This is incorrect, or at least, not globally correct.

When you have an LLC, you have a choice on how its taxed.

You can trivially have an LLC that is taxed as a corp, and the owners are not subject to any pass-through or self-employment tax.

My business is setup that way, and its fairly common. Many LLC's start out small, with pass-through taxing, and then go the corp-taxed route when they get big enough for it to make sense.

Actually, that _always_ works, at least with mainstream raid controllers.

RAID-1 mirroring (and only RAID-1 mirroring) does not write the data in a proprietary format on the drive. The only difference between a mirrored drive and a regular drive is that most decent RAID controllers will write the volume configuration to every drive as well.

Now, what you say is absolutely true when dealing with any other raid type.

Note that there may be odd or really crappy controllers that do use a proprietary format for RAID-1, but thats not the case for all the mainstream cards used in intel servers.

I dont think you understand what RAID1 is for.

No there arent. There's always a primary, and unless it fails, its the correct one, by definition.

This is not a failure mode RAID1 is intended to protect against.

If this happens, then that means the system's/rack's/room's battery backups didnt work, and the raid card's onboard battery also didnt work. This is not a failure of RAID1, its a failure of your systems design and maintenance.

You always know which drive to replace. The RAID card tells you. On most systems, its the drive with the red or orange light on it, instead of the regular green light.

The chances of it completing successfully before the other drive fails is usually quite high. If your rebuild times are so long that you experience significant risk of failing the other drive during rebuild, then you need to use smaller drives, or some other approach.

This statement shows that you dont understand what RAID1 is for. No RAID solution is, by itself, intended to protect against bus errors, undetected write corruption, cosmic-ray induced bit flipping, or other forms of corruption at that level.

RAID1 provides availability. It allows your machine to stay up and keep going if a drive fails. You also get some concomitant improvement in read speeds, but thats not usually the primary reason, its just a nice side effect.

Slower at what? Sure, MySQL may be faster when doing a single table select with a simple where clause on an ISAM table.

But then it utterly breaks down when you want to do things like join a bunch of tables together, or do sub-queries or WHERE IN clauses. I can make MySQL go into an infinite loop using an extremely simple 'where in' subquery on tiny tables. This is a bug thats been in the system and known for YEARS, but never fixed.

MySQL is horrendously slow at the kind of sql queries that surpass single-table selects.

MS-SQL's query planner and core engine may not be as mature and advanced as Oracle's, but it's still orders of magnitude better than MySQL and PostgreSQL in my experience.

Especially the former. I can run queries in MSSQL that does an inner join on 12 tables, none of which have less than a million records, and get a result in far less than a second.

Compare that to MySQL, where if you use a WHERE IN clause, will largely tend to go into an infinite loop and never finish, even on tiny tables and recordsets.

Once you get past the most basic of basic one-table CRUD operations, you really see how incredibly primitive MySQL is.

Sadly though, MySQL ends up being completely adequate in a lot of situations, as long as you're willing to adapt report-query writing and your style to its incredible limitations.

You're missing some key aspects of the PC business.

Manufacturers like Dell and HP get alot of money from 3rd parties (like Intuit) to put trial version and nagware on the windows desktops.

This can often drive the effective net price of a windows desktop lower than one without an OS (+$50 for windows, -$150 for various bundled trialware/nagware).

In addition, if the manufacturer doesnt have their support infrastructure fully setup, then they may feel that there is a higher support cost to them for non-windows than windows.

Then there are marketing subsidies from Intel, AMD and Microsoft to put labels on the machines, etc.

There are many non-obvious aspects of the industry like this, its never as simple as hardware + os = total price.

Only for Vista x64 and only for kernel-mode drivers.

What exact driver/hardware is it that is causing you this problem?

You cant compare education pricing to the real world. Educational pricing for MS software is like 10-cents on the dollar, or thereabouts.

Plus much of the time the deal the school has with MS includes 'home use' rights for a pittance, which is not much more than the price of labor & materials to burn a new CD.

The claim was that H1-B participation increases unemployment in the US, which I disagreed with and argued against.

What part of that is 'ENTIRELY UNTRUE'?

Can you speak to any way in which you believe H1-B program participation increases unemployment?

Hate to feed the cowards, but this was too amusing ..

Really? Wow, thanks man. And here I thought I had a Math and CS degree and was the lead developer for a small business that I founded and own. Thanks for clearing things up for me.

Really? Wow, thanks man. And here I thought I was the one championing amongst my peers that hiring in the top 10% of developers gives you an order of magnitude better developer. Glad you cleared that up for me.

Now mind you, I cant always afford to bring on a $100,000 per year veteran dev, but I can bring on a $40k per year young guy, and grow the business with him, so that 5-10 years from now he can make $100k in my business.

Who said I cant find good people? I have a fantastic team, and am very proud of the work they do. Not sure what you're referring to here.

Wow. Thats quite an archaic (and ineffective) choice of how you group the 'us' vs. 'them' in your world. Human beings are human beings. The concept that because someone lucked into being born in a different location than you makes them 'the enemy' is really sad, and a big part of what is wrong with this world.

Personally, I define 'us' as intelligent, hard working, decent (ie, moral and ethical) human beings. The random location of where they happen to be born and what government happens to claim them for taxation purposes has nothing to do with it.

If you really believe that, then you live in a very strange world indeed.

Do you outsource for house building, or do you do it yourself? What about for that computer you're using? Did you make it yourself? Or was it outsourced to someone else who is better at it, and can do it cheaper than you could.

Just because some outsourcing happens to cross an arbitrary national line doesnt make it anything different than local outsourcing.

Indians tell you how you should work and in what conditions? Thats pretty weird.

In no way was I talking about offshoring, rather just the hiring of local vs. foreign. I think offshoring is usually a bad idea, but then again, my business is an american consultancy, so effectively, we're in competition with the offshoring companies.

Part of hiring people is hiring those with good think on their feet skills and good communication skills. That doesnt mean that they have to have English as a first language, just that they can communicate effectively.

A thick accent and lack of idiomatic knowledge of the language will often lose a person a job for me. But there are plenty of Asian-ethnicity people I've run into who have an accent, but are great communicators.

You're overgeneralizing. While there are many cases (especially amongst the bigger companies) where this is the case, there are many legitimate reasons to outsource.

For example, many small and medium businesses dont have anyone in house who has skills in managing technical people. This makes it very hard for them to hire one or two IT folks and make it work well in the business.

Thats exactly the kind of client we want. With us, you dont have to know how to manage or hire technical people, thats what we do, and we're quite good at it. And it works. The vast, vast majority of our clients experience a net win by working with us, rather than trying to hire internally.

It's not a dictatorship. No one made them move. They decided that it was the best choice for themselves and then took action.

There's no big hand in the sky that is plucking all the talented people from African and flinging them to the US or western Europe.

And besides, its often quite a telling indicator that someone was willing to move and try something completely different. People that do that now and then in their lives tend to be much better, more rounded, more big picture sorts of people.

Provinciality breeds provincials.

Thats usually a good thing! People that spend their whole lives with the same group of friends as they had in elementary or high school tend to be fairly limited. Travel and change builds character, builds a more global outlook, and tends to make better people.

I can see what you're saying, but in reality, most smart businesses dont hire people who are the most skilled at a narrow vertical of specific skills, but who is the overall better developer (there are exceptions, and you tend to see alot more of this at big orgs, who have incredibly niche software that they spent millions on, that they need to support).

This includes things like willingness to learn, ability to adapt, and solve general problems.

I should say that I dont have any direct experience with Indian ethnic folks.

But the chinese, Russian (or generally eastern european), Vietnamese and Korean folks I've worked with tend to be a cut above. If nothing else, they're willing to work hard and just 'get things done' without thinking that the occasional boring work was beneath them.

Again, I think its a cultural thing here in the states. Too many students coming out of college think that they'll be the next Gates or Brin or Ellison, and they genuinely get offended when you offer them a market wage commensurate with their experience. Or they get upset when they have to do 'boring' work, even if its just now and then. Or if its not fun and interesting work, they will barely work on it.

It's a cultural entitlement thing. People think that because they can program, they deserve to make six figures right out of college (again, not on the coasts).

I think everyone should have to spend 5 years starting and growing a small business, so they can get a clue what is actually involved with building something from nothing, and what hard work really is.