Am I the only one who read this initially thinking that "supercharger" meant a pump that forces compressed air into an internal combustion engine?

Not my choice, we got them in a deal with a VC. And I will tell you from experience that they're not all great programmers. A *few* of them were very good programmers, most of them were OK, and a few were very *bad* programmers. Just like everyone else. The idea that the H1B program just brings in technical giants is pure fantasy. This isn't 1980; if a CS genius living in Bangalore wants to work he doesn't have to come to the US anymore, there are good opportunities for him at home..

H1B brings in a cross section of inexperienced programmers and kicks them out of the country once they've gained some experience. I have nothing against bringing more foreign talent into the US, but it should be with an eye to encouraging permanent residency. I think if you sponsor an H1B and he goes home, you should have to wait a couple years before you replace him. Then companies will be pickier about who they bring over.

I have to say, managing a team of H1Bs was very rewarding, not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a cultural standpoint. Because I had to learn about each programmer on my team and the way things are done in his culture, I think I became closer to a lot of them than I would have to a team of Americans.

Instead if replacing comparatively-cheap programmers with cheaper overseas programmers, why not replace expensive middle and upper management with cheaper overseas middle and upper management? For what our CEO makes, I could hire a couple hundred engineers. But I bet I could find a guy from India who'd be happy to be our CEO for about what one engineer makes. And he'd be every bit as effective at it as our CEO is!

I'd guess they probably tried to dump several gigabytes of comments into one gigantic XML document, and their... lessee 18 years... I'm going to say, DG/UX system couldn't handle a file of that size. Is that about right? I don't even want to know what hokey solution they duct-taped to their system to get it to spit out XML.

If only there were some sort of magical agency that knew how to deal with communications and could actually design a decent transfer format for these guys. I bet that very same agency might know why it would be important that the people who provide access to the Internet should not be allowed to constrain those channels based on who you decide to talk to.

Since the mid 2000s I feel like I've been seeing a lot more BFI solutions, BAD BFI solutions, than I did back in the '90's. I guess back then you had to use some finessee in your programming to get the performance you needed out of the system. Either that or I'm working with more bad developers lately. I suppose that's also possible.

What if, instead of doing that, we came up with a language that you could use to build your program without a browser? Now stay with me here, I know this sounds crazy, but it could work! Since you're not working with a fundamentally stateless protocol, this language wouldn't need to maintain state externally to itself! All its variables and state would be self-contained! But since you might want to pull data in from the network or a database or something, you could add interfaces to that functionality to your language! Wouldn't that be something? I know, I know, this suggestion has been made, like 12648430 times before, but I think it's a really good idea that could work!

Same here! Made the headline very difficult to parse. I was all like "Ooh! Google Motion! Must be a Kinect competitor! Just fire up Buckethead's Aquabot, your Google Motion and start dancing!

So what's the motive then? Plain ol' extortion, or are they trying to distract the media from the CIA torture story that came out about the same time? If it's the latter, it did a good job -- the media and public seem to have the attention span of a two-year-old.

If that doesn't get them, we can suggest that they included "Twerking" in a future Olympics! Sooner or later I'm gonna see those guys' heads explode!

Are they guaranteeing throughput? Then it's meaningless for most folks. It's like putting tires rated for 200 MPH on your care and assuming it will now go 200 MPH.

Presidents, governors and mayors all do this kind of thing -- call up private businesses and ask them to do stuff. The mayor may call a local business and ask it to reconsider withdrawing its sponsorship of the local youth baseball league. The governor might call up union leaders and senior management in a strike, particularly if it affects things lots of people need like transit or health care.

This is the exercise of *soft* power, of influence rather than of compulsion. Obama can't call Apple and compel them to change their stance. But he can call Tim Cook and *persuade* him, possibly with more success than Michael Lynton, particuarly given that the two may be having some kind of dispute. Ego *does* play a role in CEO decision making.

Sony is a long, long, long way from breaking even on this thing.

Indeed. In this case, the reason is that Obama has said publicly several times that he wished Sony had come to him for help before canceling the release of the movie. This is just Sony taking Obama up on his offer.

If only to watch the IOCs' heads explode when the suggestion is put forth.

I listen to the ones who are from someone I actually want to talk to, the rest of them I just delete. If I'm listening to them without the visual voicemail interface, I just hit 7 about 4 seconds into the voice mail, otherwise I look at the caller ID on the VVS and hit the delete button. My phone is not someone else's tool for forcing me to talk to them. I get 3-4 calls a day from very low quality technical recruiters. I get a call every couple of months from someone I might actually want to talk to.

The only people who call me at work are IT people in response to online tickets. Then I get an E-mail from the phone system that they called me and I have to look them up and send them an E-Mail politely reminding them that, as I explained in my ticket, IT doesn't seem to be capable of installing a phone at my desk and that they're better off emailing me. Not to mention the fact that all my voicemails go to a null number and the size of that mailbox will eventually crash the corporate phone system. I also sit in a location they are incapable of finding or accessing if they do actually find it. I mostly just submit tickets for the comedy value, once or twice a week. I'm over 40, so I suppose they were probably talking about me.