foreign language instructors. Since the USA has a miniscule talent pool of foreign language speakers and instructors, they MUST be imported from other countries. I know many Japanese language instructors working on H1-B visas, since the new post-9/11 procedures were implemented, they have extreme difficulty renewing their visas every year, which makes it almost impossible for them to commit to jobs in universities, which are renewed annually. This is almost solely due to the visa program being clogged up with visa seekers who want to work at computer companies. Let me make this clear: there are NO jobs in the US IT industry that cannot be filled by Americans. IT talent can be educated and created in the US, unlike native speakers of foreign languages, which MUST be educated and created outside the US. Every H1-B visa granted to a foreign IT worker displaces a job that could be granted to an unemployed American IT worker. The demand by companies like Sun and Microsoft to increase H1-B workers for IT jobs is because they don't want to hire Americans at regular wages when they can get a foreigner to work at slave wages on an H1-B visa.
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I might be wrong about the size, but these were the original "Winchester" models, now that you mention it I don't recall if they were 10, 20 or 30Mb, all I remember is that they were so huge (to us then) and that they took goddam forever to back up to floppies. The drives were big grey boxes with a translucent plastic lid, you could see the heads move across the platter. Then those were placed inside a Corvus white box. My understanding is that these Winchester drives were originally produced for IBM mainframes but IBM didn't like them so the limited production went to OEMs like Corvus. These were the first commercially available hard drives for microcomputers like the Apple II, and ran Omninet for multiuser storage networking. That worked like crap, because the Apple DOS system (and the Apple /// SOS system we were helping develop) didn't have robust file and record locking.
Yeah, the 10Gb was a typo, it's hard to believe that at one time hard drives with 10 or 20 megs was considered huge.
Please do not project your hardware neuroses onto me, I'm not using cheapshit white box PeeCees loaded with Windoze malware, I use pro Macs.
Your backup system isn't a procedure, it is a fetish. You claim your "rework window" is only 24 hours. How many 24-hour time slots have you wasted over the past few years, doing unnecessary backups?
You weren't paying attention. I specifically said that due to my diligent maintenance, I have a 0% hard drive failure rate over the last 20 years. I just retired a server with an Atlas 10K SCSI drive that ran 24/7/365 for over 5 years without a single problem, not even a soft error. That's what happens when you buy quality products, like high-end SCSI drives instead of cheapshit IDE drives.
Yes, I am invulnerable. My OS and apps are backed up on their original distribution discs. My handmade data is archived almost as fast as I create it. Backups are useless. Maintenance and archiving is a better approach. I don't need to hear lectures from someone like you who sells backup systems by slinging FUD and scary statistics.
I never NEVER backup. It is futile, a huge waste of time, and a monumental risk. The only time I have ever lost data was while performing backups. Let me give you an example.
/// machines, and it took a whole case of floppy disks to back up the system, IIRC something like 180 floppies. It took goddam forever, so I usually started early in the morning on Fridays, and the network was unusable during the backup, so everyone (except ME) got to sleep in on Fridays (usually they didn't show up at all).
Way back around 1979, it was my first serious development job, and as the junior programmer in the shop I had the onerous duty of performing the weekly backups of our production drive, containing all the code for our accounting software development. We had a big 10Gb Corvus hard drive (the original Winchester) networked to our Apple IIs and pre-release Apple
So I spent all morning doing the backup, shuffling floppies in and out of the stupid disk drive, then when it was all done, doing a verification pass, which took just as long as the backup. All was well, I turned the hard drive back to network usage, verified it was operational, and went for a long lunch and a haircut. Nobody was around when I left, so I locked the door and left.
I came back to the office at about 2PM, everyone was there and they all started yelling at me immediately. The moment I left the office for lunch, the Corvus hard drive died. It was totally not my fault, it was a random hardware failure, at least it was a good thing it happened AFTER the backup was finished. The only problem was, it was the only unit we had, it would take 2 weeks to get a replacement drive shipped and installed (hard drives were very hard to obtain back then). Of course everyone jumped to the conclusion that I killed the drive, I protested that it was working correctly when I left, and I tried to reassure them that the backup was verified so no work was lost. Everyone assumed that since I had taken 2 hours for lunch (I had scheduled the haircut a week earlier with my boss, who wasn't in the office that Friday) that I had killed the hard drive, then fled in a panic. No matter what I said, nobody believed me. I got fired that day. Since that day, I have never performed backups, and I have never lost ANY data. I have a totally different strategy.
System and app backups are totally useless. Sys configs and apps can be replaced easily by a fresh install, and much quicker than doing a restore, and you don't have to waste time doing repetitive, useless, time-wasting backups every week/month/etc.
The only data worth saving is irreplaceable data. This should not be backed up, but instead, archived. For the most precious data, for example, photo and graphic design jobs I created from scratch for customers, those are archived immediately upon delivery (I usually work on short deliverable cycles, like a week or two at most). Routine archiving of each job to CDs or DVDS makes it easy to create an extra copy as a deliverable, and one for my archives. Other major file stores, for example, my mp3 collection, is archived each time I acquire a full DVD worth of new data. It is better to archive as you go, than to waste time in full system backups.
Rather than wasting time with backups, it is preferable to make sure your disks don't NEED restoration, by scrupulously maintaining them in optimal condition. Maintenance is better than backups. I buy only high quality hard drives, I monitor their performance and integrity continuously, and as a result, I've never had a single hard drive failure in any system I've owned, and that goes back almost 20 years. I have never lost any data.
Try Toon Boom Studio. Cheap, free trial available.
I bet their dorm room still smells like dirty laundry.
You are the only person I know of (besides me) who ever HEARD of Mark Sense cards, let alone USED them. I still have vivid memories of scratching away on these cards with a #2 pencil. But we still used coding forms before committing to cards.
When I was your age, we didn't have no fancy IDEs. We used Coding Forms. And we LIKED it.
One of these days, some asshole is going to take down the entire net, just to prove that it can be done.
I keep thinking about the old saying, "what isn't prohibited, is required." Because the net doesn't prohibit these massive DDoS attacks, someone WILL do them, over and over, either because they are into extortion, or just because they're evil fucks and like creating mayhem. I almost believe that someone ought to just do it and break the net permanently so everyone will have to come to grips with this. So maybe the solution will mean that nobody with an insecure OS will be allowed back on the net. Maybe we need a catastrophic failure to force a total revamp of network protocols, and an excuse to exile all the lusers like people still using Win98. I dunno, it would probably be faster, cheaper, and ultimately more satisfying if we could just assassinate spamming assholes like PharmaMaster/Eran Reshef.
This is a GREAT idea! The chemical and biological industry should welcome coders that dropped out of college after a single semester. Our medical and pharmaceutical industries are always ready to risk the public's lives on the unskilled, untrained code geeks who learned how to sling together a few Visual Basic routines.
Ferchrissake man, do you really think that coding gives you insights into other areas of scientific knowledge? Do you actually think coding could make you a better chemist or biologist, even if you have no training in chemistry or biology? This is the one thing about computer geeks that just drives me crazy, some of them think that since they can code well, they can do ANYTHING well. It's arrogance of the highest degree.
Go back to school if you want to work in a specialized field. I went back to school at age 38 and got 2 degrees, it's not as hard as you think. Get the training you need. Get your degree. Being a self-taught code geek without a degree means you're on the same level as high-school graduates. Finishing a college degree means you can finish something serious, something that requires persistent effort despite obstacles. Dropping out of college means you did NOT have the persistence to finish something important, and that you are a loser who can't be trusted with serious projects. Don't think I'm being harsh here, this is really how employers think, I know, I've been there.
Actually, if you've watched any American cartoons, you've seen animation from India. Most of the gruntwork in the US cartoon industry is outsourced to India and Korea.
Yeah, that Crumpler is more like what I'm looking for. But man it's HUGE. I wonder if there isn't a bag that is a bit smaller, just enough for a 15" PowerBook and a DSLR, I don't want to carry much more than that. I suppose almost any small messenger bag would work, if I separate the lens from the camera for transport, but hell, then your camera is never ready to shoot when you need it.
You know, I was thinking about the general practice of PC magazines trolling Mac users for hits. It occurs to me that the PC magazines' advertisers are getting the shaft. Mac users aren't the target market for PC-specific ads, but the PC advertisers pay for those page views by Mac users anyway. I suspect that on an extreme troll, the proportion of Mac users might be as high as 90%, with tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of page views. And the PC advertisers are paying for all those hits, and it's all for nothing, Mac users aren't interested in buying PC products.
It is time for the PC advertisers to send a clear message to the Dvoraks, Louderbecks, and other trolls, to stop wasting their advertising dollars by trolling Mac users.
Remember that screed was written by Jim Louderbeck, one of the more notorious anti-Mac PeeCee trolls. I still remember him doing the commentary on a Stevenote carried on ZDTV a few years back, he nitpicked on everything, for no good reasons. Note that his employer, Ziff-Davis, has a major investment from Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen). Loudermouth knows he has to cater to his owner's financial interests. Nice little doggie, sit up and beg, little Loudermouth!
I have a different problem, I need a bag for traveling, something big enough to carry the gear that's too precious to check in during an airline flight, specifically my laptop and a big digital SLR camera. There are plenty of good laptop bags, but none of them seem to be large enough to carry an SLR too. And I hate backpacks.
This would mean AOL/TW is ineligible for the Gigalapse award. AOL lost money acquiring old tech (TV, publishing), where I'm looking for a money lost on an internet investment.
You see, it isn't easy getting a clear winner on this bet.
Show me a single TW stockholder who lost 1Billion in cash on the AOL acquisition and I'll grant them the Gigalapse. I couldn't find any.
I considered Time Warner as a candidate for the "Gigalapse" but I could not identify $1billion in real cash money that evaporated. It was all stock swaps, just paper money that evaporated.
These guys are penny ante losers. I want to know the REALLY BIG losers.
I remember seeing some TV show back around 1992, some analysts from Bolt Beranek & Newman said they had a bet in their office about what company would be the first to lose $1 Billion in cash by investing it in the Internet. He called it by some stupid name like "a Gigalapse."
I've remembered that bet for quite a few years, and whenever I hear a big loss, I always see if it comes up to a billion. I've seen a few companies lose hundreds of millions, but nobody's come close to a billion that I know of. But surely it will happen someday, sooner than we think. For all we know, Microsoft or Google might have lost a billion in some bad internet investment and buried it somewhere in their P&L where nobody is looking.
You obviously didn't read US v. Reynolds. The plaintiffs were seeking federal data to support their CIVIL lawsuit. The case established the Government's right to invoke Executive Privilege to stop disclosure in a tort.
The EFF case is entirely different. The government claims that Executive Privilege is a higher power than the 4th Amendment in the Bill of Rights. And the EFF, in the process of losing their lawsuit, will permanently erode the 4th Amendment, and place the Executive Branch beyond the reach of the courts.
The problem is not just that the EFF loses cases. The problem is that for every lost case, a new legal precedent is established that permanently reduces our civil rights. In this case, the EFF has given the government an opportunity to use a new legal theory, that they are immune from lawsuits to prevent illegal violations of the Fourth Amendment (i.e. illegal search and seizure) merely by invoking Executive Privilege with a National Security Letter.
With their ill-conceived, poorly planned and poorly executed lawsuit, the EFF will permanently establish that the President and the Executive Branch is above the law and can violate the Bill of Rights at their whim, and that citizens have no redress. Thanks a lot, EFF!
OK, I can see the need to make sense out of the abysmal state of Linux video device drivers. But this is hardly a multimedia platform. Sure you can do cool stuff with multimedia once you've got your hardware configuration sorted out, but the demos look like mere stunts. Do I really need to stretch a picture across two laptops, one Linux and one Windows? I could just email the Wintel laptop half the picture. Show me something PRACTICAL and USEFUL.
Well thanks for the support, but I don't think I quite got my point across. The intent of H1-B was not to just import talent that is not found in the US, but to import talent that could NEVER be found in the US. Foreign languages were specifically raised as a reason for implementing H1-B visas, you must have native speakers educated in a foreign land to teach the native accents and expressions properly. Of course this could equally apply to any specific technology that is exclusive to another country, say for example, if Latvia had a worldwide monopoly on some specific machining technique to make some device, then you'd need trained Latvian machinist immigrants if you want to make those devices in the US.
But this does NOT apply to IT skills. Anyone in any land can learn the same programming languages and concepts, and besides, most computer systems are designed (if not built) in the US anyway, we have a headstart on the technology. Importing C++ and Oracle programmers from Bangalore makes as much sense as the fabled importation of coals to Newcastle.
Huh? I read the whole article and I didn't see him express any preference about the appearance of ANY speaker set.
The original intent of the H1-B program is still encoded into its operational law. It was originally intended for the sole purpose of importing unique talent that could ONLY be found outside the US, specifically, foreign language instructors. Since the USA has a miniscule talent pool of foreign language speakers and instructors, they MUST be imported from other countries.
I know many Japanese language instructors working on H1-B visas, since the new post-9/11 procedures were implemented, they have extreme difficulty renewing their visas every year, which makes it almost impossible for them to commit to jobs in universities, which are renewed annually. This is almost solely due to the visa program being clogged up with visa seekers who want to work at computer companies. Let me make this clear: there are NO jobs in the US IT industry that cannot be filled by Americans. IT talent can be educated and created in the US, unlike native speakers of foreign languages, which MUST be educated and created outside the US. Every H1-B visa granted to a foreign IT worker displaces a job that could be granted to an unemployed American IT worker. The demand by companies like Sun and Microsoft to increase H1-B workers for IT jobs is because they don't want to hire Americans at regular wages when they can get a foreigner to work at slave wages on an H1-B visa.