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Wednesday, 18 June 2008 12:28 |
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While the rest of the country focuses on illegal immigration from south of the border, an immigration story of a different kind is happening inside the U.S. and in poor countries throughout the world. The use of H1B and H2B visas to bring in foreign workers in the tech and science fields and as laborers and in manufacturing, respectively, has led to a huge underground business of defrauding hopeful immigrants out of thousands of dollars and is largely unregulated by Homeland Security. One such scam shop was recently exposed but it is only one of thousands operating around the world. The wait for an H1B visa is long and the process arduous. Yet the applicants wait patiently for the chance to come work in the United States and positively contribute to the fabric of the nation. Less well known than the tech focused H1B visas are H2B visas. This visa category was used to bring in foreign workers on oil rigs and in factories. Shady recruiters have moved to using this category to defraud the poor with promises of U.S. citizenship. Recently, Indian workers protested in front of the Capitol after paying $20,000 to recruiters to secure their visas and a promised green card. Such a practice is devestating for the workers and their families left back home trying to pay the heavy debts to local strongmen who loaned them the money. The repercussions for the workers and their families are similar to those of Indian farmers who have been committing suicide in larger number after being unable to pay back loans. These workers and their families may be facing such a situation. The U.S. government should keep a registery of all fradulent recruiters and refuse to accept any documents submitted through them. Recruiters should be required to pay a sizable fee to register with the government as a legitimate broker in order to stop such abuses. Visas issued to workers should make the terms of the visa very clear and use the native language if possible to avoid any confusion. Finally, any recruiters found to be in violation of such terms should face jail time and stiff penalties as well as being blacklisted to ensure they can never swindle future workers. Finally, the most important piece of this puzzle is improving the conditions in the home countries so that the economy there can provide jobs and a rising standard of living. These recruiters should not be allowed to engage in such trickery and implementing the above steps will go a long way to eradicating this deplorable practice.
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Monday, 16 June 2008 00:00 |
The Washington Post is doing an excellent series of articles on the crisis gripping the American economic market. The series, The Credit Crunch, explains very well how the cycle started and how each step of the process made the situation worse for the average American. The subprime mortage lending fiasco is the central character of the drama and is the focal point for the unfolding of the credit market and other lending. Businesses are having difficulty getting banks to back investments and the government had to buy bad loans to guarantee banks and lending companies from going under. The national disaster is a lesson for everyone individually. People are taking on too much debt, saving too little and living on credit for day to day purchases. It is time to do the hard work of creating a budget, paying down debts and delaying gratification for the latest gadgets and toys. The hardest pattern for many of us to break is entertaining ourselves and our friends. Being young, we want to go out to the latest movies, eat at a nice restaurant and show our dates or friends a good time. A great solution to this conundrum would be to scour the home pages of the cities you live in. Often, cities promote free or low cost activities going on that you can take advantage of to save a few bucks. Many events are time specific and have the added bonus of getting you to discover what you have around you that no one in another place can take advantage of. The national economy is still in for a hurdle. The economic rebate checks sent out by the government are mostly being used to pay off debt or buy some small items. We cannot count on the goverment to bail us out and relieve us of our obligations. Set a plan and work to achieve it. This is the best advice for any financial problem and is a great way to get anything else you want in life too. |
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Wednesday, 11 June 2008 11:37 |
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Steve Jobs introduced the next iteration of Mac OS X which will be called "Snow Leopard" during his keynot address at WWDC 2008. Features highlighted so far are: - Takes advantage of multi-core processors and parallel programming and are calling it "Grand Central". Nvidia's CEO recently commented on usage of thier CUDA technology for GPU acceleration by Apple. Grand Central however, would probably include CPU and GPU. - Support modern hardware with OpenCL (Open Computing Language) - Supports both Server and Client - Supports ZFS - Expected to ship some time next year - no support for PowerPC Click here for more details on Snow Leopard server. It is very interesting that Apple has taken the decision to tightly integrate these acceleration technologies with the operating system. Multi-core CPUs would help in parallelizing computation and handle more peripherals as each core can support multiple threads. The GPU contains stream processors which are not full blown processors like Intel or AMD processors but are cores that are very effective for small specific tasks. One won't be able to run an entire OS like they could on a multi-core CPU but these cores can produce tremendous performance for specific tasks, especially pixel "pushing". For a programming model perspective, the GPU can be viewed as hundreds of small cores that can run thousands of threads in parallel. This external core acceleration so far has been the domain of specific scientific applications and is not utilized in home or office PCs. Now, we can generally agree that acceleration is "good", it's time to speculate in which areas would CPU/GPU acceleration actually help. It is pretty clear that almost every area would benefit but there are some in which we would be able to notice a huge performance increase. - Applications like Microsoft Office/OpenOffice would get a huge bump in areas such as diction/grammar intellisense, editing graphs, etc. with the processing offloaded to the extra cores. - Obviously graphics intensive applications like Photoshop, Gimp, etc would see a decent bump in speed. The extra CPU cores will help in managing and feeding data effectively to the GPU threads. - Video and audio editing. HD video playback. - Video conferencing although it will probably be limited by network speeds. - Web browsing. If you believe it wouldn't require a lot of processing power then you just have to open multiple tabs in your browser with flash. The best possible thing they can do is to support old systems. By "old", i mean systems that are a year or two years old which are very capable of acceleration and contain the hardware that is necessary. For example, a person who bought a Macbook pro last year which has Intel Core 2 Duo, a multi-core processor and a 8600M video card which supports GPU acceleration. Let's also remember that external acceleration does not end with just the CPU and GPU; anything in the system with a processing core is game! (More uses for PhysX cards maybe?). What are your thoughts about this? Links: Screenshots of Snow Leopard GPGPU
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Wednesday, 11 June 2008 08:59 |
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If you have always been curious about what exactly happens inside that "box" once your press the power button then today is your lucky day. There is a lot of information about it on the web but i think this blog has a very good explanation of it. From the Article (FTA): "Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware - the chipset and other tidbits - and tries to get the CPU running." Links: How Computers Boot Up: Gustavo Duarte What is booting up? What is a BIOS (Basic Input/Output System?
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Written by M
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Thursday, 10 April 2008 14:09 |
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The United States is suffering a bad reputation. And just like high school, once aquired a bad rap is hard to shed. The United States has long been called the beacon of hope and freedom in the world. The motto on the Statute of Liberty is "Give me you tired, you poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free." In many ways, the US is still that place for many people. Millions of foreigners apply for visas to work, study and tour the United States every year. Many more attempt to illegally enter the US from our southern border. Yet, for many of the world's most disaffected, the US is nothing more than a democracy wearing the flag of hypocrisy. The US commands a large share of the world's wealth, and routinely negotiates bilateral trade deals that leave the lesser-well off nations in subordinate and dependant positions. In addition, the US uses half of the world's oil for less than 6% of the world's total population. The rich in America keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer. The world's poor, and eventhe world's better off, continue to feel their development stagnated by the US. Economics isn't the only area where the US is suffering from an image problem. The US vigorously guards the nuclear status quo and objects to any new nations acquiring the bomb. Many countries want it for the same reason the United States does: deterrance. Many nations make their homes in volatile regions, and as such, they build their armies and buy weapons instead of invest in development. The US profits on these weapons sales and actively encourages even the poorest of countries to buy the newest and most expensive weapons on the market. Of course the biggest source of dislike comes from the invasion of Iraq, and for those with longer memories, the US Latin America policy of the 1980's, the overthrow of "communist" regimes, the Vietnam War, etc. Many in the world still feel angry over these policies past which Americans forget about the moment the next celebrity forgets to wear her panties. However, for those in the war zone or left to pick up the pieces and bury the dead, these wounds never heal. They become institutionalized and passed on from generation to generation. The problem of Islamic terrorism will remain endemic and unbreakable because of this factor. The President routinely telling the world that "all options are on the table" when asked about varying hotspots in the world, only serves to heighten the paranoia pervasive in the most troubled areas of the world. The United States needs to get a good PR team. The focus should be on acknowledging the legitimate grievances of people and trying to make amends. While we pump billions of dollars into Iraq, we leave others to fend for themselves. The US is not an evil nation and should not be categorized as such. We send billions in aid packages to myriad countries and are always willing to extend a hand during a natual disaster, a la the 2004 Christmas tsunami or the 2003 earthquake in Iran. Yet, we must stop refering to ourselves only by our military might and pursue economic policies and trade deals that serve to lift underdeveloped nations into a comfortable standard of living. Student exchange programs and a more streamlined visa process will bring scores of people to the country who will have their opinions shaped by their personal experiences and not the passed on histories of their parents. The United States is a great country, but it can be better. It will take hard work and patience but in the end, it is the only way to succeed in rehabilitating our image and stopping the desperate from turning to terrorism. It is necessary work and will take a long time but it is our only choice.
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