Posted on 11/13/2002 10:28:24 AM PST by dark_lord
Care to elaborate on that comment?
As the poster named 'analog' mentioned, we'll never see any change under the GOP. It is actually they and their sponsors, the ITAA, that have brought about this mess. I'll post a voting record link for those who may want to see how their own "representatives" voted on this topic..
Actually, some of the most virulent haters of capitalism can be found in executive suites. The high-tech salaries were rising in response to forces of supply and demand; the market was sending a message and Americans were responding by enrolling in computer science programs. Clearly, the free market was working.
The response of US executives? They ran to Mommy Government, they threw a tantrum and demanded a greater number of H1B visas. When the market didn't work for them, they demanded a government intervention.
So were are your facts that support the notion that most H-1B's do no get green cards?
Sorry, but you are wrong again. If any company is laying off American workers and hiring equivalent H1B's, they are breaking the law.
The law was not written to protect American workers. If it were there would not be so many engineers being replaced by foreigners. The 90 day rule is a joke. After 90 days the company is free to do what ever it wants.
Perhaps, but it is interesting to see people here proclaim we should shut the door on H1B. If every country followed this advice and terminated skilled worker programs, there would actually be MORE Americans unemployed, since there are more Americans working overseas than there are H1's in America.
Do you have any data to support this claim? Please limit it to the engineering profession since that is the topic we are discussing. If there are so many engineering jobs available in other countries then why do I not see any job ads for them?
Pretty proud of the fact that you and others like you control Congress aren't you? Some government we have when the leaders are paid off by a selected few to screw the general public who they are supposed to "represent".
Compilers today are very effective, and extremely convenient. Processor speeds are incredible, and increasing daily. Moreover, disk space is vast and cheap.
BUT.
I think this thinking underlies the "bloatware" so prevalent today. My wife got a new 1 Ghz Duron laptop with 128 Mb of memory. It was slooooow. Why? Because XP Pro used up so much of that memory that any real work was being constantly swapped to disk !
Sure, I fixed it with another 256 Mb of memory, but frankly, I'm disgusted. XP makes Jerrold Nadler look svelte and nimble.
What really brought it home to me was when I saw the Mflop comparison between a lowly 50 Mhz 486 and a Cray XMP. The 486 had more horsepower ! The computing power we have at our fingertips today is immense - and largely wasted on crapola.
After futzing with a glacially slow foray into Linux one evening, I booted back into DOS 6.2 in disgust and started messing with a download of Ralf Brown's interrupt list. I ran his little assembly program that combines something like 25 separate files in order into one 9 Mb listing and deletes the source files. It ran in four seconds on my crummy 150 Mhz Pentium MMX laptop.
That's peformance ! And it was extremely refreshing after my ludicrous Linux experience. And that was with 16 bit code and disk access !
I suffer from the typical engineer's fault. I am always looking for the optimum, not just "good enough".
If a big enough group of determined assembly coders built a performance OS, I think they could easily leave MS in the dust. Just think, what if people could out-compute the latest multi-processor seven trillion gigahertz machines with a garage sale Pentium? There's so much wasted horsepower there that it's possible. And assembly's the key that could unlock it. Of course, seeing as CS grads don't even know what assembly is, we'll probably see pigs fly first.
That is, in context, a bold lie. Are you a liar?
If you are as knowledgable as you seem to be claiming, then you must know that many -- maybe most -- working positions held by H1B are contractor positions. If you don't know that, you are boldly misrepresenting your own knowledge of the situation in it's actual, common practise. A bold lie.
It may be that you know this reality, yet boldly misrepresent because you know how this little game works. You then would know that the H1B's are "employees" of contracting body shops who then -- as they can --- place the H1Bs into companies as contractors. Thus they are employees, in a narrow legal sense, yet in the context of this discussion, -- as you should know -- they are contractors. So then you mispresent -- a bold lie.
It's folly to ask a liar if he is a liar. You only get a liar's response.
So when I asked "Are you a liar?", that was only a rhetorical question. I wasn't really asking.
??? What do you mean, you can't? It is done all the time. You simply go to a consulting/contracting/body shop firm and say - I need a couple of contractors to work on a project. That firm provides a couple of bodies. Those bodies happen to be H-1Bs. That is perfectly legal and happens a lot!!!
H1B's have fought sweatshops in the courts and won on restrictive contracts. I don't care if it was signed in Antarctica. US courts won't uphold contracts binding people to an employer. What do H1's care if the contract can be enforced back in India? They are in the US!
So the firm holding the contract (signed in India) fires the H-1B (for poor performance, whatever.) Now what does the H-1B do? If they don't find another job right quick, they are required to return home. To India. Where the contract is enforceable. So what difference does it make if the contract is not enforceable in the US? And I didn't say the contract "bound" the person. The contracts normally just say that the employee is responsible for paying back transportation (round trip airfare to/from India) and training expenses. Heck, this is an old, old ploy and is legal. EDS used to do this long ago - they would run employees through a multi-week training program, and then require the employee to "repay" them tens of thousands of dollars if they left withing two years of completing the training. Today, some of these H-1B shops give their employees a bunch of "required" training on CD-ROMS, some books, and make them sit in the office getting "trained" when not staffed - taught by some more senior guy who is not staffed. Contractually, the employee must repay the "value" of the training - which is normally several thousand dollars - if they quit. This is legal on those contracts. So, no, the person is not legally bound to the company. But they have contracted to repay the value of the air fare and the required training if they quit. So, unless they want to fork over several thousand bucks, they don't quit.
The company that brings these folks on as contractors does not have to pay their taxes, nor FICA, nor medicare, nor benefits
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Please tell me you aren't going to claim H1's don't pay tax. H1's are US residents for tax purposes.
What I mean is this. Firm A contracts with H-1B, brings them over. Makes them available to company B for a project, as a contractor. Company B does not have to pay any of those things, because the H-1B is not an employee, but a contractor, get it? It is the responsibility of firm A to pay those things. Which they should do. If they are large enough, they do. If they are small, or headquartered offshore in Bermuda -- enforcement is questionable. But that's not the point. The point is that company B, enjoying the benefits of the labor, does not have to pay any of this. Because they are just hiring a contractor. They pay a fixed fee per hour, or a fixed cost per contract - period. That's it. The point I was making was that many employers now prefer contractors to employees, because they aren't on the hook for this for contractors, like they would be if they hired employees. Lots of work is project work - which can be phased in sequences of 3 to 6 months. Used to be that employers would hire employees, then rotate the employees through the project work. Now, they just hire contractors, with maybe a single employee as the project manager.
1st, Microsoft code is hideously inefficient because its DLL model loads in huge wads of code rather than smaller code fragments. They are not the only ones guilty of this. But rather than having libraries with lots of small code sections, the programmers have tended to collect a lot of unrelated code together into files. When a program calls a function in a library, that library may have one thousand other non-related functions in the same file. But the DLL will load in the whole file - instant bloat!
2nd, OOP tends to lead towards bloatware. Once this paradym is adapted, programmers may chose to "inherit" functionality from a class, and then extend it. But often they only need a little of that functionality. Still, the whole class gets loaded, and that class may be inheriting functionality from parent classes that also get loaded.
3rd, Microsoft is very guilty of releasing "Easter Eggs". These are little "in jokes" in the programmer community. For example, in Windows 95 Excel (and maybe even today, I don't know), if you hit the proper sequence of keys when the cursor was in certain spreadsheet cells, it launched a mini-Doom type maze where you could wander around and see graffiti on the maze walls including the names of the programmers. This easter egg by itself was about 1Mbyte in size. Lots of MS code has these hoggy easter eggs.
These 3 factors together lead to bloatware. However, none of them are things that say - lets return to assembler!
:-)
Now THAT would be an interesting idea. MS currently utilizes an obscene number of C++ objects within its kernel. I'd say it's done that way deliberately so as to cause older systems to become obsolete, forcing the market towards higher end machines.
IF a coalition of engineers could write a new multi-tasking, scalable OS with a rich set of APIs and a new, easy to use GUI, I'd say they could give MS some serious competion with the right marketing...
Maybe not ALL in assembler, but certain key functions written in assembler would drastically speed up overall performance of an OS. Additionally, a return to C rather than relying on C++ would speed things up and make things more efficient. SOME C++ might still be utilized here and there, but only where it makes sense and where performance isn't as critical...
Corporate supporters are Republicans with deep wallets who have paid off the GOP to enact legislation that suits them. Somehow or other I do not think the GOP would like to advertise this as the meaning of being a "Republican".
Go back to DU where you belong.
I never heard of "DU". Why is it people like you always have to resort to being nasty?
Communism does not equate to worker's rights. Go ask the slave laborers in China next time you're there and ask them if they are union members...
If not the root of the problem, MS is definitely a significant factor. Thanks for the link..
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