Re:Hell, the G5 did better than PC Mag said it did
on
PC Mag Compares G5 to Xeon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
on the average the G5 is 15.7122479017% faster then the Xenon
By taking percentages, you have assumed that each test is of equal relative weight. This runs the risk of oversimplification.
For example, if computer A does task 1 in 1 second, and computer B does the same in 1.1 second, then B is slower by 10%. If A does task 2 in 5 minutes, and B does it in 6 minutes, then B is slower by 20%. If you simply take the average, then you'll show that B is slower by 15%. However, if you add up the times taken over the two tests (5m + 1s versus 6m + 1.1s), B is slower by about 20%. If task 2 is something you do a lot, then the performance difference is even more significant.
In your particular case, the actual percentages appear to range from -2.5% to 44%. It's probably not a good idea to simplify this to just 15%.
The analogy you describe between the ebola and a "harsh" computer virus is valid, in the days when a diskette was the main medium of propagation. The virus has to hide in order to propagate.
Today, the virus can propagate very quickly over the Internet. Even if it destroys its host after just ten successful infections, it's still terribly dangerous. Imagine if each ebola-infected host could infect ten random people anywhere else on earth. It's an all new ecosystem.
I want my government to be; a body that allows me to live my life as I want to, provides an environment that allows me to prosper, and protects me from those who don't want me to exercise my freedoms.
Great, so you don't need to bring out the "founding fathers" to bolster your argument.
Reasonable people do disagree on what constitutes an "environment that allows me to prosper". Welfare, for example, is intended as a stopgap measure to help people get back on their feet. Affordable health care, for example, allows people (particularly the poor) to invest more of their resources towards education and other paths to prosperity. Scholarships and other forms of tuition assistance help people get out of the vicious cycle of poverty.
I'm not saying any of these programs are well maintained as they exist today. My main point is that citizens do differ on how much they want their government to do, and the intentions of the "founding fathers" are not particularly relevant here.
Quite simply, the government was never intended to [...]
With all due respect to the American "founding fathers", whose many ideas put them centuries before their time, they don't have all the answers. Copyright, as they considered it, did not include the possibility of very cheap exact digital copies of artworks, or computer software. Government, as they envisioned it, did not include the advances in telecommunications and transportation that could allow for a more effective federal government (and less state rights). Nevermind that they were not that ahead of their time in terms of women's rights or the rights of "colored people", and certainly could not be imagining the legal or societal effects of asexual human reproduction. They were, however, intelligent enough to know that they don't know everthing, and left provisions for the US Constitution to be amended.
Point is, Confucius was a great sage, but you still don't want to take his every word literally. The question is, what do you want the government to be? Just say it, and stop hiding behind the "founding fathers" or the Bible whenever it is convenient.
Tell me this, which is more desirable, paying taxes on what you use or paying taxes for what other people are using?
There is certainly great truth in this statement, but it cannot be taken to the extreme. Education, for example, is not something many families can afford to pay for on an as-needed basis. The society (including adults with no children) essentially chips in to send most or every child through some minimal required schooling. Firefighter or police services are similarly quite expensive (especially when they are effective) for only the users to pay for. I cannot imagine a society where your principle is taken to its logical conclusion holding together.
Put another way, yours is not a sound principle, because it cannot be effectively applied to every situation. The better question is where to draw the line between things everybody should chip in for, and things only users should pay for. Above what is "desirable" you must consider what is "responsible".
Tax cuts don't have to be justified. Taking people's money away and spending it for them has to be justified.
If you pay any attention at all, you'll realize that Bush is not cutting services, only taxes. The government is going into deficit spending. What Bush has done is to borrow money on your behalf, and that absolutely needs to be justified by a responsible leader.
This is exactly like taking out a loan to start a business. The money you borrow needs to help you make more profit than you have to pay back in interest, or you might as well not do anything at all. When a government cuts taxes (especially when it cuts selectively), it needs to explain how the cuts that are funded by borrowing are going to make more money in the long run than the interest it has to pay. For example, if the government borrows money to build a new bridge, it needs to explain how the bridge will help commerce, or save transportation costs and time, and so on.
I would be satisfied with Bush using the bright blue color of the sky as a justification for a tax cut.
That suggests, more than anything else, that your judgement is clouded by your ideology. There's nothing inherently bad with a tax cut, but nothing inherently good, either. The half-trillion dollar question is, is the government simply more efficient (doing the same with less money), cutting services, or borrowing money. In the latter two cases, a responsible citizen needs to ask what services are getting cut, or how borrowing money is better than not.
With just a bit of coordination and standardization, hardware detection takes very little time. What takes time is hardware initialization, which is compounded if your operating system is not able to initialize multiple peripherals simultaneously.
I don't know of a single case where a company was busted for violating the "spirit"
You're still stuck on this point. Let me give you the context of the discussion:
A person is complaining that the H1-Bs they hire are incompetent. Therefore, the person concludes that H1-B is a stupid system.
My point is, the salary requirements of H1-B are meant so that you can hire the best candidates. Because a US company can afford some of the highest salaries in the world, it can easily attract the best candidates. The person in question subverted this system, and paid them below-market wages, yet complains about the quality of H1-B candidates. It tells us that the system can be subverted, which is a Bad Thing that should be fixed, but the person subverting it really shouldn't be throwing too many stones.
It has nothing to do with whether the H1-B can be subverted, or how strictly it is enforced. The law is not perfect, but it certainly allows you to do the Right Thing: hire the best with the best salaries.
My point is not that the H1-B system cannot be subverted or exploited, which is a valid criticism of any legal system. My point is that if your company starts out with the intention of using H1-B programmers primarily because they're cheaper, you are violating at least the stated spirit and objective, and possibly even the letter of the H1-B laws. It's rather silly to then claim that H1-B is a bad system, because your cheap programmers did not live up to your high expectations. Is the traffic light a bad system because you ran a red light and hit another car?
If you use the H1-B and spend the extra money to hire the best Indian or Chinese programmers, I expect your results would be rather different.
You're forgetting who gets to write the laws in the US. What you mean is, first the US citizens need to take back the US government. For that to happen, people need to stop voting for politicians who take money from businesses. Now, what makes you think the average American cares a whole lot that $50K-$100K jobs are lost?
What do I suggest? Wake up, smell the coffee, and stop chasing each other to the bottom. Computer companies are like the airlines, they are trying to starve each other out. Look at the air industry, and tell me with a straight face that sort of behavior is healthy.
First of all, there are serious differences that must not be overlooked. In general, a business might be capital intensive with relatively cheap labor (think automobile assembly plant or oil refinery), or light on capital with relatively expensive labor (think computer programmer). Airlines are both: capital intensive (airplanes and other specialized equipment) and powerful, expensive labor (pilots, etc).
As such, labor cost is pretty much the only thing a software vendor can cut. An airline can go to the Southwest model and use only one type of aircraft to save on maintenance, or try to force unions to lower wages, or try to reduce flights in unprofitable routes. A software vendor is unlikely to save any significant amount of money by making its programmers use a cheaper computer, or take up less office space. This nature of the software business is also why people can write a competitive operating system in their spare time.
Therefore, they try to find cheaper labor. Slashdot anecdotes notwithstanding, it really isn't clear at all to management that the resulting quality is markedly worse. In fact, the same Slashdot anecdotes would suggest that management hardly cares about quality at all. Like I said, I empathize, but I think "stop chasing each other to the bottom" is not an alternative that US businesses can understand and accept. Moreover, even if they didn't outsource to India (assuming the quality really is worse), they still may outsource to somewhere in Europe for similar quality and slightly lower wages. What would we complain about if they did that?
My point is, either you have a problem with poor quality, or a problem with outsourcing. Using the former as a reason to avoid the latter is really a bit hokey. A problem with outsourcing per se, however, is a political question, not a business or microeconomic one.
(Incidentally, this also likely means that setting up an automobile plant in the US is not that much more expensive than one in Japan or Europe. It's easier for the savings in shipping and taxes to make up for the higher wages, so it's not really fair to compare the two.)
We use to have H1B's from India in our shop as cheap programmers.
That's your first mistake. H1-Bs are not supposed to be cheap labor, as far as US law is concerned. If you pay them below market wages, you may have already broken US federal laws.
what are we suppose to do? Spend a senior programmer's hours to do code reviews of the H1B code? Where's the cost savings then?
Code reviews are a very good way to spend a senior engineer's time. They can review far more code than they can possible write and test, and this way the benefits of their experience can be applied to a much bigger code base. Think about it: while a $100K programmer might be able to write twice as much (well-tested, good) code in
the same time as a $50K programmer, a $150K
programmer most likely couldn't produce triple the output of the $50K junior programmer. Helping two or more $50K programmer produce like a $75K programmers, on the other hand, justifies paying him/her that extra $50K.
The project was $270k over budget and a year late. That's the cost of three senior programmers at $90k per year for a full year.
No, the full cost of an employee who makes a $90K salary is probably closer to $150K.
The more important question, I think, is how your company hired a C++ programmer who doesn't know about "break".
Why can't management understand THAT side of the equation?
Because the smarter managers leave their own mess behind for somebody else to clean up. This lack of accountability means they don't ever have to understand very much at all.
Isn't this exactly what Slashdot likes to tell the RIAA? That new technology enables new business models and kills old ones. That Internet distribution will kill the CD, and they better get on with it or face extinction.
Well, new technology enabled a less expensive worker to do your job. Are you more entitled to an income on your old "business model" than the RIAA?
Yes, the human cost is terrible. I have lost work, and I empathize. However, what do you propose US businesses do?
lazy or greedy companies... [...] It they are not lazy then they are doing more work than they have to and are burning shareholder $$$. If they aren't greedy then they are not maximizing shareholder $$$.
If you actually finished reading that sentence, then you'll realize that I wrote "lazy or greedy companies that intend to subvert the process by not honestly examining American candidates, then they're breaking the law". I'm talking about a degree of laziness or greed that is illegal.
I did not know that about H1-B, but I really don't think it matters.
Well, it does matter. If you're not sure whether you'll be living in a town for a long time, you generally hold off on purchases like real estate and various durable goods. It's not fair to hold that against H1-B workers, whose main reason for hesitation is US law!
If I were in their shoes I would have started off pursuing a more permanent means of entrance.
Like what? The only other ways to enter the US to work basically involve having blood or marital relatives in the US.
Six years is also plenty of time to pursue them while working on an H1-B visa, unless H1-B prevents you from doing so.
Actually, it's not plenty of time. The INS and various state labor departments can be horribly inefficient. Also, companies don't exactly have a great deal of incentive to help their employees get green cards. In any case, without a green card in hand, foreigners are simply not likely to make big purchases here.
The point is, you can't restrict a person to a 6-year deadline to live in the country, and still expect them not to send money home and expect them to purchase a lot of US goods.
As for the unemployed US workers, they should in fact get preferential treatment, even under existing US laws. H1-Bs must be hired at prevailing wages, and have additional expenses as far as companies are concerned. IOW, the problem doesn't need some magical solution, merely proper enforcement of laws already on the books.
I'm sure that's a whole lot fairer than telling the citizen that his job has been replaced by a h1-b [...]
I'm referring to a foreign national who accepted a legal job offer from a company that performed an honest and reasonable search for American workers to fill the job. If you think that this company should fire the foreign worker the minute an equally qualified American worker (who did not take advantage of the honest recruiting efforts) shows up at the door, you have a different definition for "fairness" than I do.
If the company didn't follow the law, then it's not just unfair, it's illegal. Report them to your local authorities.
Like, duh, you've never heard of the internet? Prohibitively expensive? Let's see: set up a website with jobs about to be given to foreigners; wait 30 days for applications; no aplications?; you can bring someone in; otherwise, forget it Mr. CEO Bossman.
You misunderstand my post.
First, assume that we're talking about an honest company that is making a real effort to find a qualified American. My point is that this company cannot be expected to find every last qualified American, and offer them the job, before hiring a foreigner. Putting the job on a website and sifting through the resumes you get is exactly part of a "reasonable recruiting effort" that I was talking about. Knocking on every door in case there's an American engineer behind it, on the other hand, is not a reasonable requirement because it is "prohibitively expensive".
Now, if we're talking about lazy or greedy companies that intend to subvert the process by not honestly examining American candidates, then they're breaking the law right there. All you should need to do is to alert the INS, not sue them for the job.
As for the "sob story", I am referring to a foreigner who made a major life decision (moving an entire family to a foreign land) based on a legitimate job offer. This offer should not be rescinded any moment an equally qualified American worker (who did not know of the honest recruiting effort, for example) shows up at their door. This is merely good faith.
Many people dislike immigrant workers, like H1-B sponsored workers and illegal aliens, because they have a habit of working here for a few years, pumping their earnings into the economy of their home country, and leaving.
You are utterly ill-informed on the issue.
The reason H1-B workers don't make long term investments in the US is because US law requires them to leave the country after 6 years as their visas expire. What would you be doing if you were in their shoes?
Also, don't lump illegal workers together with legal ones when discussing their contributions to the US economy. H1-B workers pay taxes, including social security taxes that they have no hope of collecting (because if they lose their jobs they must leave the country).
since H1Bs are supposed to be for skills that couldn't be found in the US - if I can prove that I have the skills an H1B has, can I file a lawsuit to claim that position.
No, an H1-B is granted to a foreign national who fits the requirements of a job, if no qualified American or permanent resident can be found after a reasonable recruiting effort. There are 280 million Americans, and it'll be prohibitively expensive to ensure that there are absolutely no matches anywhere in the country.
That may sound like a bad deal to you, but consider that the foreign national in question may have to have moved an entire family overseas to take the job. It is equally unfair to fire him or her the very moment a qualified and willing American shows up at the door.
They forgot to check that these folks would be in a position to pay in the first place.
They're not after money. At the rate courts proceed, they might make $20,000 off a college student after three months of lawsuits. What they're trying to do is to create a chilling effect, and it doesn't really matter how many of the 260 or so defendants actually pay anything. They are merely setting an example with them, and looks like it might just work.
At what point do we protect the rights of the producer of a good to make sure they are able to make a living off of it?
Absolutely as little as possible, but enough so that they don't just give up and find another job.
That is, as a society we benefit from creative works, and we'd like the artists to be able to afford to create full-time. However, the copyright monopoly we grant them deprives somebody else of a right to create something similar. You probably can't ever publish your novel about a young wizard named Harry Porter, unless you are rather young and live to 100 or so, even if you actually finished writing the book before Rowling did.
Nobody has an inherent right to make a living (or any money, for that matter) off any particular service. There's such a thing as a professional author or musician because society decided it was better for us to have that.
Fundamentally, the issue of slavery concerns whether a human can be another's property. What you're asking is akin to asking how cruel a master has to be for slavery to be bad. Most people today would probably say that the "amount" of cruelty need not be considered at all. However nice you plan to be to your slave, you won't be allowed to purchase another human.
Human laws basically allow you to own bacteria. Some food products containing them can be sold and ingested. There are generally no laws against washing your hands, or sterilizing an open wound with alcohol, which can result in the death of bacteria.
This isn't to say that there are not important ethical issues to consider. If the battery leaks, are the bacteria benign to our environment? Is the manufacturing process for these bacteria exceedingly wasteful? These are similar to the questions many now ask about anti-bacterial hand soap (they free up the ecosystem for bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics).
Re:The "insert technology here" ready con
on
New iMacs (and iPods)
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· Score: 2, Informative
In most cases taking a closer look at the specifications reveals that the computer does not come with the technology mentioned, but simply has a slot that will accept the device.
I don't know about Bluetooth, but when Apple says "Airport ready" they mean you get the slot for the card, and that the antenna is already built into the case. The antenna connector is of the right length, and neatly tucked to the side of the Airport card slot. The Airport card itself doesn't come with anything else, because the computer is "ready" for it.
IBM cooks up code to make the G5 look as fast as possible. Intel cooks up code to make the Xeon looks as fast as possible. [...] Now we can have a fair shootout.
But don't confuse "fair" with "true". Neither result may accurately represent what you'll get in real applications on either platform, nor reflect the performance differences between real applications on the two platforms. If so, then why benchmark at all?
develop smaller games. For every Grand Theft Auto 3, there's a Tetris.
Uh, no, and your choice of examples are most telling. GTA3 was released recently, while Tetris was released nearly 20 years ago. How many other games can you name are as cheap to produce and as well loved? If it was so easy to invent small and highly popular games, why are the big studios not doing that maximize profit?
Fact is, the GTA3s are easier for those who can afford it to churn out year after year, while good cheap ideas are extremely hard to come by. I don't disagree with your suggestion that smaller players need to do what the big studios don't do, but to say there's a Tetris for every GTA3 is not a realistic expectation to have.
Slashdot Mirror
By taking percentages, you have assumed that each test is of equal relative weight. This runs the risk of oversimplification.
For example, if computer A does task 1 in 1 second, and computer B does the same in 1.1 second, then B is slower by 10%. If A does task 2 in 5 minutes, and B does it in 6 minutes, then B is slower by 20%. If you simply take the average, then you'll show that B is slower by 15%. However, if you add up the times taken over the two tests (5m + 1s versus 6m + 1.1s), B is slower by about 20%. If task 2 is something you do a lot, then the performance difference is even more significant.
In your particular case, the actual percentages appear to range from -2.5% to 44%. It's probably not a good idea to simplify this to just 15%.
Today, the virus can propagate very quickly over the Internet. Even if it destroys its host after just ten successful infections, it's still terribly dangerous. Imagine if each ebola-infected host could infect ten random people anywhere else on earth. It's an all new ecosystem.
Great, so you don't need to bring out the "founding fathers" to bolster your argument.
Reasonable people do disagree on what constitutes an "environment that allows me to prosper". Welfare, for example, is intended as a stopgap measure to help people get back on their feet. Affordable health care, for example, allows people (particularly the poor) to invest more of their resources towards education and other paths to prosperity. Scholarships and other forms of tuition assistance help people get out of the vicious cycle of poverty.
I'm not saying any of these programs are well maintained as they exist today. My main point is that citizens do differ on how much they want their government to do, and the intentions of the "founding fathers" are not particularly relevant here.
With all due respect to the American "founding fathers", whose many ideas put them centuries before their time, they don't have all the answers. Copyright, as they considered it, did not include the possibility of very cheap exact digital copies of artworks, or computer software. Government, as they envisioned it, did not include the advances in telecommunications and transportation that could allow for a more effective federal government (and less state rights). Nevermind that they were not that ahead of their time in terms of women's rights or the rights of "colored people", and certainly could not be imagining the legal or societal effects of asexual human reproduction. They were, however, intelligent enough to know that they don't know everthing, and left provisions for the US Constitution to be amended.
Point is, Confucius was a great sage, but you still don't want to take his every word literally. The question is, what do you want the government to be? Just say it, and stop hiding behind the "founding fathers" or the Bible whenever it is convenient.
There is certainly great truth in this statement, but it cannot be taken to the extreme. Education, for example, is not something many families can afford to pay for on an as-needed basis. The society (including adults with no children) essentially chips in to send most or every child through some minimal required schooling. Firefighter or police services are similarly quite expensive (especially when they are effective) for only the users to pay for. I cannot imagine a society where your principle is taken to its logical conclusion holding together.
Put another way, yours is not a sound principle, because it cannot be effectively applied to every situation. The better question is where to draw the line between things everybody should chip in for, and things only users should pay for. Above what is "desirable" you must consider what is "responsible".
If you pay any attention at all, you'll realize that Bush is not cutting services, only taxes. The government is going into deficit spending. What Bush has done is to borrow money on your behalf, and that absolutely needs to be justified by a responsible leader.
This is exactly like taking out a loan to start a business. The money you borrow needs to help you make more profit than you have to pay back in interest, or you might as well not do anything at all. When a government cuts taxes (especially when it cuts selectively), it needs to explain how the cuts that are funded by borrowing are going to make more money in the long run than the interest it has to pay. For example, if the government borrows money to build a new bridge, it needs to explain how the bridge will help commerce, or save transportation costs and time, and so on.
I would be satisfied with Bush using the bright blue color of the sky as a justification for a tax cut.
That suggests, more than anything else, that your judgement is clouded by your ideology. There's nothing inherently bad with a tax cut, but nothing inherently good, either. The half-trillion dollar question is, is the government simply more efficient (doing the same with less money), cutting services, or borrowing money. In the latter two cases, a responsible citizen needs to ask what services are getting cut, or how borrowing money is better than not.
With just a bit of coordination and standardization, hardware detection takes very little time. What takes time is hardware initialization, which is compounded if your operating system is not able to initialize multiple peripherals simultaneously.
You're still stuck on this point. Let me give you the context of the discussion:
A person is complaining that the H1-Bs they hire are incompetent. Therefore, the person concludes that H1-B is a stupid system.
My point is, the salary requirements of H1-B are meant so that you can hire the best candidates. Because a US company can afford some of the highest salaries in the world, it can easily attract the best candidates. The person in question subverted this system, and paid them below-market wages, yet complains about the quality of H1-B candidates. It tells us that the system can be subverted, which is a Bad Thing that should be fixed, but the person subverting it really shouldn't be throwing too many stones.
It has nothing to do with whether the H1-B can be subverted, or how strictly it is enforced. The law is not perfect, but it certainly allows you to do the Right Thing: hire the best with the best salaries.
If you use the H1-B and spend the extra money to hire the best Indian or Chinese programmers, I expect your results would be rather different.
You're forgetting who gets to write the laws in the US. What you mean is, first the US citizens need to take back the US government. For that to happen, people need to stop voting for politicians who take money from businesses. Now, what makes you think the average American cares a whole lot that $50K-$100K jobs are lost?
I think we'd be lucky they don't snicker.
First of all, there are serious differences that must not be overlooked. In general, a business might be capital intensive with relatively cheap labor (think automobile assembly plant or oil refinery), or light on capital with relatively expensive labor (think computer programmer). Airlines are both: capital intensive (airplanes and other specialized equipment) and powerful, expensive labor (pilots, etc).
As such, labor cost is pretty much the only thing a software vendor can cut. An airline can go to the Southwest model and use only one type of aircraft to save on maintenance, or try to force unions to lower wages, or try to reduce flights in unprofitable routes. A software vendor is unlikely to save any significant amount of money by making its programmers use a cheaper computer, or take up less office space. This nature of the software business is also why people can write a competitive operating system in their spare time.
Therefore, they try to find cheaper labor. Slashdot anecdotes notwithstanding, it really isn't clear at all to management that the resulting quality is markedly worse. In fact, the same Slashdot anecdotes would suggest that management hardly cares about quality at all. Like I said, I empathize, but I think "stop chasing each other to the bottom" is not an alternative that US businesses can understand and accept. Moreover, even if they didn't outsource to India (assuming the quality really is worse), they still may outsource to somewhere in Europe for similar quality and slightly lower wages. What would we complain about if they did that?
My point is, either you have a problem with poor quality, or a problem with outsourcing. Using the former as a reason to avoid the latter is really a bit hokey. A problem with outsourcing per se, however, is a political question, not a business or microeconomic one.
(Incidentally, this also likely means that setting up an automobile plant in the US is not that much more expensive than one in Japan or Europe. It's easier for the savings in shipping and taxes to make up for the higher wages, so it's not really fair to compare the two.)
That's your first mistake. H1-Bs are not supposed to be cheap labor, as far as US law is concerned. If you pay them below market wages, you may have already broken US federal laws.
what are we suppose to do? Spend a senior programmer's hours to do code reviews of the H1B code? Where's the cost savings then?
Code reviews are a very good way to spend a senior engineer's time. They can review far more code than they can possible write and test, and this way the benefits of their experience can be applied to a much bigger code base. Think about it: while a $100K programmer might be able to write twice as much (well-tested, good) code in the same time as a $50K programmer, a $150K programmer most likely couldn't produce triple the output of the $50K junior programmer. Helping two or more $50K programmer produce like a $75K programmers, on the other hand, justifies paying him/her that extra $50K.
The project was $270k over budget and a year late. That's the cost of three senior programmers at $90k per year for a full year.
No, the full cost of an employee who makes a $90K salary is probably closer to $150K.
The more important question, I think, is how your company hired a C++ programmer who doesn't know about "break".
Why can't management understand THAT side of the equation?
Because the smarter managers leave their own mess behind for somebody else to clean up. This lack of accountability means they don't ever have to understand very much at all.
Isn't this exactly what Slashdot likes to tell the RIAA? That new technology enables new business models and kills old ones. That Internet distribution will kill the CD, and they better get on with it or face extinction.
Well, new technology enabled a less expensive worker to do your job. Are you more entitled to an income on your old "business model" than the RIAA?
Yes, the human cost is terrible. I have lost work, and I empathize. However, what do you propose US businesses do?
If you actually finished reading that sentence, then you'll realize that I wrote "lazy or greedy companies that intend to subvert the process by not honestly examining American candidates, then they're breaking the law". I'm talking about a degree of laziness or greed that is illegal.
Well, it does matter. If you're not sure whether you'll be living in a town for a long time, you generally hold off on purchases like real estate and various durable goods. It's not fair to hold that against H1-B workers, whose main reason for hesitation is US law!
If I were in their shoes I would have started off pursuing a more permanent means of entrance.
Like what? The only other ways to enter the US to work basically involve having blood or marital relatives in the US.
Six years is also plenty of time to pursue them while working on an H1-B visa, unless H1-B prevents you from doing so.
Actually, it's not plenty of time. The INS and various state labor departments can be horribly inefficient. Also, companies don't exactly have a great deal of incentive to help their employees get green cards. In any case, without a green card in hand, foreigners are simply not likely to make big purchases here.
The point is, you can't restrict a person to a 6-year deadline to live in the country, and still expect them not to send money home and expect them to purchase a lot of US goods.
As for the unemployed US workers, they should in fact get preferential treatment, even under existing US laws. H1-Bs must be hired at prevailing wages, and have additional expenses as far as companies are concerned. IOW, the problem doesn't need some magical solution, merely proper enforcement of laws already on the books.
I'm referring to a foreign national who accepted a legal job offer from a company that performed an honest and reasonable search for American workers to fill the job. If you think that this company should fire the foreign worker the minute an equally qualified American worker (who did not take advantage of the honest recruiting efforts) shows up at the door, you have a different definition for "fairness" than I do.
If the company didn't follow the law, then it's not just unfair, it's illegal. Report them to your local authorities.
You misunderstand my post.
First, assume that we're talking about an honest company that is making a real effort to find a qualified American. My point is that this company cannot be expected to find every last qualified American, and offer them the job, before hiring a foreigner. Putting the job on a website and sifting through the resumes you get is exactly part of a "reasonable recruiting effort" that I was talking about. Knocking on every door in case there's an American engineer behind it, on the other hand, is not a reasonable requirement because it is "prohibitively expensive".
Now, if we're talking about lazy or greedy companies that intend to subvert the process by not honestly examining American candidates, then they're breaking the law right there. All you should need to do is to alert the INS, not sue them for the job.
As for the "sob story", I am referring to a foreigner who made a major life decision (moving an entire family to a foreign land) based on a legitimate job offer. This offer should not be rescinded any moment an equally qualified American worker (who did not know of the honest recruiting effort, for example) shows up at their door. This is merely good faith.
You are utterly ill-informed on the issue.
The reason H1-B workers don't make long term investments in the US is because US law requires them to leave the country after 6 years as their visas expire. What would you be doing if you were in their shoes?
Also, don't lump illegal workers together with legal ones when discussing their contributions to the US economy. H1-B workers pay taxes, including social security taxes that they have no hope of collecting (because if they lose their jobs they must leave the country).
No, an H1-B is granted to a foreign national who fits the requirements of a job, if no qualified American or permanent resident can be found after a reasonable recruiting effort. There are 280 million Americans, and it'll be prohibitively expensive to ensure that there are absolutely no matches anywhere in the country.
That may sound like a bad deal to you, but consider that the foreign national in question may have to have moved an entire family overseas to take the job. It is equally unfair to fire him or her the very moment a qualified and willing American shows up at the door.
They're not after money. At the rate courts proceed, they might make $20,000 off a college student after three months of lawsuits. What they're trying to do is to create a chilling effect, and it doesn't really matter how many of the 260 or so defendants actually pay anything. They are merely setting an example with them, and looks like it might just work.
Absolutely as little as possible, but enough so that they don't just give up and find another job.
That is, as a society we benefit from creative works, and we'd like the artists to be able to afford to create full-time. However, the copyright monopoly we grant them deprives somebody else of a right to create something similar. You probably can't ever publish your novel about a young wizard named Harry Porter, unless you are rather young and live to 100 or so, even if you actually finished writing the book before Rowling did.
Nobody has an inherent right to make a living (or any money, for that matter) off any particular service. There's such a thing as a professional author or musician because society decided it was better for us to have that.
Human laws basically allow you to own bacteria. Some food products containing them can be sold and ingested. There are generally no laws against washing your hands, or sterilizing an open wound with alcohol, which can result in the death of bacteria.
This isn't to say that there are not important ethical issues to consider. If the battery leaks, are the bacteria benign to our environment? Is the manufacturing process for these bacteria exceedingly wasteful? These are similar to the questions many now ask about anti-bacterial hand soap (they free up the ecosystem for bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics).
I don't know about Bluetooth, but when Apple says "Airport ready" they mean you get the slot for the card, and that the antenna is already built into the case. The antenna connector is of the right length, and neatly tucked to the side of the Airport card slot. The Airport card itself doesn't come with anything else, because the computer is "ready" for it.
But don't confuse "fair" with "true". Neither result may accurately represent what you'll get in real applications on either platform, nor reflect the performance differences between real applications on the two platforms. If so, then why benchmark at all?
Uh, no, and your choice of examples are most telling. GTA3 was released recently, while Tetris was released nearly 20 years ago. How many other games can you name are as cheap to produce and as well loved? If it was so easy to invent small and highly popular games, why are the big studios not doing that maximize profit?
Fact is, the GTA3s are easier for those who can afford it to churn out year after year, while good cheap ideas are extremely hard to come by. I don't disagree with your suggestion that smaller players need to do what the big studios don't do, but to say there's a Tetris for every GTA3 is not a realistic expectation to have.