> Sad thing is, that same fountain used to have a Netscape logo on it.::sniff::
The funny thing, though, is that same fountain also used to have water in it. I worked a couple blocks from there until recently, and as of about a month ago the water seems to have disappeared. Maybe Verisign can't afford water anymore?:-)
Oddly, I know several people at Verisign. I'm hoping they're all in a department that isn't involved in this whole mess, because I'm friends with a couple of them. Of course, their CEO seemed like a nice guy too the couple of times I met him (8 years ago?) so it's hard to tell. At least back then, there was no dripping slime in evidence.
Yep. That was the going rate here in Silicon Valley until the bust a couple of years ago. Now companies seem to be offering less, and sometimes a lot less. A year or so ago there were stories in the Murky News about recruiters pursuing new careers in real estate and retail.
I've encountered a few honest recruiters. The key seemed to be that I found them rather than the other way around.
When I was first out of college, I used a headhunter to find my first programming job in Chicago. I can't remember his name or the company, but he was somewhere downtown on Wacker street I think. It took several months to find a job that I was a good fit for, especially since I didn't have a CS degree. He sent me on one or two interviews that weren't really good fits for me and was kind of amazed when I turned a company down because they were "too corporate." But he got the message, and a bit later he found me weveral interviews at once and I ended up with three offers to choose from.
Out here in Silicon Valley I know one good recruiter who used to work for one of my former employers on a contract basis. She found good people for us to interview, which is exactly what she was supposed to do. She also gave me some advice when I was job hunting again a few months ago. The recruiters who work for my current employer seemed good too. In both of these cases they definitely represented the employer, not the potential employees.
On the other hand I've run across some bad ones. Before I found the good one in Chicago, I encountered some agencies that were more like meat markets than technical recruiters. At one of them I showed up for an initial interview and they were also interviewing hairdressers. From the employer side, I've also encountered quite a few recruiters who will give managers lots and lots of resumes for unqualified people, without making any effort to filter them at all. ("Does the word Java appear anywhere on this resume? No? Then why did you send it to me for a Java programming job?")
Summary: There are some excellent recruiters out there, but they're hard to find. Once you find a good one, stick with them.
Although a camera has adjacent color receptor sites, print color doesn't work like that at all. If the cells are adjacent, they can only produce an approximate gray
If you can vary the intensity of size of the cells, you can get lots of colors other than gray. I have a fairly high-end inkjet CMYK printer that produces great prints. (It's an Epson 2200, fwiw.) To the naked eye, colored areas look, um, colored. But if you look at a print with a loupe (even my relatively cheap 4x one) you can see zillions of different-colored dots. By varying the relative sizes and positions of the dots, they can get lots of different colors.
CRTs and LCD monitors work similarly. There are lots of small, single-color dots of varying intensities. Unless you get really close, the eye blends them all together into solid colors.
I hope that was coherent. The drugs I took for my backache seem to be taking effect, so I may wake up in the morning and discover I posted something horrendous. (Which would be better than the time that I didn't remember making a post at all and wondered who had hacked my account.)
many doctors are considering leaving canada for the US because of the wage limits
It's not so great for many doctors down here either. Doctors who are in fairly obscure specialties or who do uninsured procedures like cosmetic surgery seem to be the only ones making huge piles of money any more. My doctor (an internist) has told me that I make quite a bit more than she does after she pays for office space, malpractice insurance, a receptionist, and so on. She's also mentioned some other doctors (and whole medical groups) who decided to retire early because they got sick of dealing with insurance company bureaucracies. Of course, a government insurance bureaucracy would probably be even worse.
However, the H-1B laws do not allow the following situation. Suppose that the American company actually finds an American who can write C-language code. Yet, the company knows of a foreign worker who can write even better C-language code. So, the company then hires the foreign worker.
Which is perfectly legal, as long as the requirement for the job isn't simply "can write C code". If the job requires expert knowledge of C++ or Java, OO API-design skills, the ability to implement W3C & ISO standards while working independently, and so on (all of these are things the folks in my group actually did), then your red herring doesn't apply.
Part of the whole visa process is (or was 3 years ago) a "Labor Condition Certification" application where you have to prove to the DOL that a person with the desired skills isn't available in the US. We did have one or two of these turned down; the one I remember involved someone who was extremely good but didn't have a college degree yet. These days with the market the way it is, I've heard that most companies won't look at people with H1's because they know that the Labor Condition application is very unlikely to be approved. As I said earlier, I have no idea what Google does. (I'm a US citizen so I had no reason to ask.)
Another poster claimed that IBM only hired H1-B workers if they had Ph.D.'s. This wasn't the case when I was there, though it may have changed since then. However, it was much easier to get a visa for someone with a Ph.D., because it was a lot easier to prove to the DOL that the same skills weren't available in the US. I think there might even have been a special "outstanding researcher" visa for Ph.D.'s. I don't remember the details because I never actually did this.
Are you really going to argue that the laws of economics do not apply to computer programmers?
That's an interesting topic. I'd agree that the laws of economics do seem apply to computer programmers, but only up to a point. If you're looking for people (or a job) at a high enough skill level, money is (usually) less of an issue. The salaries are sufficiently high that an extra (say) $5k or $10k isn't a huge motivator. Sure, it would be nice, but the decisions are usually based primarily on something else: the environment, interest in the work, or whatever. That's certainly true for me: in my recent job search I got an offer from a company that looked like a great place to work. I would have been happy if the monetary aspect of the offer had been anywhere in the general neighborhood of my old salary. Fortunately they offered a salary that was about the same as the old one (what a coincidence!), so the decision was easy.
As far as I can tell, economists usually start muttering about "intangible resources" and "diminishing returns" at this point. I don't think the "laws" of economics are laws at all, at least not in the sense that physical scientists use the term. They're just observations about what usually happens. Once you get to either end of the bell curve, they don't always apply.
The hot shots exist. If they don't want to work for them you either have a poor working environment or you aren't paying enough.
The problem was that we just wasn't seeing enough hot shots at all, not that they weren't accepting offers, so it wasn't the pay or the work environment that was keeping them away. It might have been IBM's reputation as a stodgy company, though. (I know I once swore I'd never work for them. Then they went and took over the company I worked for.:-) It may also have been that many of the "star" programmers were treated well enough at other companies (i.e. they had great intangibles) that they just weren't looking for jobs.
Regardless, American companies, since Reagan and Nixon, have subverted the American immigration laws in order to crush unions and discipline labor [....]
But to massively expand the H1-B program just because the richest people in American want to pay less in wages in crazy.
This is a wonderfully naive point of view that seems to be very common on Slashdot. While it might be true in some industries, it makes me think you don't have much experience with H1-B's at the higher levels of the tech industry. So I'm going on a rant....
<rant>
I was a manager at IBM for a couple of years, and in that time I think I hired two or three people on H1-B visas and helped one or two more apply for green cards. (With some overlap between the sets.) This was out of a group of abut a dozen people, so maybe a third of my team was on some sort of visa. The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage.
My group and the others at our site were feeding off the top of the programmer food chain, to borrow an analogy. We needed engineers who knew the ins and outs of Java and/or C++, had a good grasp of OOD, and were able to figure out the details of standards documents and implement them, or even to help write them in the first place. Just as important, we needed people who were smart and could learn new technologies and languages quickly.
People like this were very hard to find at the height of the tech boom here in the Valley.
When I was at IBM I and my group did a lot of interviewing, both on the phone and in person. It took up a lot of time. We got resumes from outside recruiters and we got a lot of transfer requests from other parts of the company. Even with all of those resumes, I still couldn't hire people as fast as I wanted to. Sure, there were lots of engineers available, but most of them just weren't that good. Truly talented "star" engineers are rare.
When I found a star, I did what it took to hire them, even if they weren't a US citizen. H1-B paperwork is a royal PITA, as is getting approval from umpteen levels of management. (If you're a really bad person, you come back in the next life as an immigration lawyer.) It also costs a lot of money to sponsor someone for an H1. I think it was around $5,000 when you added up the application fees, lawyer's fees and so on, but I can't remember. Then you have to do the green card a year or so later, and it costs even more and has more paperwork.
We definitely weren't saving money by hiring people on H1-B's. In addition to the legal fees and management time we spent on the visas, we were paying the H1 folks the same salaries we'd pay anyone else. Every few months we'd informally rank all the employees at the site and make sure the salaries lined up with the rankings, with absolutely no concern over visa status. The better, more productive engineers got paid more, period. There were definitely senior engineers who happened to be on H1's who got paid more than more junior (but still bright) engineers without much experience. I didn't see any correlation with visa status, except maybe that I never made any college hires of people on H1's. (It wouldn't have been worth the expense of flying them over here for an interview; the same thing applies to out-of-town junior-level US people.)
Many people think that market conditions have changed in the last few years and that H1s are now mostly obsolete. I think that may be true at some levels of the industry. But even with all the layoffs in the last couple of years, extremely bright "star" engineers are still hard to find. For an example, look at all the engineering openings at Google. You'd think that in a down economy with lots of engineers out of work, they'd be able to hire people as quickly as they wanted to. If they wanted just anybody, that might be true. But they're also feeding off the top of the food chain; they only want
Their mice are definitely nice. I have the Intellimouse Optical Explorer and love it. It fits my fairly long hands, and the two extra buttons on the left side are great for web browsing. I also have a MS "Internet Keyboard" (or maybe it's a "Multimedia Keyboard") that's pretty nice. I don't use all the extra buttons, but the basic keyboard has a good feel.
On the other hand, I've been trying out a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard at work and have decided its name is an oxymoron. I'm sorry, but the "6" key belongs on the right-hand side.
>So here comes the Second Law of Thermodynamics: in real conditions, any process will generate less energy than it takes.
Sort of. That version of the 2nd law is true in classical thermodynamics. But when you throw relativity and nuclear reactions into the mix, it breaks down. Instead, you have talk about both mass and energy, which are equivalent in the good old ratio E=mc^2. This is why atomic fission (nuclear reactors and fission bombs) and "hot" fusion (hydrogen bombs) work. A small fraction of the mass is converted into energy. The classical versions of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics are being violated, but if you take the equivalence of mass and energy into account then it all works again. (It's been ages since I studied this stuff, but I think I have that basically right.)
I've been thinking for a while that next year's Hugos ought to include a special award for Most Prolific Dead Author. The runaway winner would be Marion Zimmer Bradley, but it's nice to know that Heinlein would be in the running too.
I just stumbled across this discussion in the archives and figured I'd answer even though it's a week old.... I'm not a professional tech writer, but I've been involved in hiring them over the last few years.
The others posters who said that you'll make more money doing API documentation were right on the money, so to speak. A good technical tech writer will make somewhere around $80/hour in the Bay Area right now. That's for writers who have at least a few years of professional development experience in addition to being good writers. Writers who aren't as technical typically make $50 to $60/hour for things like user-level documentation, and it's much harder to find that sort of job right now. To give you an idea of what the market's like, a couple of years ago a really good API writer could make $100/hour.
If you really want to do tech writing as a career and want to command respect and a high salary, I'd suggest getting a programming job for a couple of years first. On the other hand, if writing is just a backup in case you can't find a programming job, then that advice doesn't really apply.
Engineers/programmers can definitely tell the difference between good and bad tech writers. In the last couple of years I worked with a few writers who used to do development before they got tired of it, and they were very good. Most of the other writers I've worked with were ok but not great. Of course, I've mostly worked on APIs, so writers without a programming background were at a big disadvantage.
Finally, make sure you really do know how to write technical documents. Take a course or two. As someone else mentioned, it's different from writing an essay, story, or research paper. I'm a very good programmer and a reasonably good tech writer, but programming comes much more naturally to me. It takes me quite a while to get "in the zone" if I'm trying to write, and I usually have to re-do everything a couple of times.
> But maybe I'm a poor judge, "the cat that walks though walls" and "the moon is a harsh mistress" are his only books I liked after the age of 14.
I thought The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was decent but not great. On the other hand, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a great book, and certainly one of Heinlein's best. It's probably my favorite "classic" SF. Another of Heinlein's early works I really like is The Past Through Tomorrow, a collection of short stories from his "future history" universe (the one Lazarus Long was in). It includes some real classics like "Methusela's Children" and "If This Goes On". Friday is probably my favorite of his later stuff.
>Even the second foundation trilogy reads like second rate cyberpunk.
That's because the second foundation trilogy sucked.
Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but it was totally derivative, had a fairly lame "cyberpunk-lite" plot, and was written by three different people. IMO, Asimov ruined both the Foundation and Robots series when he merged them in his later years. Not quite as badly as Heinlein messed up his own series with dreck like Number of the Beast, but still pretty bad.
There are still some good SF authors out there, though: Kim Stanley Robinson, CJ Cherryh, Ursula LeGuin, Connie Willis, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson,....
PIM on Linux
on
Aethera 1.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not sure what the official definition of PIM and groupware are, but here's what they mean to me: PIM is a Personal Information Manager (e.g. a PalmPilot), and groupware is software that helps people collaborate at work. There are a lot of overblown "solutions" to these problems that end up causing more work than they eliminate. Lotus Notes is a good (bad) example. When I was at IBM they had all sorts of "workflow" applications written in Notes. To do annual reviews of people in my group I had to get them to fill out a bunch of forms in a horrendous Notes UI, and then their colleagues would fill out some forms, and then I'd have to go in and fill out my own forms, and then the employee could fill out a response form. All of this in the awful Notes UI, and all on a glacially slow server because everyone in the company had to do it at the same time. Paper would have been easier.
On the other hand, PIMs can be really useful. I'm back to being a plain old engineer, but I still like to keep my address book and calendar in my Palm Vx and sync it up with the corresponding software on the desktop. That way if I'm at a meeting I can look at the Palm to see what's next on the schedule, and if I'm somewhere else (e.g. a doctor's appointment) I can check to see what days are free for my 6-month checkup visit.:-) Some people also sync their email onto Palms or Blackberries or whatever, but I've never seen the point. I'm happy to get away from it for a while.
Getting all of this to work on Windows is pretty easy. You can install Palm Desktop and sync the thing to that, or you can just install HotSync and then use "conduits" that sync up the Mozilla address book, Notes, and lots of other tools.
On Linux, you can use KPilot and KOrganizer. I got them set up on the Linux box at my new job a few days ago, and they seem to work ok. The (big) catch is that I don't really want to store my info in KOrganizer. I want the addresses to go into Mozilla and the calendar entries to go into the weird "Corporate Time" system our group uses at work. Unfortunately there's no CorporateTime conduit for Linux (only Linux and Mac), and I haven't been able to make the Mozilla one work on Linux yet either.
Summary: Linux is getting pretty good in the PIM/groupware department, but it has a little ways to go to catch up to Windows.
A friend of mine has a decent side income from some 3D modeling plugins he wrote. Here's what he does, as far as I can remember:
A demo copy is available for free, but it has limitations like a reduced number of objects you can model and maybe reduced options for saving and exporting.
The full copy is locked and requires a user-specific key to unlock it. I don't know how hard it would be to crack, but presumably not very hard for someone who knew what they were doing.
The program is relatively cheap (<$50?) and is available online. The purchase and key generation are totally automated. You type in your credit card number and click OK, and in a few minutes you get the key emailed to you. This means it's probably just as easy to buy the program as to crack it.
He spends time on the newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. related to the product and the programs it plus into. People there know he's a real person who understands the product domain and is willing to answer lots of questions, which seems to make them more inclined to pay him.
I think he originally considered publishing the plugins as shareware but decided against it. With shareware there's just not a big incentive for people to pay for the program after they already have a full, working copy.
BTW, as a disclaimer I should say that I now work for Google, starting last week. I don't have much more knowledge on how the search stuff works than what's publicly available, though. Even if I did, I wouldn't be able to talk about it.
Searching for "Kazaa" gives a Kazaa Lite link in the 4th position, and "Kazaa Lite" gives lots of KL links. I don't know if this means they've changed their minds or if the original change just hasn't propagated everywhere yet.
>Please, Gnome developers, switch Cancel and Ok to a consistent Ok(LHS) and Cancel(RHS)... Please?!!!
There's actually some fairly solid UI research that says the OK button should usually be on the RHS of a dialog. People who speak and read left-to-right languages like English tend to scan a dialog box from upper-left to lower-right, and their brains really want to click on whatever is in the lower-right corner of the dialog. Thus, the default button (usually OK) should almost always go there.
I remember reading this in a book on user interface design about 10 or 15 years ago. I think the research was done at apple, but it wasn't an Apple book. It was a collection of articles in a big blue paperback with a poorly-designed walk/don't-walk sign on the cover, but I can't remember the title. Now I may have to go dig through the boxes in my closet.
Hmm. I'll have to try installing SuSE on a spare machine and see what happens. How hard is it to keep the thing up to date with security patches? With M$, it's easy to keep it patched, but there's so damn many patches that you never know when you'll get caught in the "window" between an exploit being found and the patch being released.
>It's what we're recommending to anyone that would be stupid enough to buy that M$ crap.
There's no way I'd pay full price for it. I have a couple of copies of XP Pro that a friend who works at M$ got for me. (I'm running a copy of XP Corporate from a friend, though, so I don't have to deal with activation.) And my copy of Win2K server cost $2. On a street corner in Malaysia.:-) I don't feel particularly guilty since I have assorted copies of XP and Win2K pro laying around uninstalled.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing, though, is that same fountain also used to have water in it. I worked a couple blocks from there until recently, and as of about a month ago the water seems to have disappeared. Maybe Verisign can't afford water anymore? :-)
Oddly, I know several people at Verisign. I'm hoping they're all in a department that isn't involved in this whole mess, because I'm friends with a couple of them. Of course, their CEO seemed like a nice guy too the couple of times I met him (8 years ago?) so it's hard to tell. At least back then, there was no dripping slime in evidence.
Yep. That was the going rate here in Silicon Valley until the bust a couple of years ago. Now companies seem to be offering less, and sometimes a lot less. A year or so ago there were stories in the Murky News about recruiters pursuing new careers in real estate and retail.
When I was first out of college, I used a headhunter to find my first programming job in Chicago. I can't remember his name or the company, but he was somewhere downtown on Wacker street I think. It took several months to find a job that I was a good fit for, especially since I didn't have a CS degree. He sent me on one or two interviews that weren't really good fits for me and was kind of amazed when I turned a company down because they were "too corporate." But he got the message, and a bit later he found me weveral interviews at once and I ended up with three offers to choose from.
Out here in Silicon Valley I know one good recruiter who used to work for one of my former employers on a contract basis. She found good people for us to interview, which is exactly what she was supposed to do. She also gave me some advice when I was job hunting again a few months ago. The recruiters who work for my current employer seemed good too. In both of these cases they definitely represented the employer, not the potential employees.
On the other hand I've run across some bad ones. Before I found the good one in Chicago, I encountered some agencies that were more like meat markets than technical recruiters. At one of them I showed up for an initial interview and they were also interviewing hairdressers. From the employer side, I've also encountered quite a few recruiters who will give managers lots and lots of resumes for unqualified people, without making any effort to filter them at all. ("Does the word Java appear anywhere on this resume? No? Then why did you send it to me for a Java programming job?")
Summary: There are some excellent recruiters out there, but they're hard to find. Once you find a good one, stick with them.
Er, probably. (Scroll down a bit.)
Did someone say that hard, predictive SF was dead?
If you can vary the intensity of size of the cells, you can get lots of colors other than gray. I have a fairly high-end inkjet CMYK printer that produces great prints. (It's an Epson 2200, fwiw.) To the naked eye, colored areas look, um, colored. But if you look at a print with a loupe (even my relatively cheap 4x one) you can see zillions of different-colored dots. By varying the relative sizes and positions of the dots, they can get lots of different colors.
CRTs and LCD monitors work similarly. There are lots of small, single-color dots of varying intensities. Unless you get really close, the eye blends them all together into solid colors.
I hope that was coherent. The drugs I took for my backache seem to be taking effect, so I may wake up in the morning and discover I posted something horrendous. (Which would be better than the time that I didn't remember making a post at all and wondered who had hacked my account.)
It's not so great for many doctors down here either. Doctors who are in fairly obscure specialties or who do uninsured procedures like cosmetic surgery seem to be the only ones making huge piles of money any more. My doctor (an internist) has told me that I make quite a bit more than she does after she pays for office space, malpractice insurance, a receptionist, and so on. She's also mentioned some other doctors (and whole medical groups) who decided to retire early because they got sick of dealing with insurance company bureaucracies. Of course, a government insurance bureaucracy would probably be even worse.
Which is perfectly legal, as long as the requirement for the job isn't simply "can write C code". If the job requires expert knowledge of C++ or Java, OO API-design skills, the ability to implement W3C & ISO standards while working independently, and so on (all of these are things the folks in my group actually did), then your red herring doesn't apply.
Part of the whole visa process is (or was 3 years ago) a "Labor Condition Certification" application where you have to prove to the DOL that a person with the desired skills isn't available in the US. We did have one or two of these turned down; the one I remember involved someone who was extremely good but didn't have a college degree yet. These days with the market the way it is, I've heard that most companies won't look at people with H1's because they know that the Labor Condition application is very unlikely to be approved. As I said earlier, I have no idea what Google does. (I'm a US citizen so I had no reason to ask.)
Another poster claimed that IBM only hired H1-B workers if they had Ph.D.'s. This wasn't the case when I was there, though it may have changed since then. However, it was much easier to get a visa for someone with a Ph.D., because it was a lot easier to prove to the DOL that the same skills weren't available in the US. I think there might even have been a special "outstanding researcher" visa for Ph.D.'s. I don't remember the details because I never actually did this.
That's an interesting topic. I'd agree that the laws of economics do seem apply to computer programmers, but only up to a point. If you're looking for people (or a job) at a high enough skill level, money is (usually) less of an issue. The salaries are sufficiently high that an extra (say) $5k or $10k isn't a huge motivator. Sure, it would be nice, but the decisions are usually based primarily on something else: the environment, interest in the work, or whatever. That's certainly true for me: in my recent job search I got an offer from a company that looked like a great place to work. I would have been happy if the monetary aspect of the offer had been anywhere in the general neighborhood of my old salary. Fortunately they offered a salary that was about the same as the old one (what a coincidence!), so the decision was easy.
As far as I can tell, economists usually start muttering about "intangible resources" and "diminishing returns" at this point. I don't think the "laws" of economics are laws at all, at least not in the sense that physical scientists use the term. They're just observations about what usually happens. Once you get to either end of the bell curve, they don't always apply.
The hot shots exist. If they don't want to work for them you either have a poor working environment or you aren't paying enough.
The problem was that we just wasn't seeing enough hot shots at all, not that they weren't accepting offers, so it wasn't the pay or the work environment that was keeping them away. It might have been IBM's reputation as a stodgy company, though. (I know I once swore I'd never work for them. Then they went and took over the company I worked for. :-) It may also have been that many of the "star" programmers were treated well enough at other companies (i.e. they had great intangibles) that they just weren't looking for jobs.
Now that's a geek! :-)
This is a wonderfully naive point of view that seems to be very common on Slashdot. While it might be true in some industries, it makes me think you don't have much experience with H1-B's at the higher levels of the tech industry. So I'm going on a rant....
<rant>
I was a manager at IBM for a couple of years, and in that time I think I hired two or three people on H1-B visas and helped one or two more apply for green cards. (With some overlap between the sets.) This was out of a group of abut a dozen people, so maybe a third of my team was on some sort of visa. The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage.
My group and the others at our site were feeding off the top of the programmer food chain, to borrow an analogy. We needed engineers who knew the ins and outs of Java and/or C++, had a good grasp of OOD, and were able to figure out the details of standards documents and implement them, or even to help write them in the first place. Just as important, we needed people who were smart and could learn new technologies and languages quickly.
People like this were very hard to find at the height of the tech boom here in the Valley. When I was at IBM I and my group did a lot of interviewing, both on the phone and in person. It took up a lot of time. We got resumes from outside recruiters and we got a lot of transfer requests from other parts of the company. Even with all of those resumes, I still couldn't hire people as fast as I wanted to. Sure, there were lots of engineers available, but most of them just weren't that good. Truly talented "star" engineers are rare.
When I found a star, I did what it took to hire them, even if they weren't a US citizen. H1-B paperwork is a royal PITA, as is getting approval from umpteen levels of management. (If you're a really bad person, you come back in the next life as an immigration lawyer.) It also costs a lot of money to sponsor someone for an H1. I think it was around $5,000 when you added up the application fees, lawyer's fees and so on, but I can't remember. Then you have to do the green card a year or so later, and it costs even more and has more paperwork.
We definitely weren't saving money by hiring people on H1-B's. In addition to the legal fees and management time we spent on the visas, we were paying the H1 folks the same salaries we'd pay anyone else. Every few months we'd informally rank all the employees at the site and make sure the salaries lined up with the rankings, with absolutely no concern over visa status. The better, more productive engineers got paid more, period. There were definitely senior engineers who happened to be on H1's who got paid more than more junior (but still bright) engineers without much experience. I didn't see any correlation with visa status, except maybe that I never made any college hires of people on H1's. (It wouldn't have been worth the expense of flying them over here for an interview; the same thing applies to out-of-town junior-level US people.)
Many people think that market conditions have changed in the last few years and that H1s are now mostly obsolete. I think that may be true at some levels of the industry. But even with all the layoffs in the last couple of years, extremely bright "star" engineers are still hard to find. For an example, look at all the engineering openings at Google. You'd think that in a down economy with lots of engineers out of work, they'd be able to hire people as quickly as they wanted to. If they wanted just anybody, that might be true. But they're also feeding off the top of the food chain; they only want
On the other hand, I've been trying out a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard at work and have decided its name is an oxymoron. I'm sorry, but the "6" key belongs on the right-hand side.
Sort of. That version of the 2nd law is true in classical thermodynamics. But when you throw relativity and nuclear reactions into the mix, it breaks down. Instead, you have talk about both mass and energy, which are equivalent in the good old ratio E=mc^2. This is why atomic fission (nuclear reactors and fission bombs) and "hot" fusion (hydrogen bombs) work. A small fraction of the mass is converted into energy. The classical versions of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics are being violated, but if you take the equivalence of mass and energy into account then it all works again. (It's been ages since I studied this stuff, but I think I have that basically right.)
And they think that's going to discourage people?
I've been thinking for a while that next year's Hugos ought to include a special award for Most Prolific Dead Author. The runaway winner would be Marion Zimmer Bradley, but it's nice to know that Heinlein would be in the running too.
The others posters who said that you'll make more money doing API documentation were right on the money, so to speak. A good technical tech writer will make somewhere around $80/hour in the Bay Area right now. That's for writers who have at least a few years of professional development experience in addition to being good writers. Writers who aren't as technical typically make $50 to $60/hour for things like user-level documentation, and it's much harder to find that sort of job right now. To give you an idea of what the market's like, a couple of years ago a really good API writer could make $100/hour.
If you really want to do tech writing as a career and want to command respect and a high salary, I'd suggest getting a programming job for a couple of years first. On the other hand, if writing is just a backup in case you can't find a programming job, then that advice doesn't really apply.
Engineers/programmers can definitely tell the difference between good and bad tech writers. In the last couple of years I worked with a few writers who used to do development before they got tired of it, and they were very good. Most of the other writers I've worked with were ok but not great. Of course, I've mostly worked on APIs, so writers without a programming background were at a big disadvantage.
Finally, make sure you really do know how to write technical documents. Take a course or two. As someone else mentioned, it's different from writing an essay, story, or research paper. I'm a very good programmer and a reasonably good tech writer, but programming comes much more naturally to me. It takes me quite a while to get "in the zone" if I'm trying to write, and I usually have to re-do everything a couple of times.
I hope that helps some.
I thought The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was decent but not great. On the other hand, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a great book, and certainly one of Heinlein's best. It's probably my favorite "classic" SF. Another of Heinlein's early works I really like is The Past Through Tomorrow, a collection of short stories from his "future history" universe (the one Lazarus Long was in). It includes some real classics like "Methusela's Children" and "If This Goes On". Friday is probably my favorite of his later stuff.
It was indeed Gibson. The story was "The Gernsback Continuum". It was in his collection Burning Chrome and probably other places.
That's because the second foundation trilogy sucked.
Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but it was totally derivative, had a fairly lame "cyberpunk-lite" plot, and was written by three different people. IMO, Asimov ruined both the Foundation and Robots series when he merged them in his later years. Not quite as badly as Heinlein messed up his own series with dreck like Number of the Beast, but still pretty bad.
There are still some good SF authors out there, though: Kim Stanley Robinson, CJ Cherryh, Ursula LeGuin, Connie Willis, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, ....
On the other hand, PIMs can be really useful. I'm back to being a plain old engineer, but I still like to keep my address book and calendar in my Palm Vx and sync it up with the corresponding software on the desktop. That way if I'm at a meeting I can look at the Palm to see what's next on the schedule, and if I'm somewhere else (e.g. a doctor's appointment) I can check to see what days are free for my 6-month checkup visit. :-) Some people also sync their email onto Palms or Blackberries or whatever, but I've never seen the point. I'm happy to get away from it for a while.
Getting all of this to work on Windows is pretty easy. You can install Palm Desktop and sync the thing to that, or you can just install HotSync and then use "conduits" that sync up the Mozilla address book, Notes, and lots of other tools.
On Linux, you can use KPilot and KOrganizer. I got them set up on the Linux box at my new job a few days ago, and they seem to work ok. The (big) catch is that I don't really want to store my info in KOrganizer. I want the addresses to go into Mozilla and the calendar entries to go into the weird "Corporate Time" system our group uses at work. Unfortunately there's no CorporateTime conduit for Linux (only Linux and Mac), and I haven't been able to make the Mozilla one work on Linux yet either.
Summary: Linux is getting pretty good in the PIM/groupware department, but it has a little ways to go to catch up to Windows.
- A demo copy is available for free, but it has limitations like a reduced number of objects you can model and maybe reduced options for saving and exporting.
- The full copy is locked and requires a user-specific key to unlock it. I don't know how hard it would be to crack, but presumably not very hard for someone who knew what they were doing.
- The program is relatively cheap (<$50?) and is available online. The purchase and key generation are totally automated. You type in your credit card number and click OK, and in a few minutes you get the key emailed to you. This means it's probably just as easy to buy the program as to crack it.
- He spends time on the newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. related to the product and the programs it plus into. People there know he's a real person who understands the product domain and is willing to answer lots of questions, which seems to make them more inclined to pay him.
I think he originally considered publishing the plugins as shareware but decided against it. With shareware there's just not a big incentive for people to pay for the program after they already have a full, working copy.BTW, as a disclaimer I should say that I now work for Google, starting last week. I don't have much more knowledge on how the search stuff works than what's publicly available, though. Even if I did, I wouldn't be able to talk about it.
Searching for "Kazaa" gives a Kazaa Lite link in the 4th position, and "Kazaa Lite" gives lots of KL links. I don't know if this means they've changed their minds or if the original change just hasn't propagated everywhere yet.
There's actually some fairly solid UI research that says the OK button should usually be on the RHS of a dialog. People who speak and read left-to-right languages like English tend to scan a dialog box from upper-left to lower-right, and their brains really want to click on whatever is in the lower-right corner of the dialog. Thus, the default button (usually OK) should almost always go there.
I remember reading this in a book on user interface design about 10 or 15 years ago. I think the research was done at apple, but it wasn't an Apple book. It was a collection of articles in a big blue paperback with a poorly-designed walk/don't-walk sign on the cover, but I can't remember the title. Now I may have to go dig through the boxes in my closet.
>It's what we're recommending to anyone that would be stupid enough to buy that M$ crap.
There's no way I'd pay full price for it. I have a couple of copies of XP Pro that a friend who works at M$ got for me. (I'm running a copy of XP Corporate from a friend, though, so I don't have to deal with activation.) And my copy of Win2K server cost $2. On a street corner in Malaysia. :-) I don't feel particularly guilty since I have assorted copies of XP and Win2K pro laying around uninstalled.