Do you own an IPhone? Why is that product made in China rather than the US? Oh right! The wages for factory workers in the US were to high so they off-shored all the manufacturing jobs to a cheaper labor force.
Well welcome to the same treatment.
It's not the "same treatment" at all. In the one case (outsourcing), unskilled jobs are moving overseas not due to government interference but due to global economic pressure. Leaving a country is a basic right, as long as someone else is willing to let you in.
In the other case (in-sourcing), government is actively bringing specific types of skilled people into the country, bypassing normal immigration law and targeting very specific industries thanks to lobbyists.
You aren't screaming to have all the manufacturing jobs brought back to give Americans those jobs again as that would raise the cost of that new phone you buy every year or the new TV or appliances you get so cheaply.
Are you serious? "Have them brought back"? Like this is some kind of two-bit dictatorship? People (and the jobs they create) are free to emigrate to any country that will let them in. Good luck trying to write a law which forces job creators to remain in the US. That is truly a dark path.
By contrast, immigration policy is supposed to be "fair". But programs like H1B are anything but.
Shut up and deal with it the way the rest of the country has had to. Crybaby whiners.
The "rest of the country" certainly hasn't faced competition from H1B visa workers, more than 95% of which target the software and IT industry.
But regardless, your sentiment is clear. You are more interested in taking others down a notch because of envy, rather than being genuinely interested in public policy fairness.
If that were true then companies would not use H1B's in the first place.
Since they are using H1B's then it means that the companies care where the programmer is located.
Precisely. Very few successful and reasonably large projects are staffed by ad-hoc collections of international programmers located around the world. While it can be done, the efficiency and throughput of such projects is usually quite low. Communication overhead is usually the crippling factor there.
Offshoring an entire project is much costlier to do, and frequently management is unwilling to cede control and simultaneously unwilling to relocate. Furthermore, the same pressures in the new local market that made you leave the former local market start to creep in. Bangalore salaries for competent programmers have increased about six-fold in the last 12 years or so. The cost savings from your expensive move might suddenly evaporate.
So, companies would MUCH prefer increasing staffing levels at their current locations, especially if they can lobby politicians to make it happen without driving up salaries!
Funny how that (different AC) got modded down to -1 for not fitting the groupthink here. People seem think supply and demand should apply to other people, but not to them.
Not so. Most of us are just asking for the same supply and demand rules to apply to software jobs as to any other job in the US, rather than being targeted disproportionately by H1B visa policy. If demand really does exceed supply as the software barons claim when lobbying politicians, then prices for labor should be increasing, which is how the labor supply works in every other sector of the economy. But if prices are stagnant or even declining, then claims of a shortage ring hollow.
Nobody owes you a job. If you don't like the salary being offered, then nobody is forcing you to take it. Move on. But software is a global industry. The work can generally be done anywhere,, by anyone. It isn't anyone else's responsibility to ensure that your business model is as profitable as you want it to be.
Of course no one owes anyone a job. But we're not talking about "global" software supply/demand and salaries here: we're talking very specifically about the situation inside the US, because we're evaluating a question of local public policy there only (i.e., the H1B visa quotas). Gaming the system via immigration policy to keep wages artificially low in a few specific categories should be revolting to any capitalist who claims to respect the market. If immigration limits are to be enforced, they should be enforced across the board, without special consideration to special interests.
Exactly... this is part of the convergence effort to unify the Phone, Desktop, and Surface versions of the Windows OS. The latter two are fairly unified, but the former is still substantially different.
Might as well rehash the golden years of space exploration and milk those memories of past glory. NASA has given up on space exploration as a mission. They're now focused on the politics of climatology...
I believe them. Why, just the other day I got a very helpful email from the NSA suggesting that I fix a few spelling errors in my weekly status report before I send it to my manager. They've got my back.
Agreed. The other "horror story" describes the fact that some advanced PCI-E power management features are disabled unless the BIOS capabilities are programmed correctly, and this is due to a recent change in the kernel, and can be worked around with a boot option.
Give me a break. This whole thing was taken in a simulator, which are *programmed* to behave how they think the airplanes will behave, using recorded data from test flights to help. Because they do not test the airframes in extreme attitudes (especially barrel rolls), they have little to no data with which to program the simulator, making demonstrations like this complete nonsense.
At 3:02 into the video you just posted, the pilot admits, "Not a maneuver you'd normally see in an airliner, and in fact you probably couldn't do it in a real airplane."
I'm not sure what you were trying to prove. This video doesn't prove anything.
Any belief that Airbus pilots are somehow under the communist thumb and that square-jawed Boeing pilots would heave manfully at the controls and save the say is, um, 100% laughable.
LOL, this is the absolute definition of the straw man argument. The great-grandparent never made such a claim; just an apolitical observation that he was scared that computers fly the planes and not skilled pilots.
Stop trying to turn this engineering discussion into a US vs. Europe, Boeing vs. Airbus religious war. Your post is a troll, I'm afraid.
I'm sorry, can you tell me what goals I should set in my life? Thanks. Then you can let me know if I'm trying to achieve them correctly or not too? Or whether I've achieved enough already?
Oh, and one other thing: make sure you don't let me fail, or else you'll have to bail me out.
You are trolling and off topic. This thread is for the discussion of Intel's fine and you are trying to open a discussion of whether or not Microsoft's fine was just. That's off topic.
The grandparent is the one who brought up the Microsoft fine, using the argument that Microsoft is still non-compliant, and therefore the fine against against BOTH companies (yes, on-topic) was "not enough".
I was attempting to point out, using something called sarcasm, that this comparison of cases is specious. Intel was apparently paying companies to use their products exclusively. The EU has never claimed anything like this against Microsoft.
The other point is that anti-competition laws are written such that the burden of proof falls on the government to show that the consumer has been injured somehow. That's MISSING from this argument so far, or at least no one has reported how the Commission came to that conclusion. In that respect, this is similar to the recent EU case against Microsoft Internet Explorer.
On a side note, I'm sick and tired of "Microsoft mods" on Slashdot. Apparently conjuring Microsoft in an argument is fine as long as it's in a negative connotation. Otherwise it's a troll. Gotta love Slashdot, where apparently you're either with us, or against us!
The action against Microsoft does not seem to have hindered Microsoft's behavior in the slightest and so even though tremendously more aggressive than the action against Microsoft in the U.S., it was clearly not enough.
What behavior are you referring to this time? Including a web browser with their OS?
How dare they do that! Need to teach them a lesson again. Perhaps more record fines will ensure that they learn: they need to cripple their products. See, that will be good for consumers. Because it's certainly impossible to install a different web browser on Windows...
As for methane, who gives a shit? It's got a short shelf-life. Methane drops out of the atmosphere in a mere decade, as opposed to C02, which can hang around forever.
Apparently the IPCC and Kyoto disagree completely with you, possibly because methane gas is approximately 21 times more effective as a warming agent per unit than Co2, when measured over a 100-year period. If measured over a shorter period, its effects are even more pronounced.
So it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether the methane byproducts of these goats are causing more harm than good, especially when considering that they are being marketed as a "green" solution to replace lawnmowers.
I have also heard arguments that debunk the "fact" that ruminants are so-called "carbon-neutral" animals. In many cases the plant matter consumed and converted to methane by ruminants would instead have decayed naturally (stored mostly in topsoil) or would not have been harvested in the first place (stored mostly in living plants). In the decay scenario, a portion is released as Co2 and methane by soil bacteria, but not nearly as much as is released by ruminants and ruminant manure. And when the amount is multiplied by the methane-Co2 adjustment factor of 21, it becomes clear that ruminants are clearly NOT carbon-neutral at all, and are in fact significant contributors to greenhouse gases over a 100-year period, when compared to NO domesticated ruminants.
As for Co2 byproducts of the goats, I concur that they are irrelevant to this debate.
Google does stuff for free when it suits them. If it might get in the way of advertisers or business partners (as is certainly the case here), they back down. Despite the legion of Slashdot fans who don't want to believe otherwise, Google is a business and frequently makes business decisions. Which is fine, as long as people see it for what it is.
What happened here is just that Google wasn't expecting such a huge surge in usage and had no other choice to disable for 3rd party clients for now.
It's a bit ironic that you start your post by blasting someone for reading between the lines, and then you proceed to do the same thing yourself. Unless you work at Google, you have no way to know why this decision was made.
But it's funny that you make it sound like Google is a helpless victim. How much traffic exactly pushed their feeble servers over the capacity limit only 11 days after this software became "popular"? How many iPhone users broke the camel's back?
The reality here is that Google made a policy decision, not a capacity decision. Especially since Google is one of the best in the business at scaling. This message should silence any doubt: "SMS_ERROR_10: Sorry we don't support free SMS messaging through this client. Visit http://gmail.com/sms for more info."
... Microsoft is bound by backward compatibility requirements to keep shipping OS's that are fundamentally broken and that do not allow for 32-bit apps and drivers to run out of one 64-bit OS.
Here's a run-down on Windows and Apple's 64-bit support on the desktop:
2001, June - Windows XP 64-bit edition for Itanium1. Microsoft's first 64-bit OS. Full OS support for 64-bit IA64 applications, minus DirectX libraries. Runs 32-bit x86 applications via "Windows on Windows" emulator.
2003, March - Windows XP 64-bit edition, Version 2003. Added support for Itanium2. Discontinued in July 2005 when last Itanium workstation (not server) went off the market.
2005, March - Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Based on Server 2003 kernel, adds support for AMD64 CPU. Both 32-bit and 64-bit applications run natively, side-by-side. Included full support for all Windows APIs, including DirectX. Dropped support for 16-bit applications.
2005, April - Apple OSX 10.4 "Tiger". First Apple OS to support 64-bit user apps, but only in console mode (no graphical library support). Supports G5 64-bit addressing.
2006, November - Windows Vista 64 (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate). First 64-bit versions of Windows to ship pre-installed on mainstream PCs.
2007, October - Apple OSX 10.5 "Leopard". First edition of Apple's OS to support 64-bit graphical applications.
As you can see, Microsoft has been clearly in front of Apple regarding 64-bit application support. The fact that Apple did not support graphical 64-bit applications until October 2007 is frankly embarrassing, considering that 64-bit Windows has had this support since the first 64-bit OS in 2001.
It should also be noted that Microsoft was really important in bringing AMD64 (x64) to market. Intel was dragging its feet with Itanium, issuing press releases downplaying Itanium on the desktop, stating that 64-bit computing only made sense for servers. Microsoft's David Cutler reportedly went to Intel, asking them to introduce a set of 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set. Intel refused. So Dave started working with AMD, and in 2004 the AMD64 Hammer CPU was born. Intel was basically forced to come out with an AMD64 clone they dubbed "EMT64", about 6 months later. It is unlikely that Intel would have supported x64 unless Microsoft had agreed to support the new AMD CPU. Dave Cutler reportedly had Server 2003 running on the Hammer prototype a few hours after receiving it.
You can still see a remnant of the close AMD relationship on 64-bit Windows by opening a shell and typing "echo %processor_architecture%". Hint: it doesn't say X64.
I did see the full answer, and to most Americans, Obama's answer goes against their core beliefs and reeks of Socialism. Most people associate paying taxes with keeping the government operating, providing services which everyone can use. They do not agree with government entitlement programs which keep key identity groups dependent on handouts, eager to vote for the politicians who give them the most free stuff.
I agree on one point: our current tax system is certainly redistributive. And regarding "detailed and thorough" answers, I have never seen Obama admit that the bottom 50% of taxpayers only pay about 6.5% of the income tax burden, despite receiving a majority of the entitlement payments which comprise around 55% of the federal budget. That would be honest.
When you shopped for the computer did you take as a parameter the fact that the manufactured was openenough to provide details on how to do suspend to ram to anyone apart from MS?
It turns out that there is an industry standard for power managment on a PC originally developed by Intel known as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI). The vast majority of hardware vendors comply with the specification these days because they must do so to get a Windows logo. Partially as a result of Microsoft's enforcement of system power management testing to get a Windows logo, bugs in system ACPI tables are fairly rare anymore.
It also turns out that perhaps the most complicated part of entering system power states is coordinating the action amongst all the devices on the system. This requires power management handling implemented by all device drivers. It is no coincidence that "power management" is the biggest area of complaints surfaced by new Windows driver developers: correct handling of power management states is difficult to synchronize correctly and typically consumes a large portion of tricky code.
Microsoft has devoted a huge amount of time and money towards improving driver power management handling across the board. The Windows Driver Kit includes much improved documentation assisting driver developers in handling power IRPs correctly, and also includes a wide assortment of test tools designed to highlight power management bugs in real drivers and devices. Recently Microsoft acknowledged the difficulty of writing a power-aware WDM driver correctly and released a new driver framework which largely supercedes WDM to make power management easier for developers to get right. Finally, a significant portion of the Windows Logo testing kit validates that devices and drivers support power states properly. All of this work has paid off, as the OP indicated. Vista is one of the most power-aware operating systems in history, although much of the power savings are offset by extra resources consumed by other Vista features such as the Search Indexer. In any case, getting the PC industry to support device power management properly took lots of time and persistence Microsoft's part to achieve.
Frankly, the OSS community just hasn't put the same amount of work into handling power management, and the results speak for themselves. Linux is behind in power management because there aren't enough kernel-level developers knowledgeable about the subject and willing ot tackle the widespread problems in various drivers. Resuming from ACPI states S3 and S4 are very complicated operations to get right depending on what may have happened while the PC was asleep. Handling all of these edge cases in the driver code is tough, and unfortunately only an elite few know how to do it properly. Not to mention advanced bus support like USB's "selective suspend" whereby individual devices are suspended (e.g., state D2) to save power when not in use.
Advanced device support is still a major area where commercial software can still beat OSS today.
Blaming the McCain campaign for these intrusions into Joe's personal information is a ridiculous tactic certain to fail. Joe was already in the spotlight the day before the debate, because the ABC news video clip was sensational enough to be picked up by several political commentators. The sound bite with Obama's comments about "spreading the wealth around" was shocking, in fact.
Most of the smear attacks on Joe ("not a plumber", "doesn't have a license", "doesn't pay his taxes") that no doubt surfaced as a result of this personal information hunt have come from two camps. On the one hand, eager media reporters looking for a sensational headline rather than digging for truth. And on the other hand, Obama supporters urgently trying to perform damage control over video footage clearly bad for Obama's "middle-of-the-road" image. "Who is this guy?" they asked. "Surely it's not possible that a random individual in this middle-class Ohio neighborhood could ask a question that might make Obama stumble! We chose this neighborhood carefully: surely no one around here might be upset at Obama's tax policies? There simply MUST be something nefarious in his background we can use to discredit him! Let's find it! Dig!"
Joe was really caught in the middle of all this. Here's a random guy who had a TV camera shoved in his face while playing football with his kid in his own front yard. He had the presence of mind to ask a tough question that goes to the heart of the political divide. And the media allowed the political hacks to switch focus towards this guy's personal background, rather than the topic of the conversation. Shame on them for being so shallow.
Partly right. Microsoft didn't get prosecuted for merely being a monopoly or for bundling apps with their OS.
What planet are you from? The EU Commission's primary arguments were: 1) Bundled Media player hurts competition and 2) the monopoly of Windows on the desktop requires full documentation of proprietary server protocols, regardless of server market share.
In other words, bundling and monopoly position are precisely why they've been prosecuted recently!
Now you can't fully uninstall QuickTime as some of the basic libraries of QuickTime are used in their Quartz rendering engine. But nothing stops you from using another movie player.
Oh, the irony. You do realize you just summarized Microsoft's losing 1998 argument about IE, right?
Windows Logo certification involves running automated tests supplied by a self-test kit called the Windows Logo Kit. Each device requesting a logo and a WHQL signature for the driver must fit into one of several pre-determined device categories, for which Microsoft has written hundreds of tests that must pass.
The set of tests covered by the WLK is fairly extensive. In fact, depending on the category, the breadth of testing generally surpasses what most vendors can afford to develop in-house or are willing to test themselves. (Think fly-by-night manufacturer mass-producing a USB widget at the lowest possible cost.) However, obviously the public never sees what bugs are caught by these tests; the public only sees bugs which slip through the cracks...
Microsoft could do something about it. It would just take dumping an entire driver model and replacing it something better though.
This is exactly what Microsoft did with WDF, released in December 2005 and shipped with all of the Windows Driver Kits released since then (including all of the Vista Beta kits).
WDF has two components: KMDF (kernel-mode) and UMDF (user-mode). In a nutshell, they are well-documented object-oriented libraries which implement much of the complicated synchronization logic and rules imposed by WDM architecture, freeing the driver developer to focus only on aspects unique to their hardware. WDF drivers generally have fewer lines of code, because thousands of lines of bug-prone WDM code is already implemented by the framework.
The transition process from WDM to WDF will take time. There are countless old WDM drivers written for Windows for nearly every conceivable device you can use on a PC (in fact, some consider this Windows greatest strength). It would be stupid to ditch all of this code. But for NEW drivers, this is the way to go.
Developer education is one key aspect. Now there is a book on WDF for driver developers that requires no previous WDM experience.
Actually, most Republicans today simply want equality of rights under the law, which once upon a time was a cherished ideal.
Democrats, who depend heavily on identity politics to stay in power, must continuously reinforce their voting blocks with separatist rhetoric emphasizing each group's plight, and advocate policies which create new rights imbalances in the opposite direction to keep these groups focused on identity issues.
Planting the idea that nominating a female VP candidate is a Republican "trick" is a perfect example of identity politics in action.
Ironically, identity politics have been waning in success recently, even as many individuals in these classical identity groups have achieved their own socioeconomic success. Successful individuals tend to bristle when asked to vote based on gender or ethnic identity alone. Democrats have to be careful or this strategy can backfire easily.
Most of these driver incompatibilities were actually caused because microsoft changed the driver structure at the last minute which basically shot a lot of the manufacturers in the foot at the starting line.
Actually Microsoft had been talking to the graphics IHVs about the new Longhorn "Advanced Driver Model" as early as spring 2005. Both ATI and nVidia had representatives (i.e., developers) working closely with Redmond during that time. The Longhorn/Vista display model became known as "WDDM" and was more or less locked down, from what I understand, by late 2005. By the time of WinHEC 2006 (April), they were already talking about WDDM 2.0, as you can see from this presentation. If you take a look at the slide deck, ATI's Tim Kelley actually delivered part of the presentation on WDDM 2.0.
Frankly, I don't think nVidia invested enough energy in making high-quality Vista drivers in time for launch. They had approximately a full year of Betas, the same time that ATI and Intel had. The Vista Beta and RC programs had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, for which Microsoft collected crash dump data (which is the same type of data mentioned in this article, collected BEFORE launch). Yet even with this time, and the user crash dump reports, clearly by launch in January 2007 nVidia still wasn't ready with robust drivers.
The evidence here really does point at nVidia, no matter how much you want it to point at Microsoft.
I wonder if AMD can use this in a lawsuit of their own due to anti-competitive practices
I don't think so, for two reasons. First, the standards were subsequently lowered for everybody, including AMD, so enforcement was fair. (Although you could make the argument that they were all treated poorly, I suppose.) Second, I understand that AMD was not selling desktop or laptop chipsets in 2006, as they had not yet merged with ATI. AMD chipsets would therefore not have been affected by this change, although ATI chipsets may have been. But it is not clear whether they were negatively impacted. Some ATI chipsets with integrated video may have benefited from this change, in fact. You just may not hear about them because they aren't as widespread as the 915 was and still is.
From what I understand, this decision was largely forced upon Microsoft by several OEMs (e.g. like Dell, Sony, Lenovo, IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Acer), who had relatively large inventories of 915-based products which they wanted to sell, and were afraid that without the "Vista Capable" logo they wouldn't sell well. Some OEMs (apparently HP) had already updated their 2006 product line to the original published Vista requirements, and were therefore understandably upset when the standards were lowered to include their competitors' less capable (and less expensive) offerings as "Vista Capable" too. I can certainly understand why these OEMs would be upset.
The fact that some systems (especially laptops) would lack Aero support was clear long before Vista shipped. Around June or July 2006, or 6 full months prior to Vista's release, Microsoft went live with the official Vista logo programs, of which there were two: "Certified for Windows Vista" (premium), and "Works with Windows Vista" (basic). One of the chief differences between the two was Aero support. (It is no coincidence that Windows Vista Home Basic edition does not contain Aero support, while Home Prmium does. The two SKUs were intended to align with their respective logos.)
Therefore, OEMs knew by at least mid-2006 that not all hardware would be able to achieve the "premium", Aero-enabled logo category. In June/July 2006 Microsoft released a logo test kit for these new Vista logo programs, which included a test called the "Aero Acceptance Test" which was required for the "Certified" logo. It failed several manufacturers' integrated video solutions, including the Intel 915. But since Vista was not yet shipping (and therefore these logos, although "ready", were not yet shipping to customers), OEMs were free to continue selling these non-Aero chipsets to customers with the older "Vista Capable" logo. At this point, however, they knew full well that these systems could never achieve the "Certified" logo. But obviously they felt no obligation to warn potential purchasers of the future limitation.
Ideally in my opinion, Microsoft should have specified two different "Vista Capable" logos all along, anticipating the fact that not all hardware was created equal and were equally "Vista Capable". However easy this is to note in hindsight, it is obviously difficult to specify hardware standards. It takes a lot of work. Having two such programs ready a year in advance of a fluctuating OS release date is even more complicated, and deciding where to draw the line between the "basic" and "premium" versions in 2005, when you don't really even know what features will make it into the finished product, is well near impossible.
So while I sympathize somewhat with customers who purchased hardware in 2006 with the understanding that it would run Aero in 2007, frankly no one promised them anything, and their systems are capable of running 95% of Vista just fine. Purchasing hardware with future expectations of 100% feature support has always been a gamble. You don't know whether something is going to work 100% until it's actually available.
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Do you own an IPhone? Why is that product made in China rather than the US? Oh right! The wages for factory workers in the US were to high so they off-shored all the manufacturing jobs to a cheaper labor force.
Well welcome to the same treatment.
It's not the "same treatment" at all. In the one case (outsourcing), unskilled jobs are moving overseas not due to government interference but due to global economic pressure. Leaving a country is a basic right, as long as someone else is willing to let you in.
In the other case (in-sourcing), government is actively bringing specific types of skilled people into the country, bypassing normal immigration law and targeting very specific industries thanks to lobbyists.
You aren't screaming to have all the manufacturing jobs brought back to give Americans those jobs again as that would raise the cost of that new phone you buy every year or the new TV or appliances you get so cheaply.
Are you serious? "Have them brought back"? Like this is some kind of two-bit dictatorship? People (and the jobs they create) are free to emigrate to any country that will let them in. Good luck trying to write a law which forces job creators to remain in the US. That is truly a dark path.
By contrast, immigration policy is supposed to be "fair". But programs like H1B are anything but.
Shut up and deal with it the way the rest of the country has had to. Crybaby whiners.
The "rest of the country" certainly hasn't faced competition from H1B visa workers, more than 95% of which target the software and IT industry.
But regardless, your sentiment is clear. You are more interested in taking others down a notch because of envy, rather than being genuinely interested in public policy fairness.
If that were true then companies would not use H1B's in the first place. Since they are using H1B's then it means that the companies care where the programmer is located.
Precisely. Very few successful and reasonably large projects are staffed by ad-hoc collections of international programmers located around the world. While it can be done, the efficiency and throughput of such projects is usually quite low. Communication overhead is usually the crippling factor there.
Offshoring an entire project is much costlier to do, and frequently management is unwilling to cede control and simultaneously unwilling to relocate. Furthermore, the same pressures in the new local market that made you leave the former local market start to creep in. Bangalore salaries for competent programmers have increased about six-fold in the last 12 years or so. The cost savings from your expensive move might suddenly evaporate.
So, companies would MUCH prefer increasing staffing levels at their current locations, especially if they can lobby politicians to make it happen without driving up salaries!
Funny how that (different AC) got modded down to -1 for not fitting the groupthink here. People seem think supply and demand should apply to other people, but not to them.
Not so. Most of us are just asking for the same supply and demand rules to apply to software jobs as to any other job in the US, rather than being targeted disproportionately by H1B visa policy. If demand really does exceed supply as the software barons claim when lobbying politicians, then prices for labor should be increasing, which is how the labor supply works in every other sector of the economy. But if prices are stagnant or even declining, then claims of a shortage ring hollow.
Nobody owes you a job. If you don't like the salary being offered, then nobody is forcing you to take it. Move on. But software is a global industry. The work can generally be done anywhere,, by anyone. It isn't anyone else's responsibility to ensure that your business model is as profitable as you want it to be.
Of course no one owes anyone a job. But we're not talking about "global" software supply/demand and salaries here: we're talking very specifically about the situation inside the US, because we're evaluating a question of local public policy there only (i.e., the H1B visa quotas). Gaming the system via immigration policy to keep wages artificially low in a few specific categories should be revolting to any capitalist who claims to respect the market. If immigration limits are to be enforced, they should be enforced across the board, without special consideration to special interests.
What's really funny is that you're stereotyping, and by your own logic, that must make you a conservative?
Printing on the surface of the moon would make for a really cool billboard.
Exactly... this is part of the convergence effort to unify the Phone, Desktop, and Surface versions of the Windows OS. The latter two are fairly unified, but the former is still substantially different.
Might as well rehash the golden years of space exploration and milk those memories of past glory. NASA has given up on space exploration as a mission. They're now focused on the politics of climatology...
I believe them. Why, just the other day I got a very helpful email from the NSA suggesting that I fix a few spelling errors in my weekly status report before I send it to my manager. They've got my back.
Agreed. The other "horror story" describes the fact that some advanced PCI-E power management features are disabled unless the BIOS capabilities are programmed correctly, and this is due to a recent change in the kernel, and can be worked around with a boot option.
This video shows an Airbus pilot switching off the flight computers then barrel rolling an A320: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2KygSyVE58
Give me a break. This whole thing was taken in a simulator, which are *programmed* to behave how they think the airplanes will behave, using recorded data from test flights to help. Because they do not test the airframes in extreme attitudes (especially barrel rolls), they have little to no data with which to program the simulator, making demonstrations like this complete nonsense.
At 3:02 into the video you just posted, the pilot admits, "Not a maneuver you'd normally see in an airliner, and in fact you probably couldn't do it in a real airplane."
I'm not sure what you were trying to prove. This video doesn't prove anything.
Any belief that Airbus pilots are somehow under the communist thumb and that square-jawed Boeing pilots would heave manfully at the controls and save the say is, um, 100% laughable.
LOL, this is the absolute definition of the straw man argument. The great-grandparent never made such a claim; just an apolitical observation that he was scared that computers fly the planes and not skilled pilots.
Stop trying to turn this engineering discussion into a US vs. Europe, Boeing vs. Airbus religious war. Your post is a troll, I'm afraid.
I'm sorry, can you tell me what goals I should set in my life? Thanks. Then you can let me know if I'm trying to achieve them correctly or not too? Or whether I've achieved enough already?
Oh, and one other thing: make sure you don't let me fail, or else you'll have to bail me out.
You are trolling and off topic. This thread is for the discussion of Intel's fine and you are trying to open a discussion of whether or not Microsoft's fine was just. That's off topic.
The grandparent is the one who brought up the Microsoft fine, using the argument that Microsoft is still non-compliant, and therefore the fine against against BOTH companies (yes, on-topic) was "not enough".
I was attempting to point out, using something called sarcasm, that this comparison of cases is specious. Intel was apparently paying companies to use their products exclusively. The EU has never claimed anything like this against Microsoft.
The other point is that anti-competition laws are written such that the burden of proof falls on the government to show that the consumer has been injured somehow. That's MISSING from this argument so far, or at least no one has reported how the Commission came to that conclusion. In that respect, this is similar to the recent EU case against Microsoft Internet Explorer.
On a side note, I'm sick and tired of "Microsoft mods" on Slashdot. Apparently conjuring Microsoft in an argument is fine as long as it's in a negative connotation. Otherwise it's a troll. Gotta love Slashdot, where apparently you're either with us, or against us!
The action against Microsoft does not seem to have hindered Microsoft's behavior in the slightest and so even though tremendously more aggressive than the action against Microsoft in the U.S., it was clearly not enough.
What behavior are you referring to this time? Including a web browser with their OS?
How dare they do that! Need to teach them a lesson again. Perhaps more record fines will ensure that they learn: they need to cripple their products. See, that will be good for consumers. Because it's certainly impossible to install a different web browser on Windows...
As for methane, who gives a shit? It's got a short shelf-life. Methane drops out of the atmosphere in a mere decade, as opposed to C02, which can hang around forever.
Apparently the IPCC and Kyoto disagree completely with you, possibly because methane gas is approximately 21 times more effective as a warming agent per unit than Co2, when measured over a 100-year period. If measured over a shorter period, its effects are even more pronounced.
So it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether the methane byproducts of these goats are causing more harm than good, especially when considering that they are being marketed as a "green" solution to replace lawnmowers.
I have also heard arguments that debunk the "fact" that ruminants are so-called "carbon-neutral" animals. In many cases the plant matter consumed and converted to methane by ruminants would instead have decayed naturally (stored mostly in topsoil) or would not have been harvested in the first place (stored mostly in living plants). In the decay scenario, a portion is released as Co2 and methane by soil bacteria, but not nearly as much as is released by ruminants and ruminant manure. And when the amount is multiplied by the methane-Co2 adjustment factor of 21, it becomes clear that ruminants are clearly NOT carbon-neutral at all, and are in fact significant contributors to greenhouse gases over a 100-year period, when compared to NO domesticated ruminants.
As for Co2 byproducts of the goats, I concur that they are irrelevant to this debate.
What happened here is just that Google wasn't expecting such a huge surge in usage and had no other choice to disable for 3rd party clients for now.
It's a bit ironic that you start your post by blasting someone for reading between the lines, and then you proceed to do the same thing yourself. Unless you work at Google, you have no way to know why this decision was made.
But it's funny that you make it sound like Google is a helpless victim. How much traffic exactly pushed their feeble servers over the capacity limit only 11 days after this software became "popular"? How many iPhone users broke the camel's back?
The reality here is that Google made a policy decision, not a capacity decision. Especially since Google is one of the best in the business at scaling. This message should silence any doubt: "SMS_ERROR_10: Sorry we don't support free SMS messaging through this client. Visit http://gmail.com/sms for more info."
... Microsoft is bound by backward compatibility requirements to keep shipping OS's that are fundamentally broken and that do not allow for 32-bit apps and drivers to run out of one 64-bit OS.
Here's a run-down on Windows and Apple's 64-bit support on the desktop:
As you can see, Microsoft has been clearly in front of Apple regarding 64-bit application support. The fact that Apple did not support graphical 64-bit applications until October 2007 is frankly embarrassing, considering that 64-bit Windows has had this support since the first 64-bit OS in 2001.
It should also be noted that Microsoft was really important in bringing AMD64 (x64) to market. Intel was dragging its feet with Itanium, issuing press releases downplaying Itanium on the desktop, stating that 64-bit computing only made sense for servers. Microsoft's David Cutler reportedly went to Intel, asking them to introduce a set of 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set. Intel refused. So Dave started working with AMD, and in 2004 the AMD64 Hammer CPU was born. Intel was basically forced to come out with an AMD64 clone they dubbed "EMT64", about 6 months later. It is unlikely that Intel would have supported x64 unless Microsoft had agreed to support the new AMD CPU. Dave Cutler reportedly had Server 2003 running on the Hammer prototype a few hours after receiving it.
You can still see a remnant of the close AMD relationship on 64-bit Windows by opening a shell and typing "echo %processor_architecture%". Hint: it doesn't say X64.
I did see the full answer, and to most Americans, Obama's answer goes against their core beliefs and reeks of Socialism. Most people associate paying taxes with keeping the government operating, providing services which everyone can use. They do not agree with government entitlement programs which keep key identity groups dependent on handouts, eager to vote for the politicians who give them the most free stuff.
I agree on one point: our current tax system is certainly redistributive. And regarding "detailed and thorough" answers, I have never seen Obama admit that the bottom 50% of taxpayers only pay about 6.5% of the income tax burden, despite receiving a majority of the entitlement payments which comprise around 55% of the federal budget. That would be honest.
When you shopped for the computer did you take as a parameter the fact that the manufactured was openenough to provide details on how to do suspend to ram to anyone apart from MS?
It turns out that there is an industry standard for power managment on a PC originally developed by Intel known as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI). The vast majority of hardware vendors comply with the specification these days because they must do so to get a Windows logo. Partially as a result of Microsoft's enforcement of system power management testing to get a Windows logo, bugs in system ACPI tables are fairly rare anymore.
It also turns out that perhaps the most complicated part of entering system power states is coordinating the action amongst all the devices on the system. This requires power management handling implemented by all device drivers. It is no coincidence that "power management" is the biggest area of complaints surfaced by new Windows driver developers: correct handling of power management states is difficult to synchronize correctly and typically consumes a large portion of tricky code.
Microsoft has devoted a huge amount of time and money towards improving driver power management handling across the board. The Windows Driver Kit includes much improved documentation assisting driver developers in handling power IRPs correctly, and also includes a wide assortment of test tools designed to highlight power management bugs in real drivers and devices. Recently Microsoft acknowledged the difficulty of writing a power-aware WDM driver correctly and released a new driver framework which largely supercedes WDM to make power management easier for developers to get right. Finally, a significant portion of the Windows Logo testing kit validates that devices and drivers support power states properly. All of this work has paid off, as the OP indicated. Vista is one of the most power-aware operating systems in history, although much of the power savings are offset by extra resources consumed by other Vista features such as the Search Indexer. In any case, getting the PC industry to support device power management properly took lots of time and persistence Microsoft's part to achieve.
Frankly, the OSS community just hasn't put the same amount of work into handling power management, and the results speak for themselves. Linux is behind in power management because there aren't enough kernel-level developers knowledgeable about the subject and willing ot tackle the widespread problems in various drivers. Resuming from ACPI states S3 and S4 are very complicated operations to get right depending on what may have happened while the PC was asleep. Handling all of these edge cases in the driver code is tough, and unfortunately only an elite few know how to do it properly. Not to mention advanced bus support like USB's "selective suspend" whereby individual devices are suspended (e.g., state D2) to save power when not in use.
Advanced device support is still a major area where commercial software can still beat OSS today.
Blaming the McCain campaign for these intrusions into Joe's personal information is a ridiculous tactic certain to fail. Joe was already in the spotlight the day before the debate, because the ABC news video clip was sensational enough to be picked up by several political commentators. The sound bite with Obama's comments about "spreading the wealth around" was shocking, in fact.
Most of the smear attacks on Joe ("not a plumber", "doesn't have a license", "doesn't pay his taxes") that no doubt surfaced as a result of this personal information hunt have come from two camps. On the one hand, eager media reporters looking for a sensational headline rather than digging for truth. And on the other hand, Obama supporters urgently trying to perform damage control over video footage clearly bad for Obama's "middle-of-the-road" image. "Who is this guy?" they asked. "Surely it's not possible that a random individual in this middle-class Ohio neighborhood could ask a question that might make Obama stumble! We chose this neighborhood carefully: surely no one around here might be upset at Obama's tax policies? There simply MUST be something nefarious in his background we can use to discredit him! Let's find it! Dig!"
Joe was really caught in the middle of all this. Here's a random guy who had a TV camera shoved in his face while playing football with his kid in his own front yard. He had the presence of mind to ask a tough question that goes to the heart of the political divide. And the media allowed the political hacks to switch focus towards this guy's personal background, rather than the topic of the conversation. Shame on them for being so shallow.
What planet are you from? The EU Commission's primary arguments were: 1) Bundled Media player hurts competition and 2) the monopoly of Windows on the desktop requires full documentation of proprietary server protocols, regardless of server market share.
In other words, bundling and monopoly position are precisely why they've been prosecuted recently!
Oh, the irony. You do realize you just summarized Microsoft's losing 1998 argument about IE, right?
Windows Logo certification involves running automated tests supplied by a self-test kit called the Windows Logo Kit. Each device requesting a logo and a WHQL signature for the driver must fit into one of several pre-determined device categories, for which Microsoft has written hundreds of tests that must pass.
The set of tests covered by the WLK is fairly extensive. In fact, depending on the category, the breadth of testing generally surpasses what most vendors can afford to develop in-house or are willing to test themselves. (Think fly-by-night manufacturer mass-producing a USB widget at the lowest possible cost.) However, obviously the public never sees what bugs are caught by these tests; the public only sees bugs which slip through the cracks...
This is exactly what Microsoft did with WDF, released in December 2005 and shipped with all of the Windows Driver Kits released since then (including all of the Vista Beta kits).
WDF has two components: KMDF (kernel-mode) and UMDF (user-mode). In a nutshell, they are well-documented object-oriented libraries which implement much of the complicated synchronization logic and rules imposed by WDM architecture, freeing the driver developer to focus only on aspects unique to their hardware. WDF drivers generally have fewer lines of code, because thousands of lines of bug-prone WDM code is already implemented by the framework.
The transition process from WDM to WDF will take time. There are countless old WDM drivers written for Windows for nearly every conceivable device you can use on a PC (in fact, some consider this Windows greatest strength). It would be stupid to ditch all of this code. But for NEW drivers, this is the way to go.
Developer education is one key aspect. Now there is a book on WDF for driver developers that requires no previous WDM experience.
Actually, most Republicans today simply want equality of rights under the law, which once upon a time was a cherished ideal.
Democrats, who depend heavily on identity politics to stay in power, must continuously reinforce their voting blocks with separatist rhetoric emphasizing each group's plight, and advocate policies which create new rights imbalances in the opposite direction to keep these groups focused on identity issues.
Planting the idea that nominating a female VP candidate is a Republican "trick" is a perfect example of identity politics in action.
Ironically, identity politics have been waning in success recently, even as many individuals in these classical identity groups have achieved their own socioeconomic success. Successful individuals tend to bristle when asked to vote based on gender or ethnic identity alone. Democrats have to be careful or this strategy can backfire easily.
Actually Microsoft had been talking to the graphics IHVs about the new Longhorn "Advanced Driver Model" as early as spring 2005. Both ATI and nVidia had representatives (i.e., developers) working closely with Redmond during that time. The Longhorn/Vista display model became known as "WDDM" and was more or less locked down, from what I understand, by late 2005. By the time of WinHEC 2006 (April), they were already talking about WDDM 2.0, as you can see from this presentation. If you take a look at the slide deck, ATI's Tim Kelley actually delivered part of the presentation on WDDM 2.0.
Frankly, I don't think nVidia invested enough energy in making high-quality Vista drivers in time for launch. They had approximately a full year of Betas, the same time that ATI and Intel had. The Vista Beta and RC programs had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, for which Microsoft collected crash dump data (which is the same type of data mentioned in this article, collected BEFORE launch). Yet even with this time, and the user crash dump reports, clearly by launch in January 2007 nVidia still wasn't ready with robust drivers.
The evidence here really does point at nVidia, no matter how much you want it to point at Microsoft.
I don't think so, for two reasons. First, the standards were subsequently lowered for everybody, including AMD, so enforcement was fair. (Although you could make the argument that they were all treated poorly, I suppose.) Second, I understand that AMD was not selling desktop or laptop chipsets in 2006, as they had not yet merged with ATI. AMD chipsets would therefore not have been affected by this change, although ATI chipsets may have been. But it is not clear whether they were negatively impacted. Some ATI chipsets with integrated video may have benefited from this change, in fact. You just may not hear about them because they aren't as widespread as the 915 was and still is.
From what I understand, this decision was largely forced upon Microsoft by several OEMs (e.g. like Dell, Sony, Lenovo, IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Acer), who had relatively large inventories of 915-based products which they wanted to sell, and were afraid that without the "Vista Capable" logo they wouldn't sell well. Some OEMs (apparently HP) had already updated their 2006 product line to the original published Vista requirements, and were therefore understandably upset when the standards were lowered to include their competitors' less capable (and less expensive) offerings as "Vista Capable" too. I can certainly understand why these OEMs would be upset.
The fact that some systems (especially laptops) would lack Aero support was clear long before Vista shipped. Around June or July 2006, or 6 full months prior to Vista's release, Microsoft went live with the official Vista logo programs, of which there were two: "Certified for Windows Vista" (premium), and "Works with Windows Vista" (basic). One of the chief differences between the two was Aero support. (It is no coincidence that Windows Vista Home Basic edition does not contain Aero support, while Home Prmium does. The two SKUs were intended to align with their respective logos.)
Therefore, OEMs knew by at least mid-2006 that not all hardware would be able to achieve the "premium", Aero-enabled logo category. In June/July 2006 Microsoft released a logo test kit for these new Vista logo programs, which included a test called the "Aero Acceptance Test" which was required for the "Certified" logo. It failed several manufacturers' integrated video solutions, including the Intel 915. But since Vista was not yet shipping (and therefore these logos, although "ready", were not yet shipping to customers), OEMs were free to continue selling these non-Aero chipsets to customers with the older "Vista Capable" logo. At this point, however, they knew full well that these systems could never achieve the "Certified" logo. But obviously they felt no obligation to warn potential purchasers of the future limitation.
Ideally in my opinion, Microsoft should have specified two different "Vista Capable" logos all along, anticipating the fact that not all hardware was created equal and were equally "Vista Capable". However easy this is to note in hindsight, it is obviously difficult to specify hardware standards. It takes a lot of work. Having two such programs ready a year in advance of a fluctuating OS release date is even more complicated, and deciding where to draw the line between the "basic" and "premium" versions in 2005, when you don't really even know what features will make it into the finished product, is well near impossible.
So while I sympathize somewhat with customers who purchased hardware in 2006 with the understanding that it would run Aero in 2007, frankly no one promised them anything, and their systems are capable of running 95% of Vista just fine. Purchasing hardware with future expectations of 100% feature support has always been a gamble. You don't know whether something is going to work 100% until it's actually available.