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Well, alot of companies seem to have gotten no hangover as a result of discarding their "currently invested capital and starting from scratch" when they moved from U.S. to Indian based IT talent.

• concerns about quality (they were overridden by cost savings concerns);
• concerns about intellectual property theft (anybody remembers Ishoni Networks? Thought so...);
• (related) concerns about inability to bring the unscrupulous partners to justice - hell, they can't do that even if the company is in the US! (ask me how I know...)
• concerns about cultural differences - they're different for different nationalities, but they all have their impact. Nobody paid attention to this back then, because the decisions were being made by people on the top who may have never as much as spoken with an alien;
• concerns about xenophobia - foreigners in US had to live with the fact they were ridiculed, 'cause they came here by their own volition. However, not so if they are offended in their native countries, and some of the cultures are very particular about having their grudge revenged (Roger Zelazny: "revenge is a dish that is best served cold");

As long as the labor cost difference is sufficient to counter the "exit cost" of throwing away current capital and yield a net increase ROI, there will be no hangover.

From the tone of your post, I infer that you are looking forward to a day of reckoning for these companies that outsource U.S. jobs. My advice: don't hold your breath.

There are extensions, SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveragine Extenstions (SIMPLE) and others, which add features people have comes to expect (is someone online, etc.) to SIP.

SIP is used by MSN Messanger 5.0 and onwards; Microsoft have explicitly stated that they will support SIMPLE Conversation with Messanger artitect Peter Ford.

Likewise Yahoo and AOL are switching to using SIP internally (can't find the URLs at the moment). What that means is that SIP -- also used widley for VoIP -- is going to be the protocol everyone uses.

Nielsen is respectable not only because of the clarity of his arguments but because he also cites empirical evidence, rather than just complaining.

But he is just complaining!

From the article: "It is naive to believe that IM is the answer to the information overload that's ailing e-mail. Continue current trends a few years and most people will get so much IM that they will have to tune it out to get any work done."

This is the problem he's trying to address it would seem, and his solution is a nice pretty control panel that does everything for him. Now this is obviously a problem, as many many other people have pointed out, but what is Nielsen doing about it? Whining that someone else should write a program apparently. If he believes this control panel is the end-all-be-all solution he should write it and try to sell it, but I'm not buying it. Until some public key standard ala PGP is made idiot proof and seamless enough for the average suburban housewife to use, consumers and big media will keep complaining, imho.

"303,648 messages comprising 21,213 conversations between 692 pairs of people".

When I first started out with Java, I was a Netbeans user. It was fine for a little while, but then it got to the point where I was fighting its interface more than I was actually coding. Along with that problem, it's also a system resource hog, which I'm guessing was due to all the stuff that it loaded on when it started up- for me, most of that stuff was unneeded since I basically was just using the core API's.

I then come across Eclipse- it was a dream. The interface was sleek and seemed like the IBM teams that worked on it breathed "Keep It Simple Stupid" throughout it's development. Plus, it also runs much faster and I can tell it what to load up and use on my system. However, it's best feature is the fact that it provides a very stable platform for other developers to create their own tools on. Check out this article on the subject over at ACM's Queue: Eclipse: A Platform Becomes an Open-Source Woodstock

For me, the announcement of a decent GUI designer for it is like extra icing on the cake.

Microsoft Dream (2003)
End users are beginning to ask for it. They get jazzed about the idea of being able to start an IM session with somebody, then if that person goes offline at some point, the message being sent would be saved and retrieved at a later time.
IBM Reality (1972)
You can also leave a message for wdd to receive when he logs on by typing: send 'message' user(wdd) logon.

Making a case for Efficient Supercomputing
From Power
Vol. 1, No. 7 - October 2003
by Wu-Chun Feng, Los Alamos National Laboratory It's time for the computing community to use alternative metrics for evaluating performance.Motivation

A supercomputer evokes images of big iron and speed; it is the Formula 1 racecar of computing. As we venture forth into the new millennium, however, I argue that efficiency, reliability, and availability will become the dominant issues by the end of this decade, not only for supercomputing, but also for computing in general.

Over the past few decades, the supercomputing industry has focused on and continues to focus on performance in terms of speed and horsepower, as evidenced by the annual Gordon Bell Awards for performance at Supercomputing (SC). Such a view is akin to deciding to purchase an automobile based primarily on its top speed and horsepower. Although this narrow view is useful in the context of achieving performance at any cost, it is not necessarily the view that one should use to purchase a vehicle. The frugal consumer might consider fuel efficiency, reliability, and acquisition cost. Translation: Buy a Honda Civic, not a Formula 1 racecar. The outdoor adventurer would likely consider off-road prowess (or off-road efficiency). Translation: Buy a Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle, not a Formula 1 racecar. Correspondingly, I believe that the supercomputing (or more generally, computing) community ought to have alternative metrics to evaluate supercomputersspecifically metrics that relate to efficiency, reliability, and availability, such as the total cost of ownership (TCO), performance/power ratio, performance/space ratio, failure rate, and uptime.

Motivation

In 1991, a Cray C90 vector supercomputer occupied about 600 square feet (sf) and required 500 kilowatts (kW) of power. The ASCI Q supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory will ultimately occupy more than 21,000 sf and require 3,000 kW. Although the performance between these two systems has increased by nearly a factor of 2,000, the performance per watt has increased only 300-fold, and the performance per square foot has increased by a paltry factor of 65. This latter number implies that supercomputers are making less efficient use of the space that they occupy, which often results in the design and construction of new machine rooms, as shown in figure 1, and in some cases, requires the construction of entirely new buildings. The primary reason for this less efficient use of space is the exponentially increasing power requirements of compute nodes, a phenomenon I refer to as Moore's law for power consumption (see figure 2)that is, the power consumption of compute nodes doubles every 18 months. This is a corollary to Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors per square inch on a processor doubles every 18 months [1]. When nodes consume and dissipate more power, they must be spaced out and aggressively cooled.

Figure 1

Without the exotic housing facilities in figure 1, traditional (inefficient) supercomputers would be so unreliable (due to overheating) that they would never be available for use by the application scientist. In fact, unpublished empirical data from two leading vendors corroborates that the failure rate of a compute node doubles with every 10-degree C (18-degree F) increase in temperature, as per Arrenhius' equation when applied to microelectronics; and temperature is proportional to power consumption.

We can then extend this argument to the more general computing community. For example, for e-businesses such as Amazon.com that use multiple compute systems to process online orders, the cost of downtime resulting from the unreliability and unavailability of computer systems can be astronomical, as shown in table 1millions of dollars per hour for brokerages an

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