22. September, 2000 - More geekiness
- H1B Workers Being Deported - H1B visas started six years ago, and
the visas have a six-year time limit. They're also not being deported,
but leaving voluntarily before their visas expire. The original story is
The H-1B welcome mat wears out, and you should probably read that
first. The important point is that the H1B was a temporary work
visa. If someone wanted to stay, there's another visa, called a green
card that's more appropriate. This whole mess is the most compelling
reason I can think of to eliminate or seriously reform the H1B visa.
- Get Off The Grid: GE announces home fuel cells. About the size
of a refrigerator, the HomeGen 7000 provides 100% of a home's
energy needs, plus runs on fuels (natural gas or propane) already
delivered to your home. Cool. And the ''waste'' heat can be used
for hot water or space heating. It should be out in 2001, but you can
sign up now if you want to be an early adopter. Heck, if you've got a
hog-farm, a lot of cow-farts, rotting vegetation, or other source of
methane available, you probably wouldn't even need deliveries.
- I've been using my TiVo for just about a month, and I have to agree
that TiVo is One Jack Short. It's so close to cool, and it does
change the way I watch TV, but it could be so much cooler.
- CNet is reporting that e-tailers dodge phone calls to cut costs.
Nothing surprising there, but they do go out of their way to
point out the companies who are doing customer service right.
That's a good thing. Make sure to check the related stories
links for more. This looks like a pretty darned good series.
- OS X: Our New War.
With Aqua, Apple has removed 15 years of progress [on the Mac
OS user interface] and started afresh. They've put us 10 years
behind, and now, we have to climb that mountain all over again.
Amen!
I have two major gripes about Mac OS X. The first is that the UI is
sluggish at the wrong times, and there's no real way to control it.
When a background task starts hogging the CPU, the foreground
task can't respond to user actions immediately and it feels wrong.
The second gripe is the gratuitous use of color. While the old close-box
and zoom-box in the title bar weren't completely clear about what
they did, because of their positioning, it was easy to remember
which did what. With the new grouping of the window controls at
the left side, and the only difference between them being the color,
it's much more difficult to figure out which does which.
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Tue, 08 Jan 2002 15:35:13.