While negotiations are a good idea in theory, the reality is that most H1B's are "captured" by their employer. It is far from uncommon for an H1B's salary to be negotiated down after the H1B is in place and proven to be a satisfactory employee. The crux with H1Bs is that they're willing to take a lower rate than their American counterparts, because they're either used to a lower quality of life, or because they're willing to put up with it while their Green Card is in process.
I've tried twice to get my Green Card in the US, working through TN/TC visas for the first year, with a subsequent upgrade to an H1B. As a Canadian, I am not willing to work for an insulting salary, so both times the GC has been abandoned before completion.
I won't be trying again. If I opt to take any more US-based contracts, they'll be under 1-year TN/TC visas. I am no one's slave, and permanent residency is not worth allowing myself to be treated as one.
Unfortunately for the H1B and GC processes, there are hundreds of thousands of workers out there who are quite willing to put up with insulting pay rates to get their residency. If companies and consulting agencies were forced to pay equivalent salaries to H1Bs that their American counterparts receive, you'd soon find they weren't anywhere near as interested in getting H1Bs on staff.
Robotic System Errors
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Robot Pharmacists
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· Score: 3, Informative
I spent over two years working at NorTel's Bramalea site, which had robotic slide-lines for manufacturing surface-mount component boards.
The equipment used tape hoppers of parts, which had individual components mounted on tape similar to a belt-fed machine gun. Once programmed, the robots themselves were flawless, doing exactly what they had been instructed.
The errors that typically cropped up after an assembly program was put in production were caused by good old fashioned human error: loading the wrong parts tape in a hopper (e.g. resistors with the wrong ohm value.)
I cannot see a robotic prescription-filler avoiding this problem. If someone fills the Atenolol (high blood pressure medication) hopper with Viagra, the robot is going to happily count out the correct number of the wrong pills, label them as Atenolol, and leave it up to humans to notice the error.
Cashiers/assistants (sometimes part-time high school or university students) usually hand the packages to customers, not the pharmacist. Even if the bottles aren't pre-bagged, the assistants are very unlikely to notice the pills are the wrong color, size, or shape -- they don't know what the pills are supposed to look like.
While I can see the benefit of a manually fed pill-counter device, all I can forsee from full automation are inevitable mis-filled prescriptions resulting in injury or death of the patients. This is one of the best examples of over-automation I've seen to date.
Some jobs just shouldn't be fully automated, even if we have the technology to do so.
Blades are clusters-in-a-box, not integrated SMP systems. Like clusters, they hide the fact that you're dealing with multiple boxen, and don't have the shared system image and devices of a large system chassis.
Assuming those are 2-CPU blades, you'd need 16 of them to equate a 32-core system chassis, and would still need to add RAID arrays to the rack (unless a virtual SAN will do for your application -- it won't for large database servers.)
Bottom line is you need to know what the system is going to be used for, and compare the features that support those needs. Even identically-cored systems based on SMP vs. cluster vs. blade are going to have radically different performance characteristics and benefits for different uses.
Blades are great for things like web server hosting, where you want a lot of isolated processes. Clusters are good when you need shared storage, but don't need shared memory. SMP chassis can handle all of the above, plus deal with the large IO caches and shared memory that database and application services require, but at a higher dollar/benchmark cost than the first two. (Not surprising -- SMP backplanes require far more complex engineering than clusters or blades of off-the-shelf SMP systems relying on GNet or other non-backplane interconnects.)
"...output precision... of lesser value than the actual precision image operations are performed at."
Not true if you're doing real imaging work. How about that fancy LCD monitor you've been eyeballing (or just picked up)? Noticed any of the color problems, especially with dark shades? No?
Then you aren't doing graphics work that needs the display accuracy of an SGI or equivalent.
Two way systems are not data center solutions that IBM, Sun, and SGI are competing for with this kind of hardware.
Even if they were, you're ignoring the fact that you cannot physically pack as many CPUs with Intel or AMD as with MIPS, Power4, or Sparc into a chassis. Part of the reason they are clocked slower is because you need to balance heat management with performance density when you're dealing with the big servers.
These boxes are about aggregate compute and storage power per dollar, not about whether the individual CPU cores smoke. The only place you see these cores as singletons is workstations (Single-cored "servers" are usually just the same or similar motherboards as a workstation, but in a case that has a beefier power supply and room for a useful number of hot-swap cages.)
You try and pack 32 Intel cores at 3GHz into a chassis that will handle the same number of MIPS cores, and the only thing you're going to get is voltage underflow from an overloaded power supply. Beef up the power supply, and within minutes you're going to be getting that wonderful whiff of frying, overheated electronics.
Raw performance of a core is only one factor in engineering a complete server. Anyone who claims otherwise has clearly not been involved with the hardware end of this industry.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
In other words the army, the police, and the "weekend warriors" in the reserves. The reserves are essentially what a militia was back then -- people who wanted to do their part, but couldn't dedicate themselves to it as a career.
It is written in plain text, using the terms and language of the times, and was very clear about "regulated militia", not a free-for-all by the general public.
From Webster's Dictionary:
\Mi*li"tia\, n. [L., military service, soldiery, fr. miles, militis, soldier: cf. F. milice.] 1. In the widest sense, the whole military force of a nation, including both those engaged in military service as a business, and those competent and available for such service; specifically, the body of citizens enrolled for military instruction and discipline, but not subject to be called into actual service except in emergencies.
It's not a question of my interpretation, but of whether you're willing to accept the parts of the constitution that disagree with your own wishes. You always have to read historical documents with an eye to the common-use terminology of the period, not the modern meanings of the words.
Headed back to the Great White North until things settle down. Economy on both sides sucks right now, but the fam is freezing their butts of right now, so I figure I might as well join them until I find the next contract.
Realistically both the US and Canada have plenty of problems, but this whole police-state thing I see happening really has me wanting to be just about anywhere but here until things settle down.
I know enough about nuclear fission to hack together a nuclear device if I had the materials and patience, but that doesn't mean I am (or should) be trusted to do so.
What has the "composition" of an assault rifle got to do with whether someone can be trusted with them? I don't give a rats ass what kind of stock it has, what the barrel length is, or what calibre it is -- the distinguishing feature of an assault rifle is large clip capacity, maneuverability, and rapid fire capabilities (Yes, I know it takes all of 20 minutes for someone who knows what they are doing to make them fully automatic, often without even replacing parts.)
The only purpose of such weapons is killing people, which is a responsibility that should be reserved for the police and military (not that they're always trustworthy, either.) Any "hunter" who needs more than two shots to take down a deer should not be in the field with a high powered rifle of any kind (they're missing the target more often than not -- always a bad thing with firearms.)
The fact that a fringe lunatic has learned how to strip and reassemble their weapon in 30 seconds blindfolded does not make them trustworthy. It just means they are educated fringe lunatics with guns.
Because you disagree about the terrorism comment, and I didn't spend a couple days preparing a research paper to prove my point with quotes and citations, all other points are are to be taken with a grain of salt?
9/11 is a sensitive topic for Americans, and I understand that. But it does not negate the fact that there are dozens (if not hundreds) of terrorist attacks world wide each month througout the mideast, asia, and europe. You just don't hear about it because CNN didn't have cameras there, and even if they did it would have been a footnote filler item unless an American died.
The US, Mexico, and Canada produce at least 90% of the marijuana consumed in North America. Or did you translate "North America" as "US", forgetting that Mexico and Canada are on this same continent?
If the US system produces such "major upheavals" at election time, how can you explain humanoids like Hollings? Was there truly no one better deserving of the people's vote than these sellouts?
Most Canadians have no illusion that things will change after an election. A new party will come in, a few new faces will get key posts, the "advisors" and civil servants will continue making most of the decisions on behalf of the talking heads who get the media coverage, and the government will continue stealing income through taxes until Canada becomes a third-world nation. (Hell, it's damned close already. Over 60% of my university associates are programmers, teachers, union members, etc. They've also had to declare bankruptcy because they can't afford to live on the half of their salary the government "lets" them keep.)
I've really lost hope that anything short of another revolution has any hope of getting their attention. EMails? They don't read them. Snail mail? Staff read and discard them, except for a choice few that can provide a sound bite. TV? Can't afford it, if you can even find a network that is willing to present dissenting views. Print? Same issue as TV, except for the cost.
Want real change? Hire an assasin. Seriously. Some fringe group of lunatics stating their case and then taking out a few key political figures is probably the only thing that will wake those in power to the fact that the people are the nation, and that pissing them off decade after decade is a really bad thing to do.
(No, I don't advocate violence. I'm just at a loss as to what can be done to save our nations from our politicians/corporations and get them back to serving the people.)
For a clear and informed argument. Most of the pro-gun people I've run into tend to be fringe lunatics that I wouldn't trust with a butter knife, much less an assault rifle.
I still think it's over before your home armoury can do any good. *g*
Backbone providers typically lease their fibre from larger providers, including certain telcos. Other large companies actually own their own fibre (I believe it's IBM that has such fibre running across northern Canada to provide a physically seperate link from their main fibre in the US.)
Most telcos lease their fibre, too. Only a few big providers like AT&T, MCI, and a few others actually own their fibre. (There are a couple companies that run huge cross-US fibre, but I can't remember the name off hand. One might be Inktomi, but that doesn't sound right for some reason.)
My rant was never intended to change the way the government acts, but to respond to the poster who claimed the Slashdot crowd is "overreacting." I really don't believe anything short of revolution will fix the governments in the US or Canada anymore, because they just don't give a damn what thinking citizens want. They just want their "share" of the tax trough, or else get trampled by the trough-feeders if they do try to support the rights and wishes of the people.
I don't advocate violence, but it is really going to take a major upheaval to wake the deadbeats in Washington and Ottawa up.
The military and police have those weapons, as approved by the constitution. You will never convince me that a 30-round assault rifle (automatic or not) has any business anywhere except in the military, the police, or a licensed, registered collector. By the time anyone gets close enough to US soil for you to use your "personal protection" weapons, the war is already lost.
If the trillions of dollars worth of military personnel, nukes, missiles, air craft, naval armadas, subs, and satellites aren't enough to keep out "the enemy", what makes you think some guy with an assault rifle is going to make a damned bit of difference?
Don't get me wrong -- I like guns. Target shooting with a Sig is an absolute gas, venison brought down by a skilled hunter is damned tasty, and I've used them many times for butchering pigs or cattle. I just think they have their uses and their place, and assault rifles in the home isn't one of them.
The backbone providers are not the internet. They provide dedicated, optionally secure, and optionally fault-tolerant data links.
The internet may or may not use fibre that is strung in parallel with those links (i.e. part of the same bundle), but it does not run on the same physical fibre. I've worked on a provisioning system that is used to manage those resources, and the "internet" is miniscule compared to the number of links that are managed for private business and government.
Want to take out those links? Go to isolated spots along certain railway tracks, highways, and other infrastructure where the physical fiber is run. Cut the fibre or plant a bomb. Goodbye several petabytes of capacity until someone can find the breach and fix it. How did any of the government proposals even try to prevent the damage from happening?
"Security" has never been anything but a smokescreen to justify increased power in the hands of a few, and anyone who thinks they are "secure" just happens to be naive enough to believe them.
The worst "terrorism" we have to fear in North America is from our own governments. Not to offend anyone who lost friends or family in the WTC on 9/11, but more people than that are killed every year by terrorists in many countries, without having led to knee-jerk police state behavior.
Don't believe me?
Look at the current crop of anti-drug ads in the US. Blatant lies and FUD -- most marijuana is grown in North America by North Americans who keep their assets in North America and spend most of the profits in (you guessed it!) North America. Heroin and Opium might be another story, but that isn't what the government is trying to convince everyone, because it wouldn't make people as nervous (everyone knows at least one pot smoker, but how many of you know heroin users?)
Do some checking and find out how many innocent people have been killed by government agents (police SWAT teams) raiding the wrong house. Look into the number of people currently being held because they immigrated from the wrong nation, or because their second cousin has a friend who knows a guy who claimed to be with Al Queda. Ask someone of Japanese descent how much more "secure" they felt for being imprisoned until the war was over.
So another GNU team has almost managed to replicate the work done by the Blackdown team 4-5 years ago.
Meanwhile the GNU team has almost managed to release a kernel.
On the sidelines, Wine has almost enabled cross-platform execution, provided you don't want to do something so uncommon as opening a file picker!!! (I mean, come on! I can play video games, but I can't pick an input file to open with a utility program?)
Lately I see a lot of "almost" me-too projects, but I'd be a lot more impressed if they didn't start celebrating until the damned things worked.
Eclipse is free and pretty nice (need to try it again -- it was rough when I first looked almost a year ago.) Sun's SunONE Studio 4 is ok, too.
My favourite remains JBuilder, but I just can't afford to upgrade anymore (paid full price for 3.0, paid for the 3.5 upgrade, the 4.0 upgrade, and realized I'd spent over $2000 with no end in site.)
Despite all the fancy IDEs out there, I still do the bulk of my editing with vi(m), emacs, and text tools, then debug and fix in an IDE. I've yet to find a Java (or C++) IDE whose editor is more than barely usable. But that is another rant...
You are correct in that most so-called programmers with less than 5 years experience think they "deserve" a six-figure salary because they used to be with some dot-bomb. You are also correct that most of them aren't productive enough to justify those rates.
The problem is that people with the experience to justify those salaries have a hard time getting noticed and hired when 490 of the 500 resumes submitted are barely or un- qualified.
The problem is also that businesses have no problem nickel and diming their development salaries post-dot-bomb. Hell, I just saw a posting for Oregon that was offering a whopping $12/hour for front-line Unix support. How many people with any kind of professional training (doctor, engineer, lawyer) would even dream of taking a job at such rates? Yet it's "greedy" for me to expect to make a living with a University degree and fifteen years experience to back me up?
Banks run on private networks like SWIFT, not on the internet. Your personal account might have some kind of web access, but not the intra-bank network.
The same goes for any large enterprise that gives a damn about their security and reliability. The internet is unreliable, insecure, and can never be anything but by the very nature of it's design. (Note: fault resilience such as rerouting around failed nodes is not the same thing as fault tolerant -- the segments behind the failed node are still unreachable.)
When you say they "aren't trying to control cyberspace", I just have these visions of the founding fathers of the US inscribing "the right to bear arms" with the intent of allowing the country to defend itself, and the modern twisting of those words to justify possession and use of assault weapons and handguns far beyond the defense of a nation.
I look at the "temporary" income taxes that were to pay for war costs, which are still in place and increasing.
I look at the insanity of a "War on Drugs" that destroys the careers of hundreds of thousands of people for smoking a joint, while the death toll on the highways and roads due to "legal" drunk drivers continues.
I look at Hollings & co. selling out to the entertainment industry, even though it damages an IT industry worth many times that amount to the nation.
Trust them? Sure, I trust them. I trust them to steal my income, invade my privacy, interfere with my life, and ignore our objections to what is rapidly becoming a police state.
Thank God I'm getting out of this screwed up country in a few days. Maybe in a few years after the American people have revolted against the insanity it will be safe to come back with the expectation of being allowed to live without excess interference from a corporate-run government.
Seeing as SciFi has decided to become the "schlock horror flick of the week" channel, someone has to pick up the slack. It's good to see TechTV doing something other than running the same half hour show (e.g. Extended Play) 3-4 times per day.
Besides, how many techs are into anime? How many "regular" people are into anime? So TechTV is catering to a significant segment of their audience, while other stations would be catering to the fringes to try the same thing.
The receptionist is one of the overpaid support staff I mentioned. For a company that size, the receptionist usually is also doing paperwork for payroll and such.
What would you need a seperate sysadmin for? The team should make sysadmins look like trained monkeys in comparison, and once things like the RCS, CVS, and database servers are set up with backup procedures, there isn't a lot for sysadmins to do in such an operation. Despite that, I'll give you the sysadmin, which means there are another 8 unused payroll slots to go.
Marketing? What marketing? When have you ever seen any real marketing by Mandrake? Ditto "PR" deadweights. But again, lets be generous and give you one of each. You've got six slots to go.
Development managers have already been covered. Salesreps are not salaried positions anywhere that I've worked -- they live entirely on commissions that come by making sales. Given their lack of profitability, I figure their last sales rep starved to death about six months ago.
Regardless of how you slice it, Mandrakes income-expense ratios are way beyond anything that can be salvaged. If the mere cost of running a business in France is that high, they need to relocate or give up. Taxes and other expenses are just part of the equation for corporate profitability, and all the whining in the world about how high they are in France won't change the fact that Mandrake is not a profitable organization, and is unlikely to survive more than a year even with contributions.
It's not sales of CDs, but of services. If you check Red Hat's Advanced Server subscription options, you'll see that the entry point for RHAS is around $800 with updates for one year, but no SLA. The $1500 and $2500 versions include SLAs for the year.
At a minimum, you're paying $600 extra for RHAS vs. the "regular" distro. If you're paying for a minimal SLA (i.e. corporate datacenter buyer), you're paying $1300 more per server as the SLA only covers one system.
In other words, over 85% of the price of a corporate purchase of RHAS with minimal SLA is for the support contract, not for the distro itself.
Mandrake's closest profit generator would be their multi-network firewall/VPN at around $2000.
Looking at the typical corporate or ISP data center, how many firewall boxen are running? How many database, application, and web servers are running? Lets assume we're dealing with a moderate company that decides to buy from both vendors:
1 firewall - $2000 to Mandrake
2 database servers - $3000/year to RedHat
2 app servers - $3000/year to RedHat
1 web server - $1500/year to RedHat
Isn't it obvious that Mandrake has targetted a niche market that cannot hope to generate the kind of revenue stream that RedHat's approach does?
The frustrating thing is I've preferred Mandrake to RedHat since I got burnt by RH 7.1 and that 2.96 compiler fiasco. I'd love to see Mandrake do well, but I just can't see any way they can even hope to survive.
Rereading through some of the posts, it struck me that the comment about my grandfather's pancreatic cancer could imply that he was being selfish by clinging to life.
While he lived far longer than the doctors expected, it wasn't due to a lot of treatment. They tried chemo briefly, but did not continue when it had no useful effect. His last six months were spent in bed, sleeping 12-16 hours a day as the morphine knocked him out. He lived as long as he did because he wanted to, not because of some miraculous expensive life-stretching procedures.
I was more thinking about true, destitute, no-food, no-potable-water, no-healthcare...
Sounds like you are describing a part of the world unfit to support humans. When such areas are overpopulated and deal with famines as a result, I have a real hard time feeling much pity.
When there is no way to survive where you are, you move. Expecting others to pay to make the area livable is ridiculous.
I've purchased three Mandrake box sets in the past few years, as well as a couple from SuSE and RedHat. They all do the same job, and are roughly comparable for features and support. If only 10,000 copies of the pack are sold per year at $75/ea at a $50/pack profit (far less than it should be), that should be bringing in 500,000 per year. They are asking for 4,000,000 in donations above that.
Lets assume I've wildly underestimated their sales by 500%, and they're actually making 2,500,000 in box-set profits. That is still only 38% of their current cash-burn rate of $6,500,000 per year. (The alternative is that they are only covering less than 20% of costs from sales income, which even the most asinine of managers would realize is a failed business.)
At $100K/developer plus another $100K/developer to cover overhead, corporate income tax contributions, etc., $6.5M would cover 32 well-paid staff.
I "rolled my own" distro last year over 3-4 months of 2-3 hours/night (i.e. 15-20 hours/week), ending up with every feature and package that I use under Linux. If I can come up with an installation by myself in that short a time, there is absolutely no way I can see Mandrake requiring assets beyond:
4 developers assigned to integrate open source packages
4 to develop internal enhancements and installation utilities
4 to perform testing
1 overpaid graphic designer to redo the packaging from scratch each time
2 overpaid documentation techs
3 team leads for integration, internal, and test groups
1 manager over the whole mess
2 overpaid support staff to manage paperwork, payroll, etc.
2 extremely overpaid shippers/packagers to send out the packs
That is still only 23 staff members, roughly 15% of whom are grossly overpaid ($100K for a shipper is more than even the most obscenely bloated union salary would reach for the skills required.)
What are the other 9 staffers doing? Or are their staff that hideously over-compensated and unskilled that they need nearly a 50% incompetancy overhead?
I have tried. Really I have. But I am so damned impressive, intelligent, and knowledgeable that I just can't.
*LOL* This discussion would have been ever so much more entertaining in person. You are tenacious, persistent, and firm in your beliefs. Fine fuel for a fun after-meal discussion group. (Surely you didn't think I had anything against you personally just because I disagree with your opinion on the current subject!)
Slashdot Mirror
While negotiations are a good idea in theory, the reality is that most H1B's are "captured" by their employer. It is far from uncommon for an H1B's salary to be negotiated down after the H1B is in place and proven to be a satisfactory employee. The crux with H1Bs is that they're willing to take a lower rate than their American counterparts, because they're either used to a lower quality of life, or because they're willing to put up with it while their Green Card is in process.
I've tried twice to get my Green Card in the US, working through TN/TC visas for the first year, with a subsequent upgrade to an H1B. As a Canadian, I am not willing to work for an insulting salary, so both times the GC has been abandoned before completion.
I won't be trying again. If I opt to take any more US-based contracts, they'll be under 1-year TN/TC visas. I am no one's slave, and permanent residency is not worth allowing myself to be treated as one.
Unfortunately for the H1B and GC processes, there are hundreds of thousands of workers out there who are quite willing to put up with insulting pay rates to get their residency. If companies and consulting agencies were forced to pay equivalent salaries to H1Bs that their American counterparts receive, you'd soon find they weren't anywhere near as interested in getting H1Bs on staff.
I spent over two years working at NorTel's Bramalea site, which had robotic slide-lines for manufacturing surface-mount component boards. The equipment used tape hoppers of parts, which had individual components mounted on tape similar to a belt-fed machine gun. Once programmed, the robots themselves were flawless, doing exactly what they had been instructed.
The errors that typically cropped up after an assembly program was put in production were caused by good old fashioned human error: loading the wrong parts tape in a hopper (e.g. resistors with the wrong ohm value.)
I cannot see a robotic prescription-filler avoiding this problem. If someone fills the Atenolol (high blood pressure medication) hopper with Viagra, the robot is going to happily count out the correct number of the wrong pills, label them as Atenolol, and leave it up to humans to notice the error.
Cashiers/assistants (sometimes part-time high school or university students) usually hand the packages to customers, not the pharmacist. Even if the bottles aren't pre-bagged, the assistants are very unlikely to notice the pills are the wrong color, size, or shape -- they don't know what the pills are supposed to look like.
While I can see the benefit of a manually fed pill-counter device, all I can forsee from full automation are inevitable mis-filled prescriptions resulting in injury or death of the patients. This is one of the best examples of over-automation I've seen to date.
Some jobs just shouldn't be fully automated, even if we have the technology to do so.
Blades are clusters-in-a-box, not integrated SMP systems. Like clusters, they hide the fact that you're dealing with multiple boxen, and don't have the shared system image and devices of a large system chassis.
Assuming those are 2-CPU blades, you'd need 16 of them to equate a 32-core system chassis, and would still need to add RAID arrays to the rack (unless a virtual SAN will do for your application -- it won't for large database servers.)
Bottom line is you need to know what the system is going to be used for, and compare the features that support those needs. Even identically-cored systems based on SMP vs. cluster vs. blade are going to have radically different performance characteristics and benefits for different uses.
Blades are great for things like web server hosting, where you want a lot of isolated processes. Clusters are good when you need shared storage, but don't need shared memory. SMP chassis can handle all of the above, plus deal with the large IO caches and shared memory that database and application services require, but at a higher dollar/benchmark cost than the first two. (Not surprising -- SMP backplanes require far more complex engineering than clusters or blades of off-the-shelf SMP systems relying on GNet or other non-backplane interconnects.)
"...output precision... of lesser value than the actual precision image operations are performed at."
Not true if you're doing real imaging work. How about that fancy LCD monitor you've been eyeballing (or just picked up)? Noticed any of the color problems, especially with dark shades? No?
Then you aren't doing graphics work that needs the display accuracy of an SGI or equivalent.
Two way systems are not data center solutions that IBM, Sun, and SGI are competing for with this kind of hardware.
Even if they were, you're ignoring the fact that you cannot physically pack as many CPUs with Intel or AMD as with MIPS, Power4, or Sparc into a chassis. Part of the reason they are clocked slower is because you need to balance heat management with performance density when you're dealing with the big servers.
These boxes are about aggregate compute and storage power per dollar, not about whether the individual CPU cores smoke. The only place you see these cores as singletons is workstations (Single-cored "servers" are usually just the same or similar motherboards as a workstation, but in a case that has a beefier power supply and room for a useful number of hot-swap cages.)
You try and pack 32 Intel cores at 3GHz into a chassis that will handle the same number of MIPS cores, and the only thing you're going to get is voltage underflow from an overloaded power supply. Beef up the power supply, and within minutes you're going to be getting that wonderful whiff of frying, overheated electronics.
Raw performance of a core is only one factor in engineering a complete server. Anyone who claims otherwise has clearly not been involved with the hardware end of this industry.
In other words the army, the police, and the "weekend warriors" in the reserves. The reserves are essentially what a militia was back then -- people who wanted to do their part, but couldn't dedicate themselves to it as a career.
It is written in plain text, using the terms and language of the times, and was very clear about "regulated militia", not a free-for-all by the general public.
From Webster's Dictionary:
It's not a question of my interpretation, but of whether you're willing to accept the parts of the constitution that disagree with your own wishes. You always have to read historical documents with an eye to the common-use terminology of the period, not the modern meanings of the words.
Headed back to the Great White North until things settle down. Economy on both sides sucks right now, but the fam is freezing their butts of right now, so I figure I might as well join them until I find the next contract.
Realistically both the US and Canada have plenty of problems, but this whole police-state thing I see happening really has me wanting to be just about anywhere but here until things settle down.
I know enough about nuclear fission to hack together a nuclear device if I had the materials and patience, but that doesn't mean I am (or should) be trusted to do so.
What has the "composition" of an assault rifle got to do with whether someone can be trusted with them? I don't give a rats ass what kind of stock it has, what the barrel length is, or what calibre it is -- the distinguishing feature of an assault rifle is large clip capacity, maneuverability, and rapid fire capabilities (Yes, I know it takes all of 20 minutes for someone who knows what they are doing to make them fully automatic, often without even replacing parts.)
The only purpose of such weapons is killing people, which is a responsibility that should be reserved for the police and military (not that they're always trustworthy, either.) Any "hunter" who needs more than two shots to take down a deer should not be in the field with a high powered rifle of any kind (they're missing the target more often than not -- always a bad thing with firearms.)
The fact that a fringe lunatic has learned how to strip and reassemble their weapon in 30 seconds blindfolded does not make them trustworthy. It just means they are educated fringe lunatics with guns.
Because you disagree about the terrorism comment, and I didn't spend a couple days preparing a research paper to prove my point with quotes and citations, all other points are are to be taken with a grain of salt?
9/11 is a sensitive topic for Americans, and I understand that. But it does not negate the fact that there are dozens (if not hundreds) of terrorist attacks world wide each month througout the mideast, asia, and europe. You just don't hear about it because CNN didn't have cameras there, and even if they did it would have been a footnote filler item unless an American died.
The US, Mexico, and Canada produce at least 90% of the marijuana consumed in North America. Or did you translate "North America" as "US", forgetting that Mexico and Canada are on this same continent?
If the US system produces such "major upheavals" at election time, how can you explain humanoids like Hollings? Was there truly no one better deserving of the people's vote than these sellouts?
Most Canadians have no illusion that things will change after an election. A new party will come in, a few new faces will get key posts, the "advisors" and civil servants will continue making most of the decisions on behalf of the talking heads who get the media coverage, and the government will continue stealing income through taxes until Canada becomes a third-world nation. (Hell, it's damned close already. Over 60% of my university associates are programmers, teachers, union members, etc. They've also had to declare bankruptcy because they can't afford to live on the half of their salary the government "lets" them keep.)
I've really lost hope that anything short of another revolution has any hope of getting their attention. EMails? They don't read them. Snail mail? Staff read and discard them, except for a choice few that can provide a sound bite. TV? Can't afford it, if you can even find a network that is willing to present dissenting views. Print? Same issue as TV, except for the cost.
Want real change? Hire an assasin. Seriously. Some fringe group of lunatics stating their case and then taking out a few key political figures is probably the only thing that will wake those in power to the fact that the people are the nation, and that pissing them off decade after decade is a really bad thing to do.
(No, I don't advocate violence. I'm just at a loss as to what can be done to save our nations from our politicians/corporations and get them back to serving the people.)
For a clear and informed argument. Most of the pro-gun people I've run into tend to be fringe lunatics that I wouldn't trust with a butter knife, much less an assault rifle.
I still think it's over before your home armoury can do any good. *g*
Backbone providers typically lease their fibre from larger providers, including certain telcos. Other large companies actually own their own fibre (I believe it's IBM that has such fibre running across northern Canada to provide a physically seperate link from their main fibre in the US.)
Most telcos lease their fibre, too. Only a few big providers like AT&T, MCI, and a few others actually own their fibre. (There are a couple companies that run huge cross-US fibre, but I can't remember the name off hand. One might be Inktomi, but that doesn't sound right for some reason.)
My rant was never intended to change the way the government acts, but to respond to the poster who claimed the Slashdot crowd is "overreacting." I really don't believe anything short of revolution will fix the governments in the US or Canada anymore, because they just don't give a damn what thinking citizens want. They just want their "share" of the tax trough, or else get trampled by the trough-feeders if they do try to support the rights and wishes of the people.
I don't advocate violence, but it is really going to take a major upheaval to wake the deadbeats in Washington and Ottawa up.
The military and police have those weapons, as approved by the constitution. You will never convince me that a 30-round assault rifle (automatic or not) has any business anywhere except in the military, the police, or a licensed, registered collector. By the time anyone gets close enough to US soil for you to use your "personal protection" weapons, the war is already lost.
If the trillions of dollars worth of military personnel, nukes, missiles, air craft, naval armadas, subs, and satellites aren't enough to keep out "the enemy", what makes you think some guy with an assault rifle is going to make a damned bit of difference?
Don't get me wrong -- I like guns. Target shooting with a Sig is an absolute gas, venison brought down by a skilled hunter is damned tasty, and I've used them many times for butchering pigs or cattle. I just think they have their uses and their place, and assault rifles in the home isn't one of them.
The backbone providers are not the internet. They provide dedicated, optionally secure, and optionally fault-tolerant data links.
The internet may or may not use fibre that is strung in parallel with those links (i.e. part of the same bundle), but it does not run on the same physical fibre. I've worked on a provisioning system that is used to manage those resources, and the "internet" is miniscule compared to the number of links that are managed for private business and government.
Want to take out those links? Go to isolated spots along certain railway tracks, highways, and other infrastructure where the physical fiber is run. Cut the fibre or plant a bomb. Goodbye several petabytes of capacity until someone can find the breach and fix it. How did any of the government proposals even try to prevent the damage from happening?
"Security" has never been anything but a smokescreen to justify increased power in the hands of a few, and anyone who thinks they are "secure" just happens to be naive enough to believe them.
The worst "terrorism" we have to fear in North America is from our own governments. Not to offend anyone who lost friends or family in the WTC on 9/11, but more people than that are killed every year by terrorists in many countries, without having led to knee-jerk police state behavior.
Don't believe me?
Look at the current crop of anti-drug ads in the US. Blatant lies and FUD -- most marijuana is grown in North America by North Americans who keep their assets in North America and spend most of the profits in (you guessed it!) North America. Heroin and Opium might be another story, but that isn't what the government is trying to convince everyone, because it wouldn't make people as nervous (everyone knows at least one pot smoker, but how many of you know heroin users?)
Do some checking and find out how many innocent people have been killed by government agents (police SWAT teams) raiding the wrong house. Look into the number of people currently being held because they immigrated from the wrong nation, or because their second cousin has a friend who knows a guy who claimed to be with Al Queda. Ask someone of Japanese descent how much more "secure" they felt for being imprisoned until the war was over.
So another GNU team has almost managed to replicate the work done by the Blackdown team 4-5 years ago.
Meanwhile the GNU team has almost managed to release a kernel.
On the sidelines, Wine has almost enabled cross-platform execution, provided you don't want to do something so uncommon as opening a file picker!!! (I mean, come on! I can play video games, but I can't pick an input file to open with a utility program?)
Lately I see a lot of "almost" me-too projects, but I'd be a lot more impressed if they didn't start celebrating until the damned things worked.
Eclipse is free and pretty nice (need to try it again -- it was rough when I first looked almost a year ago.) Sun's SunONE Studio 4 is ok, too.
My favourite remains JBuilder, but I just can't afford to upgrade anymore (paid full price for 3.0, paid for the 3.5 upgrade, the 4.0 upgrade, and realized I'd spent over $2000 with no end in site.)
Despite all the fancy IDEs out there, I still do the bulk of my editing with vi(m), emacs, and text tools, then debug and fix in an IDE. I've yet to find a Java (or C++) IDE whose editor is more than barely usable. But that is another rant...
You are correct in that most so-called programmers with less than 5 years experience think they "deserve" a six-figure salary because they used to be with some dot-bomb. You are also correct that most of them aren't productive enough to justify those rates.
The problem is that people with the experience to justify those salaries have a hard time getting noticed and hired when 490 of the 500 resumes submitted are barely or un- qualified.
The problem is also that businesses have no problem nickel and diming their development salaries post-dot-bomb. Hell, I just saw a posting for Oregon that was offering a whopping $12/hour for front-line Unix support. How many people with any kind of professional training (doctor, engineer, lawyer) would even dream of taking a job at such rates? Yet it's "greedy" for me to expect to make a living with a University degree and fifteen years experience to back me up?
Banks run on private networks like SWIFT, not on the internet. Your personal account might have some kind of web access, but not the intra-bank network.
The same goes for any large enterprise that gives a damn about their security and reliability. The internet is unreliable, insecure, and can never be anything but by the very nature of it's design. (Note: fault resilience such as rerouting around failed nodes is not the same thing as fault tolerant -- the segments behind the failed node are still unreachable.)
When you say they "aren't trying to control cyberspace", I just have these visions of the founding fathers of the US inscribing "the right to bear arms" with the intent of allowing the country to defend itself, and the modern twisting of those words to justify possession and use of assault weapons and handguns far beyond the defense of a nation.
I look at the "temporary" income taxes that were to pay for war costs, which are still in place and increasing.
I look at the insanity of a "War on Drugs" that destroys the careers of hundreds of thousands of people for smoking a joint, while the death toll on the highways and roads due to "legal" drunk drivers continues.
I look at Hollings & co. selling out to the entertainment industry, even though it damages an IT industry worth many times that amount to the nation.
Trust them? Sure, I trust them. I trust them to steal my income, invade my privacy, interfere with my life, and ignore our objections to what is rapidly becoming a police state.
Thank God I'm getting out of this screwed up country in a few days. Maybe in a few years after the American people have revolted against the insanity it will be safe to come back with the expectation of being allowed to live without excess interference from a corporate-run government.
It'll never happen. Anime doesn't meet Canadian Content regs. Even if it did, you'd get the Quebecois crying that there isn't a french translation.
Seeing as SciFi has decided to become the "schlock horror flick of the week" channel, someone has to pick up the slack. It's good to see TechTV doing something other than running the same half hour show (e.g. Extended Play) 3-4 times per day.
Besides, how many techs are into anime? How many "regular" people are into anime? So TechTV is catering to a significant segment of their audience, while other stations would be catering to the fringes to try the same thing.
The receptionist is one of the overpaid support staff I mentioned. For a company that size, the receptionist usually is also doing paperwork for payroll and such.
What would you need a seperate sysadmin for? The team should make sysadmins look like trained monkeys in comparison, and once things like the RCS, CVS, and database servers are set up with backup procedures, there isn't a lot for sysadmins to do in such an operation. Despite that, I'll give you the sysadmin, which means there are another 8 unused payroll slots to go.
Marketing? What marketing? When have you ever seen any real marketing by Mandrake? Ditto "PR" deadweights. But again, lets be generous and give you one of each. You've got six slots to go.
Development managers have already been covered. Salesreps are not salaried positions anywhere that I've worked -- they live entirely on commissions that come by making sales. Given their lack of profitability, I figure their last sales rep starved to death about six months ago.
Regardless of how you slice it, Mandrakes income-expense ratios are way beyond anything that can be salvaged. If the mere cost of running a business in France is that high, they need to relocate or give up. Taxes and other expenses are just part of the equation for corporate profitability, and all the whining in the world about how high they are in France won't change the fact that Mandrake is not a profitable organization, and is unlikely to survive more than a year even with contributions.
It's not sales of CDs, but of services. If you check Red Hat's Advanced Server subscription options, you'll see that the entry point for RHAS is around $800 with updates for one year, but no SLA. The $1500 and $2500 versions include SLAs for the year.
At a minimum, you're paying $600 extra for RHAS vs. the "regular" distro. If you're paying for a minimal SLA (i.e. corporate datacenter buyer), you're paying $1300 more per server as the SLA only covers one system.
In other words, over 85% of the price of a corporate purchase of RHAS with minimal SLA is for the support contract, not for the distro itself.
Mandrake's closest profit generator would be their multi-network firewall/VPN at around $2000.
Looking at the typical corporate or ISP data center, how many firewall boxen are running? How many database, application, and web servers are running? Lets assume we're dealing with a moderate company that decides to buy from both vendors:
Isn't it obvious that Mandrake has targetted a niche market that cannot hope to generate the kind of revenue stream that RedHat's approach does?
The frustrating thing is I've preferred Mandrake to RedHat since I got burnt by RH 7.1 and that 2.96 compiler fiasco. I'd love to see Mandrake do well, but I just can't see any way they can even hope to survive.
Rereading through some of the posts, it struck me that the comment about my grandfather's pancreatic cancer could imply that he was being selfish by clinging to life.
While he lived far longer than the doctors expected, it wasn't due to a lot of treatment. They tried chemo briefly, but did not continue when it had no useful effect. His last six months were spent in bed, sleeping 12-16 hours a day as the morphine knocked him out. He lived as long as he did because he wanted to, not because of some miraculous expensive life-stretching procedures.
Sounds like you are describing a part of the world unfit to support humans. When such areas are overpopulated and deal with famines as a result, I have a real hard time feeling much pity.
When there is no way to survive where you are, you move. Expecting others to pay to make the area livable is ridiculous.
I've purchased three Mandrake box sets in the past few years, as well as a couple from SuSE and RedHat. They all do the same job, and are roughly comparable for features and support. If only 10,000 copies of the pack are sold per year at $75/ea at a $50/pack profit (far less than it should be), that should be bringing in 500,000 per year. They are asking for 4,000,000 in donations above that.
Lets assume I've wildly underestimated their sales by 500%, and they're actually making 2,500,000 in box-set profits. That is still only 38% of their current cash-burn rate of $6,500,000 per year. (The alternative is that they are only covering less than 20% of costs from sales income, which even the most asinine of managers would realize is a failed business.)
At $100K/developer plus another $100K/developer to cover overhead, corporate income tax contributions, etc., $6.5M would cover 32 well-paid staff.
I "rolled my own" distro last year over 3-4 months of 2-3 hours/night (i.e. 15-20 hours/week), ending up with every feature and package that I use under Linux. If I can come up with an installation by myself in that short a time, there is absolutely no way I can see Mandrake requiring assets beyond:
That is still only 23 staff members, roughly 15% of whom are grossly overpaid ($100K for a shipper is more than even the most obscenely bloated union salary would reach for the skills required.)
What are the other 9 staffers doing? Or are their staff that hideously over-compensated and unskilled that they need nearly a 50% incompetancy overhead?
*LOL* This discussion would have been ever so much more entertaining in person. You are tenacious, persistent, and firm in your beliefs. Fine fuel for a fun after-meal discussion group. (Surely you didn't think I had anything against you personally just because I disagree with your opinion on the current subject!)