I'm one of the group that Slashdot crowd loves to despise - an H1B programmer who grew up in India.
I don't have anything against those that are here on H-1Bs. I do have an issue with the employers that abuse the system, though. If you've been here 10 years, you should have at least been given the opportunity to get a green card, and should be allowed the same freedom of movement that any domestic employee would have without having to worry about being deported if something happens with your job.
As far as the quality issue goes, I've worked with really crappy H-1Bs and really amazing ones. Like most domestic programmers, those that have a real interest in the field tend to do well, and those that got into it only because they thought it would pay well, not so much.
Obviously the tools are a lot better now, but there are plenty of embedded environments with that kind of resource pressure. "Okay, how do I make this all fit into 128 bytes?!"
That is, the usual way for 1980s computer geeks. Self-taught BASIC on an Apple II using a few books on Applesoft and Integer BASIC. Later Pascal also on the Apple II with a few books including Jensen and Wirth's PASCAL User Manual and Report. Learned C (K&R, mind you, none of that prototype crap) on a Mac XL with the old Megamax compiler. Picked up 6502 assembler out of necessity in there, also 68000 and 6809.
This was pretty similar to my path. I started with Applesoft on the Apple IIs (the sweet black Bell & Howell ones) at the local learning center on the base my dad was stationed at, and a few months after that the director of the center called me over and said that he thought I needed to be learning more complex stuff, and gave me a book on 6502 assembly programming, which I just devoured. I skipped the Pascal route because the UCSD package that they had was always checked out by someone else when I got there. After we moved, my mom was a manager at a local ComputerLand (back when such a place existed) and I pretty much had the run of the place - I got a copy of "Inside Macintosh" and picked up 68K assembler playing with that, and also got to play with an AT&T 7300, which was my first exposure to Unix. It wasn't until after I graduated from high school that I got my own first computer - an Amiga. Stayed with the 68K assembler, and learned C as well. By the year after high school I was doing occasional contract work. My first real professional job didn't come until a couple of years later when I went to work for a contractor writing software for the Navy. Lots of C/C++ during my term there, and the occasional fun stuff like writing TSRs under DOS.
I got into programming because it was something that interested me, and as a result I acquired a fairly substantial library and picked up quite a lot that one would expect to learn in college. I know I'm not the best coder out there, but I also know (and my employment record would tend to corroborate) that I'm reasonably competent and I don't seem to have any difficulty getting stuff done with the MS's and PhDs where I work. I'd like to go to college and get a CS degree for my own enlightenment, but at this point in my life I don't have the time and it wouldn't make much sense financially.
Unsecured bank debt falls under 11 USC 507(a)(2), unsecured debt incurred after declaring is under (a)(3), and wages fall under (a)(4) and are limited to $10,000. Secured debt is covered under 507(b) and is explicitly declared to be higher priority. Private (i.e. non-bank) debt is in fact lower priority than wages - I actually hadn't known that.
If you feel I've misinterpreted things, I'm open to discussing it - I've been wrong before and will be in the future, but what I'm reading here jives with the two BKs I've been involved with as an employee. Just the same, if there's no money left after the secured creditors get their cut, the employees aren't getting anything.
Patented technology is already exposed by definition. Technology that remains a trade secret should be questioned as to why it hasn't been patented already if it's legitimate.
Unfortunately it also means that anyone at Theranos that's has unpaid wages is out of luck. Unsecured creditors are higher up on the BK ladder than employees.
Venture capitalists don't really care a fig about the future of the company, its technology, or anything -- they just want to get paid and won't invest unless they are first in line for payment.
Plus they don't really care about voting, since they hold the purse strings and can pretty much dictate how things are run from a practical perspective.
There are, in fact tens of thousands of them. Including a fair number that come pretty close to Earth (one passed between Earth and Luna a while back, for example)....
And they often go zipping past at 35,000 mph or so. We're already bitching about the energy cost to get a payload of a few thousand pounds into LEO at half that speed. Getting something going fast enough to match an asteroid's orbit for mining, and then slowing back down enough to get back to Earth is going to be a bit of a challenge, aside from the fact that getting back might take a year or two. You could possibly try mining stuff at the L4/L5 points, but again, getting there and back with substantial mass in tow isn't trivial.
It's rival was WinNT and it was NT4 that destroyed OS/2.
OS/2 was already well on its way to the grave by the time NT4 was introduced. Hell, I was working in an IBM shop with dozens of active OS/2 installs two years prior to NT4's release and even then there were already plans well underway to move off of it. By the time NT4 was actually available, the only OS/2 machines remaining were two machines in the DC that needed to talk directly to the 390s, and four running a specific radiology transcription package that wasn't yet available on Windows, with the rest having been migrated to Windows of one form or another. I didn't write a single line of OS/2 code the entire time I was there.
I've seen a few people try to recreate it on the web, but they never really get the same feel. The sense of community and of being a member of a club is gone now.
Yeah, for sure. It was a great time, but it's not coming back again. I never ran my own BBS, but I was a sysop on a big Amiga board back then and implemented PC door support by hanging an ancient XT running RemoteAccess off the Amiga via some glue code I wrote for the Amy. It was also cool having the weekend get-togethers at the local restaurant to actually talk to the people that you might not known except as text otherwise.
Also, the OS/2 box I mentioned before was 8 *megs*, not gigs.:-D
My OS/2 monstrosity ran on a 386/33 with 8 gigs of RAM and a 100 meg drive. I really miss the BBS days though, and I keep thinking about setting one up. Then it occurs to me that no one else would likely use it, and the thought falls by the wayside again.
My experience was having developed some software for a civil service agency under 1.3 & Presentation Manager back around the time that Windows 3.1 came out. They essentially needed an 8-line BBS that had some other functionality that required multithreading, and OS/2 ended up being the fastest and cheapest way to do it, plus it had good support for the Digi multiport serial boards. I got a nice Plexiglas award from IBM for writing that. I did do a little bit of development with Warp 2.0 after it came out, and have a copy of Warp 4 somewhere around here, but I agree that by that time there wasn't much to be gained by paying it any more attention.
NT4 had some nasty warts-- no PnP support, No USB support, and a number of others. A proper reboot of the OS/2 ecosystem with proper win32 app support, WDM driver support (So it could use windows drivers, even if just using a wrapper to do so) along with proper OpenGL, USB, and PnP support would have gone a long way back in the day.
By the time USB became available, Windows 95 had already destroyed OS/2 in the marketplace. WDM drivers didn't exist until Windows 98.
You don't see too many active OS/2 installs anymore, but years ago it was difficult to find an ATM that ran on anything else. The biggest business case was for those companies that ran IBM mainframes - Communication Manager/2 made it relatively easy to get OS/2 boxes to co-exist with them, which I'm sure contributed to the aforementioned popularity as an OS for ATMs. Additionally, if you had MS-DOS applications that required a specific version, the primitive VM support allowed you to run several different versions in separate windows.
You're speaking more of what the Turbo line grew into, after Borland came out with their full-bore C++. In that later period they had light and inexpensive Turbo products, and the very powerful Borland C++. In the earlier time Turbo Pascal was a really lightweight DOS development product.
Right. The earliest Turbo Pascal that you're speaking of was the one that had the really hokey ads in Byte and PC Magazine, with a ridiculously too-low-to-be-true price tag. The problem for other compiler vendors was that it was a serious compiler that worked like a champ.
. At the time IBM's BIOS was reverse-engineered they weren't even the best computers.
IBM's BIOS wasn't reverse-engineered. The source was available directly from IBM via the Technical Reference Manual. Phoenix and Compaq both merely did a clean-room reimplementation based on looking at the function call interfaces in the actual source code and what that code actually did, then writing a detailed set of requirements for the coders. No reverse-engineering was needed.
Surely a contract for penetration testing will be legal even if this law goes through.
Sure, for those few companies that are willing to spend the money to do it. Everyone else would rather pocket that money and plead ignorance to their customers and shareholders.
There are thousands of moving parts in an ICE drive train, and only a handful in an EV drive train. You will never, ever get more reliability out of more complexity (as long as all else, such as design maturity, is equivalent).
And likely thousands fewer lines of code. Failure modes don't have to be hardware-related.
Why should the people of one country be privileged over the people of any other? Just because they were born there? That's not thinking globally.
The same thought logically extends to "why should any person be privileged over any other?", in which case you're a bad person if you're living above subsistence level, because there are always others with less and you should forgo your own well-being because helping those less fortunate is more important.
I expect my government to do that which is in my country's best interests, and I expect other countries' governments to similarly look after their own citizens. If they happen to coincide to benefit both of us, great. If not, I expect my country's benefit to be of prime importance. You can call me "jingoistic and nativistic" all you want.
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I'm one of the group that Slashdot crowd loves to despise - an H1B programmer who grew up in India.
I don't have anything against those that are here on H-1Bs. I do have an issue with the employers that abuse the system, though. If you've been here 10 years, you should have at least been given the opportunity to get a green card, and should be allowed the same freedom of movement that any domestic employee would have without having to worry about being deported if something happens with your job.
As far as the quality issue goes, I've worked with really crappy H-1Bs and really amazing ones. Like most domestic programmers, those that have a real interest in the field tend to do well, and those that got into it only because they thought it would pay well, not so much.
Same here. They hire me when mediocrity is just too damned good.
Obviously the tools are a lot better now, but there are plenty of embedded environments with that kind of resource pressure. "Okay, how do I make this all fit into 128 bytes?!"
The machine was from Northgate Computer Systems.
It's been forever since I saw that name. Built like tanks, and they had possibly the best keyboard ever made.
That is, the usual way for 1980s computer geeks. Self-taught BASIC on an Apple II using a few books on Applesoft and Integer BASIC. Later Pascal also on the Apple II with a few books including Jensen and Wirth's PASCAL User Manual and Report. Learned C (K&R, mind you, none of that prototype crap) on a Mac XL with the old Megamax compiler. Picked up 6502 assembler out of necessity in there, also 68000 and 6809.
This was pretty similar to my path. I started with Applesoft on the Apple IIs (the sweet black Bell & Howell ones) at the local learning center on the base my dad was stationed at, and a few months after that the director of the center called me over and said that he thought I needed to be learning more complex stuff, and gave me a book on 6502 assembly programming, which I just devoured. I skipped the Pascal route because the UCSD package that they had was always checked out by someone else when I got there. After we moved, my mom was a manager at a local ComputerLand (back when such a place existed) and I pretty much had the run of the place - I got a copy of "Inside Macintosh" and picked up 68K assembler playing with that, and also got to play with an AT&T 7300, which was my first exposure to Unix. It wasn't until after I graduated from high school that I got my own first computer - an Amiga. Stayed with the 68K assembler, and learned C as well. By the year after high school I was doing occasional contract work. My first real professional job didn't come until a couple of years later when I went to work for a contractor writing software for the Navy. Lots of C/C++ during my term there, and the occasional fun stuff like writing TSRs under DOS.
I got into programming because it was something that interested me, and as a result I acquired a fairly substantial library and picked up quite a lot that one would expect to learn in college. I know I'm not the best coder out there, but I also know (and my employment record would tend to corroborate) that I'm reasonably competent and I don't seem to have any difficulty getting stuff done with the MS's and PhDs where I work. I'd like to go to college and get a CS degree for my own enlightenment, but at this point in my life I don't have the time and it wouldn't make much sense financially.
*People* are always trying to talk us into doing things we don't want to do. Neither sex has an exclusive on this behavior.
Here's the relevant law.
Unsecured bank debt falls under 11 USC 507(a)(2), unsecured debt incurred after declaring is under (a)(3), and wages fall under (a)(4) and are limited to $10,000. Secured debt is covered under 507(b) and is explicitly declared to be higher priority. Private (i.e. non-bank) debt is in fact lower priority than wages - I actually hadn't known that.
If you feel I've misinterpreted things, I'm open to discussing it - I've been wrong before and will be in the future, but what I'm reading here jives with the two BKs I've been involved with as an employee. Just the same, if there's no money left after the secured creditors get their cut, the employees aren't getting anything.
Patented technology is already exposed by definition. Technology that remains a trade secret should be questioned as to why it hasn't been patented already if it's legitimate.
Unfortunately it also means that anyone at Theranos that's has unpaid wages is out of luck. Unsecured creditors are higher up on the BK ladder than employees.
Venture capitalists don't really care a fig about the future of the company, its technology, or anything -- they just want to get paid and won't invest unless they are first in line for payment.
Plus they don't really care about voting, since they hold the purse strings and can pretty much dictate how things are run from a practical perspective.
There are, in fact tens of thousands of them. Including a fair number that come pretty close to Earth (one passed between Earth and Luna a while back, for example)....
And they often go zipping past at 35,000 mph or so. We're already bitching about the energy cost to get a payload of a few thousand pounds into LEO at half that speed. Getting something going fast enough to match an asteroid's orbit for mining, and then slowing back down enough to get back to Earth is going to be a bit of a challenge, aside from the fact that getting back might take a year or two. You could possibly try mining stuff at the L4/L5 points, but again, getting there and back with substantial mass in tow isn't trivial.
It's rival was WinNT and it was NT4 that destroyed OS/2.
OS/2 was already well on its way to the grave by the time NT4 was introduced. Hell, I was working in an IBM shop with dozens of active OS/2 installs two years prior to NT4's release and even then there were already plans well underway to move off of it. By the time NT4 was actually available, the only OS/2 machines remaining were two machines in the DC that needed to talk directly to the 390s, and four running a specific radiology transcription package that wasn't yet available on Windows, with the rest having been migrated to Windows of one form or another. I didn't write a single line of OS/2 code the entire time I was there.
I've seen a few people try to recreate it on the web, but they never really get the same feel. The sense of community and of being a member of a club is gone now.
:-D
Yeah, for sure. It was a great time, but it's not coming back again. I never ran my own BBS, but I was a sysop on a big Amiga board back then and implemented PC door support by hanging an ancient XT running RemoteAccess off the Amiga via some glue code I wrote for the Amy. It was also cool having the weekend get-togethers at the local restaurant to actually talk to the people that you might not known except as text otherwise.
Also, the OS/2 box I mentioned before was 8 *megs*, not gigs.
My OS/2 monstrosity ran on a 386/33 with 8 gigs of RAM and a 100 meg drive. I really miss the BBS days though, and I keep thinking about setting one up. Then it occurs to me that no one else would likely use it, and the thought falls by the wayside again.
Replying to myself - that should read "around the time that Windows 3.0 came out". This was in 1990 or so.
My experience was having developed some software for a civil service agency under 1.3 & Presentation Manager back around the time that Windows 3.1 came out. They essentially needed an 8-line BBS that had some other functionality that required multithreading, and OS/2 ended up being the fastest and cheapest way to do it, plus it had good support for the Digi multiport serial boards. I got a nice Plexiglas award from IBM for writing that. I did do a little bit of development with Warp 2.0 after it came out, and have a copy of Warp 4 somewhere around here, but I agree that by that time there wasn't much to be gained by paying it any more attention.
NT4 had some nasty warts-- no PnP support, No USB support, and a number of others. A proper reboot of the OS/2 ecosystem with proper win32 app support, WDM driver support (So it could use windows drivers, even if just using a wrapper to do so) along with proper OpenGL, USB, and PnP support would have gone a long way back in the day.
By the time USB became available, Windows 95 had already destroyed OS/2 in the marketplace. WDM drivers didn't exist until Windows 98.
I remember that you could also run Windows apps but first had to install Windows 3.11 inside OS/2.
The funny thing was that you could often get better performance running Windows software within OS/2 as opposed to a native install under DOS.
You don't see too many active OS/2 installs anymore, but years ago it was difficult to find an ATM that ran on anything else. The biggest business case was for those companies that ran IBM mainframes - Communication Manager/2 made it relatively easy to get OS/2 boxes to co-exist with them, which I'm sure contributed to the aforementioned popularity as an OS for ATMs. Additionally, if you had MS-DOS applications that required a specific version, the primitive VM support allowed you to run several different versions in separate windows.
You're speaking more of what the Turbo line grew into, after Borland came out with their full-bore C++. In that later period they had light and inexpensive Turbo products, and the very powerful Borland C++. In the earlier time Turbo Pascal was a really lightweight DOS development product.
Right. The earliest Turbo Pascal that you're speaking of was the one that had the really hokey ads in Byte and PC Magazine, with a ridiculously too-low-to-be-true price tag. The problem for other compiler vendors was that it was a serious compiler that worked like a champ.
. At the time IBM's BIOS was reverse-engineered they weren't even the best computers.
IBM's BIOS wasn't reverse-engineered. The source was available directly from IBM via the Technical Reference Manual. Phoenix and Compaq both merely did a clean-room reimplementation based on looking at the function call interfaces in the actual source code and what that code actually did, then writing a detailed set of requirements for the coders. No reverse-engineering was needed.
Surely a contract for penetration testing will be legal even if this law goes through.
Sure, for those few companies that are willing to spend the money to do it. Everyone else would rather pocket that money and plead ignorance to their customers and shareholders.
There are thousands of moving parts in an ICE drive train, and only a handful in an EV drive train. You will never, ever get more reliability out of more complexity (as long as all else, such as design maturity, is equivalent).
And likely thousands fewer lines of code. Failure modes don't have to be hardware-related.
I just do not understand, why is it necessary to go in to debt to run for president of this country
It's not. The idea is to hold fundraisers and such to get others to pay for your campaign. You're not supposed to use your own money, silly.
Why should the people of one country be privileged over the people of any other? Just because they were born there? That's not thinking globally.
The same thought logically extends to "why should any person be privileged over any other?", in which case you're a bad person if you're living above subsistence level, because there are always others with less and you should forgo your own well-being because helping those less fortunate is more important.
I expect my government to do that which is in my country's best interests, and I expect other countries' governments to similarly look after their own citizens. If they happen to coincide to benefit both of us, great. If not, I expect my country's benefit to be of prime importance. You can call me "jingoistic and nativistic" all you want.