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Daily trivia: In Sweden, PriceWaterhouseCoopers have merged with Öhrlings Reveko and thankfully they 'only' answer ÖhrlingsPriceWaterhouseCoopers on the phone. But the logo looks hilarious and their newspaper ads don't have much room for anything else. :-)

I agree, thats why I FGI. try here

A Fine Balance: The Impact of Offshore IT Services on Canada's IT Landscape -- Executive Summary

ARM maintains very tight control over its architecture, giving most of its licensees virtually no freedom in how they choose to implement the processor. The exceptions to this rule are Intel and Motorola, which are unique among the many dozens of ARM licensees in that they can design their own ARM-compatible processor cores. Whereas other ARM licensees simply use the processors that ARM provides to them, Intel and Motorola can extend, create, or modify ARM's designs to create their own unique implementations of the ARM architecture. So long as the resulting chip remains compatible with ARM software, Motorola and Intel are free to experiment with high-performance or low-power designs. This gives both Intel and Motorola a substantial advantage over the many other ARM licensees, all of which are competing with products based on identical processor cores.

I read somewhere that American citizens were not allowed to work in India for an Indian owned company. Is this true?

This is Completely FALSE. American work visa system is much more restrictive and requires more minimum qualifications versus Indian system. A commpn aspect of both American and Indian work visa system is that you need to find an employer (job offer) to sponsor your work visa application. Everything else is much more restrictive (like in US, the H1-B worker has to have a bchelor's degree and has to be paid at least the prevailing wage for that kind of job).

I would urge you to do a thorough study of requirements for work visa in US versus work visa in India. You will notice that requirements are much more restrivtive for US work visa.

Try this website for Employment Visa to work in India.

Another website has details (read the "Points to note" section at the bottom of page) of taking employment visa in India.

Please don't spread FUD.

Employment Visas are granted to those with an employment letter from an Indian company.

One of the problems I have with getting Bangalored is the fact that I can't go over there and work but they can steal my job with no problem. In a fair market I have no problem with competition as long as it is on a level playing field.

I did a google search and it seems that you can go work in India in a very similar way as Indians come to work here.

You need to get employment visa for India like Indians get employment visa to come to work here.

Here are a couple of links:
See the Employment Visa section

More Details on getting Indian Visas (read till the end of page)

Actually from a little googling it looks like the rules says that "etry visas" or visas for a general long term entry is decided on a case by case basis. Also no work permits are required. Look at this link and scroll down to the "work permits" part.
Seems like they have reasonable migration policies.Moreover no restriction on Natural/Naturalised citizens in politics either. An former Italian is the opposition leader

One country you forgot to mention is Canada, which is attracting more and more filmmakers. The reason is that Canada provides a number of tax credits and incentives for production companies who film there and use Canadian labor. It's easy to spot movies filmed in Canada under the auspices of this program, as one of the requirements is that the Canadian government and the tax credit be mentioned in the movie credits. This mention is often the first thing that pops up when the movie ends, even before the cast (or "The Players," as many Canadian-filmed movies call them, that may also be a requirement).

I'm seeing this with ever-increasing frequency. It's just plain cheaper to film a movie in Canada than it is to do it in Hollywood; it's often cheaper than filming elsewhere in the U.S. as well, even for fairly low budget stuff. You can't beat the tax breaks. British Columbia (among other locations) is becoming sort of a mini-Hollywood in its own right.

So their patent applies to using a form to gather customer information.

Having a look at PanIP's website, they list "PricewaterhouseCoopers" as their accountants.

Interesting that at This Link, PricewaterhouseCoopers has... well lookit that, a form where you enter your information so they can contact you.

Wonder if they made their own accountants pay them for their (non)intellectual property.

Not yet, no. That will come.

It's tough dealing with the "creative" ways companies express data in 10-K and 10-Q filings. VA Software filed a nice, clean statement, but many others are far worse. Worst case: a money-losing company that filed a 10-Q with a line labelled "net loss", followed by a positive number, creating the illusion to the unwary that they're profitable.

The SEC used to require companies to file an SGML-encoded "financial data schedule" that was straightforward to parse. Now, that data has to be pulled out of the filings with AI programs. Three such programs now exist (ours, PriceWaterhouse Coopers', and one from the University of Kansas). S&P has an army of clerks doing it manually.

The programs have varying degrees of success. PWC's has been around for a while. It's in Prolog, of all things, with some C and an Oracle back-end. PWC hired a Prolog heavy, who wrote the thing, and then left. It doesn't really understand the newer HTML filings; it renders them into a monospace font, then treats them as text. Ours is in Perl (should have used Java; it doesn't really use regular expressions much, and it's very object-oriented and tree-structured.) backed by MySQL. The server is a Linux system. Ours prefers HTML filings, and hammers plain text into something that looks like an HTML table before processing. The Kansas one doesn't seem to be as far along. None of them do as good a job as Standard and Poor's army of clerks.

Dealing with the variations in format is a pain, but possible. The big problem is variations in line item names. That's where the "creative accounting" comes in. Many companies would prefer not to report things in the standard categories, because this makes direct comparisons with other companies easy.

There's some lobbying from the XBRL people for tightening up on this. They have a whole XML-based scheme for representing this stuff (and, in fact, the data from Downside's engine is automatically tagged in XML with their tags; do a View Source.) The idea is to get the SEC to mandate filing in a more rigid format. XBRL would be nice, but just insisting that the line items use names drawn from the XBRL representation of Generally Acccepted Accounting Practices for U.S. companies would be sufficient.

In the current regulatory climate (i.e. post-Enron) there's a good chance of getting some tightening up here.

There are lots of indicators that this was going to happen. A particularly good chart of this is quarterly working capital.

Litgation in Computer Science
Do you suppose this means all fields of science are going to end up in court, due non-preformance?


3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!

(2) Even many of those individuals with talent have insufficient knowledge of (and/or, apparently, desire to learn about) the art and science of software engineering and so persist in making the same stupid mistakes that have been well-documented for 30+ years.

(3) As a result, anyone who has had to recruit software developers can tell you how much muck you have to sift through to find the gems.

(4) I can't speak for the relevance of most CS departments; I know that my undergraduate CS program (BSCS, BYU, 1978) helped me tremendously when I went out into the real world. But that may have been an anomoly; I had some brilliant teachers with real-world experience (one had worked at Bell Labs; another went on to co-author and co-found Word Perfect).

(5) After some years in the workforce, many of those with talent and skills find they can double or triple their salary by becoming a consultant. This leads to a talent-flight from organizations.

In short, you're trying to find someone with talent, training, inclination to your topics and circumstances, and a lack of awareness of how much s/he could be making elsewhere. :-)

Best of luck. ..bruce..

According to an article from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the US ranks third in high speed connections per capita. First is Germany (with extensive ISDN), and second Canada (where 22% of internet users have cable or ADSL). As a canadian i can believe this. I remember everyone getting cable or DSL back in grade 10 - 11 (i graduated couple years ago). I suspect cable is cheaper here; i pay $26.90 (in american dollars) / month. The US is not the only wired place!

I am an analyst at a Big 5 Accounting firm. I spend a great deal of my day doing research on the Internet. I am usually search for information on somewhat obscure industries, such as kidney dialysis. I have found that Google is consistantly the better search engine for my needs. I particularly like that it is so much faster that the other sites, it seems primarily because they don't have any of those obnoxious banner ads. More and more sites I visit are littered with ads from Double Click.

While I love the fact that Google has stayed away from advertising, I've also done enough research on Internet content providers, Internet Portals, etc. to know that they won't be around that long if they don't start generating positive cash flow. Because they are selling anything tangible, this means to generate incoming cash flow they have to sell services. For an Internet company, selling services most likely means selling advertising. Let's face it, people generally belive that information should be free on the Internet. I work for one of the largest accounting firms in the world, and I spend a great deal of time looking for free research and information on the internet because the belief is that if it is on the Internet, it should be free.

The point is, I would rather see Google start selling ads, staying away from the obnoxious Double Click banner ads, and stay around as one of the better search engines. Not enough people will pay for search service to generate enough cash flow to keep Google around.

Incidently, if you looked through the 10k filing of Andover.Net (use Edgar Scan a data base by a comptetive firm or Free Edgar), and go all the way into the notes of the financial statements, all the way to page 61 of the report, you will find the pro forma financial statement on Slashdot. For the year ending September 1999, Slashdot was profitable. All of the revenue was generated from advertising.

The economic rules are slightly different for dotcoms. Most of the cash they burn goes on advertising, the actual costs of doing business (altho' I haven't done any quant to confirm this) for boo.com would be much lower than, say, Nike Town. Once a dotcom gets funded, it could probably hang on for 6 months just by lying low.

If boo.com had worked out that marketing and advertising aren't the same thing, they'd probably have been a lot more successful. Consider a demographic who are constantly online with high powered equipment and plenty of bandwidth, have disposable income, and like to wear designer sportswear: the "new media" community, of course. Instead of the "viral" effect boo might of hoped for, the people who could have been their biggest market spent most of their time laughing at the site's ludicrous over-design - and everyone else couldn't get into the site at all!

Just for giggles I registered cooperslybrand.com (which is of course PriceWaterhouseCoopers now) just to see if many people still use it (they do). I'd probably give it up if I received a formal letter but if I had the money would that be worth fighting?