Here’s an online copy of Norman Matloff’s testimony before congress on the IT labor shortage, or they myth of it anyway. You may or may not know that Dr. Matloff has made a career of attacking proponents of increased allocations of H1B visas over the past few years. I’ve read arguments from both sides of this debate, and I’m still not sure where I come down. I can say that I’m having an awfully hard time finding qualified applicants for the jobs we have open where I work. I can also say that there are many unethical employers who exploit people working under H1B visas terribly. My gut feeling is that the debate needs to be expanded beyond the simple question of whether or not we should increase the pool of H1B visas.
Phil Greenspun’s seminal photography site photo.net has been yanked forward into the twenty-first century with a table-based layout, JavaScript powered dynamic menus, and more. Needless to say, some of the users hate it.
The struggles continue over at Salon. They just laid off 13 people, and the article says that they’re going to cancel some columns. If it were up to me, they’d fire David Horowitz and Camille Paglia, perhaps hire a conservative who’s not a provocative moron, and then stop paying people to write ridiculous articles about sex.
Dave Winer’s most recent DaveNet piece, What the Web Wants, suggests a much more sensible remedy in the Microsoft case than Judge Jackson came up with. As I’ve said here before, all I wanted in this case was for Microsoft to be found guilty, I didn’t want the company demolished or longstanding behavioral remedies that would be unworkable in a practical sense.
AT&T; finally released the source code to Plan 9, their experimental operating system. It’s released under its own license (rather than a standard license like BSD or GPL), and I was too lazy to read it. If I get bored I may try to install it, but my only impression at this point is that they have a cooler mascot than Tux or Duke. Is that thing a bunny?