Are you trying to suggest that x64 versions of Vista aren't in regular use by regular people?
If this is your feeling, then you should know it's wholly inaccurate.
I've been running Vista Pro x64 on my HP laptop (my primary work box, as a developer and business owner) for ~2 years now, and I have everything on it.
It's my primary desktop for both work and personal life.
It's been nearly flawless after SP1, and is worlds better than XP was. Mind you, it's a stacked laptop, or at least was 2 years ago when I bought it (dual core 2.4, 4gb, 7200rpm, 512mb nvidia graphics card).
Maybe you were suggesting something else though, it was hard to tell.
Vista and W7 are much more thoroughly instrumented than XP was. Many of these will send anonymous usage and config data back to MS. These are all well documented and understood, and don't really cause any concern for privacy.
They're largely all disable-able, though they are scattered, as many of the product groups rolled their own systems for this (ie, office vs. media player vs wga, etc).
Can I still play out-of-region CDs?
This is dependent on the hardware and software you use. But the OS in no way gets involved.
Do I have to fight UAC like someone with Vista?
Loaded question. UAC on Vista (post SP1) worked exactly as it was intended. Any problems you had you should blame on your app vendors.
Or yourself, if you chose to not customize UAC behavior to your liking. It is tremendously customizable (even in Vista) in how it behaves, how it prompts, whether or not to use the secure desktop, etc etc. If you don't like it, just configure it so that you do.
W7 loosens it a bit so that many actions that the OS perceives as 'initiated by the user' dont cause an elevation. This is how it ships. You can turn it back to Vista style if you want, or otherwise customize it.
Can I copy any standard file type on to any standard media?
1 x power 1 x ethernet 1 x speakers 1 x keyboard 1 x mouse 2 x external displays
I know not everyone is going to have 2 external displays, but even without, that's still 6 cables you have to plug and unplug every single time you come or go from the office.
The reason people say you need docking stations at work is that most folks can't do real 8-10 hours on the computer using tiny cramped keyboards and tiny cramped displays that are all in the wrong location from each other.
It's okay for a couple hours in meetings or sitting in Starbucks, but for real developer work you need a real full size keyboard, a real external mouse, a real 22" or larger display (at least one).
Not to mention that because Mac's lack docking stations, you can never have more than one external display.
HP makes phenomenal laptops, but you have to make sure you're buying corporate kit, and not consumer level stuff.
Basically, if you're buying it from a physical retail store, you're buying consumer garbage.
The prior generation, the ones with the 'Compaq' label and otherwise just numbers were excellent.
The new ones are the Elitebooks (IIRC) and are quite amazing.
Not cheap though.
They're marketed as Engineering Workstation Laptops. My HP Compaq 8710w has treated me well for a couple years now, and has been nearly indestructible. Might be a bit big/heavy for some folks (17" widescreen, plus I carry the external 12-cell monstro-battery with it so I can work at Starbucks for hours and hours).
Your primary argument for the Mac's seems to be how they look.
Who cares. It's a tool.
And there are a number of aluminum chassis laptops with backlit keyboards and nearly all the stuff you want. Most of the mainstream corp kit is that nowadays.
It's arguable that the Macs are slightly better made from a physical standpoint. But there are some very nice non-apple laptops out there.
The HP Compaq stuff (Elitebook 17" for example), or the Dell Latitude E's, or the Lenovo.
Lastly, you're right in that when it was owned by IBM, the Thinkpad's were the best. That margin is pretty much non-existent now under Lenovo. The rest of the manufacturers have caught up.
Right now I'm using an HP Compaq 8710w, and this thing is a workhorse. It gets abused and just keeps on going. It's black, and dirty, because I'm a man and I don't give a rat's hairy ass how it looks.
Again, I'm a man, so I could care less about size and weight, within reason. With other equipment, books, and magazines in my laptop bag, the bag approaches 30 pounds at times anyway, so the couple pounds of the laptop is irrelevant.
My docking station has 7 wires running out of it. Without the docking station, I would have to connect and disconnect all 7 of those wires every time (multiple times per day) that I arrive at or leave from the office.
There isn't a laptop on earth whose keyboard can match my MS Natural, or a proper optical mouse. Not to mention the 24" screens and real speakers.
Generally the only people who can use the laptop full time without external keyboard/mouse/displays are lightweight users, people who only use it a couple hours per day.
Active LLC owners are subject to the self employment tax. This is one of the advantages of S Corp over LLC.
This is incorrect, or at least, not globally correct.
When you have an LLC, you have a choice on how its taxed.
You can trivially have an LLC that is taxed as a corp, and the owners are not subject to any pass-through or self-employment tax.
My business is setup that way, and its fairly common. Many LLC's start out small, with pass-through taxing, and then go the corp-taxed route when they get big enough for it to make sense.
You can't count to break a hardware-managed mirror, take one disk to a standard SATA controller and get any data out of it.
Actually, that _always_ works, at least with mainstream raid controllers.
RAID-1 mirroring (and only RAID-1 mirroring) does not write the data in a proprietary format on the drive. The only difference between a mirrored drive and a regular drive is that most decent RAID controllers will write the volume configuration to every drive as well.
Now, what you say is absolutely true when dealing with any other raid type.
Note that there may be odd or really crappy controllers that do use a proprietary format for RAID-1, but thats not the case for all the mainstream cards used in intel servers.
There are failure modes where mirroring makes it impossible to determine which drive is correct.
No there arent. There's always a primary, and unless it fails, its the correct one, by definition.
Errors when writing sectors are not always reported,
This is not a failure mode RAID1 is intended to protect against.
quite apart from the case where the power goes off and one drive has flushed its cache and the other drive hasn't.
If this happens, then that means the system's/rack's/room's battery backups didnt work, and the raid card's onboard battery also didnt work. This is not a failure of RAID1, its a failure of your systems design and maintenance.
Even if you know which drive to replace
You always know which drive to replace. The RAID card tells you. On most systems, its the drive with the red or orange light on it, instead of the regular green light.
What do you think the chances of that operation completing successfully with today's large drives is? Hint: the rate of errors/sector hasn't improved much in the last ten years while the sector count has increase massively.
The chances of it completing successfully before the other drive fails is usually quite high. If your rebuild times are so long that you experience significant risk of failing the other drive during rebuild, then you need to use smaller drives, or some other approach.
RAID1 is useless for protecting against hardware errors - people use it for the stellar read-performance and for no other reason.
This statement shows that you dont understand what RAID1 is for. No RAID solution is, by itself, intended to protect against bus errors, undetected write corruption, cosmic-ray induced bit flipping, or other forms of corruption at that level.
RAID1 provides availability. It allows your machine to stay up and keep going if a drive fails. You also get some concomitant improvement in read speeds, but thats not usually the primary reason, its just a nice side effect.
I love how people still say PostgreSQL does it better and yet it is still slower,
Slower at what? Sure, MySQL may be faster when doing a single table select with a simple where clause on an ISAM table.
But then it utterly breaks down when you want to do things like join a bunch of tables together, or do sub-queries or WHERE IN clauses. I can make MySQL go into an infinite loop using an extremely simple 'where in' subquery on tiny tables. This is a bug thats been in the system and known for YEARS, but never fixed.
MySQL is horrendously slow at the kind of sql queries that surpass single-table selects.
MS-SQL's query planner and core engine may not be as mature and advanced as Oracle's, but it's still orders of magnitude better than MySQL and PostgreSQL in my experience.
Especially the former. I can run queries in MSSQL that does an inner join on 12 tables, none of which have less than a million records, and get a result in far less than a second.
Compare that to MySQL, where if you use a WHERE IN clause, will largely tend to go into an infinite loop and never finish, even on tiny tables and recordsets.
Once you get past the most basic of basic one-table CRUD operations, you really see how incredibly primitive MySQL is.
Sadly though, MySQL ends up being completely adequate in a lot of situations, as long as you're willing to adapt report-query writing and your style to its incredible limitations.
You're missing some key aspects of the PC business.
Manufacturers like Dell and HP get alot of money from 3rd parties (like Intuit) to put trial version and nagware on the windows desktops.
This can often drive the effective net price of a windows desktop lower than one without an OS (+$50 for windows, -$150 for various bundled trialware/nagware).
In addition, if the manufacturer doesnt have their support infrastructure fully setup, then they may feel that there is a higher support cost to them for non-windows than windows.
Then there are marketing subsidies from Intel, AMD and Microsoft to put labels on the machines, etc.
There are many non-obvious aspects of the industry like this, its never as simple as hardware + os = total price.
And don't get me started on the need for "signed device drivers". Ugh. I have to have a boot script that deactivates that little feature in the kernel every time I start my machine. I wonder if they left it in Windows 7.
Only for Vista x64 and only for kernel-mode drivers.
What exact driver/hardware is it that is causing you this problem?
You cant compare education pricing to the real world. Educational pricing for MS software is like 10-cents on the dollar, or thereabouts.
Plus much of the time the deal the school has with MS includes 'home use' rights for a pittance, which is not much more than the price of labor & materials to burn a new CD.
Hate to feed the cowards, but this was too amusing..
You are simply one of those stupid MBA-type business managers who have been duped into believing that foreign hires are better at software.
Really? Wow, thanks man. And here I thought I had a Math and CS degree and was the lead developer for a small business that I founded and own. Thanks for clearing things up for me.
There are MILLIONS of super-talented American developers right under your nose but you don't want to pay the going rate.
Really? Wow, thanks man. And here I thought I was the one championing amongst my peers that hiring in the top 10% of developers gives you an order of magnitude better developer. Glad you cleared that up for me.
Now mind you, I cant always afford to bring on a $100,000 per year veteran dev, but I can bring on a $40k per year young guy, and grow the business with him, so that 5-10 years from now he can make $100k in my business.
and keep on whining about how you can't find good people.
Who said I cant find good people? I have a fantastic team, and am very proud of the work they do. Not sure what you're referring to here.
Actually "everyone" doesn't get to keep their job, but happen to lose it to "superior" foreigners. One job for a "superior" foreigner is one job less for us.
Wow. Thats quite an archaic (and ineffective) choice of how you group the 'us' vs. 'them' in your world. Human beings are human beings. The concept that because someone lucked into being born in a different location than you makes them 'the enemy' is really sad, and a big part of what is wrong with this world.
Personally, I define 'us' as intelligent, hard working, decent (ie, moral and ethical) human beings. The random location of where they happen to be born and what government happens to claim them for taxation purposes has nothing to do with it.
Outsourcing of labor, isn't that far a concept to slavery.
If you really believe that, then you live in a very strange world indeed.
Do you outsource for house building, or do you do it yourself? What about for that computer you're using? Did you make it yourself? Or was it outsourced to someone else who is better at it, and can do it cheaper than you could.
Just because some outsourcing happens to cross an arbitrary national line doesnt make it anything different than local outsourcing.
It shouldn't be indians that tells us how we should work and in which conditions, but rather them asking to work in the same conditions that we enjoy here.
Indians tell you how you should work and in what conditions? Thats pretty weird.
In no way was I talking about offshoring, rather just the hiring of local vs. foreign. I think offshoring is usually a bad idea, but then again, my business is an american consultancy, so effectively, we're in competition with the offshoring companies.
Part of hiring people is hiring those with good think on their feet skills and good communication skills. That doesnt mean that they have to have English as a first language, just that they can communicate effectively.
A thick accent and lack of idiomatic knowledge of the language will often lose a person a job for me. But there are plenty of Asian-ethnicity people I've run into who have an accent, but are great communicators.
The sad part of your post is that you state that the best person that can be afforded, yet all these companies outsourcing and offshoring are by no means hurting financially. All they are trying to do is increase their revenue by cutting costs anywhere and everywhere possible. When it boils down to it, a company wants a contractor/consultant so they can fire them without the red tape or the legal issues around it.
You're overgeneralizing. While there are many cases (especially amongst the bigger companies) where this is the case, there are many legitimate reasons to outsource.
For example, many small and medium businesses dont have anyone in house who has skills in managing technical people. This makes it very hard for them to hire one or two IT folks and make it work well in the business.
Thats exactly the kind of client we want. With us, you dont have to know how to manage or hire technical people, thats what we do, and we're quite good at it. And it works. The vast, vast majority of our clients experience a net win by working with us, rather than trying to hire internally.
Thirdly there is a nasty fact of begger my neighbour that importing people from elsewhere implies. There are swathes of southern africa which struggle with no doctors or nurses, these places have trained these workers, but they have then been imported to western europe. This is very unfair for the local people who have invested in their training and support and now are stripped of the outcome. We should invest in our own skilled workers and leave other peoples where they are!
It's not a dictatorship. No one made them move. They decided that it was the best choice for themselves and then took action.
There's no big hand in the sky that is plucking all the talented people from African and flinging them to the US or western Europe.
And besides, its often quite a telling indicator that someone was willing to move and try something completely different. People that do that now and then in their lives tend to be much better, more rounded, more big picture sorts of people.
Provinciality breeds provincials.
Look around at your friends, how many of them are in the same town or village they grew up in and doing well? Most of my friends have moved away to get work
Thats usually a good thing! People that spend their whole lives with the same group of friends as they had in elementary or high school tend to be fairly limited. Travel and change builds character, builds a more global outlook, and tends to make better people.
I can see what you're saying, but in reality, most smart businesses dont hire people who are the most skilled at a narrow vertical of specific skills, but who is the overall better developer (there are exceptions, and you tend to see alot more of this at big orgs, who have incredibly niche software that they spent millions on, that they need to support).
This includes things like willingness to learn, ability to adapt, and solve general problems.
I should say that I dont have any direct experience with Indian ethnic folks.
But the chinese, Russian (or generally eastern european), Vietnamese and Korean folks I've worked with tend to be a cut above. If nothing else, they're willing to work hard and just 'get things done' without thinking that the occasional boring work was beneath them.
Again, I think its a cultural thing here in the states. Too many students coming out of college think that they'll be the next Gates or Brin or Ellison, and they genuinely get offended when you offer them a market wage commensurate with their experience. Or they get upset when they have to do 'boring' work, even if its just now and then. Or if its not fun and interesting work, they will barely work on it.
It's a cultural entitlement thing. People think that because they can program, they deserve to make six figures right out of college (again, not on the coasts).
I think everyone should have to spend 5 years starting and growing a small business, so they can get a clue what is actually involved with building something from nothing, and what hard work really is.
First, remember that we're talking about hiring college grads for entry level development positions. My statements are not true for seasoned veterans.
Lazy? I don't think so. Americans take less vacation time than Europeans. Are you one of those people who thinks you should get 8 hours of work out of an 8 hour day? You don't value time spent on anything but work that produces profits. You consider 5 minute breaks for a bit of solitaire or web surfing or chatting at the water cooler a complete waste of time. You frown on experiments and discourage innovations because they might not work.
So its nice that you can make up lots of things that arent true and try to label them on me, but lets stick to personal experiences or factual items please.
That being said, I do think I should get most of 8 hours of work out of a 9 hour day. A couple breaks are fine, a few minutes here and there on the web is fine. Thats not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the bulk of devs out there who will get away with doing an hour or two of work per day, and reading slashdot the rest, if they can get away with it.
It's also self interest. The more effective a person is at their job, the more money the business makes, and the more money that staffer makes. Conversely, the less effective a person is, the less money the company makes, which puts their own job at risk.
Who is the authority on the appropriateness of any questioning? Surely not the same authorities who might be the ones being questioned? Somebody might be wrong, and it might be authority, or the questioner, or both or neither. It might all be a big unprofitable waste of time. Authority hates being questioned, and has the power to fire people who disagree.
A newly graduated college student, for the vast majority of them, dont have the experience, perspective, or skills to have opinions on anything but things narrowly focused on their job. Ie, code, design, etc. They generally have zero idea about what it takes to run a business, to constantly have to bring in revenue so that everyone gets paid, or how to effectively deal with troublesome customers in a way that builds the relationship and makes the company more money.
There are a rare few that are gems, but in general, college grads are incredibly green.
I have no doubt that with an attitude like that, the grads who aren't idiots and who therefore have choices don't choose to work for you, and you never even learn they exist. You're suffering from selection bias.
The grads who arent idiots I hire, or at least try to. They are a small minority.
Out of the overall pool of people that will apply for any entry level programming job you'll put up in the states, 10% or less are even worth interviewing. Thats a pretty bad ratio.
The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you trying to suggest that x64 versions of Vista aren't in regular use by regular people?
If this is your feeling, then you should know it's wholly inaccurate.
I've been running Vista Pro x64 on my HP laptop (my primary work box, as a developer and business owner) for ~2 years now, and I have everything on it.
It's my primary desktop for both work and personal life.
It's been nearly flawless after SP1, and is worlds better than XP was. Mind you, it's a stacked laptop, or at least was 2 years ago when I bought it (dual core 2.4, 4gb, 7200rpm, 512mb nvidia graphics card).
Maybe you were suggesting something else though, it was hard to tell.
All that fear mongering was a bunch of hooey.
What is locked out?
Nothing.
Do P2P apps work properly?
Yes
Are there unexplained phone-homes?
Vista and W7 are much more thoroughly instrumented than XP was. Many of these will send anonymous usage and config data back to MS. These are all well documented and understood, and don't really cause any concern for privacy.
They're largely all disable-able, though they are scattered, as many of the product groups rolled their own systems for this (ie, office vs. media player vs wga, etc).
Can I still play out-of-region CDs?
This is dependent on the hardware and software you use. But the OS in no way gets involved.
Do I have to fight UAC like someone with Vista?
Loaded question. UAC on Vista (post SP1) worked exactly as it was intended. Any problems you had you should blame on your app vendors.
Or yourself, if you chose to not customize UAC behavior to your liking. It is tremendously customizable (even in Vista) in how it behaves, how it prompts, whether or not to use the secure desktop, etc etc. If you don't like it, just configure it so that you do.
W7 loosens it a bit so that many actions that the OS perceives as 'initiated by the user' dont cause an elevation. This is how it ships. You can turn it back to Vista style if you want, or otherwise customize it.
Can I copy any standard file type on to any standard media?
Yes.
3 Cables? How do you figure that.
Looking at mine:
1 x power
1 x ethernet
1 x speakers
1 x keyboard
1 x mouse
2 x external displays
I know not everyone is going to have 2 external displays, but even without, that's still 6 cables you have to plug and unplug every single time you come or go from the office.
The reason people say you need docking stations at work is that most folks can't do real 8-10 hours on the computer using tiny cramped keyboards and tiny cramped displays that are all in the wrong location from each other.
It's okay for a couple hours in meetings or sitting in Starbucks, but for real developer work you need a real full size keyboard, a real external mouse, a real 22" or larger display (at least one).
Not to mention that because Mac's lack docking stations, you can never have more than one external display.
HP makes phenomenal laptops, but you have to make sure you're buying corporate kit, and not consumer level stuff.
Basically, if you're buying it from a physical retail store, you're buying consumer garbage.
The prior generation, the ones with the 'Compaq' label and otherwise just numbers were excellent.
The new ones are the Elitebooks (IIRC) and are quite amazing.
Not cheap though.
They're marketed as Engineering Workstation Laptops. My HP Compaq 8710w has treated me well for a couple years now, and has been nearly indestructible. Might be a bit big/heavy for some folks (17" widescreen, plus I carry the external 12-cell monstro-battery with it so I can work at Starbucks for hours and hours).
Your primary argument for the Mac's seems to be how they look.
Who cares. It's a tool.
And there are a number of aluminum chassis laptops with backlit keyboards and nearly all the stuff you want. Most of the mainstream corp kit is that nowadays.
It's arguable that the Macs are slightly better made from a physical standpoint. But there are some very nice non-apple laptops out there.
The HP Compaq stuff (Elitebook 17" for example), or the Dell Latitude E's, or the Lenovo.
Lastly, you're right in that when it was owned by IBM, the Thinkpad's were the best. That margin is pretty much non-existent now under Lenovo. The rest of the manufacturers have caught up.
Right now I'm using an HP Compaq 8710w, and this thing is a workhorse. It gets abused and just keeps on going. It's black, and dirty, because I'm a man and I don't give a rat's hairy ass how it looks.
Again, I'm a man, so I could care less about size and weight, within reason. With other equipment, books, and magazines in my laptop bag, the bag approaches 30 pounds at times anyway, so the couple pounds of the laptop is irrelevant.
Where do you plug the second external monitor into?
I dont recall that I've ever seen a Mac with a dual-density (or whatever it's called this year) dvi port on the laptop chassis.
That's ridiculous.
A typical power user on a laptop (like a developer) has the following:
1 x power
1 x ethernet
1 x speakers
1 x keyboard
1 x mouse
1or2 x external displays
I know not everyone is going to have 2 external displays, but even without, that's 6 cables to plug in. You can reduce it by one if you use a USB hub.
Plus most laptops dont have dual-density DVI ports (that support two 1920x1200 external displays) on them, only on the docking station.
That is a completely absurd statement.
My docking station has 7 wires running out of it. Without the docking station, I would have to connect and disconnect all 7 of those wires every time (multiple times per day) that I arrive at or leave from the office.
There isn't a laptop on earth whose keyboard can match my MS Natural, or a proper optical mouse. Not to mention the 24" screens and real speakers.
Generally the only people who can use the laptop full time without external keyboard/mouse/displays are lightweight users, people who only use it a couple hours per day.
Active LLC owners are subject to the self employment tax. This is one of the advantages of S Corp over LLC.
This is incorrect, or at least, not globally correct.
When you have an LLC, you have a choice on how its taxed.
You can trivially have an LLC that is taxed as a corp, and the owners are not subject to any pass-through or self-employment tax.
My business is setup that way, and its fairly common. Many LLC's start out small, with pass-through taxing, and then go the corp-taxed route when they get big enough for it to make sense.
You can't count to break a hardware-managed mirror, take one disk to a standard SATA controller and get any data out of it.
Actually, that _always_ works, at least with mainstream raid controllers.
RAID-1 mirroring (and only RAID-1 mirroring) does not write the data in a proprietary format on the drive. The only difference between a mirrored drive and a regular drive is that most decent RAID controllers will write the volume configuration to every drive as well.
Now, what you say is absolutely true when dealing with any other raid type.
Note that there may be odd or really crappy controllers that do use a proprietary format for RAID-1, but thats not the case for all the mainstream cards used in intel servers.
I dont think you understand what RAID1 is for.
There are failure modes where mirroring makes it impossible to determine which drive is correct.
No there arent. There's always a primary, and unless it fails, its the correct one, by definition.
Errors when writing sectors are not always reported,
This is not a failure mode RAID1 is intended to protect against.
quite apart from the case where the power goes off and one drive has flushed its cache and the other drive hasn't.
If this happens, then that means the system's/rack's/room's battery backups didnt work, and the raid card's onboard battery also didnt work. This is not a failure of RAID1, its a failure of your systems design and maintenance.
Even if you know which drive to replace
You always know which drive to replace. The RAID card tells you. On most systems, its the drive with the red or orange light on it, instead of the regular green light.
What do you think the chances of that operation completing successfully with today's large drives is? Hint: the rate of errors/sector hasn't improved much in the last ten years while the sector count has increase massively.
The chances of it completing successfully before the other drive fails is usually quite high. If your rebuild times are so long that you experience significant risk of failing the other drive during rebuild, then you need to use smaller drives, or some other approach.
RAID1 is useless for protecting against hardware errors - people use it for the stellar read-performance and for no other reason.
This statement shows that you dont understand what RAID1 is for. No RAID solution is, by itself, intended to protect against bus errors, undetected write corruption, cosmic-ray induced bit flipping, or other forms of corruption at that level.
RAID1 provides availability. It allows your machine to stay up and keep going if a drive fails. You also get some concomitant improvement in read speeds, but thats not usually the primary reason, its just a nice side effect.
I love how people still say PostgreSQL does it better and yet it is still slower,
Slower at what? Sure, MySQL may be faster when doing a single table select with a simple where clause on an ISAM table.
But then it utterly breaks down when you want to do things like join a bunch of tables together, or do sub-queries or WHERE IN clauses. I can make MySQL go into an infinite loop using an extremely simple 'where in' subquery on tiny tables. This is a bug thats been in the system and known for YEARS, but never fixed.
MySQL is horrendously slow at the kind of sql queries that surpass single-table selects.
MS-SQL's query planner and core engine may not be as mature and advanced as Oracle's, but it's still orders of magnitude better than MySQL and PostgreSQL in my experience.
Especially the former. I can run queries in MSSQL that does an inner join on 12 tables, none of which have less than a million records, and get a result in far less than a second.
Compare that to MySQL, where if you use a WHERE IN clause, will largely tend to go into an infinite loop and never finish, even on tiny tables and recordsets.
Once you get past the most basic of basic one-table CRUD operations, you really see how incredibly primitive MySQL is.
Sadly though, MySQL ends up being completely adequate in a lot of situations, as long as you're willing to adapt report-query writing and your style to its incredible limitations.
You're missing some key aspects of the PC business.
Manufacturers like Dell and HP get alot of money from 3rd parties (like Intuit) to put trial version and nagware on the windows desktops.
This can often drive the effective net price of a windows desktop lower than one without an OS (+$50 for windows, -$150 for various bundled trialware/nagware).
In addition, if the manufacturer doesnt have their support infrastructure fully setup, then they may feel that there is a higher support cost to them for non-windows than windows.
Then there are marketing subsidies from Intel, AMD and Microsoft to put labels on the machines, etc.
There are many non-obvious aspects of the industry like this, its never as simple as hardware + os = total price.
And don't get me started on the need for "signed device drivers". Ugh. I have to have a boot script that deactivates that little feature in the kernel every time I start my machine. I wonder if they left it in Windows 7.
Only for Vista x64 and only for kernel-mode drivers.
What exact driver/hardware is it that is causing you this problem?
You cant compare education pricing to the real world. Educational pricing for MS software is like 10-cents on the dollar, or thereabouts.
Plus much of the time the deal the school has with MS includes 'home use' rights for a pittance, which is not much more than the price of labor & materials to burn a new CD.
The claim was that H1-B participation increases unemployment in the US, which I disagreed with and argued against.
What part of that is 'ENTIRELY UNTRUE'?
Can you speak to any way in which you believe H1-B program participation increases unemployment?
Hate to feed the cowards, but this was too amusing ..
You are simply one of those stupid MBA-type business managers who have been duped into believing that foreign hires are better at software.
Really? Wow, thanks man. And here I thought I had a Math and CS degree and was the lead developer for a small business that I founded and own. Thanks for clearing things up for me.
There are MILLIONS of super-talented American developers right under your nose but you don't want to pay the going rate.
Really? Wow, thanks man. And here I thought I was the one championing amongst my peers that hiring in the top 10% of developers gives you an order of magnitude better developer. Glad you cleared that up for me.
Now mind you, I cant always afford to bring on a $100,000 per year veteran dev, but I can bring on a $40k per year young guy, and grow the business with him, so that 5-10 years from now he can make $100k in my business.
and keep on whining about how you can't find good people.
Who said I cant find good people? I have a fantastic team, and am very proud of the work they do. Not sure what you're referring to here.
Actually "everyone" doesn't get to keep their job, but happen to lose it to "superior" foreigners. One job for a "superior" foreigner is one job less for us.
Wow. Thats quite an archaic (and ineffective) choice of how you group the 'us' vs. 'them' in your world. Human beings are human beings. The concept that because someone lucked into being born in a different location than you makes them 'the enemy' is really sad, and a big part of what is wrong with this world.
Personally, I define 'us' as intelligent, hard working, decent (ie, moral and ethical) human beings. The random location of where they happen to be born and what government happens to claim them for taxation purposes has nothing to do with it.
Outsourcing of labor, isn't that far a concept to slavery.
If you really believe that, then you live in a very strange world indeed.
Do you outsource for house building, or do you do it yourself? What about for that computer you're using? Did you make it yourself? Or was it outsourced to someone else who is better at it, and can do it cheaper than you could.
Just because some outsourcing happens to cross an arbitrary national line doesnt make it anything different than local outsourcing.
It shouldn't be indians that tells us how we should work and in which conditions, but rather them asking to work in the same conditions that we enjoy here.
Indians tell you how you should work and in what conditions? Thats pretty weird.
In no way was I talking about offshoring, rather just the hiring of local vs. foreign. I think offshoring is usually a bad idea, but then again, my business is an american consultancy, so effectively, we're in competition with the offshoring companies.
Part of hiring people is hiring those with good think on their feet skills and good communication skills. That doesnt mean that they have to have English as a first language, just that they can communicate effectively.
A thick accent and lack of idiomatic knowledge of the language will often lose a person a job for me. But there are plenty of Asian-ethnicity people I've run into who have an accent, but are great communicators.
The sad part of your post is that you state that the best person that can be afforded, yet all these companies outsourcing and offshoring are by no means hurting financially. All they are trying to do is increase their revenue by cutting costs anywhere and everywhere possible. When it boils down to it, a company wants a contractor/consultant so they can fire them without the red tape or the legal issues around it.
You're overgeneralizing. While there are many cases (especially amongst the bigger companies) where this is the case, there are many legitimate reasons to outsource.
For example, many small and medium businesses dont have anyone in house who has skills in managing technical people. This makes it very hard for them to hire one or two IT folks and make it work well in the business.
Thats exactly the kind of client we want. With us, you dont have to know how to manage or hire technical people, thats what we do, and we're quite good at it. And it works. The vast, vast majority of our clients experience a net win by working with us, rather than trying to hire internally.
Thirdly there is a nasty fact of begger my neighbour that importing people from elsewhere implies. There are swathes of southern africa which struggle with no doctors or nurses, these places have trained these workers, but they have then been imported to western europe. This is very unfair for the local people who have invested in their training and support and now are stripped of the outcome. We should invest in our own skilled workers and leave other peoples where they are!
It's not a dictatorship. No one made them move. They decided that it was the best choice for themselves and then took action.
There's no big hand in the sky that is plucking all the talented people from African and flinging them to the US or western Europe.
And besides, its often quite a telling indicator that someone was willing to move and try something completely different. People that do that now and then in their lives tend to be much better, more rounded, more big picture sorts of people.
Provinciality breeds provincials.
Look around at your friends, how many of them are in the same town or village they grew up in and doing well? Most of my friends have moved away to get work
Thats usually a good thing! People that spend their whole lives with the same group of friends as they had in elementary or high school tend to be fairly limited. Travel and change builds character, builds a more global outlook, and tends to make better people.
I can see what you're saying, but in reality, most smart businesses dont hire people who are the most skilled at a narrow vertical of specific skills, but who is the overall better developer (there are exceptions, and you tend to see alot more of this at big orgs, who have incredibly niche software that they spent millions on, that they need to support).
This includes things like willingness to learn, ability to adapt, and solve general problems.
I should say that I dont have any direct experience with Indian ethnic folks.
But the chinese, Russian (or generally eastern european), Vietnamese and Korean folks I've worked with tend to be a cut above. If nothing else, they're willing to work hard and just 'get things done' without thinking that the occasional boring work was beneath them.
Again, I think its a cultural thing here in the states. Too many students coming out of college think that they'll be the next Gates or Brin or Ellison, and they genuinely get offended when you offer them a market wage commensurate with their experience. Or they get upset when they have to do 'boring' work, even if its just now and then. Or if its not fun and interesting work, they will barely work on it.
It's a cultural entitlement thing. People think that because they can program, they deserve to make six figures right out of college (again, not on the coasts).
I think everyone should have to spend 5 years starting and growing a small business, so they can get a clue what is actually involved with building something from nothing, and what hard work really is.
First, remember that we're talking about hiring college grads for entry level development positions. My statements are not true for seasoned veterans.
Lazy? I don't think so. Americans take less vacation time than Europeans. Are you one of those people who thinks you should get 8 hours of work out of an 8 hour day? You don't value time spent on anything but work that produces profits. You consider 5 minute breaks for a bit of solitaire or web surfing or chatting at the water cooler a complete waste of time. You frown on experiments and discourage innovations because they might not work.
So its nice that you can make up lots of things that arent true and try to label them on me, but lets stick to personal experiences or factual items please.
That being said, I do think I should get most of 8 hours of work out of a 9 hour day. A couple breaks are fine, a few minutes here and there on the web is fine. Thats not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the bulk of devs out there who will get away with doing an hour or two of work per day, and reading slashdot the rest, if they can get away with it.
It's also self interest. The more effective a person is at their job, the more money the business makes, and the more money that staffer makes. Conversely, the less effective a person is, the less money the company makes, which puts their own job at risk.
Who is the authority on the appropriateness of any questioning? Surely not the same authorities who might be the ones being questioned? Somebody might be wrong, and it might be authority, or the questioner, or both or neither. It might all be a big unprofitable waste of time. Authority hates being questioned, and has the power to fire people who disagree.
A newly graduated college student, for the vast majority of them, dont have the experience, perspective, or skills to have opinions on anything but things narrowly focused on their job. Ie, code, design, etc. They generally have zero idea about what it takes to run a business, to constantly have to bring in revenue so that everyone gets paid, or how to effectively deal with troublesome customers in a way that builds the relationship and makes the company more money.
There are a rare few that are gems, but in general, college grads are incredibly green.
I have no doubt that with an attitude like that, the grads who aren't idiots and who therefore have choices don't choose to work for you, and you never even learn they exist. You're suffering from selection bias.
The grads who arent idiots I hire, or at least try to. They are a small minority.
Did you not read my post which you replied to?
It is NOT about pushing down wages.
It IS about hiring from a better candidate pool.
I'll try to go through it again.
Out of the overall pool of people that will apply for any entry level programming job you'll put up in the states, 10% or less are even worth interviewing. Thats a pretty bad ratio.
The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.