H1-B workers are paid less than U.S. workers. This is in fact illegal.
The legality of an action does not always carry the weight it should with the corporate world - witness Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, etc. There are plenty of companies out there that couldn't give a damn about whether it's legal or not, because the odds are that their H1B dealings will never be audited. My employer unfortunately is one of them, and the poor Sri Lankans I work with have to deal with the result.
It's not that expensive, and the prevailing wage requirement is a joke - I challenge anyone to show where the INS or Department of Labor has *ever* performed an audit.
The company for which I work manufactures industrial laser marking equipment, and our software department employs 13 people, and all but four are H1Bs, and all of the H1Bs have been hired in the last two years. The H1Bs are skilled guys, and have good people skills but make about half of what the Americans do, and I've seen proof of that. In our case, the H1B program is simply being used as a means to save money, nothing more.
I'm sure the Disklavier owner will attest to this, but Yamahas are probably the most consistent pianos made - you can get a good Steinway, but you can get a really awful one too. Same for Bosendorfer and most other premium brands. Yamaha pianos in general don't suffer from this, and back when the C5M (a previous version about 15 years back) was the big thing, I played about five of them side by side and couldn't easily tell one from another by either touch or sound.
A CueCat makes a passable general purpose bar code reader with a little bit of work, and if you can't do that, at least you've still got a spiffy little flashlight. I can't see any such utility with RealNames.
Ever sat there for two hours with an oscilloscope or bus analyzer trying to figure out exactly why your driver code isn't working properly while the phone is ringing off the hook and people are constantly bugging you in your cube? Problem solving requires thinking, and for most people it's difficult to focus on the problem at hand if there are distractions constantly being put in the way.
But Steve Yzerman wasn't having his game interrupted 20 times per day with phone calls from customers bitching about features that are broken because management felt it better to shove the product out the door instead of spending the up-front time to get it right, and the meetings that follow that mostly consist of management hand-wringing and complaining that the product has too many bugs. Forcing your engineers to take regular customer service calls that would not be necessary if they had been given the proper time to write the code is one sure way to kill productivity.
Antialiasing is effectively low-pass filtering of the image, and thus is actually *removing* data from the image - you want to remove a lot of the high-frequency components (i.e. the jaggies). You artificially increase the number of samples (by means of virtually rendering in a higher resolution) in order to make this filtering easier and more effective - you see the same principle at work in CD players, where oversampling makes it possible to do most of the filtering digitally instead of trying to design and build an analog low-pass filter with a really sharp cutoff.
This would be a valid point if MS actually paid any substantial taxes - the company doesn't pay dividends and last I heard, was sitting on $40 billion in cash, practically none of which had been taxed.
Actually, the police drive Crown Vics because they need a real four-door sedan for hauling people around in the back seat, and they're not terribly expensive - since Chevy stopped making the Caprice, the Crown Vic is about the only car on the market that fits those requirements. I might also point out that the Interceptor package that practically every police dept. orders their Crowns with isn't exactly standard equipment.:-)
I agree totally about the Camaros - I had an opportunity to speak with a Madison County deputy sheriff here in Florida, and the guys universally loved those rockets.
Typing it into a MDT doesn't help - MDT transmissions are rather easy to intercept with a computer, trunk-tracking scanner, and FSK decoder, and the data is ultimately going to end up in the same place anyway.
That argument is valid, but only holds up in areas where there were not grants of monopoly by the local municipality. There are *lots* of cities in the U.S. where the incumbent cable company was protected from competition by the local government. Go to Virginia Beach, VA and look at the history of Cox Cable there if you'd like to see it in action.
It probably should be clarified that the statement about Antares being the next probable supernova really meant "Antares is the next likely SN candidate in that cluster". For quite some time, astronomers have been keeping an eye on Eta Carinae, which is about somewhere between 7.5K and 10K light years away, but could possibly let go at any time. It will likely be quite harmless except to astronauts and orbiting spacecraft (there is some discussion regarding whether it could become a gamma ray burster), but quite spectacular to see. There just aren't any sufficiently massive stars close enough to us to really worry about supernovas anytime soon.
One reason is that NASA hopefully will have the Next Generation Space Telescope up and running reasonably soon. Another reason is that the adaptive optics technology that is being used in the larger telescopes (Keck, Subaru, Gemini, etc.) lets these telescopes yield images that are on par, and many times better, than what Hubble can provide. The new optical interferometry system that the Keck telescopes use promise far better resolution than even that, and if something needs to be fixed, it doesn't cost a half-billion dollars to get someone there to fix it.
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H1-B workers are paid less than U.S. workers. This is in fact illegal.
The legality of an action does not always carry the weight it should with the corporate world - witness Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, etc. There are plenty of companies out there that couldn't give a damn about whether it's legal or not, because the odds are that their H1B dealings will never be audited. My employer unfortunately is one of them, and the poor Sri Lankans I work with have to deal with the result.
It's not that expensive, and the prevailing wage requirement is a joke - I challenge anyone to show where the INS or Department of Labor has *ever* performed an audit. The company for which I work manufactures industrial laser marking equipment, and our software department employs 13 people, and all but four are H1Bs, and all of the H1Bs have been hired in the last two years. The H1Bs are skilled guys, and have good people skills but make about half of what the Americans do, and I've seen proof of that. In our case, the H1B program is simply being used as a means to save money, nothing more.
I don't know about the rest of the states mentioned, but Florida only requires 12 hours' notice for landlords.
They can't hide it *too* craftily - if the antenna can't see the satellites, it won't work very well. :-)
I'm sure the Disklavier owner will attest to this, but Yamahas are probably the most consistent pianos made - you can get a good Steinway, but you can get a really awful one too. Same for Bosendorfer and most other premium brands. Yamaha pianos in general don't suffer from this, and back when the C5M (a previous version about 15 years back) was the big thing, I played about five of them side by side and couldn't easily tell one from another by either touch or sound.
A CueCat makes a passable general purpose bar code reader with a little bit of work, and if you can't do that, at least you've still got a spiffy little flashlight. I can't see any such utility with RealNames.
Ever sat there for two hours with an oscilloscope or bus analyzer trying to figure out exactly why your driver code isn't working properly while the phone is ringing off the hook and people are constantly bugging you in your cube? Problem solving requires thinking, and for most people it's difficult to focus on the problem at hand if there are distractions constantly being put in the way.
But Steve Yzerman wasn't having his game interrupted 20 times per day with phone calls from customers bitching about features that are broken because management felt it better to shove the product out the door instead of spending the up-front time to get it right, and the meetings that follow that mostly consist of management hand-wringing and complaining that the product has too many bugs. Forcing your engineers to take regular customer service calls that would not be necessary if they had been given the proper time to write the code is one sure way to kill productivity.
Antialiasing is effectively low-pass filtering of the image, and thus is actually *removing* data from the image - you want to remove a lot of the high-frequency components (i.e. the jaggies). You artificially increase the number of samples (by means of virtually rendering in a higher resolution) in order to make this filtering easier and more effective - you see the same principle at work in CD players, where oversampling makes it possible to do most of the filtering digitally instead of trying to design and build an analog low-pass filter with a really sharp cutoff.
This would be a valid point if MS actually paid any substantial taxes - the company doesn't pay dividends and last I heard, was sitting on $40 billion in cash, practically none of which had been taxed.
Actually, the police drive Crown Vics because they need a real four-door sedan for hauling people around in the back seat, and they're not terribly expensive - since Chevy stopped making the Caprice, the Crown Vic is about the only car on the market that fits those requirements. I might also point out that the Interceptor package that practically every police dept. orders their Crowns with isn't exactly standard equipment. :-)
I agree totally about the Camaros - I had an opportunity to speak with a Madison County deputy sheriff here in Florida, and the guys universally loved those rockets.
Mod me down - I obviously didn't completely read the post in context before I responded. :-)
Typing it into a MDT doesn't help - MDT transmissions are rather easy to intercept with a computer, trunk-tracking scanner, and FSK decoder, and the data is ultimately going to end up in the same place anyway.
That argument is valid, but only holds up in areas where there were not grants of monopoly by the local municipality. There are *lots* of cities in the U.S. where the incumbent cable company was protected from competition by the local government. Go to Virginia Beach, VA and look at the history of Cox Cable there if you'd like to see it in action.
It probably should be clarified that the statement about Antares being the next probable supernova really meant "Antares is the next likely SN candidate in that cluster". For quite some time, astronomers have been keeping an eye on Eta Carinae, which is about somewhere between 7.5K and 10K light years away, but could possibly let go at any time. It will likely be quite harmless except to astronauts and orbiting spacecraft (there is some discussion regarding whether it could become a gamma ray burster), but quite spectacular to see. There just aren't any sufficiently massive stars close enough to us to really worry about supernovas anytime soon.
One reason is that NASA hopefully will have the Next Generation Space Telescope up and running reasonably soon. Another reason is that the adaptive optics technology that is being used in the larger telescopes (Keck, Subaru, Gemini, etc.) lets these telescopes yield images that are on par, and many times better, than what Hubble can provide. The new optical interferometry system that the Keck telescopes use promise far better resolution than even that, and if something needs to be fixed, it doesn't cost a half-billion dollars to get someone there to fix it.