Both are the government not even being willing to abide by the rules that it has declared everyone must abide by.
This is silly. It isn't as if the H1B program says: "Workers cannot come to America unless they work for the government." Rather it says: "Workers cannot come to America unless they come to work in jobs that we think will increase the average wealth of Americans rather than decrease it."
These are special favors for specially choosen industries. They aren't for the benefit of the populace, but for the benefit of corporations. I.e., fictional entities that are allowed to exist because otherwise we can't make the laws do what we want. (Liability in this case.)
It is precisely because corporations do not physically exist that it makes no sense to talk of them being the end beneficiaries of a law. Rather, the beneficiaries are either individual shareholders, individual employees or individual customers.
Do you really see it as unreasonable for a libertarian to be upset because the government is playing favorites with the rich and powerful?
Oh yeah, Indian and Eastern European IT workers are the rich and powerful. If this was all about breaks for the powerful, why wouldn't there be an H1B program for automotive workers? GM is pretty powerful. How about healthcare workers? HMOs are pretty powerful. H1Bs are good for freedom because they increase the freedom to migrate for those who get them. This maybe a small increase in freedom overall (miniscule even) but more is better than less isn't it? Why do I car if my freedom was bought by a corporate lobbyist? Better they spend their influence buying freedom than the opposite (which is what they usually are working on).
Welcome to poverty. Hope you're ready for an economy of deflation and permanent unemployment. Because that's where this economy is going. Show me where the job creation is happening in this country.
You're missing the point... This isn't about some technology roll-over putting obsolete workers in the unemployment line. This is about companies operating in the richest country in the world screwing over the middle class so the executives can spend an extra week in the Bahamas or put in that new backyard tennis court they've been wanting.
It is a total myth that reductions in expenses directly pad the executives wallets. That could only happen if there were absolutely no competitor willing to increase its market share by paying its executives less. Yes, executive salaries are high. But if IBM saves $10 billion dollars through outsourcing, what percentage of that money do you really think ends up in executive pay checks? $10 billion? Or do you rather think that they would use a big chunk of that to reduce their rates so that they could compete more effectively with HP and their other competitors?
Oh dear. Everything is different this time. We'll never rebound. Just like the early 90s. And the 70s. And the 30s. Get over it. This is a very shallow and short recession. If you disagree I'll ask a simple question: how many other recessions have you lived through in your employment career? This one may have hurt IT disproportionately but we also benefited disproportionately from the boom that preceded it.
So basically, you have faith that some unknown new industry will come along, and everyone will get jobs in that, once all the current jobs are gone? And you have this faith in spite of no evidence, based purely on the fact that in the past it's happened a few times?
Do you have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow? Based upon what? Experience and a mathematical model? What's the difference?
Well, you've certainly adopted capitalism as religion.
I'm actually thinking it might be a good idea to move offshore myself. I'd earn less, but I might earn more when adjusted to the cost of living in, say, the Philippines or Brazil.
What about Arkansas or Montana?
Re:You know you're in deep water...
on
SCO Roundup
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The EFF is not light-handed on the legal representation side, and if they're coming down on the side of Linux against SCO, then SCO has problems.
Would you rather go up against the EFF's lawyers or IBM's lawyers?
Well you're demonstrating the problem perfectly. The Linux world wants to be unified as long as unification does not in any way reduce the number of equally valid choices. I don't see how this is going to happen. If the "Linux world" does decide that it really wants to standardize and unify, it shouldn't do so by eliminating choice about what desktop should run on the Linux kernel. It should do so by marketing the unified desktop _as the brand_ that the customer cares about. Then the Linux kernel can continue to be a general purpose "component inside" like the Intel CPU.
To make this VERY concrete. When a user downloads a version of "UnifiedOpenSourceDesktop" they should be confident about what apps will run on it, as they are (relatively) with Windows XP versus Windows 98 (some apps are certified for one, some for the other, some for both). But if we rally around "Linux 3.0" and try to build that level of application compatibility then we must ALL use the same versions of everything from the kernel to the compiler to the LibC to the desktop because any variation will cause incompatibility problems. Better to rally around the topmost abstraction layer: the desktop/GUI.
If you can't tell from this why someone who doesn't like geeky things (aka average computer user) is put off by linux...
The problem is marketing. The average computer user should not care about Linux. Linux is a kernel. The average user should care about Red Hat or Lindows. Their choice of distro will narrow the options down into a coherent set. "Linux" is hardly a relevant concept at the end-user level.
It would be great if we could chuck the whole user-based system in favor of some sort of role or program-based model where programs have privileges based on what they are rather than who is running them.
In fact, that's a core concept of the capability security model: "There is no fundamental reason why a program that you write for me should be able to delete my bank transactions file just because I can. Yet those are the permission rules imposed by the current commercial OSes for personal systems."
"mass of earth" = 5.9742 x 10 24 kg "speed of light" = 299 792 458 m / s
It isn't as if Google is figuring this stuff FROM THE WEB! There is a big set of definitions somewhere...probably less than a megabyte in size. (doesn't even have "width of human hair" or "mass of the solar system" or "population of China")
Okay, yes. Google calculator is a neat idea. But step back for a second and think about the sheer wastefulness of making an HTTP connection to do a CALCULATION. Wouldn't it make more sense for the feature to live in the brower, operating system or anything else living on the client side?
So a friend asks me today to help them install XP. I was reluctant but XP does have some legitimate advantages over Windows 98 and her Windows 98 was crashing. The disk she hands me from the computer store is from 2001. Okay, I'll have to download some patches, I think. She's a modem user. Little did I understand (as a naive Mac/Unix user) that in the time it takes to connect to the Microsoft site I was already infected by TWO virii. Egad! So I downloaded a disinfector and then initalized the firewall. Now I go to see whta it takes to download the patches and update. According to Windows Update, she needs *40* security patches and critical updates...totally over 40MB. Over her freaking dialup modem!
Okay, maybe I should have turned on the firewall before connecting to the Intenet. I didn't realize the virii were scanning so relentlessly and quickly. I also thought that the idea of turning on a software firewall on a brand-new install seems a little dumb. All the firewall does is prevent incoming connections to insecure ports. If Microsoft knew when they shipped the OS that the ports would likely be found insecure, why wouldn't they just turn them off by default? I mean it is one thing to buy Norton Firewall on the presumption that they are fixing Microsoft's broken security model but why would I use a "security fix" that comes on the same CD as the program that introduced the security hole in the first place! It seems totally illogical to me.
This deal is so sweet for Vector that it is barely legal. $124M is nothing for a company with annual revenues of $127M and 70M in cash. This is also the most illogical time to sell the company. The market is in the toilet, Corel shares are at an all-time low, Corel has plenty of cash in the bank, Corel has new product lines that have not been given time to prove themselves, etc. The whole thing looks very poorly thought out.
Your post mixes up a bunch of things. For one thing, it implies that Python and Java allow pointer aliasing. They don't. Second, you include Lisp in your list of languages that are easy to optimize but give no indication why Lisp would be easier to optimize than (e.g.) Java. Neither allows pointer aliasing. Furthermore, Java compilers in general have more type information available to them at compile time and they do use that for optimization. Of course you can add type annotations to Lisp but if we're talking about which language is easier to optimize _by default_ I would have to say Java. Functional languages are great and all but it doesn't helpt the case to spew FUD on the other languages.
you would be amazed how many times you're in a huge meeting full of suits and your CTO asks you "so how much would it cost to build a 25TB san from scratch versus buying one from EMC?"
The CTO asks you rather than pulling a number out of his own ass because he presumes you have some domain knowledge about SANs. Not perfect insight but more knowledge than the person on the street. But the applicant is unlikely to have any domain knowledge about the compressability of cotton balls whatsoever so the questions are not analogous. Why not ask them something relevant like how they would estimate the price of the SAN or how they would estimate the price of a coding project? Furthermore, when the CTO asks me a question that I don't have any more knowledge about than he does, I'm honest about it: "You probably could estimate that as well as I could", which is a nice way of saying: "I have no good idea but if you are willing to pull a number out of your ass, go for it." That's honesty and I'd say the CTO would appreciate that more than a number pulled out of my ass about a topic I have no insight into. "How much electricity does it take to run a 25 TB SAN? Sorry. I'm a programmer. I don't know much about electricity. But I can find out for you."
Only in a very limited sense could Python be considered strong typing. It's stronger than C, but most anything is
There are a variety of languages that allow you to cast raw memory addresses to whatever you like: C, C++, Forth, Assembly language, many basics, etc. Those are weakly typed languages as the term was originally applied. Python is a strongly, dynamically typed language. And object has exactly one type and you cannot convince it to behave as another type merely by asserting it is that other type. When you try to get a Python object to do something disallowed by its type, you get an exception whereas in the languages described earlier the results are undefined.
Which of these languages do you think is dynamically typed? VB has become more and more statically typed with every generation and Microsoft's answer to any problem with it (especially the problem of porting VB code to VB.NET) is "add type declarations".
s Xbox really "teh fu7ur3"? Seriously, had not Microsoft budgeted such a huge amount of money for this venture, the Xbox would never survive. And it's quite a waste of money not to be in #1 after all.
As the article says, that's exactly the point. Microsoft has decided that they will do whatever it takes to win and they have the pocketbooks required to do some extraordinary things. Nintendo, in particular, cannot afford to hang around sponsoring consoles out of profits from some other division (other than console software!). Sony also does not accumulate excess cash the way Microsoft does.
Python, Perl and Ruby are all very good interpreted, flexible, rapid-prototyping languages. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, but all are good enough that if you are choosing between them, it boils down pretty much to your own preferences and what coworkers and other people around you use (or on what animal you prefer on the cover of your reference literature:) ).
I don't think that is really true. How cheap and easy is it to make a COM object or Java class in Perl? What if you want to work with Unicode. Would Ruby be up to it? The truth is that about half of my Python work is really not the sort of thing that even Perl evangelists tend to do in Perl.
dude, SVG is vector graphic, and has completely different purpose.
That's fine. XML had a completely different purpose when it was developed also. Did you look at the "overlaying, scaling, tiling, cropping" features of SVG? It's all there! You can do amazing things with transformation, filter effects etc.
You should have seen SchemaSoft's amazing "swell magnifier" at SVG Open! (described a bit on the musings page of http://jibbering.com/)
Also I'm yet to find any usable image in SVG format.
What does that mean? What is a "usable image?" Download SodiPodi and draw something. That's a usable image. You should use SVG to have AfterStep leap ahead of competitors in standards compliance and sophistication. If you want to talk about it more, you should join one of hte SVG mailing lists like SVG=developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Both are the government not even being willing to abide by the rules that it has declared everyone must abide by.
This is silly. It isn't as if the H1B program says: "Workers cannot come to America unless they work for the government." Rather it says: "Workers cannot come to America unless they come to work in jobs that we think will increase the average wealth of Americans rather than decrease it."
These are special favors for specially choosen industries. They aren't for the benefit of the populace, but for the benefit of corporations. I.e., fictional entities that are allowed to exist because otherwise we can't make the laws do what we want. (Liability in this case.)
It is precisely because corporations do not physically exist that it makes no sense to talk of them being the end beneficiaries of a law. Rather, the beneficiaries are either individual shareholders, individual employees or individual customers.
Do you really see it as unreasonable for a libertarian to be upset because the government is playing favorites with the rich and powerful?
Oh yeah, Indian and Eastern European IT workers are the rich and powerful. If this was all about breaks for the powerful, why wouldn't there be an H1B program for automotive workers? GM is pretty powerful. How about healthcare workers? HMOs are pretty powerful. H1Bs are good for freedom because they increase the freedom to migrate for those who get them. This maybe a small increase in freedom overall (miniscule even) but more is better than less isn't it? Why do I car if my freedom was bought by a corporate lobbyist? Better they spend their influence buying freedom than the opposite (which is what they usually are working on).
5-7 years is too long for a landlord to sit on an empty property no matter how many people they lay off. They will lower their prices or go bankrupt.
Welcome to poverty. Hope you're ready for an economy of deflation and permanent unemployment. Because that's where this economy is going. Show me where the job creation is happening in this country.
Happy to: http://makeashorterlink.com/?W2FB51FB5 http://yir.yahoo.com/2002/hj/growing_industries.ht ml
http://packard.csesp.umflint.edu/hickslm/CSCpgm/ec opro_table4.htm
Oh dear! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
You're missing the point... This isn't about some technology roll-over putting obsolete workers in the unemployment line. This is about companies operating in the richest country in the world screwing over the middle class so the executives can spend an extra week in the Bahamas or put in that new backyard tennis court they've been wanting.
It is a total myth that reductions in expenses directly pad the executives wallets. That could only happen if there were absolutely no competitor willing to increase its market share by paying its executives less. Yes, executive salaries are high. But if IBM saves $10 billion dollars through outsourcing, what percentage of that money do you really think ends up in executive pay checks? $10 billion? Or do you rather think that they would use a big chunk of that to reduce their rates so that they could compete more effectively with HP and their other competitors?
Oh dear. Everything is different this time. We'll never rebound. Just like the early 90s. And the 70s. And the 30s. Get over it. This is a very shallow and short recession. If you disagree I'll ask a simple question: how many other recessions have you lived through in your employment career? This one may have hurt IT disproportionately but we also benefited disproportionately from the boom that preceded it.
So basically, you have faith that some unknown new industry will come along, and everyone will get jobs in that, once all the current jobs are gone? And you have this faith in spite of no evidence, based purely on the fact that in the past it's happened a few times?
Do you have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow? Based upon what? Experience and a mathematical model? What's the difference?
Well, you've certainly adopted capitalism as religion.
I guess that makes the rest of us sun-worshipers.
I'm actually thinking it might be a good idea to move offshore myself. I'd earn less, but I might earn more when adjusted to the cost of living in, say, the Philippines or Brazil.
What about Arkansas or Montana?
The EFF is not light-handed on the legal representation side, and if they're coming down on the side of Linux against SCO, then SCO has problems.
Would you rather go up against the EFF's lawyers or IBM's lawyers?
Well you're demonstrating the problem perfectly. The Linux world wants to be unified as long as unification does not in any way reduce the number of equally valid choices. I don't see how this is going to happen. If the "Linux world" does decide that it really wants to standardize and unify, it shouldn't do so by eliminating choice about what desktop should run on the Linux kernel. It should do so by marketing the unified desktop _as the brand_ that the customer cares about. Then the Linux kernel can continue to be a general purpose "component inside" like the Intel CPU.
To make this VERY concrete. When a user downloads a version of "UnifiedOpenSourceDesktop" they should be confident about what apps will run on it, as they are (relatively) with Windows XP versus Windows 98 (some apps are certified for one, some for the other, some for both). But if we rally around "Linux 3.0" and try to build that level of application compatibility then we must ALL use the same versions of everything from the kernel to the compiler to the LibC to the desktop because any variation will cause incompatibility problems. Better to rally around the topmost abstraction layer: the desktop/GUI.
If you can't tell from this why someone who doesn't like geeky things (aka average computer user) is put off by linux...
The problem is marketing. The average computer user should not care about Linux. Linux is a kernel. The average user should care about Red Hat or Lindows. Their choice of distro will narrow the options down into a coherent set. "Linux" is hardly a relevant concept at the end-user level.
It would be great if we could chuck the whole user-based system in favor of some sort of role or program-based model where programs have privileges based on what they are rather than who is running them.
In fact, that's a core concept of the capability security model: "There is no fundamental reason why a program that you write for me should be able to delete my bank transactions file just because I can. Yet those are the permission rules imposed by the current commercial OSes for personal systems."
More here.
How big do you think those tables are?
"mass of earth" = 5.9742 x 10 24 kg
"speed of light" = 299 792 458 m / s
It isn't as if Google is figuring this stuff FROM THE WEB! There is a big set of definitions somewhere...probably less than a megabyte in size. (doesn't even have "width of human hair" or "mass of the solar system" or "population of China")
Okay, yes. Google calculator is a neat idea. But step back for a second and think about the sheer wastefulness of making an HTTP connection to do a CALCULATION. Wouldn't it make more sense for the feature to live in the brower, operating system or anything else living on the client side?
Okay, maybe I should have turned on the firewall before connecting to the Intenet. I didn't realize the virii were scanning so relentlessly and quickly. I also thought that the idea of turning on a software firewall on a brand-new install seems a little dumb. All the firewall does is prevent incoming connections to insecure ports. If Microsoft knew when they shipped the OS that the ports would likely be found insecure, why wouldn't they just turn them off by default? I mean it is one thing to buy Norton Firewall on the presumption that they are fixing Microsoft's broken security model but why would I use a "security fix" that comes on the same CD as the program that introduced the security hole in the first place! It seems totally illogical to me.
This deal is so sweet for Vector that it is barely legal. $124M is nothing for a company with annual revenues of $127M and 70M in cash. This is also the most illogical time to sell the company. The market is in the toilet, Corel shares are at an all-time low, Corel has plenty of cash in the bank, Corel has new product lines that have not been given time to prove themselves, etc. The whole thing looks very poorly thought out.
Your post mixes up a bunch of things. For one thing, it implies that Python and Java allow pointer aliasing. They don't. Second, you include Lisp in your list of languages that are easy to optimize but give no indication why Lisp would be easier to optimize than (e.g.) Java. Neither allows pointer aliasing. Furthermore, Java compilers in general have more type information available to them at compile time and they do use that for optimization. Of course you can add type annotations to Lisp but if we're talking about which language is easier to optimize _by default_ I would have to say Java. Functional languages are great and all but it doesn't helpt the case to spew FUD on the other languages.
Why? DAV is easier to secure because of its simpler port usage.
you would be amazed how many times you're in a huge meeting full of suits and your CTO asks you "so how much would it cost to build a 25TB san from scratch versus buying one from EMC?"
The CTO asks you rather than pulling a number out of his own ass because he presumes you have some domain knowledge about SANs. Not perfect insight but more knowledge than the person on the street. But the applicant is unlikely to have any domain knowledge about the compressability of cotton balls whatsoever so the questions are not analogous. Why not ask them something relevant like how they would estimate the price of the SAN or how they would estimate the price of a coding project? Furthermore, when the CTO asks me a question that I don't have any more knowledge about than he does, I'm honest about it: "You probably could estimate that as well as I could", which is a nice way of saying: "I have no good idea but if you are willing to pull a number out of your ass, go for it." That's honesty and I'd say the CTO would appreciate that more than a number pulled out of my ass about a topic I have no insight into. "How much electricity does it take to run a 25 TB SAN? Sorry. I'm a programmer. I don't know much about electricity. But I can find out for you."
Only in a very limited sense could Python be considered strong typing. It's stronger than C, but most anything is
There are a variety of languages that allow you to cast raw memory addresses to whatever you like: C, C++, Forth, Assembly language, many basics, etc. Those are weakly typed languages as the term was originally applied. Python is a strongly, dynamically typed language. And object has exactly one type and you cannot convince it to behave as another type merely by asserting it is that other type. When you try to get a Python object to do something disallowed by its type, you get an exception whereas in the languages described earlier the results are undefined.
Offtopic: was Cuba a Gulag? Why would the Soviet Union pay to fly dissidents to a tropical eco-paradise: even one run by a dictatorial maniac?
Which of these languages do you think is dynamically typed? VB has become more and more statically typed with every generation and Microsoft's answer to any problem with it (especially the problem of porting VB code to VB.NET) is "add type declarations".
s Xbox really "teh fu7ur3"? Seriously, had not Microsoft budgeted such a huge amount of money for this venture, the Xbox would never survive. And it's quite a waste of money not to be in #1 after all.
As the article says, that's exactly the point. Microsoft has decided that they will do whatever it takes to win and they have the pocketbooks required to do some extraordinary things. Nintendo, in particular, cannot afford to hang around sponsoring consoles out of profits from some other division (other than console software!). Sony also does not accumulate excess cash the way Microsoft does.
Python, Perl and Ruby are all very good interpreted, flexible, rapid-prototyping languages. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, but all are good enough that if you are choosing between them, it boils down pretty much to your own preferences and what coworkers and other people around you use (or on what animal you prefer on the cover of your reference literature:) ).
I don't think that is really true. How cheap and easy is it to make a COM object or Java class in Perl? What if you want to work with Unicode. Would Ruby be up to it? The truth is that about half of my Python work is really not the sort of thing that even Perl evangelists tend to do in Perl.
dude, SVG is vector graphic, and has completely different purpose.
That's fine. XML had a completely different purpose when it was developed also. Did you look at the "overlaying, scaling, tiling, cropping" features of SVG? It's all there! You can do amazing things with transformation, filter effects etc.
Masking, clipping, etc. in SVG
Filters, transforms, etc. in SVG
You should have seen SchemaSoft's amazing "swell magnifier" at SVG Open! (described a bit on the musings page of http://jibbering.com/)Also I'm yet to find any usable image in SVG format.
What does that mean? What is a "usable image?" Download SodiPodi and draw something. That's a usable image. You should use SVG to have AfterStep leap ahead of competitors in standards compliance and sophistication. If you want to talk about it more, you should join one of hte SVG mailing lists like SVG=developers.