You have to actually go do something useful and productive with you gifts to be rewarded once you leave school (and you'll discover there's far more to a programming job than abstract problem-solving)
Yes, but having the confidence to actually go and do something useful is in itself a privilege. The reason so many (socially and economically) underprivileged kids fail at school is because others expect little of them, and they learn to expect little of themselves. When kids want to learn, what do they do? They ask a question about whatever it is they don't understand. If the teacher sighs and looks at them like they're stupid, that stifles the kids eagerness to ask questions, and kills their ability to learn.
A hell of a lot of what we get in life is sheer luck. We shouldn't feel devalued by this, but it's important to remember that the homeless drunk you step over in the street might have been living the same life 12 months ago that you're living now.
at which point, if you're contributing more than the next guy, it's only just that you get more in return.
Whereas in the real world, it's the bankers who get the big bucks, and the guys who produce the actual value get made redundant while watching the value of their pension pot shrink year on year....
and the cure for depression isn't "pull yourself together man."
That's all you have, bro. No one else is going to do it for you.
Indeed not, because people like you are going to keep bringing us down, while patting yourselves on the back for being superior, practical and helpful.
Dude, go away and learn something about human nature.
Xamarin has been endorsed by Microsoft as a legal and legitimate cross-platform c# vendor for a while now. Microsoft may still be evil, but whoever is running their C# ecosystem is yet untainted. *fingers crossed*
Enlightened self-interest. C# is closely bound to the.NET framework, which was (until the move to Metro) the future of the Windows architecture. It was in their interests to get guys interested in developing C# one way or the other, even though it's just "more of the same" when taken as a language outside of the native.NET framework
Hmmmm....Interesting concept. An open salary audit. Let me see. So what you are saying is that all employees for a given job description are equal. Is that correct?
Certainly not -- wages should be on individual merit. The goal of an audit would be to identify any discriminatory practices that didn't reflect individual performance. If the majority of immigrant workers of a particular class are getting less than the majority of US-born workers of the same class, then it is likely that this is not on grounds of individual merit, but on discriminatory grounds.
As has often been said: if these guys are good enough for you to bring over, if they deserve an H1B visa, surely they're worth paying? If they're not good enough to merit the full salary, why not hire someone who is?
What surprizes me is that the sales guy in India needs to come to the U.S.? Also, 60K is chump change for sales. All this nonsense combined with so much drum beating has me wondering, "why?"
The subtext not mentioned in either the summary or the article is that Oracle's overseas hiring policy is a money-saver, which goes completely against the spirit and letter of the H1B visa legislation. The policy is that visas should be granted where skilled staff fill a skills gap in the USA, not because US staff are too expensive. There have been complaints that big companies have been flouting this, and if this guy wins his case, Oracle will end up with a judgement that effectively states that they're breaking immigration laws. That's the big story....
Yeah, you've basically spent the last few posts telling me how incompetent you are.
No I haven't -- you've spent the last few posts telling me I'm incompetent. What I have told you is a few details of my existence -- details which are common to a great many of the unemployed people I know. I haven't once mentioned the online courses I've been following. I haven't mentioned the book on natural language processing which I have been reading, or the world-class language software I have been writing with the knowledge I've gleaned from the book. I haven't mentioned the gardening, the home-made liqueur or the cheesecakes.
But despite all that, I find myself feeling detached and shiftless -- there is nothing concrete "grounding" me in day-to-day life. This causes low self-esteem and leads many into depression, and the cure for depression isn't "pull yourself together man."
All I'm trying to say is to have a little compassion for the unemployed rather than judging them. Which you do. Constantly.
Seriously bro? You can't create a routine for yourself? I mean, really?
Anyone can "create" a routine, but very few people can stick to a routine without some kind of positive or negative feedback. Turning up for work at 9am, 5 days a week is easy, because there are easily anticipated negative consequences if you don't. Getting your weekly shop on a Sunday is easy if the alternative is running out on Wednesday and having to rush out and grab something.
But getting up at a regular time when there's no comeback? Doing something on a specific day when you could do it whenever? It's very, very human to just Not See The Point. It's also very human to climb up on your high horse and look down on people who are going through a rough time and tell them why it's all their own fault. Perhaps this is simply denial -- perhaps you don't realise that you didn't get where you are today based on hard work and dedication, but on luck. I didn't get made redundant because of a lack of skill, effort or dedication; I got made redundant because the company decided they didn't want people doing my job in Scotland, they wanted them doing it in Wales. Pure arbitrary logistics -- it could happen to you. And then people like you will spit on you and say it's your own fault.
Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring.
Well, that's your fault, bro. Go to the library if you need to.
The library isn't free if you're not within walking distance (and libraries are closing across the UK at an unprecedented rate anyway). And besides, it's not about lack of opportunity (I own plenty of books and DVDs) -- it's about lack of routine. There is practically nothing regular to give structure to your week. I'm sure it's easier if you're devoutly religious (morning prayers, visit the church/mosque/synagogue on the designated day, etc) but I'm not, and there's not enough decent stuff on TV to build a routine around.
If we had an open fire, I'd at least be able to make a routine out of chopping wood. About the only thing I've got to peg time to is the weekly bin collection.
As my mum said, "Only the boring are bored."
Who did she say it to? You. Why? Because you were bored. Does that make you boring? No, it makes you normal. I'm guessing that you heard it most in the summer holidays, as you didn't have the routine of school to structure your existence around and there was no external motivating factors forcing you into action. Human beings are pack animals, and most of our daily lives are dedicated to fulfilling a function within the pack, not choosing our own individual path.
Find a python project and finish it! Then put that in your resume as the only person to have every finished a python project and the jobs offers will roll in.
...unless I want to work on public sector projects. Finishing a project? Whatever will they think of next? (...aaaaaaaand we're back on topic;-)
His best bet is to get up to speed on tablet programming. Not crappy store apps, but in-house software business are starting to want their own proprietary applications for field staff, basically replacing laptops for people out in the wild.
That's a skill I'll be needing to work on, certainly, as the teaching app that I'm working on will need a mobile client. (I'm quite unhappy about Apple's policy of demanding money even to start developing and testing on an iOS device, mind.)
I'm in Central Scotland. The reason I'm doing Python is because I have a personal project underway to develop language learning software. I chose Python essentially as a prototyping language, because its string-handling and list-manipulation features let me develop my algorithms quickly without fighting with a language and its libraries.
I'm planning to rewrite it in a "proper" language (my old anti-scripting prejudice just doesn't go away) once I've got it going, but if I start now, I'll be far less likely to refactor my code. (And besides, it's likely to end up as a web app, and I could just stick with Python on the server.)
I'm not really very employable as a coder, because I ended up going into desktop IT soon after leaving university, and a decade on, I don't have the CV for dev work. If I produce a world-beating learning app, though, people might start to give me a second look...;-)
Segmentation fault. America's poorest segment is poor people. If you make your segments based on race rather than income, then you end up defining such people as Don King, Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey and the president of the whole bloody country in your "poorest segment".
You do realise, don't you, that the history of non-white immigration goes back almost a millenium (first recorded instances in the 12th century) whereas the history of unemployment benefits basically starts with the Beveridge Report in 1942...?
Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring. You've got the jobcentre staff warning you that you've got to be available for work at any time, so you're not allowed to go anywhere interesting. So on the one hand we've got Iain Duncan Smith telling us that looking for a job "is a full-time job", but on the other, we're being denied the basic rights of full-time employees to paid leave. You've not got the money for lots of interesting things outside of the home, and when you amortise the cost of those "luxury goods" (games consoles, home entertainment systems etc) over the amount of time you're stuck in front of them, they're actually one of the cheapest ways of distracting you from the dull emptiness of your life.
The first time I was unemployed (over ten years ago), I had a job coming up, so I wasn't afraid to spend what I had. I looked for temporary work locally, but not having found any, I bought a book on playing blues and boogie-woogie piano, and taught myself. I bought a bunch of wood and parts and built myself an electric guitar. And it was also summer. I enjoyed that unemployment. This time round, though, I'm stuck in a house in a small village, isolated from any and all fun activities, in the middle of an unusually wet winter. My only real opportunity for social contact is the village pub, and I occupy my mind with the internet.
I'm trying to build up my skillset with the aid of the internet, but you have no idea how time just drags when you've go no externally-enforced routine. One day I can spend 13 or 14 hours working on my Python project, and the next I do nothing, because there's no defined "start point" to my day.
I'm not a heavy drinker, I'm not a smoker, I'm not a gambler and I'm not on drugs. I am a cyclist. If I was told that as an unemployed person I had no right to own both a £1000 road bike and a £500 touring bike, I would be upset. If you took it away from me, I would cease to function. It's very difficult for an unemployed person to give up their only comfort and escape, so no matter how bad that escape is, don't begrudge it to anyone.
Should be added that for most recipients the total of housing benefit received is less than the total rent and they are expected to make up any excess from their unemployment or disability living allowance payments (where 'rents' include standing charges such as power, heating, council tax anyway) - so even if the landlord has a defaulting tenant and gets direct payments from the local authority, they only receive the element of the total rent that relates to actual rent, and must pursue the tenant for the rest.
this system has caused many UK landlords to refuse to rent premises to recipients on housing benefit
The situation is even worse than that. My sister is moving abroad temporarily, and is trying to get her flat rented out while she's away. She was personally quite happy to have the property let to benefits claimants, but none of the letting agencies she spoke to were willing to do it.
The problem isn't simply that they don't get the money, it's that the regulations make it very difficult to get an HB tenant to leave. If they leave the property of their own accord, then they're no longer at involuntary risk of homelessness, and therefore no longer eligible for housing benefit. This means that if the rent burden becomes too high through change of circumstances (eg if a child leaves home, leading to a spare room becoming available -> bedroom tax) then even if they can find a property that their housing benefit would cover, they can't actually move there.
There is only one way to move out without risk of losing housing benefit, and that is to be evicted by court order, a process which is very time consuming, and ends up leaving the landlord going 6 months or so without any rental income.
Note that this is not a malicious move on the part of the tenants -- it is their only option. Because the law is a bachelor (of Arts, from Christ College Cambridge) and the law is an ass.
To be fair, you guys have brought it on yourselves. The funniest bit about it is how your bosses have resorted to getting you guys to do the AC shill thing on Slashdot. Snowden really burst your bubble, eh?
However, the experts in human control systems are genuine experts who get shit done, not simple blaggers who've convinced middle management that they know stuff. The Clang guys didn't know what they were talking about.
If so... it's an improvement.... but the requirement that the entrepreneur front, essentially 39% of the funds, to raise less than $100K.. would appear to be unduly burdensome. The requirement for a CPA audit would also appear to be unduly burdensome.
The person raising this money, should have a less-expensive option: that does not require losing a significant amount of their funding. And they should have an option of disclosing that no audit has been or will be performed.
They do: and that option is to raise funds from friends and family.
Our society isn't "capitalist", it's "monetarist". In capitalism, capital is earned through labour, and it's main purpose is to allow and encourage efficiency. In monetarism, the market exists to serve money, and everything's about manipulation of value in order to increase money.
If a company can put all of that together, they probably don't need crowdfunding in the first place. That's the ENTIRE POINT of having kickstarter in the first place!
This has nothing to do with Kickstarter. This is about selling SHARES in these companies, not about prepaying for potential products. I'm no expert, but best as I can tell this rules will have zero effect on crowd-funding as sites like kickstarter and indiegogo have been doing it.
...to begin with. The problem is that "equity" is not the only form of "security" -- "debt securities" also exist. Is the promise of future, not-yet-made products a debt security or not? Probably "not", given that securities are supposed to be tradable and there's no mechanism in Kickstarter for passing your backer's status on to a third party.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to actually go do something useful and productive with you gifts to be rewarded once you leave school (and you'll discover there's far more to a programming job than abstract problem-solving)
Yes, but having the confidence to actually go and do something useful is in itself a privilege. The reason so many (socially and economically) underprivileged kids fail at school is because others expect little of them, and they learn to expect little of themselves. When kids want to learn, what do they do? They ask a question about whatever it is they don't understand. If the teacher sighs and looks at them like they're stupid, that stifles the kids eagerness to ask questions, and kills their ability to learn.
A hell of a lot of what we get in life is sheer luck. We shouldn't feel devalued by this, but it's important to remember that the homeless drunk you step over in the street might have been living the same life 12 months ago that you're living now.
at which point, if you're contributing more than the next guy, it's only just that you get more in return.
Whereas in the real world, it's the bankers who get the big bucks, and the guys who produce the actual value get made redundant while watching the value of their pension pot shrink year on year....
What was not mentioned was H1-B, which has been a hot topic for several years.
and the cure for depression isn't "pull yourself together man."
That's all you have, bro. No one else is going to do it for you.
Indeed not, because people like you are going to keep bringing us down, while patting yourselves on the back for being superior, practical and helpful.
Dude, go away and learn something about human nature.
Xamarin has been endorsed by Microsoft as a legal and legitimate cross-platform c# vendor for a while now. Microsoft may still be evil, but whoever is running their C# ecosystem is yet untainted. *fingers crossed*
Enlightened self-interest. C# is closely bound to the .NET framework, which was (until the move to Metro) the future of the Windows architecture. It was in their interests to get guys interested in developing C# one way or the other, even though it's just "more of the same" when taken as a language outside of the native .NET framework
.
Hmmmm....Interesting concept. An open salary audit. Let me see. So what you are saying is that all employees for a given job description are equal. Is that correct?
Certainly not -- wages should be on individual merit. The goal of an audit would be to identify any discriminatory practices that didn't reflect individual performance. If the majority of immigrant workers of a particular class are getting less than the majority of US-born workers of the same class, then it is likely that this is not on grounds of individual merit, but on discriminatory grounds.
As has often been said: if these guys are good enough for you to bring over, if they deserve an H1B visa, surely they're worth paying? If they're not good enough to merit the full salary, why not hire someone who is?
What surprizes me is that the sales guy in India needs to come to the U.S.? Also, 60K is chump change for sales. All this nonsense combined with so much drum beating has me wondering, "why?"
The subtext not mentioned in either the summary or the article is that Oracle's overseas hiring policy is a money-saver, which goes completely against the spirit and letter of the H1B visa legislation. The policy is that visas should be granted where skilled staff fill a skills gap in the USA, not because US staff are too expensive. There have been complaints that big companies have been flouting this, and if this guy wins his case, Oracle will end up with a judgement that effectively states that they're breaking immigration laws. That's the big story....
Yeah, you've basically spent the last few posts telling me how incompetent you are.
No I haven't -- you've spent the last few posts telling me I'm incompetent. What I have told you is a few details of my existence -- details which are common to a great many of the unemployed people I know. I haven't once mentioned the online courses I've been following. I haven't mentioned the book on natural language processing which I have been reading, or the world-class language software I have been writing with the knowledge I've gleaned from the book. I haven't mentioned the gardening, the home-made liqueur or the cheesecakes.
But despite all that, I find myself feeling detached and shiftless -- there is nothing concrete "grounding" me in day-to-day life. This causes low self-esteem and leads many into depression, and the cure for depression isn't "pull yourself together man."
All I'm trying to say is to have a little compassion for the unemployed rather than judging them. Which you do. Constantly.
Seriously bro? You can't create a routine for yourself? I mean, really?
Anyone can "create" a routine, but very few people can stick to a routine without some kind of positive or negative feedback. Turning up for work at 9am, 5 days a week is easy, because there are easily anticipated negative consequences if you don't. Getting your weekly shop on a Sunday is easy if the alternative is running out on Wednesday and having to rush out and grab something.
But getting up at a regular time when there's no comeback? Doing something on a specific day when you could do it whenever? It's very, very human to just Not See The Point. It's also very human to climb up on your high horse and look down on people who are going through a rough time and tell them why it's all their own fault. Perhaps this is simply denial -- perhaps you don't realise that you didn't get where you are today based on hard work and dedication, but on luck. I didn't get made redundant because of a lack of skill, effort or dedication; I got made redundant because the company decided they didn't want people doing my job in Scotland, they wanted them doing it in Wales. Pure arbitrary logistics -- it could happen to you. And then people like you will spit on you and say it's your own fault.
Seriously bro? You can't create a routine for yourself? I mean, really?
Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring.
Well, that's your fault, bro. Go to the library if you need to.
The library isn't free if you're not within walking distance (and libraries are closing across the UK at an unprecedented rate anyway). And besides, it's not about lack of opportunity (I own plenty of books and DVDs) -- it's about lack of routine. There is practically nothing regular to give structure to your week. I'm sure it's easier if you're devoutly religious (morning prayers, visit the church/mosque/synagogue on the designated day, etc) but I'm not, and there's not enough decent stuff on TV to build a routine around.
If we had an open fire, I'd at least be able to make a routine out of chopping wood. About the only thing I've got to peg time to is the weekly bin collection.
As my mum said, "Only the boring are bored."
Who did she say it to? You. Why? Because you were bored. Does that make you boring? No, it makes you normal. I'm guessing that you heard it most in the summer holidays, as you didn't have the routine of school to structure your existence around and there was no external motivating factors forcing you into action. Human beings are pack animals, and most of our daily lives are dedicated to fulfilling a function within the pack, not choosing our own individual path.
Find a python project and finish it! Then put that in your resume as the only person to have every finished a python project and the jobs offers will roll in.
...unless I want to work on public sector projects. Finishing a project? Whatever will they think of next? (...aaaaaaaand we're back on topic ;-)
His best bet is to get up to speed on tablet programming. Not crappy store apps, but in-house software business are starting to want their own proprietary applications for field staff, basically replacing laptops for people out in the wild.
That's a skill I'll be needing to work on, certainly, as the teaching app that I'm working on will need a mobile client. (I'm quite unhappy about Apple's policy of demanding money even to start developing and testing on an iOS device, mind.)
I'm in Central Scotland. The reason I'm doing Python is because I have a personal project underway to develop language learning software. I chose Python essentially as a prototyping language, because its string-handling and list-manipulation features let me develop my algorithms quickly without fighting with a language and its libraries.
I'm planning to rewrite it in a "proper" language (my old anti-scripting prejudice just doesn't go away) once I've got it going, but if I start now, I'll be far less likely to refactor my code. (And besides, it's likely to end up as a web app, and I could just stick with Python on the server.)
I'm not really very employable as a coder, because I ended up going into desktop IT soon after leaving university, and a decade on, I don't have the CV for dev work. If I produce a world-beating learning app, though, people might start to give me a second look... ;-)
African Americans(Americans Poorest Segment)
Segmentation fault. America's poorest segment is poor people. If you make your segments based on race rather than income, then you end up defining such people as Don King, Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey and the president of the whole bloody country in your "poorest segment".
You do realise, don't you, that the history of non-white immigration goes back almost a millenium (first recorded instances in the 12th century) whereas the history of unemployment benefits basically starts with the Beveridge Report in 1942...?
Have you ever been unemployed? Even are a month of it, it's mind-numbingly boring. You've got the jobcentre staff warning you that you've got to be available for work at any time, so you're not allowed to go anywhere interesting. So on the one hand we've got Iain Duncan Smith telling us that looking for a job "is a full-time job", but on the other, we're being denied the basic rights of full-time employees to paid leave. You've not got the money for lots of interesting things outside of the home, and when you amortise the cost of those "luxury goods" (games consoles, home entertainment systems etc) over the amount of time you're stuck in front of them, they're actually one of the cheapest ways of distracting you from the dull emptiness of your life.
The first time I was unemployed (over ten years ago), I had a job coming up, so I wasn't afraid to spend what I had. I looked for temporary work locally, but not having found any, I bought a book on playing blues and boogie-woogie piano, and taught myself. I bought a bunch of wood and parts and built myself an electric guitar. And it was also summer. I enjoyed that unemployment. This time round, though, I'm stuck in a house in a small village, isolated from any and all fun activities, in the middle of an unusually wet winter. My only real opportunity for social contact is the village pub, and I occupy my mind with the internet.
I'm trying to build up my skillset with the aid of the internet, but you have no idea how time just drags when you've go no externally-enforced routine. One day I can spend 13 or 14 hours working on my Python project, and the next I do nothing, because there's no defined "start point" to my day.
I'm not a heavy drinker, I'm not a smoker, I'm not a gambler and I'm not on drugs. I am a cyclist. If I was told that as an unemployed person I had no right to own both a £1000 road bike and a £500 touring bike, I would be upset. If you took it away from me, I would cease to function. It's very difficult for an unemployed person to give up their only comfort and escape, so no matter how bad that escape is, don't begrudge it to anyone.
Should be added that for most recipients the total of housing benefit received is less than the total rent and they are expected to make up any excess from their unemployment or disability living allowance payments (where 'rents' include standing charges such as power, heating, council tax anyway) - so even if the landlord has a defaulting tenant and gets direct payments from the local authority, they only receive the element of the total rent that relates to actual rent, and must pursue the tenant for the rest.
this system has caused many UK landlords to refuse to rent premises to recipients on housing benefit
The situation is even worse than that. My sister is moving abroad temporarily, and is trying to get her flat rented out while she's away. She was personally quite happy to have the property let to benefits claimants, but none of the letting agencies she spoke to were willing to do it.
The problem isn't simply that they don't get the money, it's that the regulations make it very difficult to get an HB tenant to leave. If they leave the property of their own accord, then they're no longer at involuntary risk of homelessness, and therefore no longer eligible for housing benefit. This means that if the rent burden becomes too high through change of circumstances (eg if a child leaves home, leading to a spare room becoming available -> bedroom tax) then even if they can find a property that their housing benefit would cover, they can't actually move there.
There is only one way to move out without risk of losing housing benefit, and that is to be evicted by court order, a process which is very time consuming, and ends up leaving the landlord going 6 months or so without any rental income.
Note that this is not a malicious move on the part of the tenants -- it is their only option. Because the law is a bachelor (of Arts, from Christ College Cambridge) and the law is an ass.
Well there was the SDIO protocol as used on PDAs, although that never got anywhere. There may be something in there that will do the job.
To be fair, you guys have brought it on yourselves. The funniest bit about it is how your bosses have resorted to getting you guys to do the AC shill thing on Slashdot. Snowden really burst your bubble, eh?
I'd rather see personal responsibility.
There are uneducated people in this world. They are easy to trick. We have collective responsibilty for the lack of education they have received.
However, the experts in human control systems are genuine experts who get shit done, not simple blaggers who've convinced middle management that they know stuff. The Clang guys didn't know what they were talking about.
If so... it's an improvement.... but the requirement that the entrepreneur front, essentially 39% of the funds, to raise less than $100K.. would appear to be unduly burdensome. The requirement for a CPA audit would also appear to be unduly burdensome.
The person raising this money, should have a less-expensive option: that does not require losing a significant amount of their funding. And they should have an option of disclosing that no audit has been or will be performed.
They do: and that option is to raise funds from friends and family.
Our society isn't "capitalist", it's "monetarist". In capitalism, capital is earned through labour, and it's main purpose is to allow and encourage efficiency. In monetarism, the market exists to serve money, and everything's about manipulation of value in order to increase money.
why was clang a bad idea (or unrealistic)?
The problem was that the guys involved weren't really experts in the field, from what I read.
If a company can put all of that together, they probably don't need crowdfunding in the first place. That's the ENTIRE POINT of having kickstarter in the first place!
This has nothing to do with Kickstarter. This is about selling SHARES in these companies, not about prepaying for potential products. I'm no expert, but best as I can tell this rules will have zero effect on crowd-funding as sites like kickstarter and indiegogo have been doing it.
...to begin with. The problem is that "equity" is not the only form of "security" -- "debt securities" also exist. Is the promise of future, not-yet-made products a debt security or not? Probably "not", given that securities are supposed to be tradable and there's no mechanism in Kickstarter for passing your backer's status on to a third party.