I am in my mid 20's and back when I was in college we had 3 years of Cobol, some Fortran 77 and 99 and quite a bit of AIX Unix on an RS-6000 (was a linux addict even before then). The main purpose was to provide good programmers for the millenium fix which affected quite a bit old finance programs on mainframes. The funny thing was that in my first year we only had 70 people starting in computer science (that was 1996). That summer newspapers started talking about the millenium problems that could occur and the amount of money companies were willing to spent in order to get their old software fixed. The next year they had over 300 applicants! I'm not sure what the situation in the US was at the time, but I assume more companies over there had already switched to WinNT and most universities had stopped teaching those ancient programming languages... Looks like I might be able to use those skills after all.
Nothing in the article says we are actually going to throw people out. I know working in the US on an H1B is always stressfull and makes it hard to make long term plans, and I can see that people become a little tense when they make announcements like these. Once again this is only a letter, no bill has passed, no actual measurements have been taken. I do disagree with a couple of posts out there mentioning that people don't integrate. I know here in Silicon Valley alone are quite a bit of H1B's and most of these people live lives just as US people would. They take part in community events, organise stuff, help out where they can. Watch out, after all we are all immigrants in this country:)
Well let's not get too excited about all this. Chances are they will never be able to put their foot down, and if they do, oh well, consider it a good intention to build a new and better image compression technology (although JPEG 2000 looks rather promising).
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I am in my mid 20's and back when I was in college we had 3 years of Cobol, some Fortran 77 and 99 and quite a bit of AIX Unix on an RS-6000 (was a linux addict even before then). The main purpose was to provide good programmers for the millenium fix which affected quite a bit old finance programs on mainframes. The funny thing was that in my first year we only had 70 people starting in computer science (that was 1996). That summer newspapers started talking about the millenium problems that could occur and the amount of money companies were willing to spent in order to get their old software fixed. The next year they had over 300 applicants! I'm not sure what the situation in the US was at the time, but I assume more companies over there had already switched to WinNT and most universities had stopped teaching those ancient programming languages... Looks like I might be able to use those skills after all.
Nothing in the article says we are actually going to throw people out. I know working in the US on an H1B is always stressfull and makes it hard to make long term plans, and I can see that people become a little tense when they make announcements like these. Once again this is only a letter, no bill has passed, no actual measurements have been taken. I do disagree with a couple of posts out there mentioning that people don't integrate. I know here in Silicon Valley alone are quite a bit of H1B's and most of these people live lives just as US people would. They take part in community events, organise stuff, help out where they can. Watch out, after all we are all immigrants in this country :)
Well let's not get too excited about all this. Chances are they will never be able to put their foot down, and if they do, oh well, consider it a good intention to build a new and better image compression technology (although JPEG 2000 looks rather promising).