A real man can take the flame

to W

"why a US jail and not here?"

cause we're full up right now

Greig Aitken

Subject: FLOPS!

Greetings.. I just want to point out the flaw in IBM's press release as well as your own report. The abbreviation of "floating point operation per second" is FLOPS, not FLOP... guess what the trailing "s" is for. It is not there because there's many of them. I'll give you a second to think about it.

Correct would be: "one petaflops is less than three petaflops".

Henrik

Subject: Hmm... There's no PC in Econ

Dear Vaderfanatic,

Employees are commodities. Economically, labor (l) is a quantifiable unit, as are wages (w), capital (K) and output (Q).

Q=l*w*K

There's nothing political about it, it's fundamental microeconomics and quite intrinsic to the economics of choice.

Illuminating original article, btw. And McAbee's, er, "eloquent" response is one of the reasons I guess Americans get a bad rap abroad. Not that it means anything in the end. We'd be disliked nearly as much no matter how conscientious we ought to be. Human competitive instinct and all that jazz.

JDW

Subject: speeds for Barcelona

There you see AMDs problem, which surfaced already years ago: too tiny speed-steps. 100MHz more or less in the age of gigahertz is laughable. At Intel, they needed four chips to cover the range from 1.86GHz to 2.4 GHz. At AMD they need six. Double price gets you just 300MHz, that's almost one speedstep at Intel, but three at AMD.

And whats with numbers? What sense does it make to take a 4-digit-number and then only change it in stpes of two values? At Intel, you see what you get 6300 or 6600 looks already like a difference. Can you image a dialog like "I got an AMD Barcelona" - "The 2350?" - "No the 2358!" Does it sound like a 800 bucks difference? Nope, it doesn't.

And that's why with this strategie, they will not make it.

Regards
Florian

Subject: OSX crash hits Glastonbury

Was there an actual story here? Did I miss something?

Jacob B.

Subject: Hamburger Eater

I would much rather eat any hamburger than that swill you call "food" in the U.K. Also, I am baffled as to how you Brits consistently achieves the world's highest ranking of teenage pregnancy... that is, with beauties like Laura Davies and all.

Steve Sinclair

Subject: Letters page

J McAbee might like to note that North America and South America are separate continents, and that this is a UK rag where the USA is colloquially known as 'America'.

Personally, I'd like to think that Canada, USA and Mexico are fat hamburger eaters regardless though. Maybe not Brazil.

T Evans

Subject: J McAbee

In measured response to J McAbee's retaliation: Eh, dude, you can't talk about North and South America in one sentence then go on to say America is a continent.  The Americas are known as a Hemisphere.  North America is a continent, South America is a continent, Central America is an isthmus, and Mexico is a subcontinent of North America.

I thought maybe an American should point that out before some snide European took a crack at it.

This reminds me of a satirical stage play I once watched where the white "upper class" were stereotyping an ethnic minority.  Stuff that was highly insulting of course, being a satire, so that it portrayed the speakers as fearful idiots.  The real humor was that the play stereotyped the white upper class...exaggerating its fears and ignorance.

Everyone else in the audience was either afraid to laugh or didn't get the joke.

Tom Strom

Subject: iPhone rates the same as a smartphone

Check out the data plan rates for an ordinary smartphone with the same minutes and you'll see that the rates are the same.

Leonard Hermens

Subject: Dell Website Meltdown

Dell's website appears to be suffering from a sporadic meltdown or twelve.

I keep getting the message, "We need you to adjust your order" and that the evalue code is not found even though it's been input from Dell's own website.

It seems their product page updates in the wake of their new launches is creating havoc for the web developers.

It's causing me some severe annoyance as I am trying to assist a friend in ordering a new slim Dell XPS system.

Kennedigital

Subject: hamburgers

i love hamburgers...

Glen

Subject: car gets rid of....

Hey guys,

I thought that it is the driver that turns the steering wheel, which results in the front wheels turning. So explain to me how is it that digital signals turn the steering wheel and not the driver?

cheers
Petertd

Subject: ibm petaflop

And we're worried about how much of a carbon footprint our quad cores are making?

Serenity

Subject: iPhone tariffs

Maybe in comparison to the tariffs in Europe that's expensive, I don't know. But I am a customer of Cingular/AT&T and have a 450 minute plan with rollover for $39.99, plus 5MB of data and 200 text messages monthly for $14.99.  I think the unlimited data plan is normally $39.99 so if the iPhone users are getting it for only $20 extra plus getting 200 text messages, so they are getting a much better deal than other Cingular customers -- saving about $25 per month versus the ala carte pricing for those packages.

If you think that's overpriced I guess all Cingular/AT&T customers are getting screwed.  While I don't doubt that's probably true, its not as if the other US carriers are offering significantly better deals.  Some might offer more minutes but they will screw you with roaming charges, or charge a lot more (or don't offer) unlimited data, etc.

Doug

Subject: "How US tech firms place job ads no-one will apply for"

I am a British (and indeed Harrow) ex-pat currently working here in darkest Southern California on one of "those" infamous H-1B visas.

In the article "How US tech firms place job ads no-one will apply for" the Inq makes the same mistakes many Americans do when trying to understand the rationale of the recruitment requirements for hiring a foreign IT worker.

The mistake is in not realizing that the US employer has ALREADY done the recruiting. Think about it - To be applying for an H-1B for a foreign worker the employer has gone their normal recruiting processes, which 99% of the time will be far more rigorous than those required by the USCIS. (The agency formerly known as the INS.)

So having spent the time and money on to find a suitable candidate they then employee immigration attorneys to run the gamut of the suitably arcane USCIS regulations to apply for an H-1B visa which requires them to do the recruitment AGAIN. As these lawyers are being paid to get the visa for the chosen candidate and not to find an alternative they of course do what all lawyers do and use the gaping loopholes in the system to best of their client's advantage.

Of course the simple and obvious solution is for the INITIAL recruitment performed to be admissible to the USCIS for the H-1B application.

Unfortunately the likelihood of this mind-bogglingly simple reform being taken up, given the utter intransigence of the entire US government when it comes to Immigration reform is somewhere between slim and none.

This report is somewhat illuminating if you've not already seen it:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15266.htm

Aunty Dan

Subject: He who lives in a glass house

Do you scone munching fellows think you are exempt from the third-world hiring phenomena, then you are living in a dreamworld.  Just looking at the number of Brits employed by Temp Agencies shows that you folks aren't exactly cheap labor. 

Plus, immigration laws in the UK are just as tough, if not tougher, than in the US...unless you are an unskilled laborer from (insert Islamic country here), then it seems that the welcome mat is rolled out.

Vince

Subject: iphone laughs

Haha, there's no way some clown from the New York Post got ahold of an Iphone. For all the muck you rake about Apple being super secret, do you really think they would allow a phone to leak to a joke newspaper? Theres a reason their articles are written at a 4th grade reading level. Also, I wish I could say that those rates were high. Most cell providers in the US (at least the good ones) don't offer plans below 45 or 50 bucks. Or maybe Apple just knows they can charge whatever they want.

Ataddley

Subject: nice article

One of the best articles of the week, don't listen to the angry hamburger munchers.  If you are a real man, you can take the flame.  LOL this article made my day.

Compres

Subject: Blue Gene/P

IBM's Blue Gene/P, 294,912 processors to perform the work of 100,000 desktops. Where is the upside?

David

Subject: limey

"They eat more food, use more petrol and create more greenhouse gas than the rest of us. So when they go to work they need a hefty salary."

Screw you, Limey.  You'd probably eat more food if you could find a decent meal in your own country, most of your slop seems to be composed of internal organs like livers and kidneys that we feed to our dogs.

Another thing, it's probably a lot easier for you to burn less fuel because your teeny tiny little country is about the size of one of our states and there are limits to how far you can drive.

Here's an idea to increase your fuel consumption, make a few trips to the dentist.

Also, this is about 50 years late, but HA HA HA WE STOLE YOUR EMPIRE.

Lewobfuscated