By law, an employer is required to pay H1-B at least as much or more than the US market average for the given position.
By law maybe, but it reality, far from it. Employers use foreign contractors to save money, not because they can't find someone in the US at the "market average" price, but because they can find a foreign worker and illegally pay them less.
That's another reason the smart ones may be leaving. They have priced themselves out of the market. The came over with dreams of making a nice "American" salary and are leaving disappointed. Companies want cheap labor.
Exactly - and another hypermiling technique that tremendously hurts everyone else is slow acceleration from red lights in heavy traffic. Someone near the front of the line should accelerate quickly in order to enable as many people as possible to get through the light. One person saving a few drops of gas can easily lead to many cars missing the green light and idling for another 2 minutes. In heavy traffic situations, people need to drive to optimize TRAFFIC efficiency, not their car's personal efficiency.
Of course, this only applies in heavy traffic situations where people have to wait at the same light for multiple cycles.
Furthermore, "the most powerful, technologically advanced military in the world" is comprised of U.S. citizens. So if there were ever an armed revolution, it's reasonable to assume that some of that military would defect to the side of the revolution.
That, plus a bunch of pissed off citizens with guns pretty much gaurantees that we can take back our government should we ever need to. It's a hugely important right.
... I would not care about the specific college. And I interview people pretty regularly. I'd be much more interested in how smart you really are, not what college you attended.
Exactly. Web servers, j2ee app servers, search engines, databases, compilers, web browsers, pretty much everything is already multithreaded. Why the panic?
For your examples you threw out a bunch of problems that are currently being parallelized just fine by today's software, which would indicate we're not having problems with parallel programming. Name a search engine, database query engine, weather simulation software, etc, that isn't already multithreaded. Where's the issue?
Problems that can and should be parallelized in software already are for the most part. There is no issue here.
Business processes are often serial (step B depends on output of step A). That's what a lot of corporate programmers work on. And even these have steps that are done in parallel or can run multiple instances of a process in parallel. Anyone working on a web application or j2ee infrastructure is probably running lots of their small, serialized problems, in parallel. Again, there is no issue here.
On my old as heck home PC I have Windows 2000 and still receive software updates with security, performance, and stability updates. Pentium III, 500 Mhz, 384 MB RAM and it works fine for MS Office Pro and Opera.
I am writing this from a 500 Mhz, 384 MB RAM, Windows 2000 PC. It is 7 years old.
I run the latest and greatest Opera, IE, Firefox, and Eclipse (w/ many plugins) all simultaneously for web development. I don't experience any problems in doing so. Eclipse takes a while to start up, but hell, it does so on my modern PC at the office as well.
Face it, web browsing doesn't require much hardware at all - even with the newest browsers.
Every PC/Server out there today will be doing context switching between processes and threads. Check out how many processes are running on your PC. Many of those processes are multi-threaded. So regardless of how you write your program, there will be context switching done by the one or many cores available.
Modern Linux distributions switch by default 1000 times every second, even if you're running a single threaded app. If every other thread/process is idle, your app can still get 99.9% of the runtime of the CPU.
Furthermore, without processor affinity, your single threaded app may get swapped around to different cores or processors while all of this stuff is going on.
The overhead of context-switching is overrated. If a problem can be parallelized, it should be, even if the target system is a single core system.
Their Hyperion Essbase cube was 12 GB? And they had to partition it into 3?
That's nothing. We have MS Analysis Services cubes of almost 400 GB (partitioned into 3 seperate ones, like Google). If this is supposed to be an advertisement for Hyperion, it's not very impressive.
Of course, we are using 3 seperate 8 processor Itanium boxes with 64 GB RAM. That helps some.
I would happily pay higher taxes on gasoline if I received an income tax break to offset. Like you suggest, this would "even out" for most people but it would actively discourage fuel use which would be a good thing.
CORBA is the best solution for a lot of applications. Web services just don't perform as well and don't handle more complicated interfaces as elegantly (inheritance, one-way calls, callbacks, etc).
Web services are nice for simple remote calls, but in a complex system where all sorts of RPCs are flying around the place, CORBA is a better solution.
Other solutions aren't as interoperable between different languages/environments. CORBA still has it's place. ICE sounds even better, but I haven't tried it. Given it's author, it should be very good. Thrift sounds similar, but I'd be much more trusting of ICE considering the source and maturity.
Bush and his administration have stated that corn is not the way of the future for ethanol. A lot of money and support has been dedicated towards developing cellulosic ethanol. I'm sorry this doesn't support your conspiracy theories, maybe Cheney is secretly part owner of a cellulosic ethanol company that is receiving DOE funding?
Anyway, ethanol from corn is good FOR NOW because it reduces the need for corn subsidies and helps get people switched to ethanol. It will never be a long term source of massive amounts of ethanol. Everyone knows that. It's just the most easily available source FOR NOW in the US. It's not a conspiracy.
I find it hard to believe that they would have lost all communication from a software glitch like this. Things like radios, compasses, radars, etc surely still worked. Hopefully this just crashed a navigation system and left the pilots able to fly the plane using conventional navigation techniques. If it brought down everything else, that's a serious design flaw, not just a bug.
Good thing Office versions are always backwards compatible. I work in a 9000 or so person company and it's never a problem sharing Word documents. So a word processor standard format does nothing for us.
That sounds nice in theory, but really, how often are people passing around documents to other people for shared editing, when these people don't have access to the same word processor? We can already share documents for display and printing - it's not a problem (pdf, html, etc.). Multiple people editing the same document have access to the same word processor in just about every scenario I can think of (corporations, school). If you are going to create some document for shared editing around the world by people in different places who may or may not have the same word processor as you, then by all means, start the document off in Open Office. If someone doesn't have OO, they can easily download it.
Now, for your terrible GPS analogy. I really can't think of a single reason why a government GPS signal is analagous to a word processing file format. GPS signals are extremely simple and putting your own GPS satellites in orbit isn't practical for many people. A word processing file format standard is 600-6000 pages long apparently and anybody who can write software can create an implementation of it. Plus, even if GPS signals are file formats were analogous, it would still be a bad argument because one can easily see how GPS companies could constantly be improving (innovating) GPS signals and associated products if it weren't a standard.
Assume for a minute that we had a standard word processing file format before the internet was around. Now, fast forward until a little while after Al Gore invents the internet. Now the guys at Open Office decide to add the ability to embed a hyperlink in a word processor document, but there is no standard way to do this. What happens? If the standard leaves open a method for declaring vendor specific extensions you use that method - but this arguably makes a standard pointless when common features are implemented in a vendor specific way. The other option the guys at Open Office would have would be to go to the standards organization and try to get it on the next draft. This would take a long time, and would assure every other word processor company to have the time to implement the feature as well.
I just think a standard file format in this scenario is unnecessary. If you are a company, buy all your employees the same word processor! If you share documents elsewhere (for editing, not just printing and display) then make sure everyone has the same word processor as you or choose to use a free one, such as Open Office.
I DON'T work for this company but I can answer some of your questions.
1 - ??
2 - ??
3 - There are no batteries involved. Excess electricity is sold back to your local power company. Your house is still connected to the grid so your lights will still work if you paint your solar panels.
4 - Yes, payback for installing a system yourself would be 17-20 years. Now, if you had your own assembly factory producing a huge amount of solar panels, payback would be a few years earlier. I wouldn't expect this company to start turning a profit for 15 years or so. But once they do cross that magic line, the profit should be pretty big if their solar panels can last 25 years.
5 - I don't think Citizenre is more interested in signing up distributors than customers. I've signed up as a potential customer and haven't seen any pressure whatsoever to become a distributor. There is a link on their webpage. I think a lot of people are just signing up as distributors on their own because it's potentially lucrative if Citizenre can pull this off. Since the security deposit is only due once your solar panels are ready, there is no way this is a pyramid scheme. How can you have a pyramid scheme without the people at the bottom providing money to someone?
I'm skeptical myself, yet hopeful. If the average consumer can make payback in 20 years, then this company should be able to make payback even sooner when doing it on a massive scale. It will require huge upfront money, but I think the business concept is sound so I imagine there are plenty of investors willing to take the risk. The only real risk I see is a new electrical generation technology popping up that's super cheap for the homeowner. If we all have Mr. Fusions in our garage in less than 25 years than Citizenre will be in a lot of trouble - of course they could always start being the ones selling their current customers the Mr. Fusions...
They don't ask you for money until they put the solar panels on your roof. At that time a $500 security deposit is required.
I don't see how this could be a scam on the consumers. I guess they could be scamming their investors, but that's not my problem!
How about Microsoft and OpenOffice just keep their own XML formats? One of the great things about XML is that you can use XSLT to transform one XML document into another one with different syntax. As long as both products can open, display, and convert the other format then I don't really see the need for a standard in this situation.
A standard is going to limit innovation in word processors unless you specifically allow extensions in the standard, which kind of defeats the purpose of a standard.
If the goal is to send out a document that anyone can read, then convert to PDF or a web page. "I shouldn't have to convert b/c I'm a stupid user" you say? Don't expect a 600-6000 page standard to solve this problem.
Well, keep waiting, because this is nothing like what you have described. This is another SQL RDBMS with a different way of storing the data on disk so that it is optimized for data warehouses instead of transaction based DBs.
Yes, still SQL. Column oriented DBs are meant to optimize SQL reads where you only are using a few columns in your SQL, but the tables have many columns. This doesn't change anything about SQL.
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By law maybe, but it reality, far from it. Employers use foreign contractors to save money, not because they can't find someone in the US at the "market average" price, but because they can find a foreign worker and illegally pay them less.
That's another reason the smart ones may be leaving. They have priced themselves out of the market. The came over with dreams of making a nice "American" salary and are leaving disappointed. Companies want cheap labor.
Exactly - and another hypermiling technique that tremendously hurts everyone else is slow acceleration from red lights in heavy traffic. Someone near the front of the line should accelerate quickly in order to enable as many people as possible to get through the light. One person saving a few drops of gas can easily lead to many cars missing the green light and idling for another 2 minutes. In heavy traffic situations, people need to drive to optimize TRAFFIC efficiency, not their car's personal efficiency. Of course, this only applies in heavy traffic situations where people have to wait at the same light for multiple cycles.
Furthermore, "the most powerful, technologically advanced military in the world" is comprised of U.S. citizens. So if there were ever an armed revolution, it's reasonable to assume that some of that military would defect to the side of the revolution. That, plus a bunch of pissed off citizens with guns pretty much gaurantees that we can take back our government should we ever need to. It's a hugely important right.
So what happens when I want to drag a file over to the desktop and dump it there?
... I would not care about the specific college. And I interview people pretty regularly. I'd be much more interested in how smart you really are, not what college you attended.
Exactly. Web servers, j2ee app servers, search engines, databases, compilers, web browsers, pretty much everything is already multithreaded. Why the panic?
For your examples you threw out a bunch of problems that are currently being parallelized just fine by today's software, which would indicate we're not having problems with parallel programming. Name a search engine, database query engine, weather simulation software, etc, that isn't already multithreaded. Where's the issue?
Problems that can and should be parallelized in software already are for the most part. There is no issue here.
Business processes are often serial (step B depends on output of step A). That's what a lot of corporate programmers work on. And even these have steps that are done in parallel or can run multiple instances of a process in parallel. Anyone working on a web application or j2ee infrastructure is probably running lots of their small, serialized problems, in parallel. Again, there is no issue here.
On my old as heck home PC I have Windows 2000 and still receive software updates with security, performance, and stability updates. Pentium III, 500 Mhz, 384 MB RAM and it works fine for MS Office Pro and Opera.
... but I'm going to reply anyway.
Software that needs to be multithreaded today easily can be, and usually already is. There is no issue in the industry.
Please move along, nothing to see here.
I am writing this from a 500 Mhz, 384 MB RAM, Windows 2000 PC. It is 7 years old. I run the latest and greatest Opera, IE, Firefox, and Eclipse (w/ many plugins) all simultaneously for web development. I don't experience any problems in doing so. Eclipse takes a while to start up, but hell, it does so on my modern PC at the office as well. Face it, web browsing doesn't require much hardware at all - even with the newest browsers.
Every PC/Server out there today will be doing context switching between processes and threads. Check out how many processes are running on your PC. Many of those processes are multi-threaded. So regardless of how you write your program, there will be context switching done by the one or many cores available. Modern Linux distributions switch by default 1000 times every second, even if you're running a single threaded app. If every other thread/process is idle, your app can still get 99.9% of the runtime of the CPU. Furthermore, without processor affinity, your single threaded app may get swapped around to different cores or processors while all of this stuff is going on. The overhead of context-switching is overrated. If a problem can be parallelized, it should be, even if the target system is a single core system.
With a nice enough RAID system and a large enough RAM cache, disk I/O may not have been an issue.
Their Hyperion Essbase cube was 12 GB? And they had to partition it into 3? That's nothing. We have MS Analysis Services cubes of almost 400 GB (partitioned into 3 seperate ones, like Google). If this is supposed to be an advertisement for Hyperion, it's not very impressive. Of course, we are using 3 seperate 8 processor Itanium boxes with 64 GB RAM. That helps some.
Sweet - when I visit Alaska one day I'll be able to take the "Bridge to Nowhere" on my way to the "Tunnel to Siberia."
I would happily pay higher taxes on gasoline if I received an income tax break to offset. Like you suggest, this would "even out" for most people but it would actively discourage fuel use which would be a good thing.
CORBA is the best solution for a lot of applications. Web services just don't perform as well and don't handle more complicated interfaces as elegantly (inheritance, one-way calls, callbacks, etc).
Web services are nice for simple remote calls, but in a complex system where all sorts of RPCs are flying around the place, CORBA is a better solution.
Other solutions aren't as interoperable between different languages/environments. CORBA still has it's place. ICE sounds even better, but I haven't tried it. Given it's author, it should be very good. Thrift sounds similar, but I'd be much more trusting of ICE considering the source and maturity.
Bush and his administration have stated that corn is not the way of the future for ethanol. A lot of money and support has been dedicated towards developing cellulosic ethanol. I'm sorry this doesn't support your conspiracy theories, maybe Cheney is secretly part owner of a cellulosic ethanol company that is receiving DOE funding?
Anyway, ethanol from corn is good FOR NOW because it reduces the need for corn subsidies and helps get people switched to ethanol. It will never be a long term source of massive amounts of ethanol. Everyone knows that. It's just the most easily available source FOR NOW in the US. It's not a conspiracy.
I find it hard to believe that they would have lost all communication from a software glitch like this. Things like radios, compasses, radars, etc surely still worked. Hopefully this just crashed a navigation system and left the pilots able to fly the plane using conventional navigation techniques. If it brought down everything else, that's a serious design flaw, not just a bug.
Good thing Office versions are always backwards compatible. I work in a 9000 or so person company and it's never a problem sharing Word documents. So a word processor standard format does nothing for us.
That sounds nice in theory, but really, how often are people passing around documents to other people for shared editing, when these people don't have access to the same word processor? We can already share documents for display and printing - it's not a problem (pdf, html, etc.). Multiple people editing the same document have access to the same word processor in just about every scenario I can think of (corporations, school). If you are going to create some document for shared editing around the world by people in different places who may or may not have the same word processor as you, then by all means, start the document off in Open Office. If someone doesn't have OO, they can easily download it.
Now, for your terrible GPS analogy. I really can't think of a single reason why a government GPS signal is analagous to a word processing file format. GPS signals are extremely simple and putting your own GPS satellites in orbit isn't practical for many people. A word processing file format standard is 600-6000 pages long apparently and anybody who can write software can create an implementation of it. Plus, even if GPS signals are file formats were analogous, it would still be a bad argument because one can easily see how GPS companies could constantly be improving (innovating) GPS signals and associated products if it weren't a standard.
Assume for a minute that we had a standard word processing file format before the internet was around. Now, fast forward until a little while after Al Gore invents the internet. Now the guys at Open Office decide to add the ability to embed a hyperlink in a word processor document, but there is no standard way to do this. What happens? If the standard leaves open a method for declaring vendor specific extensions you use that method - but this arguably makes a standard pointless when common features are implemented in a vendor specific way. The other option the guys at Open Office would have would be to go to the standards organization and try to get it on the next draft. This would take a long time, and would assure every other word processor company to have the time to implement the feature as well.
I just think a standard file format in this scenario is unnecessary. If you are a company, buy all your employees the same word processor! If you share documents elsewhere (for editing, not just printing and display) then make sure everyone has the same word processor as you or choose to use a free one, such as Open Office.
I DON'T work for this company but I can answer some of your questions. 1 - ?? 2 - ?? 3 - There are no batteries involved. Excess electricity is sold back to your local power company. Your house is still connected to the grid so your lights will still work if you paint your solar panels. 4 - Yes, payback for installing a system yourself would be 17-20 years. Now, if you had your own assembly factory producing a huge amount of solar panels, payback would be a few years earlier. I wouldn't expect this company to start turning a profit for 15 years or so. But once they do cross that magic line, the profit should be pretty big if their solar panels can last 25 years. 5 - I don't think Citizenre is more interested in signing up distributors than customers. I've signed up as a potential customer and haven't seen any pressure whatsoever to become a distributor. There is a link on their webpage. I think a lot of people are just signing up as distributors on their own because it's potentially lucrative if Citizenre can pull this off. Since the security deposit is only due once your solar panels are ready, there is no way this is a pyramid scheme. How can you have a pyramid scheme without the people at the bottom providing money to someone? I'm skeptical myself, yet hopeful. If the average consumer can make payback in 20 years, then this company should be able to make payback even sooner when doing it on a massive scale. It will require huge upfront money, but I think the business concept is sound so I imagine there are plenty of investors willing to take the risk. The only real risk I see is a new electrical generation technology popping up that's super cheap for the homeowner. If we all have Mr. Fusions in our garage in less than 25 years than Citizenre will be in a lot of trouble - of course they could always start being the ones selling their current customers the Mr. Fusions...
They don't ask you for money until they put the solar panels on your roof. At that time a $500 security deposit is required. I don't see how this could be a scam on the consumers. I guess they could be scamming their investors, but that's not my problem!
How about Microsoft and OpenOffice just keep their own XML formats? One of the great things about XML is that you can use XSLT to transform one XML document into another one with different syntax. As long as both products can open, display, and convert the other format then I don't really see the need for a standard in this situation.
A standard is going to limit innovation in word processors unless you specifically allow extensions in the standard, which kind of defeats the purpose of a standard.
If the goal is to send out a document that anyone can read, then convert to PDF or a web page. "I shouldn't have to convert b/c I'm a stupid user" you say? Don't expect a 600-6000 page standard to solve this problem.
Well, keep waiting, because this is nothing like what you have described. This is another SQL RDBMS with a different way of storing the data on disk so that it is optimized for data warehouses instead of transaction based DBs.
Yes, still SQL. Column oriented DBs are meant to optimize SQL reads where you only are using a few columns in your SQL, but the tables have many columns. This doesn't change anything about SQL.