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We've crossed this bridge many times before throughout the years from various articles.

What happened to companies (especially high tech companies) allowing people to work from home? Maybe a visit to the office once every two weeks or maybe a monthly meeting for employee social time...sharing projects, dinner, etc etc. This means that you could employ people not even local to SF which is in the end overall cheaper(for everyone). There are many many bright people who live elsewhere in the US(many of them not single) that just dont want to live in this area for many different social, economical and political reasons.

This also means you dont have to pay through the nose for a building that houses all the employees. Just room enough for the owner, the receptionist and a big open atrium/hall for company meetings when everyone is supposed to check in. I really don't think companies get it. Check out Art & Logic . All their employees work remote and they at least claim that they only look for the best and the brightest. Their clients are also big time companies.

Here's a company that's been rural-sourcing for over 10 years. They pay competitive rates, but the catch is that they have a tough screening process: See the software developers at Art & Logic.

Check out Art & Logic, Inc. They hire programmers from rural USA and put them on monumentally cool projects. The company has thrived during the so-called "outsourcing craze" and is desperately trying to find programmers that live up to their standards.

Disclaimer: I've worked with them for many years, and they do indeed live up to the hype.

Programming is definitely an art. Check out Art & Logic.

Here's a company that uses a geographically-distributed business model to hire the best programmers. Their coders are in the USA, but the company doesn't have to pay top-dollar. How do they do this? They hire people in lower-cost areas. Not every brilliant programmer works in the bay area. Check 'em out here.

This is nothing new. Art & Logic has been doing HTML-based GUI's for almost a decade now. Check out their HTML-based applications page.

This is nothing new. Art & Logic has been doing HTML-based GUI's for almost a decade now. Check out their HTML-based applications page.

Software developer companies like Art & Logic and IBM have been doing outsourcing for decades. The advantages of outsourcing (on or offshore) are widely known. It's well documented that the number one factor to sucessful software projects is individual team members. Some companies solve this issue by using US-wide telecommuting, to allow them to hire the best programmers no matter where they live.

People are talking about offshore outsourcing as if it's going to ruin us all. It won't. There will always be a market for seasoned programmers, and the US has no shortage of those kind of people!

If you want to save the environment, save money, and be real, I suggest getting a mid-90's Toyota or Honda.

I bought my first new car 4 years ago (VW Bug) and I regretted it. Sure, it's a great car, but it costs a lot to fix, costs a lot in terms of depreciation, etc. I recently decided to sell it, and I'll be going back to my 1992 Honda Civic. Great on gas, and I can kick the door shut without worrying about scratching the paint.

Cars are a necessary evil. They're not an investment. They're not even cool. If you want to be cool, spend $1000 on clothes and a haircut. Buy a new car, and you throw away many thousands of dollars in depreciation the day you drive it off the lot.

Once you get over that new car smell, you realize you've been taken.

Plus, if you get a software developer job at a place like Art & Logic, you can develop software without burning fossil fuels on your way to/from work.

It is nice to see these rebuttals happening. As a software developers company it's nice to see that Open Source is finally winning against proprietary solutions. Service companies will benefit from all the prebuilt tools.

Apple integrates the many apps together with publically accessible APIs, so that other people may do the same.

Careful how you bash Microsoft. It's fun, and I'm using Jaguar this minute to post, but nobody does a better job exposing APIs to the public than Microsoft and COM.

Guess how long it takes to make a web browser in Visual Basic 6? Seconds if you know what control to use (Microsoft Internet Control) -- and seconds if you don't; there's a pre-built form you can add from the Project-Add Form menu item. How long to add Media Player? Seconds. How about automate Excel or Word? Those are a little more complicated, but only b/c of their more complicated APIs.

(And yes, I know about cocoa and embedding browsers)

Don't get me wrong. I don't like Microsoft's silly claims that they can't take IE out of Windows OS. I hate the way they embrace and extend. I hate the way they aggresively go after smaller businesses and spend them out of existence. (imo, etc)

But when it comes to making something quickly that communicates between two application engines, whether first or third party, you won't get any more robust a solution than VB6. MS loves opening up their APIs. Means every one of your users will also have to pay the Windows Tax.

Small web servers are old news. Art & Logic has been creating embedded web applications since 1996. Typically, embedded web servers are used for something called web-based device management. Companies do this as an alternative to CLI or Windows/Java applications. All the usual advantages to web-based management apply, including ease of development, deployment, support, etc.

This story has a lot of cool factor, but other companies (Ubicom, for example) sell web-enabled chips for less money (last time I checked). If you're talking about consumer devices (such as a toaster, fridge, etc), it's all about cost per unit.

If you're building a more expensive product, you might have room for an RTOS (real-time operating system) and a software-based webserver to run on top of it, such as the GoAhead WebServer or the Device Management Framework.

Small web servers are old news. Art & Logic has been creating embedded web applications since 1996. Typically, embedded web servers are used for something called web-based device management. Companies do this as an alternative to CLI or Windows/Java applications. All the usual advantages to web-based management apply, including ease of development, deployment, support, etc.

This story has a lot of cool factor, but other companies (Ubicom, for example) sell web-enabled chips for less money (last time I checked). If you're talking about consumer devices (such as a toaster, fridge, etc), it's all about cost per unit.

If you're building a more expensive product, you might have room for an RTOS (real-time operating system) and a software-based webserver to run on top of it, such as the GoAhead WebServer or the Device Management Framework.

Small web servers are old news. Art & Logic has been creating embedded web applications since 1996. Typically, embedded web servers are used for something called web-based device management. Companies do this as an alternative to CLI or Windows/Java applications. All the usual advantages to web-based management apply, including ease of development, deployment, support, etc.

This story has a lot of cool factor, but other companies (Ubicom, for example) sell web-enabled chips for less money (last time I checked). If you're talking about consumer devices (such as a toaster, fridge, etc), it's all about cost per unit.

If you're building a more expensive product, you might have room for an RTOS (real-time operating system) and a software-based webserver to run on top of it, such as the GoAhead WebServer or the Device Management Framework.

Art & Logic has a free embedded web server. Also check out GoAhead WebServer.

Some companies are using web interfaces in their routers, storage devices, virtual servers, printers, and even cable modems. Art & Logic has exampes of lots of embedded web interfaces

Art & Logic has some excellent examples of what you might use an embedded web server for. Check out:

Personally I'd rather use the Art & Logic software-based web server. Check this out:

Notice how the author compares CGI unfavorably with something he calls DMF? Here it is, and it looks like one of the flagship products of this company. Imagine that.

He's setting up a straw man, then claiming that his own (proprietary, for-profit ... not that there's anything wrong with that) solution is better. When he says "CGI" he's talking about something that few people use for anything but toys. Slashdot (e.g.) uses the Perl CGI module, but runs it under mod_perl, thus obviating most of his arguments (CGI is slow, must be compiled at run-time, and has no access to the web server internals). Slashdot, again, uses a templating system, thus taking care of his second argument (programmers must copy-paste HTML into their code).

Both these problems have been solved for over 5 years, yet he's trying to make it sound like his beautiful DMF is the first to even discover them. *Yawn* - another press release day on /.

First GOTO and now CGI. Why doesn't someone call C evil so we can call it a night

Some other small (and embeddable) web servers to check out:

Device Management Framework: http://www.artlogic.com/dmf/
This is a web application platform for making device management apps - say, for controlling a cable modem, printer, or industrial equipment. It supports some cool stuff including SOAP and XML-RPC.

GoAhead WebServer: http://www.goahead.com/webserver/webserver.htm
This server is also embeddable but not as useful as the Device Management Framework. It's fine for serving a personal web site, or as an alternative to PWS.

For about two years, I lived in Kentucky and did realtime systems development for a client in Georgia. They shipped me the hardware I needed, so I could do the development and a certain amount of testing at home, and then I would upload the software to them and do remote testing/debugging with them over the phone. It worked out really well, and when I joined a consulting firm I brought them along as one of our clients.

There are companies that make telecommuting and remote development their standard practice - check out Art & Logic for example.

The standard interview format doesn't work for programmers. The best interview I've been given was from Art & Logic, which is a coding test. It weeded out the weak pretty well, as well as the non-self motivated types (I made the cut, worked with them for a while, then got an offer I couldn't refuse elsewhere - but they're a great team of solid coders).

My only complaint with them is that I didn't get a peer code-review afterwards - I would have liked to have had more feedback on the code, even though they apparently liked it enough to hire me.

A lot of game companies do this as well - I know Acclaim's subsidiary Iguana software used to ask for you to write a Defender knockoff, and I've heard of others.

The standard interview format doesn't work for programmers. The best interview I've been given was from Art & Logic, which is a coding test. It weeded out the weak pretty well, as well as the non-self motivated types (I made the cut, worked with them for a while, then got an offer I couldn't refuse elsewhere - but they're a great team of solid coders).

My only complaint with them is that I didn't get a peer code-review afterwards - I would have liked to have had more feedback on the code, even though they apparently liked it enough to hire me.

A lot of game companies do this as well - I know Acclaim's subsidiary Iguana software used to ask for you to write a Defender knockoff, and I've heard of others.

The demo appears to be working again.