The H1B program is deeply flawed and unfair. Big companies can exploit loopholes and it works out very cheaply.
But for single or small numbers of workers the fees are marginally smaller and the requirements are odious.
They limit when you can apply, force you to pay a fee and then give no guarantee that your application will be processed in time. What do you do when you apply on the first day you're allowed but the VISA still isn't processed months after the job ended. I know people this happened to.
If the government is going to treat seasonal migrant workers like that (and greatly inconvenience small businesses) then they're going to end up with a situation where the only people using the system are people who aim to exploit it.
They're actually making it impossible or unreasonably difficult for companies to do business and to get the best people through their own incompetence and insistence on treating everyone like criminals. If you don't use lawyers to manipulate the system you're stopped dead in your tracks.
It's about as substantial as the difference between "you can't put your hand into the fire" and "putting your hand into the fire is not a good idea"
If the tool isn't designed to relied on for critical decisions then maybe it shouldn't be used for meaningful scientific analysis.
Too many people (including myself, on occasion) are getting by using Excel too well to use something more appropriate and specialised. It's a case of being too used to using one tool for all problems rather than learning to use the right tool for each problem.
The owner of Bristol, the small English carmaker, only sells to people he knows. His company, he can do what he wants.
Carelessly selling refers to the extraordinary range of products they introduced. Tartan baseball caps!!! They were just asking for brand trouble and it's exactly what they got.
To use your car analagy it would be like Porche bringing out some hot-hatch to compete with boy racers who want souped-up Civics and then watching their regular customers getting completely turned off.
To be fair, chavs didn't just discover it. Burberry was carelessly selling to them and lapping up the extra sales and profits until they realised the damage that the -synonymous with chavs- Burberry print baseball caps were doing to their image.
It was nothing to do with chavs suddenly starting wearing the same Burberry jackets that everyone was familiar with; instead, Burberry bizarrely brought out a range of clothes that only chavs would wear.
Your example is one that perfectly points out the dangers that Apple would face if they went toe-to-toe with Dell for $500 laptops and grey boxes.
Banks are just as, if not more so, demanding about cost. The difference is that they actually need to have them work and Diebold wouldn't make any money selling grossly defective ATMs.
For the money that Diebold were paid they didn't come close to implementing a secure system and it had very little to do with fundamental reasons that indicated that it couldn't be done for the specified cost. Good security is more expensive but bad design is most expensive.
Ultra-low power chips are enormously important for several key Apple areas. They're buying technology; but also expertise.
There are all sorts of things that Apple could be looking at this for Apple TV, iPhone, Tablet's, Apple EEPC/Macbook Air, Newton, iPod or even something different.
But at the same time they like to work with Intel on chip designs. They had one specially made for the Macbook Air. Besides the implied threat of an ability to go their own way they might find that collaborating with Intel on design may give them a massive say in the ultra-low power chips end up.
Without directly using PA Semi chips they could use PA semi to improve their own power consumption. Ultimately, $278m isn't actually that much money given the importance of low power performance to Apple across most of their product line.
Half the problem is the over-reliance on Captchas. Most of the cracks work by educated guessing and have large error rates. This fact could be exploited by the webmail companies. Additional Captchas for sending suspicious messages (lots of messages) and early activity.
That a Captcha is the only thing standing between a gmail account and the ability to send large numbers of spam messages is more of the problem. Run the spam filters on outgoing messages and delay some of them to give time for the new address to be blacklisted if it's sending spam and especially if there were large numbers of Captcha failures.
I thought it was just an oversight. Safari for Windows is important because it's the same browser that the iPhone uses and getting Safari marketshare up on Windows was an important way to improve iPhone compatibility and allow web developers to test pages easily.
Apple don't need a Eula to limit installing when standard disclaimers cover all the configuration problems.
Sorry, but I can't agree that no-one expected the Eee to do well. The people telling us that the Eee would flop were the same people talking up the Origami. They completely misjudged the market because they, themselves, weren't price sensitive. The success of the Eee isn't about Linux but that was important. It's a limited, but capable enough for most people, PC that hit the critical points of price, size and functionality. Given the fuss over the OLPC and the number of people foaming at the mouth over paying $300 for them it's not really a surprise that someone like Asus stepped up to fill the gaping hole in the market that everyone saw but none of the other big guys cared about (until they saw Asus making money on it) enough to take a risk.
Many people fall in love with the Eee the first time they see it because the simple fact is that it's something in their price range and it's something that very few users wouldn't find useful. To understand why so many commentators got it wrong it should be pointed out that the same people get it wrong really often. iPods, Macbook Air, Blackberry, Wii etc. were all laughed at while massive sections of the industry completely misunderstood what their customers wanted and pushed products amid much fanfare that no-one wanted. Some, like Blu-Ray might be successes in spite of themselves.
2gb is what you need if you're thinking about running Parallels. If it's hard to upgrade then you run into all sorts of problems. It's probably not all that expensive to add the ram once the extra engineering involved in fitting the stuff is taken account of and also the difficulties that are encountered with build to ordering, stocking additional ram, warranty claims.
Also, it's not really 2gb of ram. The integrated graphics take their share and that would really make 1gb impractical. Performance is going to be affected by using the smaller, slower drive and that would be exacerbated by a shortage of ram as any use of virtual memory involves a bigger than usual hit.
Yes, Apple are frustrating with some of their design choices, but they also know their stuff. They have one of the biggest selling notebook ranges of any manufacturer based on only 2 models (3 if you count the 17"). They'll be expecting big things if they're going to the trouble of adding a 3rd. But I expect this thing to sell. I've been considering one but eventually decided that 2 pounds isn't worth the difference to me as I'm a pretty strong guy and I drive most places. But public transport commuters might see things differently.
They'll have a lot of data on who's been buying additional batteries for their MBs and MBPs. I'm sure they're confident enough that they know they it's not that big a deal for enough of their customer base. To be honest, I've never bought a 2nd battery and most of the people I know never really even consider it. Magsafe will be an issue with coming up with power accessories (such as an extra, external battery pack) but if the demand is there...
Apple are design leaders when it comes to laptops and I can see their policy on ports becoming more popular. Many people use their DVD drives very rarely so it was only going to be a matter of time with all the memory sticks and wireless out there. FW was a bit of a shock, as was the Kensington slot but ultimately the shape of the side dictated things. That shape is designed to sit more easily and comfortably on someone's lap. It also makes it easier to pick up. Thinner design is really useful for typing. It makes for more comfortable typing as does the thinner front. I had been hoping Apple would make this change soon as there were some other nice laptops out there that were showing the way.
I thought they might have had a special mention for John Darwin, who faked his death in a canoeing accident, then showed up - pretending to suffer from amnesia - in a London police station a few months after his wife received the life insurance and moved to Panama. But maybe that was too recent for this set of awards. He's one guy who should have stayed dead and quietly gone on with his life in Panama rather than creating national headlines even before the fraud came to light.
Well, if you don't have Openoffice (or Microsoft Office etc.) then you can still open occasional documents without installing.
So if I was sending an ODF file to someone I could include a link that would allow them to read the document online without installing software. That's actually a very useful feature and it could also be used to test how OOo parses Word documents without installing, if you were thinking of switching.
Sometimes I find it simpler and faster to view Word/Excel documents on Google Apps rather than firing up Office. Google aren't too focused on getting in-document graphics working, it's useful to have an alternative.
Sure there are certain loads that mainframes were better at but the I/O that cellphones could be dealing with rivals the I/O for (some of the) mainframes with the processing power of a cellphone.
Yes, there's specialisation but many old mainframes wouldn't have had the processing power, the memory or the I/O to handle simultaneous video conferencing while talking to different base stations.
Modern mainframes are better at I/O but that wasn't really in dispute. The point was that their lower energy usage might allow further savings.
Stress in multiuser environments? Are you serious?
Cell phones have to deal with interference from thousands of other cell phones while moving between base stations without dropping encrypted packets of data where even a slight delay is noticeable to the user.
Call waiting, conference calls, video calling etc. are all tasks that a mainframe would have struggled with.
That's sorta the problem from a music industry perspective with subscriptions. If only power users use the service then the data costs are relatively large and a small subset of users who would be spending far more on music get a great discount. No one else sees subscriptions as worth it.
$10/month is easy to pass if you're regularly buying music. Hell, it'd be hard to stay under for many music fans.
Subscriptions would need to be as common as iPods to actually be worth anything to the music industry. Streaming music is easy for anyone who has really regular access to a connection. A sub is only useful to someone with a mobile device.
I agree that an exclusive deal was probably needed. Apple have been interesting in forcing customers to get unlimited data plans. Once everyone does that then Safari on iPhone is a different prospect. I know so many people who won't use data on their phones due to the perception of costs. That's the real reason why Apple aren't willing to consider pay-as-you-go.
I don't want to pretend that Apple didn't make big concessions too. I'm sure they'd have been interested in iChat on the iPhone and maybe even VOIP. Using the iPhone as a modem for a MacBook would have also been something that Apple would have been hugely interested in too.
But then we know that Apple had a reasonably hard time getting deals for the iPhone and required pretty significant network changes such as the visual voicemail.
Yeah, but the thief will make less money from stealing iPods if half of them are worthless. It's less worthwhile risking getting busted for something that might be worthless. In areas where there's more iPod theft the rate of usage of such a feature might increase. If iPods become less profitable to steal then thieves move onto something else instead.
There's a certain reassurance knowing that your iPod is less likely to be stolen. It also makes it harder for someone to nick it off your desk/out of your bag. If the thief can't charge it it might reappear. That'd mean that you're less inclined to worry about your iPod being stolen.
Movement. Laptops are often off when they move and most people carry them very slowly if they're off. An iPhone can move around the campus a lot faster and will try to connect to every access point along the way. In colleges a lot of movement is at exactly the same time i.e. lunch and between classes. During these times a large number of devices could move from one node to another. The network might have trouble keeping up with all the movement of devices into and out of it.
Not all navigation is used in car either. Sometimes it's not in your car either. They're portable but you're not going to have them anywhere. It's very useful to have the functionality.
Finding the shortest route is useful for drivers but at the end of the day an extra mile or two isn't the end of the world. Makes a massive difference when you're walking somewhere though.
GPS phones also allow tie-ins. My GPS can look up local restaurents and can also ring them.
It's not something that Apple are focusing on so they haven't included it.
There are a few good reasons to have Safari on Windows beyond the simple ability for developers to test pages for the iPhone.
If you're using Parallels or Bootcamp you've been using Firefox etc instead of Safari on Windows. Same if you flit between Windows and OSX on different computers. It's easier to use Firefox on OSX than to switch repeatedly. I've already switched to Safari on Windows and it means that I'll be more inclined to use Safari on my Macbook Pro too.
This could actually help Safaris market share on OSX. Even more so when you consider that one of the biggest problems with Safari on OSX is that a lot of sites work better under Firefox. Since sites are more likely to support Safari now (and it'll be easier) this announcement benefits Mac owners who have zero direct interest in ever running Safari on Windows.
It'll certainly result in major websites supporting Safari sooner. This is really important for the iPhone.
I imagine there's the possibility down the road of integrating the iTS/podcasts etc. more closely into Safari so that songs can be easily linked to across the web without launching iTunes. It's kinda a pain to have to use the browser within iTunes to view iTS.
It'd be nice for Apple to add iCal or Mail on Windows to really expand the experience.
It's another alternative to IE and it's one with a good reputation that looks great out of the box. The ability to dynamically resize comment boxes on Safari3 is a god-send. Right now I can read the whole comment as I type it. It's seriously going to make a massive difference- particularly when websites adapt to the feature by putting in small comment boxes to allow quick replies. Small comment boxes are annoying to type in but big ones get in the way of information. This is the best of both worlds.
Slashdot Mirror
Chic and chicks are different but I wouldn't worry about it as neither concept are relevant.
The H1B program is deeply flawed and unfair. Big companies can exploit loopholes and it works out very cheaply.
But for single or small numbers of workers the fees are marginally smaller and the requirements are odious.
They limit when you can apply, force you to pay a fee and then give no guarantee that your application will be processed in time. What do you do when you apply on the first day you're allowed but the VISA still isn't processed months after the job ended. I know people this happened to.
If the government is going to treat seasonal migrant workers like that (and greatly inconvenience small businesses) then they're going to end up with a situation where the only people using the system are people who aim to exploit it.
They're actually making it impossible or unreasonably difficult for companies to do business and to get the best people through their own incompetence and insistence on treating everyone like criminals. If you don't use lawyers to manipulate the system you're stopped dead in your tracks.
It's about as substantial as the difference between "you can't put your hand into the fire" and "putting your hand into the fire is not a good idea"
If the tool isn't designed to relied on for critical decisions then maybe it shouldn't be used for meaningful scientific analysis.
Too many people (including myself, on occasion) are getting by using Excel too well to use something more appropriate and specialised. It's a case of being too used to using one tool for all problems rather than learning to use the right tool for each problem.
The owner of Bristol, the small English carmaker, only sells to people he knows. His company, he can do what he wants.
Carelessly selling refers to the extraordinary range of products they introduced. Tartan baseball caps!!! They were just asking for brand trouble and it's exactly what they got.
To use your car analagy it would be like Porche bringing out some hot-hatch to compete with boy racers who want souped-up Civics and then watching their regular customers getting completely turned off.
To be fair, chavs didn't just discover it. Burberry was carelessly selling to them and lapping up the extra sales and profits until they realised the damage that the -synonymous with chavs- Burberry print baseball caps were doing to their image.
It was nothing to do with chavs suddenly starting wearing the same Burberry jackets that everyone was familiar with; instead, Burberry bizarrely brought out a range of clothes that only chavs would wear.
Your example is one that perfectly points out the dangers that Apple would face if they went toe-to-toe with Dell for $500 laptops and grey boxes.
Banks are just as, if not more so, demanding about cost. The difference is that they actually need to have them work and Diebold wouldn't make any money selling grossly defective ATMs.
For the money that Diebold were paid they didn't come close to implementing a secure system and it had very little to do with fundamental reasons that indicated that it couldn't be done for the specified cost. Good security is more expensive but bad design is most expensive.
Ultra-low power chips are enormously important for several key Apple areas. They're buying technology; but also expertise.
There are all sorts of things that Apple could be looking at this for Apple TV, iPhone, Tablet's, Apple EEPC/Macbook Air, Newton, iPod or even something different.
But at the same time they like to work with Intel on chip designs. They had one specially made for the Macbook Air. Besides the implied threat of an ability to go their own way they might find that collaborating with Intel on design may give them a massive say in the ultra-low power chips end up.
Without directly using PA Semi chips they could use PA semi to improve their own power consumption. Ultimately, $278m isn't actually that much money given the importance of low power performance to Apple across most of their product line.
Half the problem is the over-reliance on Captchas. Most of the cracks work by educated guessing and have large error rates. This fact could be exploited by the webmail companies. Additional Captchas for sending suspicious messages (lots of messages) and early activity.
That a Captcha is the only thing standing between a gmail account and the ability to send large numbers of spam messages is more of the problem. Run the spam filters on outgoing messages and delay some of them to give time for the new address to be blacklisted if it's sending spam and especially if there were large numbers of Captcha failures.
I thought it was just an oversight. Safari for Windows is important because it's the same browser that the iPhone uses and getting Safari marketshare up on Windows was an important way to improve iPhone compatibility and allow web developers to test pages easily.
Apple don't need a Eula to limit installing when standard disclaimers cover all the configuration problems.
Sorry, but I can't agree that no-one expected the Eee to do well. The people telling us that the Eee would flop were the same people talking up the Origami. They completely misjudged the market because they, themselves, weren't price sensitive.
The success of the Eee isn't about Linux but that was important. It's a limited, but capable enough for most people, PC that hit the critical points of price, size and functionality. Given the fuss over the OLPC and the number of people foaming at the mouth over paying $300 for them it's not really a surprise that someone like Asus stepped up to fill the gaping hole in the market that everyone saw but none of the other big guys cared about (until they saw Asus making money on it) enough to take a risk.
Many people fall in love with the Eee the first time they see it because the simple fact is that it's something in their price range and it's something that very few users wouldn't find useful. To understand why so many commentators got it wrong it should be pointed out that the same people get it wrong really often. iPods, Macbook Air, Blackberry, Wii etc. were all laughed at while massive sections of the industry completely misunderstood what their customers wanted and pushed products amid much fanfare that no-one wanted. Some, like Blu-Ray might be successes in spite of themselves.
Yes, but that was why they needed the DMCA.
Now they don't need real security at all.
2gb is what you need if you're thinking about running Parallels. If it's hard to upgrade then you run into all sorts of problems. It's probably not all that expensive to add the ram once the extra engineering involved in fitting the stuff is taken account of and also the difficulties that are encountered with build to ordering, stocking additional ram, warranty claims.
Also, it's not really 2gb of ram. The integrated graphics take their share and that would really make 1gb impractical. Performance is going to be affected by using the smaller, slower drive and that would be exacerbated by a shortage of ram as any use of virtual memory involves a bigger than usual hit.
Yes, Apple are frustrating with some of their design choices, but they also know their stuff. They have one of the biggest selling notebook ranges of any manufacturer based on only 2 models (3 if you count the 17"). They'll be expecting big things if they're going to the trouble of adding a 3rd. But I expect this thing to sell. I've been considering one but eventually decided that 2 pounds isn't worth the difference to me as I'm a pretty strong guy and I drive most places. But public transport commuters might see things differently.
They'll have a lot of data on who's been buying additional batteries for their MBs and MBPs. I'm sure they're confident enough that they know they it's not that big a deal for enough of their customer base. To be honest, I've never bought a 2nd battery and most of the people I know never really even consider it. Magsafe will be an issue with coming up with power accessories (such as an extra, external battery pack) but if the demand is there...
Apple are design leaders when it comes to laptops and I can see their policy on ports becoming more popular. Many people use their DVD drives very rarely so it was only going to be a matter of time with all the memory sticks and wireless out there. FW was a bit of a shock, as was the Kensington slot but ultimately the shape of the side dictated things. That shape is designed to sit more easily and comfortably on someone's lap. It also makes it easier to pick up. Thinner design is really useful for typing. It makes for more comfortable typing as does the thinner front. I had been hoping Apple would make this change soon as there were some other nice laptops out there that were showing the way.
I thought they might have had a special mention for John Darwin, who faked his death in a canoeing accident, then showed up - pretending to suffer from amnesia - in a London police station a few months after his wife received the life insurance and moved to Panama. But maybe that was too recent for this set of awards. He's one guy who should have stayed dead and quietly gone on with his life in Panama rather than creating national headlines even before the fraud came to light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darwin_disappearance_case
Well, if you don't have Openoffice (or Microsoft Office etc.) then you can still open occasional documents without installing.
So if I was sending an ODF file to someone I could include a link that would allow them to read the document online without installing software. That's actually a very useful feature and it could also be used to test how OOo parses Word documents without installing, if you were thinking of switching.
Sometimes I find it simpler and faster to view Word/Excel documents on Google Apps rather than firing up Office. Google aren't too focused on getting in-document graphics working, it's useful to have an alternative.
Or might the lower piracy rates for Vista be due to other reasons, say pirating XP instead.
Sure there are certain loads that mainframes were better at but the I/O that cellphones could be dealing with rivals the I/O for (some of the) mainframes with the processing power of a cellphone.
Yes, there's specialisation but many old mainframes wouldn't have had the processing power, the memory or the I/O to handle simultaneous video conferencing while talking to different base stations.
Modern mainframes are better at I/O but that wasn't really in dispute. The point was that their lower energy usage might allow further savings.
Stress in multiuser environments? Are you serious?
Cell phones have to deal with interference from thousands of other cell phones while moving between base stations without dropping encrypted packets of data where even a slight delay is noticeable to the user.
Call waiting, conference calls, video calling etc. are all tasks that a mainframe would have struggled with.
That's sorta the problem from a music industry perspective with subscriptions. If only power users use the service then the data costs are relatively large and a small subset of users who would be spending far more on music get a great discount. No one else sees subscriptions as worth it.
$10/month is easy to pass if you're regularly buying music. Hell, it'd be hard to stay under for many music fans.
Subscriptions would need to be as common as iPods to actually be worth anything to the music industry. Streaming music is easy for anyone who has really regular access to a connection. A sub is only useful to someone with a mobile device.
their spell-checkers like them
Actually, it does explain it pretty well on FF2. If they changed that it would be news.
I agree that an exclusive deal was probably needed. Apple have been interesting in forcing customers to get unlimited data plans. Once everyone does that then Safari on iPhone is a different prospect. I know so many people who won't use data on their phones due to the perception of costs. That's the real reason why Apple aren't willing to consider pay-as-you-go.
I don't want to pretend that Apple didn't make big concessions too. I'm sure they'd have been interested in iChat on the iPhone and maybe even VOIP. Using the iPhone as a modem for a MacBook would have also been something that Apple would have been hugely interested in too.
But then we know that Apple had a reasonably hard time getting deals for the iPhone and required pretty significant network changes such as the visual voicemail.
Yeah, but the thief will make less money from stealing iPods if half of them are worthless. It's less worthwhile risking getting busted for something that might be worthless. In areas where there's more iPod theft the rate of usage of such a feature might increase. If iPods become less profitable to steal then thieves move onto something else instead.
There's a certain reassurance knowing that your iPod is less likely to be stolen. It also makes it harder for someone to nick it off your desk/out of your bag. If the thief can't charge it it might reappear. That'd mean that you're less inclined to worry about your iPod being stolen.
Movement. Laptops are often off when they move and most people carry them very slowly if they're off. An iPhone can move around the campus a lot faster and will try to connect to every access point along the way. In colleges a lot of movement is at exactly the same time i.e. lunch and between classes. During these times a large number of devices could move from one node to another. The network might have trouble keeping up with all the movement of devices into and out of it.
Not all navigation is used in car either. Sometimes it's not in your car either. They're portable but you're not going to have them anywhere. It's very useful to have the functionality.
Finding the shortest route is useful for drivers but at the end of the day an extra mile or two isn't the end of the world. Makes a massive difference when you're walking somewhere though.
GPS phones also allow tie-ins. My GPS can look up local restaurents and can also ring them.
It's not something that Apple are focusing on so they haven't included it.
There are a few good reasons to have Safari on Windows beyond the simple ability for developers to test pages for the iPhone.
If you're using Parallels or Bootcamp you've been using Firefox etc instead of Safari on Windows. Same if you flit between Windows and OSX on different computers. It's easier to use Firefox on OSX than to switch repeatedly. I've already switched to Safari on Windows and it means that I'll be more inclined to use Safari on my Macbook Pro too.
This could actually help Safaris market share on OSX. Even more so when you consider that one of the biggest problems with Safari on OSX is that a lot of sites work better under Firefox. Since sites are more likely to support Safari now (and it'll be easier) this announcement benefits Mac owners who have zero direct interest in ever running Safari on Windows.
It'll certainly result in major websites supporting Safari sooner. This is really important for the iPhone.
I imagine there's the possibility down the road of integrating the iTS/podcasts etc. more closely into Safari so that songs can be easily linked to across the web without launching iTunes. It's kinda a pain to have to use the browser within iTunes to view iTS.
It'd be nice for Apple to add iCal or Mail on Windows to really expand the experience.
It's another alternative to IE and it's one with a good reputation that looks great out of the box. The ability to dynamically resize comment boxes on Safari3 is a god-send. Right now I can read the whole comment as I type it. It's seriously going to make a massive difference- particularly when websites adapt to the feature by putting in small comment boxes to allow quick replies. Small comment boxes are annoying to type in but big ones get in the way of information. This is the best of both worlds.