Ironically they said the VP they said that to was a women. She hired two female programers. I rolled off that contract soon after and my understanding is pretty much all the IT resources in the building were replaced by "prevailing wage" H1-B workers.

My first experience with them was back in 1999. They came into our office saying they could provide programmers at 60% of the cost of the existing contractors. Even less if we were willing to hire a woman.

I'm sure the Chinese Gov't would be more than happy to have the US Gov't check the serial numbers on those Xeon chips to tell were the source is. Obviously not. As long as the chips are allowed to be exported to China for general business use I don't see any way for the US to control it. At best whatever quasi Gov't agency in China has to buy through a 3rd party and falsify some paperwork

It's not like China doesn't have FABs and engineers that could make a similar CPU. What Intel fears the most is this will kickstart some national pride that's going to end with gov't funded R&D to make high end CPUs and GPUs.

It's a bit akin to the CarMax approach.

Long and short of this is we're not going to know how well this works (or doesn't) for at least a year.

Because "Flyover Land" is still pretty expensive. There's a lot of reasons to choose H1-B. The biggest being that they need to be sponsored. That sponsorship puts the employee under the thumb of the employer. They can revoke that sponsorship at any time forcing the employee to leave the country if they cannot find a new sponsor.

Some corporate bean counter figures he can pay a college hire and a H1-B about the same. The college hire will gain experience and will want a raise. If they don't get it they'll leave. The H1-B visa holder doesn't have that flexibility.

The problem for the companies is that the current Visa caps means even H1-B workers are in short supply. This has not gone unnoticed to the folks that run the consulting companies that often sponsor the Visa candidates. I was talking to an IT manager a few months ago and they were complaining the Wipro wanted to raise their rates for Business Analysts to over $100/hr. Mind you the worker isn't going to see most of that money.

The current bill in the senate that has bi-partisan support entirely removes all H1-B visa caps. It's the nuclear option more or less for American Tech workers.

In in a modest market in the midwest the wages are closer to 70-80K. The issue is likely that he's doing hardware programming. You're competing with Chinese engineering firms.

My experiences with IBM is you get a couple true blue IBM guys that act as front men that go to meetings while the real work is done by off-shore workers. Sometimes the offshore folks are IBM, but a lot of the time they are someone IBM has contracted to do the work. Which is why increasingly American companies have been dumping IBM and cutting deals directly with the offshore companies. Why pay IBM to be a middle-man? It's unclear to me exactly what value IBM brings in China outside a name to make executives and investors feel like good decisions are being made. Maybe that's enough.

If you needed someone to write device drivers or interact with low level hardware I could see that. If you need someone to write a web application or service based API, not so much.

Maybe Colbert will hire Stewart to be the Late Show's side kick?

They really screwed over the MST3K guys. Unless the shows are broadcast on TV the cast doesn't get jack squat. None of the cast gets jack squat for the DVDs and box sets.

Kilborn did 5 questions when he hosted the Late Late show. I used to think Kilborn was playing this self absorbed D-Bag host (think of it as a pre-Colbert), but after seeing the longer format interviews on the Late Late show (not to meant ion the blow up with Liz Windstead), I'm not sure if it was an act.

It's really the wrong question. The industry is going in the direction where the OS is simple and secure while the App deployment package is responsible for having all the required bits and pieces required to make the app work.

For instance for a Java application we might use something like Spring-Boot to assist in creating the deployment artifact. That artifact will include the Apache Tomcat server. So all we need is a simple Linux server that has a JVM installed. Comes in handy for automation for running stuff at one of the many "cloud" providers.

That was a Unix system. Specifically File System Navigator for Silicon Graphics's unix system IRIX. At the time SGI was pretty popular in movie production. Albeit quite unrealistic for a tween to have a $15k unix workstation.

But hey, at her age I had Slackware running on a machine, installed from a from a bunch of floppy disks.

I've work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market for over a decade. I get calls from recruiters daily. Clients can never find enough experienced people. There's tons of H1Bs working in the market. It's been like that for since about 2006. It can be hard as a college grad to find a job because some bean counter is weighing paying an experienced H1B worker a similar wage as a college hire (and the H1B can't easily leave without obtaining a new sponsor.) But, as the H1B cap have tightened it's forced companies to invest in college workers like they did in the 90s.

To summarize, MN's general unemployment rate is 3.9%, it's tech unemployment rate is a fraction of a percent. It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.

Outside of Lufthansa (which bought the 747-800) pretty much every other passenger airline has planes on the book to get rid of their 747s. I would expect by 2020-2022 you'll see them confined to cargo use and third world airlines.