Modded as funny for some reason, but you have a point! Some sucker is paying $500/month to lease this beta test car. I wonder if all the other mfgs will start doing this too. Oh, you want to be our beta-tester for the new 2007 Ah-Nold Edition Hummer..that'll be $5000 month.
The software knows nothing about memory latency, the software only knows it needs to move a block of data from point A to point B. That Java/C/C++ Move_Memory function translates at the lowest level to machine code instructions which are implemented in the logic of the silicon. The coder or the compiler may optimize the ORDER of execution of the instructions, or use different instructions (such as BlockMoves) to speed things up, but the basic underlying machine instructions execute the same way every time (either they hit the cache and load from there, or it misses and a memory fetch is executed across the memory bus). On-chip caches were a design to minimize memory fetch and it's associated latency. On-chip caches are small and fast and are a different design than the external memory.
What you would want is to eliminate the wait states from CPU to RAM (or get more cache hits) and that is NOT something a compiler or OS can do for you, that is done in the algorithms that run the CPU. You can change that to some extent in the BIOS settings, to tell the CPU that memory wait states are zero, or the clock is higher but IIRC the CPU and Memory and Bus Controller have to agree on all this setting and must be able to implement its' timing. Overclocking the CPU won't fix this when the Bus and Memory can't run any faster.
Maybe not, they will likely only hit M$ as they have the deep pockets and can pay up. If they tried to sue Open Source companies they wouldn't get much money! Are they are suing M$ over specific things or just "methods and concepts. Specific things are actionable, the other (IMHO) is NOT. But that is up to the courts to decide (see SCO vs IBM)
There is a Project Gutenberg that has FREE copies of certain books in e-book format. They PROCEEDED Google, so in this case Google copied others so they must feel there is something unique about thier methods. Henry Ford invented the low cost automobile, and a lot of others copied his idea and entered competition with him, yet he survived just fine. It's not always about the idea, or the product, it's about something else that is unique about HOW the concept is implemented. If someone copies Google's idea and makes it better then users will use that servive instead of Google.
Audio and video recording technologies (CD, DVD) are advancing at a fast rate. We are fortunate if a recording technology stays current for more than twenty years (i.e. Anyone still use 9 Track Magentic Tapes?). In the case of a magnetic recording media with a fifty-year life expectancy (30 is really about the max) the media would undoubtedly outlive the recording system technology lifetime several times over. To truly achieve a fifty-year (or more) archival life, recording systems, sufficient spare parts, and technical manuals would need to be archived along with the recorded media. Rather than trying to preserve old, outdated recording formats and technologies, it may be more practical to transcribe on a regular basis - every ten to twenty years or even more frequently. The old copy could be preserved until the new copy is transcribed to the next generation of recording system. In this fashion, at least two copies of the material are always in existence.
Give me a fucking break. The MARKET is run by the traders, and yes, they can manipulate the price by direct or indirect means and overwhelm the "invisible hand". IIRC, Adam Smith's Invisible hand assumes a fair market with fair traders. I'm not sure that is the case in any commodity market.
Setting the market conditions for oil to limit the trading to fixed increases or decreases per day is about the only way to limit what you call "gouging". Corporate earnings ARE taxed, if you tax windfalls are you going to give a tax break when things are bad? "Robin Hood" taxes don't work plain and simple, they discourage investment in maximizing profit by the firm. Profit maximazation (by ethical means) is the mandate to business by the shareholders.
Gas is higher in the EU because it is a DIFFERENT market, they have different issues and the TAXES are higher. As smart as you are you should know that.
These are NOT over-simplifications, they are direct FACTS. Facts don't have to be complicated to be true. If you can't grasp simple facts then there is not any use continuing this discussion.
You forget that the US companies such as Exxon are partners with these National Oil Companies in many of these reserves. In fact the Saudi National Oil Company sold "concessions" to produce and market the oil to American firms as recently as 1998 for certain production.
Saudi Arabs, Americans and Oil By Robert L. Norberg
Human Resources
In 1949, when Harry Snyder was hired to head up the training of Saudi Arabs for Aramco, James Terry Duce, a company executive in New York, told him what was expected: Your task at Aramco is to train Saudis as quickly and as soundly as possible to operate the Saudi oil industry. Inevitably, the Saudi Arab Government will eventually nationalize the industry. When that occurs, we want the young Saudis to have attained the proficiency that will enable them to operate the oil industry efficiently and with goodwill toward Aramco. Thus they will be serving their country's best interests and will be protecting the interests of our parent companies.1
This vision of the training mission and its ultimate result might have appeared reasonably attainable if recruits were available from local schools, knew a bit of English, and had some exposure to industrial practices. But those conditions did not exist when the concession agreement was signed in 1933, nor in 1949 as the postwar development of Saudi Arabia's petroleum resources gathered momentum. Tom Barger, a geologist who arrived in Arabia in 1937 and rose to board chairman before retiring in 1969, recalled many years later: [One] aspect that impressed me was the enormous, inordinate poverty of the inhabitants. As I found out later, nearly everybody was hungry most of the time. . . . There's no education, obviously. The few people who could read and write largely had taught themselves. And there were some very learned men, as a matter of fact, among this population, although most of it was illiterate. They had practically no mechanical skills. We had new employees who couldn't get out of a room because they didn't know how to use a doorknob."2
B. C. Nelson, who served Aramco in employee relations for many years, recalled in 1965 what it had been like for Saudis recruited to Aramco in the early years of the enterprise: Word spread to the desert and townspeople that in exchange for some physical effort the blue-eyed foreigners would give a man a handful of silver! And so they flocked to Aramco's budding oil centers . . . Imagine the effect on a recruit to be plunged into the mechanical age -- none of which fit in with his prior orientation or culture -- with little or nothing in his experience to help him adjust. The most amazing thing about these times in terms of one small facet of an Industrial Relations problem -- absenteeism-was not that, when they were handed their bag of money, they returned to their tribe with their glad tidings, but rather that they ever came back to work. Industrial discipline was practically unknown, so the amazing thing was that there was only a 75 percent turnover in the first few years.3
On-the-job training began on an informal basis in the 1930s and was soon complemented by rudimentary industrial training in classrooms. But without English, Arabic literacy, and basic arithmetic, there was a limit to the progress Saudis could make in job performance and advancement. In 1944, with operations revived after a wartime suspension, the Jabal (meaning "mountain" or "hill") School was opened in Dhahran. Surely in 1944 no one expected history to remember the humble Jabal School. Yet the little company school endures as a symbol for development -- not for the development of an oil company, but for the development of a generation of very special young men. Many Saudis were introduced to the mystery of letters and numbers at the Jabal School. Among them were future scholars, successful businessmen and powerful executives.4
The Jabal School was the beginning of an ever-evolving, structured program of job-related training and general education that replicated under corpor
So you want to fix price oil? Never happen, it's directly anti-capitalist. The MARKET sets the prices, the oil companies spent lots of money to get efficient at $30/bbl oil. They had NOTHING to do with the prices going up, that was part increased demand, part Hurricanes (60%+ of oil and 30%+ of Gulf of Mexico production is still off line..see http://www.mms.gov/ they updated the offline figures daily), part specualtion by traders. If ANYONE is to be blamed it is the traders and their panic that drove prices high. Now they have to keep it high long enough to cover the options they bought so they don't lose money. Oil is a commodity just like OJ, and it's an open market, subject to some manipulation. The oil companies just benefit from the price increase, and when prices ease in the Market they will suffer decreased earning and lower stock prices.
We also have lots of crude avaulable but a supply bottleneck with old, not so efficient refineries that are located in harm's way on the Coasts. We have plenty of oil, just not enough refeneries. If we had surplus refining capacity Gas prices would go down a LOT. Also, it's NOT just USA oil companies that are making money, the ones in Eurpore (BP, Elf, Total) are doing well too. FYI, at $3/gal our prices are still less than the EU.
Your data is about 2 yrs out of date. For example a 2X dual-core Opteron system from Sun pulls about 500-550W per sever unit (CPU, Disk, Memory, Fans, I/O Cards included), so thats 550/4 or about 137.5W per "CPU" (per CPU since that is the power hog). I heard SGI is coming out with water cooled units which may cut costs as chilled water loops can be cheaper (water carries more heat than air) and more efficent than forced air in the long run (but hell to pay to install and if it ever leaks). There are options to lower bills, use interruptible power such that when overall demand hits a certain level your power is reduced (better have standby generators), or you can do hedging in the market on natural gas prices, you can recycle the heat from the servers to heat the building in the winter, you can use high-efficiency A/C units. The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option on anything but Disk Drives.
So, you are OK with 1 out of 10 MANNED Missions (Shuttle, ISS, etc.) failing with loss of the crew and the vehicle? Glad you are not running NASA. Shuttle is about 1 in 100 failures (2 losses in just over 200 missions) and BOTH those could have been prevented with better engineering. The extra engineering costs are minute compared to losing the whole mission.
Source for those figures please.."Kids" with a BS in CompSci are getting hired for a LOT more than 30K. When I got my degree back in 1984, I made 30K! Now if you just mean any old person off the street who has a Microsoft cert or some classes at the Jr. College level you are about right in salary. Of course, I no longer write code, I consult on IT Systems Architectures and manage Development Projects. I don't mind paying for skills, I have had H1B's working for me and found within the narrow window of their experience and knowledge they do fine. Don't expect innovation or self-starters, and don't expect really good code, it works but it won't be fast, tight or reusuable.
If your brother will only pay (afford?) 40K for 10 yr vets then all he will get is H1B's. No one is going to sit in a place 10 yrs to make a 10K raise. Right now the market is red-hot for experienced programmers in areas like Java, J2EE and.NET, not so much so for VB, COBOL,and "web designers".
I doubt your brother sets his budgets, so he has to live within what he was given. So, if he was given an "average" budget for salaries based on what the company HR says is average salary, then he will get "average" people (mostly H1B's). If he wants to have a kick-butt IT department he has to step up and pay for talent. People who ask for more money are not always BSing you, often they are worth it has been my experience.
I think the whole problem is that all programmers are not equal in real life however badly the State Employment Agency wants them to be, thus the salary averages should be broken out in degreed vs non-degreed, and also into other skill levels such as Java/J2EE, etc. which I think would show higher averages in the areas that require more skill.
Part of my group here buys mega storage boxes..they tell me the Engenia software (unity) makes any vendor solution better. We currently run the software over a lot of EMC boxes, and some SGI storage too. I've been told we will be moving away from EMC for several reasons, cost/performance being one, reliability being another. They are looking at Sun and Fujitsu for new purchases. From what I was told both those vendors have good performance and very nice price points.
Insightful? How..this is a consortium of companies NOT IBM alone!! What they are trying to do is establish an "open standard" or some type of interoperability between storage vendors. If you own an IBM now and then decide your next gen SAN is EMC/Sun/etc. how to you get it all to work together is the concept. Making it work is a service the new vendor can provide. Services have higher margins than hardware.
Far as I have seen StorageTek has done pretty good, EMC and IBM are the big dogs but ST held it's own. Tighter integration with Sun can't hurt just like IBM AIX boxes and mainframes work really well with IBM SHARCs. If you want the best kick ass performance in a SAN, you go to the niche players like Ingenia not IBM. I see this as a benefit to the end user and it will allow the companies that adopt it to open up more markets and those that don't will fade. FYI -- Storage was already a commodity and has been for about the last 5 years.
AHA, evidence that the article WAS right. You should make EXACTLY the same as the US Programmer if the H1-B system was not being abused.
A LOT of H1-Bs are here on contracts, the contracts are often setup as 1099's which means the WORKER pays ALL taxes, not just half and the employer half. The H1B doesn't pay the taxes and flys under the radar for a few years until they get the Green Card then they Government knows about them and they start paying. It's illegal but there are a lot of companies out there that don't care.
programmers with 10 years of experience are willing to work for 30k
Really? Where can I hire some for my Fortune 100 company in the Southwest? Kids right out of school make 40K. 10 yr vets make over 70K AVERAGE. Even in the Deep South, I know, I was one in Alabama at one point in time. They must be slinging COBOL or VB where no really strong skills are required to pay that low for US employees. Fortune 100 companies usually pay OK, that sounds like the pay rates for city/county/state Government (lower wages but lifetime jobs).
I don't think he can legally get away using his COUNTY to set pay rates. It has to be State level. Of course the H1Bs are not going to complain about 40K salary, they make 6-8K in India!!
H1-Bs need a SPONSOR, nothing more. Experience is nice but not required. I have had several agencies I worked for that wanted me to add unexperienced H1-B Java programmers at 30-35K/yr to my project so they could make more from the rate they charged the customer. If they could add a H1B at $25/hr versus a US Employee at $40/hr and still charge the customer $80 they darn sure were going to do that. I kept rejecting the applicants as there was a requirement by the customer for them to be US Citizens
Agreed. Sun now owns StorageTek. With a StorageTek SAN and some Sun AMD 1U server boxes using Linux, and Fibrechannel HBAs you get a lot of capability and performance for less than EMC. IBM SHARC is also very good as are the boxes from Fujutsi, Hitachi and Ingenia but none of these are "low cost".
Could be the ops budget and the dev budget are different piles of money. I've seen that happen a LOT, but your point is valid as energy costs are high and getting higher. I also noticed the PetaBox only supports up to GB Ethernet, and there are other technolgies (like FiberChannel and InfiniBand) that are faster (if speed is an issue), but I haven't seen open-source drivers.
I worked on HST software but it was years ago so I may be a bit off base but here is what I recall.
The Cameras on the Hubble don't really focus like we think of with a 35mm camera. They take exposures of various durations and with certain filters in place. Then the raw data is postprocessed on the ground and based on the raw data, the wavelength filters, etc. then "image" is constructed.
With the UV "camera" what they would be doing is taking a (TBD time) open shutter picture of the moon with the filters set to only let UV wavelengths pass to the detectors. The detectors will record the intensity of the light hitting each "pixel" of the camera ("binning") and send that data to the ground for processing. If you go to NASAwatch.com there is an article about this that actually links to the experiment definitions, process, etc that was submitted by the researcher in order to get the (very limited) time with the Instrument.
The kid couldn't make up his mind so he did nothing? That's not very intelligent. He could have taken the first year or two of college to make up his mind. I changed majors two times and still made it out in 5 years. If he liked problem solving maybe he would have gotten into Chemistry or Physics and would have had the ability to write his own software for research. IMO there is no excuse for not giving it a try and seeing what happened.
Listening to the Slashdot for advice is not a good idea either you get way too many opinions. If he had checked online at various locations about careers he might have decided to go on to school. Or he could have talked to Placement Offices at Colleges. Sounds like he spent too much time with his computers and too little learning the way the world works. In programming things are usually either right or wrong with little grey area, in the real world it is the oppisite, most things are grey with few black and white decisions.
He obviously has some talents, he just needs to suck it up, take the "risk" and get an education!! It does NOT have be in CS, in fact a LOT of programmers are not CS majors. He may have found he was very good at something in CS and gone on to get a PhD and done research, there is no excuse for him "wasting" his talent because he was scared about the future in Programming.
No, the CIA can now share information they gather from "intelligence sources" about possible terrorist activities inside the USA with the FBI and other domestic law enforcement. That had NOT been the case in the past.
My point was more for Hospitals and care facilities. If it was on the roof of a large building (hotel) perhaps some people could have stayed there. Or maybe the Superdome would not have lost power.
I wonder if you can plug a dropcord into the thing? With lots of drop cords power could have been run to a few places close by to the site of the device. I suspect some enterprising folks could have done quite a bit with a few of these.
Slashdot Mirror
Modded as funny for some reason, but you have a point! Some sucker is paying $500/month to lease this beta test car. I wonder if all the other mfgs will start doing this too. Oh, you want to be our beta-tester for the new 2007 Ah-Nold Edition Hummer..that'll be $5000 month.
The software knows nothing about memory latency, the software only knows it needs to move a block of data from point A to point B. That Java/C/C++ Move_Memory function translates at the lowest level to machine code instructions which are implemented in the logic of the silicon. The coder or the compiler may optimize the ORDER of execution of the instructions, or use different instructions (such as BlockMoves) to speed things up, but the basic underlying machine instructions execute the same way every time (either they hit the cache and load from there, or it misses and a memory fetch is executed across the memory bus). On-chip caches were a design to minimize memory fetch and it's associated latency. On-chip caches are small and fast and are a different design than the external memory.
What you would want is to eliminate the wait states from CPU to RAM (or get more cache hits) and that is NOT something a compiler or OS can do for you, that is done in the algorithms that run the CPU. You can change that to some extent in the BIOS settings, to tell the CPU that memory wait states are zero, or the clock is higher but IIRC the CPU and Memory and Bus Controller have to agree on all this setting and must be able to implement its' timing. Overclocking the CPU won't fix this when the Bus and Memory can't run any faster.
Maybe not, they will likely only hit M$ as they have the deep pockets and can pay up. If they tried to sue Open Source companies they wouldn't get much money! Are they are suing M$ over specific things or just "methods and concepts. Specific things are actionable, the other (IMHO) is NOT. But that is up to the courts to decide (see SCO vs IBM)
There is a Project Gutenberg that has FREE copies of certain books in e-book format. They PROCEEDED Google, so in this case Google copied others so they must feel there is something unique about thier methods. Henry Ford invented the low cost automobile, and a lot of others copied his idea and entered competition with him, yet he survived just fine. It's not always about the idea, or the product, it's about something else that is unique about HOW the concept is implemented. If someone copies Google's idea and makes it better then users will use that servive instead of Google.
Audio and video recording technologies (CD, DVD) are advancing at a fast rate. We are fortunate if a recording technology stays current for more than twenty years (i.e. Anyone still use 9 Track Magentic Tapes?). In the case of a magnetic recording media with a fifty-year life expectancy (30 is really about the max) the media would undoubtedly outlive the recording system technology lifetime several times over. To truly achieve a fifty-year (or more) archival life, recording systems, sufficient spare parts, and technical manuals would need to be archived along with the recorded media. Rather than trying to preserve old, outdated recording formats and technologies, it may be more practical to transcribe on a regular basis - every ten to twenty years or even more frequently. The old copy could be preserved until the new copy is transcribed to the next generation of recording system. In this fashion, at least two copies of the material are always in existence.
Give me a fucking break. The MARKET is run by the traders, and yes, they can manipulate the price by direct or indirect means and overwhelm the "invisible hand". IIRC, Adam Smith's Invisible hand assumes a fair market with fair traders. I'm not sure that is the case in any commodity market.
Setting the market conditions for oil to limit the trading to fixed increases or decreases per day is about the only way to limit what you call "gouging". Corporate earnings ARE taxed, if you tax windfalls are you going to give a tax break when things are bad? "Robin Hood" taxes don't work plain and simple, they discourage investment in maximizing profit by the firm. Profit maximazation (by ethical means) is the mandate to business by the shareholders.
Gas is higher in the EU because it is a DIFFERENT market, they have different issues and the TAXES are higher. As smart as you are you should know that.
These are NOT over-simplifications, they are direct FACTS. Facts don't have to be complicated to be true. If you can't grasp simple facts then there is not any use continuing this discussion.
You forget that the US companies such as Exxon are partners with these National Oil Companies in many of these reserves. In fact the Saudi National Oil Company sold "concessions" to produce and market the oil to American firms as recently as 1998 for certain production.
Saudi Arabs, Americans and Oil
By Robert L. Norberg
Human Resources
In 1949, when Harry Snyder was hired to head up the training of Saudi Arabs for Aramco, James Terry Duce, a company executive in New York, told him what was expected:
Your task at Aramco is to train Saudis as quickly and as soundly as possible to operate the Saudi oil industry. Inevitably, the Saudi Arab Government will eventually nationalize the industry. When that occurs, we want the young Saudis to have attained the proficiency that will enable them to operate the oil industry efficiently and with goodwill toward Aramco. Thus they will be serving their country's best interests and will be protecting the interests of our parent companies.1
This vision of the training mission and its ultimate result might have appeared reasonably attainable if recruits were available from local schools, knew a bit of English, and had some exposure to industrial practices. But those conditions did not exist when the concession agreement was signed in 1933, nor in 1949 as the postwar development of Saudi Arabia's petroleum resources gathered momentum. Tom Barger, a geologist who arrived in Arabia in 1937 and rose to board chairman before retiring in 1969, recalled many years later:
[One] aspect that impressed me was the enormous, inordinate poverty of the inhabitants. As I found out later, nearly everybody was hungry most of the time. . . . There's no education, obviously. The few people who could read and write largely had taught themselves. And there were some very learned men, as a matter of fact, among this population, although most of it was illiterate. They had practically no mechanical skills. We had new employees who couldn't get out of a room because they didn't know how to use a doorknob."2
B. C. Nelson, who served Aramco in employee relations for many years, recalled in 1965 what it had been like for Saudis recruited to Aramco in the early years of the enterprise:
Word spread to the desert and townspeople that in exchange for some physical effort the blue-eyed foreigners would give a man a handful of silver! And so they flocked to Aramco's budding oil centers . . . Imagine the effect on a recruit to be plunged into the mechanical age -- none of which fit in with his prior orientation or culture -- with little or nothing in his experience to help him adjust. The most amazing thing about these times in terms of one small facet of an Industrial Relations problem -- absenteeism-was not that, when they were handed their bag of money, they returned to their tribe with their glad tidings, but rather that they ever came back to work. Industrial discipline was practically unknown, so the amazing thing was that there was only a 75 percent turnover in the first few years.3
On-the-job training began on an informal basis in the 1930s and was soon complemented by rudimentary industrial training in classrooms. But without English, Arabic literacy, and basic arithmetic, there was a limit to the progress Saudis could make in job performance and advancement. In 1944, with operations revived after a wartime suspension, the Jabal (meaning "mountain" or "hill") School was opened in Dhahran.
Surely in 1944 no one expected history to remember the humble Jabal School. Yet the little company school endures as a symbol for development -- not for the development of an oil company, but for the development of a generation of very special young men. Many Saudis were introduced to the mystery of letters and numbers at the Jabal School. Among them were future scholars, successful businessmen and powerful executives.4
The Jabal School was the beginning of an ever-evolving, structured program of job-related training and general education that replicated under corpor
So you want to fix price oil? Never happen, it's directly anti-capitalist. The MARKET sets the prices, the oil companies spent lots of money to get efficient at $30/bbl oil. They had NOTHING to do with the prices going up, that was part increased demand, part Hurricanes (60%+ of oil and 30%+ of Gulf of Mexico production is still off line..see http://www.mms.gov/ they updated the offline figures daily), part specualtion by traders. If ANYONE is to be blamed it is the traders and their panic that drove prices high. Now they have to keep it high long enough to cover the options they bought so they don't lose money. Oil is a commodity just like OJ, and it's an open market, subject to some manipulation. The oil companies just benefit from the price increase, and when prices ease in the Market they will suffer decreased earning and lower stock prices.
We also have lots of crude avaulable but a supply bottleneck with old, not so efficient refineries that are located in harm's way on the Coasts. We have plenty of oil, just not enough refeneries. If we had surplus refining capacity Gas prices would go down a LOT. Also, it's NOT just USA oil companies that are making money, the ones in Eurpore (BP, Elf, Total) are doing well too. FYI, at $3/gal our prices are still less than the EU.
Your data is about 2 yrs out of date. For example a 2X dual-core Opteron system from Sun pulls about 500-550W per sever unit (CPU, Disk, Memory, Fans, I/O Cards included), so thats 550/4 or about 137.5W per "CPU" (per CPU since that is the power hog). I heard SGI is coming out with water cooled units which may cut costs as chilled water loops can be cheaper (water carries more heat than air) and more efficent than forced air in the long run (but hell to pay to install and if it ever leaks). There are options to lower bills, use interruptible power such that when overall demand hits a certain level your power is reduced (better have standby generators), or you can do hedging in the market on natural gas prices, you can recycle the heat from the servers to heat the building in the winter, you can use high-efficiency A/C units. The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option on anything but Disk Drives.
If we are talking unmanned I agree but the first post did not clarify that.
Some idiots modded me down to -1. Oh well, I got Karma on top of Karma. Thier turn is coming!
The "Moonies" would dust it off. Didn't you see them when Wallace and Grommit visited to get some Cheese?
So, you are OK with 1 out of 10 MANNED Missions (Shuttle, ISS, etc.) failing with loss of the crew and the vehicle? Glad you are not running NASA. Shuttle is about 1 in 100 failures (2 losses in just over 200 missions) and BOTH those could have been prevented with better engineering. The extra engineering costs are minute compared to losing the whole mission.
Source for those figures please.."Kids" with a BS in CompSci are getting hired for a LOT more than 30K. When I got my degree back in 1984, I made 30K! Now if you just mean any old person off the street who has a Microsoft cert or some classes at the Jr. College level you are about right in salary. Of course, I no longer write code, I consult on IT Systems Architectures and manage Development Projects. I don't mind paying for skills, I have had H1B's working for me and found within the narrow window of their experience and knowledge they do fine. Don't expect innovation or self-starters, and don't expect really good code, it works but it won't be fast, tight or reusuable.
.NET, not so much so for VB, COBOL,and "web designers".
If your brother will only pay (afford?) 40K for 10 yr vets then all he will get is H1B's. No one is going to sit in a place 10 yrs to make a 10K raise. Right now the market is red-hot for experienced programmers in areas like Java, J2EE and
I doubt your brother sets his budgets, so he has to live within what he was given. So, if he was given an "average" budget for salaries based on what the company HR says is average salary, then he will get "average" people (mostly H1B's). If he wants to have a kick-butt IT department he has to step up and pay for talent. People who ask for more money are not always BSing you, often they are worth it has been my experience.
I think the whole problem is that all programmers are not equal in real life however badly the State Employment Agency wants them to be, thus the salary averages should be broken out in degreed vs non-degreed, and also into other skill levels such as Java/J2EE, etc. which I think would show higher averages in the areas that require more skill.
Part of my group here buys mega storage boxes..they tell me the Engenia software (unity) makes any vendor solution better. We currently run the software over a lot of EMC boxes, and some SGI storage too. I've been told we will be moving away from EMC for several reasons, cost/performance being one, reliability being another. They are looking at Sun and Fujitsu for new purchases. From what I was told both those vendors have good performance and very nice price points.
Insightful? How..this is a consortium of companies NOT IBM alone!! What they are trying to do is establish an "open standard" or some type of interoperability between storage vendors. If you own an IBM now and then decide your next gen SAN is EMC/Sun/etc. how to you get it all to work together is the concept. Making it work is a service the new vendor can provide. Services have higher margins than hardware.
Far as I have seen StorageTek has done pretty good, EMC and IBM are the big dogs but ST held it's own. Tighter integration with Sun can't hurt just like IBM AIX boxes and mainframes work really well with IBM SHARCs. If you want the best kick ass performance in a SAN, you go to the niche players like Ingenia not IBM. I see this as a benefit to the end user and it will allow the companies that adopt it to open up more markets and those that don't will fade. FYI -- Storage was already a commodity and has been for about the last 5 years.
"Yes I might make less than a US-born programmer"
AHA, evidence that the article WAS right. You should make EXACTLY the same as the US Programmer if the H1-B system was not being abused.
A LOT of H1-Bs are here on contracts, the contracts are often setup as 1099's which means the WORKER pays ALL taxes, not just half and the employer half. The H1B doesn't pay the taxes and flys under the radar for a few years until they get the Green Card then they Government knows about them and they start paying. It's illegal but there are a lot of companies out there that don't care.
I call BS on this one.
programmers with 10 years of experience are willing to work for 30k
Really? Where can I hire some for my Fortune 100 company in the Southwest? Kids right out of school make 40K. 10 yr vets make over 70K AVERAGE. Even in the Deep South, I know, I was one in Alabama at one point in time. They must be slinging COBOL or VB where no really strong skills are required to pay that low for US employees. Fortune 100 companies usually pay OK, that sounds like the pay rates for city/county/state Government (lower wages but lifetime jobs).
I don't think he can legally get away using his COUNTY to set pay rates. It has to be State level. Of course the H1Bs are not going to complain about 40K salary, they make 6-8K in India!!
H1-Bs need a SPONSOR, nothing more. Experience is nice but not required. I have had several agencies I worked for that wanted me to add unexperienced H1-B Java programmers at 30-35K/yr to my project so they could make more from the rate they charged the customer. If they could add a H1B at $25/hr versus a US Employee at $40/hr and still charge the customer $80 they darn sure were going to do that. I kept rejecting the applicants as there was a requirement by the customer for them to be US Citizens
Agreed. Sun now owns StorageTek. With a StorageTek SAN and some Sun AMD 1U server boxes using Linux, and Fibrechannel HBAs you get a lot of capability and performance for less than EMC. IBM SHARC is also very good as are the boxes from Fujutsi, Hitachi and Ingenia but none of these are "low cost".
Could be the ops budget and the dev budget are different piles of money. I've seen that happen a LOT, but your point is valid as energy costs are high and getting higher. I also noticed the PetaBox only supports up to GB Ethernet, and there are other technolgies (like FiberChannel and InfiniBand) that are faster (if speed is an issue), but I haven't seen open-source drivers.
I worked on HST software but it was years ago so I may be a bit off base but here is what I recall.
The Cameras on the Hubble don't really focus like we think of with a 35mm camera. They take exposures of various durations and with certain filters in place. Then the raw data is postprocessed on the ground and based on the raw data, the wavelength filters, etc. then "image" is constructed.
With the UV "camera" what they would be doing is taking a (TBD time) open shutter picture of the moon with the filters set to only let UV wavelengths pass to the detectors. The detectors will record the intensity of the light hitting each "pixel" of the camera ("binning") and send that data to the ground for processing. If you go to NASAwatch.com there is an article about this that actually links to the experiment definitions, process, etc that was submitted by the researcher in order to get the (very limited) time with the Instrument.
Wow..
.02 worth..
The kid couldn't make up his mind so he did nothing? That's not very intelligent. He could have taken the first year or two of college to make up his mind. I changed majors two times and still made it out in 5 years. If he liked problem solving maybe he would have gotten into Chemistry or Physics and would have had the ability to write his own software for research. IMO there is no excuse for not giving it a try and seeing what happened.
Listening to the Slashdot for advice is not a good idea either you get way too many opinions. If he had checked online at various locations about careers he might have decided to go on to school. Or he could have talked to Placement Offices at Colleges. Sounds like he spent too much time with his computers and too little learning the way the world works. In programming things are usually either right or wrong with little grey area, in the real world it is the oppisite, most things are grey with few black and white decisions.
He obviously has some talents, he just needs to suck it up, take the "risk" and get an education!! It does NOT have be in CS, in fact a LOT of programmers are not CS majors. He may have found he was very good at something in CS and gone on to get a PhD and done research, there is no excuse for him "wasting" his talent because he was scared about the future in Programming.
Just my
No, the CIA can now share information they gather from "intelligence sources" about possible terrorist activities inside the USA with the FBI and other domestic law enforcement. That had NOT been the case in the past.
My point was more for Hospitals and care facilities. If it was on the roof of a large building (hotel) perhaps some people could have stayed there. Or maybe the Superdome would not have lost power.
I wonder if you can plug a dropcord into the thing? With lots of drop cords power could have been run to a few places close by to the site of the device. I suspect some enterprising folks could have done quite a bit with a few of these.
I was being sarcastic..the CIA can't operate inside the USA anyhow.