If you like math, and more so if you think you don't like math, I implore you to read his essay with every atom of my being.... I defy you to read and find a single sentence that isn't permeated, suffused, soaked, and encrusted with truth
I don't know Scott.... I'm getting mixed messages from you about the article. Why don't you open up and tell us what you really think;-)
.... unchecked air-breathing by the earth's entire population costs governments trillions of dollars of lost revenue, billions of air-accounting jobs and millions of death by old age.
The free availability of air to anyone with the simple capability to just *SUCK IT IN* willy-nilly skews the whole thing wildly. We don't know what people would do if wanton free-for-all air-breathing weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the accounting and sale of air (by the gallons) would create huge revenues for government and private businesses. Again, we don't know because people can just... you know... inhale and exhale at will.
In other news, unchecked air-breathing by the earth's entire population costs governments trillions of dollars of lost revenue, billions of air-accounting jobs and millions of death by old age.
The free availability of air to anyone with the simple capability to just *SUCK IT IN* willy-nilly skews the whole thing wildly. We don't know what people would do if wanton free-for-all air-breathing weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the accounting and sale of air (by the gallons) would create huge revenues for government and private businesses. Again, we don't know because people can just... you know... inhale and exhale at will.
Don't underestimate the power of a great big touchscreen to wipe out many other deficiencies (including a great big price tag). You do remember the iPhone... don't you ?
They decided who they wanted from the eated company
...most of them are still there today, even though their company eventually got eated by a European company...
Will I have to surrender my usage and grammar books at the border if I move to Minnesota ?
(sorry for being a language nazi, but the second and third repetition of "eated" really grated..)
Either the content is worth it or it isn't. The physical book is essentially cost-free as far as anyone is really concerned.
Wrong on two levels. First, for a majority of the text books used in US colleges, the content is not really worth the money the student pays to buy the new version of the book. They buy the overly expensive books because they *have* to due to a collusion of many forces that conspire to keep the annual textbook spending at an artificially high levels. Not all students are backed by rich parents. Many many are working or taking onerous loans to put themselves through college. I would support them in their efforts (safely and legally) to minimize the expenses placed upon their shoulders by an unscrupulous nexus of industry and even the professors. But even if it means taking formally quasi-legal steps (xeroxing portions of books from their peers etc.) they do have my sympathy.
Secondly, it's really the physical book that carries the value in many of these situations. The content is usually in public domain (ie. for most of an undergrad science or engineering class) and can be found in various places on the internet. I do agree that a decent text book carries the effort of collating the current state of knowledge by an expert in a neat package. But is that effort really worth $100 * ? Would it really be worth that much if the market was allowed to operate freely ? Will that same content fetch the same exorbitant prices when sold in a different market (e.g. Asia) ? Hint: lower (physical)quality reprints of many of the same textbooks are sold, perfectly legally and by the same publishers, at one tenth or lower the prices in various markets throughout the world.
... and suddenly you need 8 GB RAM and multi TB disk ???? Does not compute. Why not just buy another relatively cheap (i.e. non-Apple) laptop and add external USB/Firewire disk for more storage.
Increasingly a Linux VM on my MacBook Pro is insufficient due to storage speed/processing constraints and the desire to interface more easily with some sensor packages.
Seriously though, it's not a bad idea for a young person starting his/her career in the western world to spend some time in India right about now. It will be fun (for some values of "fun") and a great asset on your resume.
When I was still reading/. through lynx a few years ago on my 486 (no joke) running Slackware, the difference between the performance of Emacs and Vim was very significant.
I call bullshit on that. I've been using emacs for more about 14 years now. Starting with a 486 with 8 Megs of ram running a 1.x linux kernel in console mode. On those kinds of machines, emacs might have been slightly slower to initally load than vi (not vim) but once it was started, it was as snappy and responsive as anything else you could run on those machines. Even with lots of very large code files loaded in multiple buffers (fortran, if you must know;-). Since then, every machine I've used as been successively more powerful and the mythical slowness or bloatedness of emacs has somehow NEVER manifested itself to me. Don't listen to the propaganda kids. The forces of vim are using good old fashioned FUD.
And oh, I have a version of emacs (22.0.50.1) running on my old powerpc mac mini. I just measured the startup time of emacs after a cold boot -- 3 seconds. Startup time to open a new finder window -- 4 seconds. "Real" memory usage (as measured by the Activity Monitor app): Emacs - 15.85 MB, Finder (with just one active Finder window open) - 19.23 MB.
There you have it.
What we have now is the H1-B visa, whereby a U.S. company can hire a worker from say China at a fixed 6-year cost. That employee is now working in America, but is unable to negotiate for a higher salary, wrong
or compete for a different job within the United States, for 6 years. wrong
Both of the above contentions are wrong because 1) H1-B rules do not require the salary to be constant over the entire stay of an employee in a company. Every H1-B I know gets raises commensurate with his/her performance. 2) it's relatively easy to move from one job to another while on H-1 B visa (it takes about a month to "port" the existing H1-B status over to a new company).
It is being used as an mechanism to artificially hold down labor costs within certain segments of the economy. Highly debatable I would have used the "wrong" designation for this yet another unfounded claim (as opposed to the top two claims, which are just factually wrong) but sadly I don't have any hard data to show you. But anecdotally, I can tell you that my company is desperately looking for good developers in OS/networking/systems field and we can't even afford to start categorizing people on the basis of their citizenship or visa status. We'll gladly go through whatever process it takes to get the right person to work for us legally. We interview lots of H1-B candidates (who maybe working for other companies in the US currently) and if we find a good person, there's no question of even trying to lowball them on salary etc. just because they are H1-B or whatever. The need in the market for *good* programmers and other sorts of techies is genuine and urgent.
Now to those who say, well why don't we pay 50% more money and see the talent line up outside our office... well how do you justify offering new people that scale without extending it to the whole company. And of course, once we extend it to the whole company, we're no longer a viable or profitable business. Yes, our pay is more than competitive in the market but we can't push it beyond a certain limit without risking the whole business model. And no I won't post the name of the company here because I'm posting under my "personal" account and I don't want it to be connected to my employer in any way.
Btw, I'm not extremely happy with the H-1B model. I would rather give highly qualified people (for some definition of "qualified") automatic permission to freely live and work in US on their terms... basically a greencard. But one way or the other, we need to have a way to get foreign talent because without them, our tech industry is doomed to either fail outright or just gets more and more globalized (which it's already in process of).
I've seen El Mariachi and it's a sort of watchable movie. Not great. Certainly not "better than most everything made at Hollywierd". But I'm aware of the cost. Reportedly ~ US $8000 (it was actually shot in Mexico). Also reportedly, Rodriguez got a large part of the money by selling his blood. The story of how the movie was made is far far more interesting then the the actual movie itself. And in fact the sequels made later with Antonio Banderas et al are far better done as far as acting/production values/Salma-Hayek value etc are concerned. The budget for the sequels of course was not even the same galaxy as that of the original.
Mr/Ms. geekoid,
I don't know what exactly is it you do in "out industry" but if I own a project, all changes to it *ARE* indeed known to me. Now I may not read each and every checked-in change, line by line, in real-time but there are other processes (regression testing, flamebox etc.) that act as a cross-check. And most importantly, if something does go wrong with the functionality of the software I have the capability to slice and dice the change history in umpteen number ways to track down exactly where each line of code came from. So ultimately there's strict accountability for everything that goes in. That's all I'm asking for from the Congress.
And perhaps you need to recalibrate your own view of the responsibility you hold if you write code that affects a lot of people.
Thank you Animats. You've just made my point. If I had the complete revision history instead of this vague, generic "change log", I'd know *exactly* who inserted what change and in what order (complete with timestamps). That's exactly what I was getting at in my OP.
Thanks you. All I see is the discussion of "Make them read the bill". That's all fine and good but the original problem I wrote about was the issue of a transparent *modification* system. That is, who made (or at least under which legislator's login-id) that particular change. Who inserted that line that grants Cowtown, WI a 20 million grant to fight terrorism etc? Those are the questions that can be easily answered via a revision control system with public read access (perhaps with a nice web front-end... something like what Twiki provides...)
I'm surprised nobody yet commented on how this case shows how broken the H-1b "Business Model" is. Isn't that the common slashdotian rap on all the other big organizations (e.g. *AA) who try to place artificial barriers on activities that seem so "natural" (e.g. sharing a song with your friend, time-shifting, place shifting, making money on google ads from traffic on your blog etc.) just to protect an technologically obsolete'd business model (making loads of money off of marketing and distributing content in un-necessary physical forms, "protecting" American jobs by artificially restricting economic activity by un-necessary and totally irrelevant geographical boundaries). The biggest irony here is that the OP could be carrying out *exactly* the identical economic activity sitting anywhere else in the world and it's perfectly legal... heck even makes an American company some money (what google is paying this guy is after all just a cut from what google *itself* is making from the advertisers, right?).
So where's the outcry for removing the bureaucratic restrictions that limit highly educated law abiding immigrant's earning potentials on all the different narrowly defined immigration categories (student visas, H-1B, research visas etc.). If we're accepting them in our fold, briging them in because we think it's in our benefit (debate it all you will... but that's what the legislation, the legal voice of this country, officially says), why treat them as sub-human by restricting them from engaging in activities that are otherwise considered perfectly legal and even desirable (creating a business, engaging in gainful employment, creating something of economic value in their free time) in our own citizens ?
> I think you meant 1.6x higher. 0.6x would be...lower.:)
Forgive me nitpicking the nitpicker. He did say 0.6x higher, didn't he? Not 0.6x of google pay. I think his meaning was absolutely clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know Scott.... I'm getting mixed messages from you about the article. Why don't you open up and tell us what you really think ;-)
.... unchecked air-breathing by the earth's entire population costs governments trillions of dollars of lost revenue, billions of air-accounting jobs and millions of death by old age.
The free availability of air to anyone with the simple capability to just *SUCK IT IN* willy-nilly skews the whole thing wildly. We don't know what people would do if wanton free-for-all air-breathing weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the accounting and sale of air (by the gallons) would create huge revenues for government and private businesses. Again, we don't know because people can just... you know... inhale and exhale at will.
In other news, unchecked air-breathing by the earth's entire population costs governments trillions of dollars of lost revenue, billions of air-accounting jobs and millions of death by old age.
The free availability of air to anyone with the simple capability to just *SUCK IT IN* willy-nilly skews the whole thing wildly. We don't know what people would do if wanton free-for-all air-breathing weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the accounting and sale of air (by the gallons) would create huge revenues for government and private businesses. Again, we don't know because people can just... you know... inhale and exhale at will.
...welcome our chin... oh wait!!
... was to have missiles with frickin lasers attached to their warheads.
Don't underestimate the power of a great big touchscreen to wipe out many other deficiencies (including a great big price tag). You do remember the iPhone... don't you ?
Royal Air F***s
Don't they know, outer space is region 8 (*laid down sideways). MPAA is still working on the technology to allow playback there.
Will I have to surrender my usage and grammar books at the border if I move to Minnesota ? (sorry for being a language nazi, but the second and third repetition of "eated" really grated..)
Wrong on two levels. First, for a majority of the text books used in US colleges, the content is not really worth the money the student pays to buy the new version of the book. They buy the overly expensive books because they *have* to due to a collusion of many forces that conspire to keep the annual textbook spending at an artificially high levels. Not all students are backed by rich parents. Many many are working or taking onerous loans to put themselves through college. I would support them in their efforts (safely and legally) to minimize the expenses placed upon their shoulders by an unscrupulous nexus of industry and even the professors. But even if it means taking formally quasi-legal steps (xeroxing portions of books from their peers etc.) they do have my sympathy.
Secondly, it's really the physical book that carries the value in many of these situations. The content is usually in public domain (ie. for most of an undergrad science or engineering class) and can be found in various places on the internet. I do agree that a decent text book carries the effort of collating the current state of knowledge by an expert in a neat package. But is that effort really worth $100 * ? Would it really be worth that much if the market was allowed to operate freely ? Will that same content fetch the same exorbitant prices when sold in a different market (e.g. Asia) ? Hint: lower (physical)quality
reprints of many of the same textbooks are sold, perfectly legally and by the same publishers, at one tenth or lower the prices in various markets throughout the world.
... and it wants its "Linux being used in X industry... Yaaay... " story back.
Not necessarily. I had a 5-digit back in the olden days but wasn't technosavvy enough to ever ... blah blah...
So many excuses... so little time... :-)
Maybe I'm unfairly biased...
Correct. You are unfairly biased.
of course the usual south vs north India ugliness raises it's head on slashdot too. I see and hear a lot of this when in India.
Seriously though, it's not a bad idea for a young person starting his/her career in the western world to spend some time in India right about now. It will be fun (for some values of "fun") and a great asset on your resume.
Here goes.
India blah blah... Outsourcing blah blah... Education system... blah blah... CEO salary.. blah blah...
Ahd oh...
Microsoft sucks.
I pretty much covered the whole discussion there... din't I ?
wrong or compete for a different job within the United States, for 6 years.
wrong
Both of the above contentions are wrong because 1) H1-B rules do not require the salary to be constant over the entire stay of an employee in a company. Every H1-B I know gets raises commensurate with his/her performance. 2) it's relatively easy to move from one job to another while on H-1 B visa (it takes about a month to "port" the existing H1-B status over to a new company).
It is being used as an mechanism to artificially hold down labor costs within certain segments of the economy.
Highly debatable I would have used the "wrong" designation for this yet another unfounded claim (as opposed to the top two claims, which are just factually wrong) but sadly I don't have any hard data to show you. But anecdotally, I can tell you that my company is desperately looking for good developers in OS/networking/systems field and we can't even afford to start categorizing people on the basis of their citizenship or visa status. We'll gladly go through whatever process it takes to get the right person to work for us legally. We interview lots of H1-B candidates (who maybe working for other companies in the US currently) and if we find a good person, there's no question of even trying to lowball them on salary etc. just because they are H1-B or whatever. The need in the market for *good* programmers and other sorts of techies is genuine and urgent. Now to those who say, well why don't we pay 50% more money and see the talent line up outside our office... well how do you justify offering new people that scale without extending it to the whole company. And of course, once we extend it to the whole company, we're no longer a viable or profitable business. Yes, our pay is more than competitive in the market but we can't push it beyond a certain limit without risking the whole business model. And no I won't post the name of the company here because I'm posting under my "personal" account and I don't want it to be connected to my employer in any way. Btw, I'm not extremely happy with the H-1B model. I would rather give highly qualified people (for some definition of "qualified") automatic permission to freely live and work in US on their terms... basically a greencard. But one way or the other, we need to have a way to get foreign talent because without them, our tech industry is doomed to either fail outright or just gets more and more globalized (which it's already in process of).
I've seen El Mariachi and it's a sort of watchable movie. Not great. Certainly not "better than most everything made at Hollywierd". But I'm aware of the cost. Reportedly ~ US $8000 (it was actually shot in Mexico). Also reportedly, Rodriguez got a large part of the money by selling his blood. The story of how the movie was made is far far more interesting then the the actual movie itself. And in fact the sequels made later with Antonio Banderas et al are far better done as far as acting/production values/Salma-Hayek value etc are concerned. The budget for the sequels of course was not even the same galaxy as that of the original.
Mr/Ms. geekoid,
I don't know what exactly is it you do in "out industry" but if I own a project, all changes to it *ARE* indeed known to me. Now I may not read each and every checked-in change, line by line, in real-time but there are other processes (regression testing, flamebox etc.) that act as a cross-check. And most importantly, if something does go wrong with the functionality of the software I have the capability to slice and dice the change history in umpteen number ways to track down exactly where each line of code came from. So ultimately there's strict accountability for everything that goes in. That's all I'm asking for from the Congress.
And perhaps you need to recalibrate your own view of the responsibility you hold if you write code that affects a lot of people.
Thank you Animats. You've just made my point. If I had the complete revision history instead of this vague, generic "change log", I'd know *exactly* who inserted what change and in what order (complete with timestamps). That's exactly what I was getting at in my OP.
Thanks you. All I see is the discussion of "Make them read the bill". That's all fine and good but the original problem I wrote about was the issue of a transparent *modification* system. That is, who made (or at least under which legislator's login-id) that particular change. Who inserted that line that grants Cowtown, WI a 20 million grant to fight terrorism etc? Those are the questions that can be easily answered via a revision control system with public read access (perhaps with a nice web front-end... something like what Twiki provides...)
I'm surprised nobody yet commented on how this case shows how broken the H-1b "Business Model" is. Isn't that the common slashdotian rap on all the other big organizations (e.g. *AA) who try to place artificial barriers on activities that seem so "natural" (e.g. sharing a song with your friend, time-shifting, place shifting, making money on google ads from traffic on your blog etc.) just to protect an technologically obsolete'd business model (making loads of money off of marketing and distributing content in un-necessary physical forms, "protecting" American jobs by artificially restricting economic activity by un-necessary and totally irrelevant geographical boundaries). The biggest irony here is that the OP could be carrying out *exactly* the identical economic activity sitting anywhere else in the world and it's perfectly legal... heck even makes an American company some money (what google is paying this guy is after all just a cut from what google *itself* is making from the advertisers, right?).
So where's the outcry for removing the bureaucratic restrictions that limit highly educated law abiding immigrant's earning potentials on all the different narrowly defined immigration categories (student visas, H-1B, research visas etc.). If we're accepting them in our fold, briging them in because we think it's in our benefit (debate it all you will... but that's what the legislation, the legal voice of this country, officially says), why treat them as sub-human by restricting them from engaging in activities that are otherwise considered perfectly legal and even desirable (creating a business, engaging in gainful employment, creating something of economic value in their free time) in our own citizens ?
> I think you meant 1.6x higher. 0.6x would be...lower. :)
Forgive me nitpicking the nitpicker. He did say 0.6x higher, didn't he? Not 0.6x of google pay. I think his meaning was absolutely clear.