The proof of their partisanship is the timing of their releases. Assange pretty much declared that he was releasing stuff in dribs and drabs to keep the flow of anti-Clinton stuff more or less constant. That's not 'release the information and let the chips fall where they may'. That's agenda-driven media manipulation. Who knows what Assange's actual agenda is - but he most certainly has shown that he's agenda driven, and that agenda included harming Clinton or helping Trump or both. Whether he cares about Russia and Putin one way or another is a different point - and he hasn't revealed anything about that yet...
And it's not just that the exposure was applied only to one side. It's also that it was strategically timed for maximum damage and/or to distract from other exposures of stuff about the other side. This wasn't making information freely available - it was partisan media manipulation, in cahoots with (or at least, in the best super-PAC tradition, in sync with) a particular party.
that updates are guaranteed for at least two years from the sale date
Who out there thinks 2 years is enough? If people keep using these things after 2 years, then they'd better get updates. I think 3-4 years is a more reasonable lifespan for a phone these days. At some point, of course, they're going to stop getting updates - and maybe they should lose their ability to connect to the internet at that point. But having them become disposable after 2 years makes them a lot less of a bargain.
That said, many of today's flagship phones don't provide much better support - in many cases worse. But that's no excuse for making Android One insecure and/or disposable. The whole point of Android One is to make sure that there's a secure alternative at the low end - rather than the utter crap that's being sold into that market now.
Right. PC's aren't dying. But the market for new PC's is drying up. Most PC users are well served by the machine they have, and their sexy new purchase is a new smartphone. PC's will still continue to be made and sold - it's just that the market is saturated, and there's nothing new worth buying a new PC for. Windows 10? Not likely.
If PC's actually do morph into a locked-down platform, then maybe stuff like System76 will actually find a market. For now, their stuff is way more expensive than a comparable PC with Windows 'thrown in'. And since it's relatively easy to set up a dual boot on those things, very few people will buy a System76 machine for cost saving reasons. Why those companies don't try to compete on price eludes me. But I guess it's a very hard thing to do to compete with Dell and HP strictly on price with a platform that limits what you can do with it. I essentially never boot Windows on my 4-year old HP box, but it was cheap, and Windows is there if I ever need it. If that box had been $1000, I'd never have bought it. But I paid $400, and it runs Linux great.
People run RedHat for the long-term support. Enterprises don't like being forced to upgrade on a vendor's schedule, and RedHat was the first Linux provider to recognize that and cater to it. Timely security upgrades for a consistent platform - over years - is what enterprise users want. And like it or not, that is a technological meaning.
Y'know what the problem really is with this. They're coming up with an arguably new screen technology, getting a patent monopoly on it, and then applying that monopoly to the whole device, so that only Apple can build 'micro-hole OLED' smartphones.
I could see them being granted a patent on the screen manufacturing process - and collecting royalties from anyone who wants to build such a screen. Or even insisting on being the sole source for such screens. But when they then limit the universe of available devices using those screens to themselves, the patent system has started going overboard.
Imagine if Apple had invented fingerprint scanning - or if Samsung had. Then no other device could use a fingerprint scanner - because Apple or Samsung wants to maintain a monopoly on smartphones with that useful feature, not just the fingerprint scanner monopoly the patent office granted them. Whoever invented the fingerprint scanner has come up with a true invention, which they arguably have the right to collect payments on. But when you start letting them dictate who they'll sell that invention to and how that invention may be used, you're limiting innovation instead of encouraging it.
- It specifically mentions that it must be an OLED screen.
So they don't own OLED screens. They don't own micro-holes. But they get to patent putting micro-holes in an OLED screen. I see...
They're not really patenting how to make such a screen - they're patenting the idea of having a screen with micro-holes providing access to controls underneath - and then getting a monopoly on the only way to implement such a thing using today's off-the-shelf components, none of which they invented or own. Sounds like a classic 'do A on a B' patent. Rejected (In our dreams).
Disabling the cache seems reasonable for testing the battery life of one PC vs another, but not to produce a real-world battery life statistic. To some extent, all tests of this sort produce 'performance in testing mode' stats that differ from real life performance, but shouldn't some attempt be made to measure the real life values as well. I normally do something like
1. wipe the cache 2. perform the test 3. perform the test again, assuming the cache is now improving the results.
Some mathematical combination of the step 2 and 3 timings would be a more useful stat than either of them alone.
Well Miamians may not feel that way when it rains hard, but I guess you have a point. A valid one if you happen to think "oh, fuck it, humanity's not going to be around in a hundred years anyway..."
Kind of like those assholes that say "there's nothing preventing you from paying more taxes than is asked". Sidesteps the collective moral issue - and doesn't really provide you with anything solid to fall back on. Unless you think the reason you're not doing those things is that they don't need to be done. Having allowed our greed-driven political system to turn this into a political issue - given the idiotic tribalism of our politics - has guaranteed nothing will be done until it's too late, and the Koch Brothers have retreated to their inland estates behind their high security fences.
By the way, plenty of people voluntarily do all the things you mention - and it's not enough. Yes, people sometimes need to be compelled (or at least prodded - or flattered) into doing the right thing. And it doesn't help to have people profiting off of telling them that they don't need to do anything.
Why it's almost as if fossil fuel-funded pols wanted us to reach a tipping point so that they could then say - there's no point attempting to stop it now. Party on and build those big seawalls. I wonder if they're investing in seawall technology now...
Nothing in that tipping point argument says that it's useless to stop throwing fuel on the fire. Yes, the tipping point means that we've got our work cut out for us, and we should be preparing in addition to trying our best not to add to the problem, but based on how well we 'prepared' for preventing getting to this point, I don't see much happening there either.
Because what the party was up to wasn't nearly as nefarious as you seem to want to paint it. Yes, they had a preferred candidate going in - and a strategy for her to glide through to the nomination with as little damage as possible. They chose her because of her name recognition, her popularity at the time (believe it or not), and yes, her connections - in the sense that she and her husband had done a lot to promote other Democrats. But they played it mostly straight once a viable challenger emerged.
If you were privy to the internal private emails of almost any organization (not just political parties) you'd see plenty that would be embarrassing - maybe even compromising. But you only saw the DNC stuff - and yet you're prepared to think that the Russians did us all a service. Well they didn't. Sure the DNC preferred Clinton to Sanders - largely because they thought she'd be more likely to win (being wrong on that doesn't make them criminal). But they didn't do anything significant to stymie Sanders. Even if they did the things they were accused of (and there's no proof they did), they wouldn't have affected the outcome in any state. Sure, there were the superdelegates - but they were there in 2008 too, and they flipped to the winner of the primary delegates, and would've flipped in 2016 had Sanders won more primary delegates than Clinton did. And you know what - if Trump hadn't won the Republican nomination, Sanders probably would've lost to any other Republican - though I agree he might well have won against Trump. Though, you know, Clinton probably would've won against Trump too had Comey, the Russians, and yes, folks like you - who trashed her for being her party's preferred choice - not had their way.
Snowden was an actual whistle blower - providing information kept from the public about what their government was actually doing. The DNC hackers were just trying to stir up trouble - using information that didn't belong to the public in the same way that the government does.
That's not really unlike the way the situation has always been for older Nexus models. The new model comes out with the latest stuff, and that stuff rolls out to the older models over the next few months. They still generally get it ahead of practically all other OEM devices.
Considering that the Pixel is a new phenomenon, and the latest Nexus devices are still being supported like they always were, "making it worse every day" is overstating things a bit. And the Pixel is what it is due to the success of the midrange Android market, which removed some of the appeal of the Nexus line. Android is fragmented because it's open source. That's got all the good and bad aspects. A lot of innovation in Android came from various OEMs, and were eventually incorporated into the mainstream Android - as well as copied by Apple.
The main problem with Android fragmentation is orphaned devices. Most Android versions will run most apps - and that's due to Googles 'lockdown' efforts as much as anything. But OEMs are still operating on a planned obsolescence model. OnePlus, Moto, and some others to varying extents (ZTE?) are (or were) trying to support the idea of allowing the ROM community to keep their devices alive longer than they're able (or willing) to do themselves. Hell, I had to turn to CyanogenMod to keep my Nexus 4 going longer that Google would too. Google never had a problem with CyanogenMod existing - and it made its gapps stuff available to load on top of it - if not bundled inside it. I'm sure they weren't happy about the "take Android away from Google" crap that the CM CEO was feeding to the press. But CM will live on as LineageOS - and very little will have changed.
Well, actually there was a plan at one time for Microsoft to invest in Cyanogen, Inc. And there was much speculation that the reason for that investment was to prepare a Microsoft-friendly mainstream Android spin that would be there in case Windows Mobile tanked (it hadn't completely tanked yet at the time). The resultant outcry caused them to back off, but you don't go making statements like CM, Inc's CEO did about 'wresting Android from Google' without some viable alternative in the wings for Google services - which are a big part of what makes Android work.
So at one point M$ had some contingency plans involving Cyanogenmod, Inc. Those didn't pan out - but they definitely have Android in their sights. Less so as a 'rival' OS these days, because MS is less and less in the OS business any more. But they sure want to get their mobile search, email and other apps to be standard issue on Android devices.
Because he's actively gaslighting the public with contradictory statements - and appointments that would seem to contradict everything that got him votes in the election. If he'd just shut up until he actually is in office, maybe people would stop bitching about the 'job' he is doing, but currently the only job he's doing is keeping the public - including his own voters - off balance about the job he intends to do.
Except that calling, say iOS sales 'generated overseas' when the software was written in the US, using US infrastructure, etc. And the company is making the bogus claim that their Irish subsidiary owns the rights to that software. It's a scam - not a loophole.
The point of this effort has nothing to do with existing.Net code. It's an acknowledgement that the desire to be cross-platform was preventing people from using.Net. And yes, now that Microsoft's priority is Azure (or perhaps, preventing Amazon from rendering Microsoft irrelevant as a future platform), they're less worried about making money selling.Net tools than they are about developer mindshare. That's not a bad thing, I guess - though you share your mind with Microsoft at your own peril...
They were in a lose-lose situation. The information was out there - and it was real information. Most of it was simply embarrassing stuff, but it played into the public's dislike of Clinton. Of course the Republican national committee's emails probably contained stuff that was at least as 'bad', but the public never saw that.
If Obama complained too loudly, he'd have been seen as using his office to influence the election - and that would've cast doubt on its legitimacy. They thought Clinton was going to win, so why cast that into doubt. And she would've won without Comey's interference. Her resulting drop in the polls was more than the margin she lost by in the states that swung.
But to suggest that complaining now is inappropriate is to suggest doing nothing about a foreign government breaking into the US political machine and using that material to influence the election. I.e., Watergate on steroids. They can't ignore that. And if that casts doubt on Trump's legitimacy, well, they're real doubts. He should be preparing to govern accordingly. But he won't - just like G.W.B, who governed as if he had a mandate, despite losing the popular vote - as well as the EC, had there not been the Pat Buchanan stupid ballot problem in Broward County,
Less than 20 percent voted for Obama too. The fact that most of the US land mass is rural and Republican is irrelevant. Most US citizens live in the small patches that vote Democratic. One person, one vote - except for the extra 2 votes that give rural states an extra 60 or so EC votes. Yep, that's the system - but don't claim it means that most Americans want Trump as President. Only the barest majority wanted him in some of the biggest states he won. FL, PA, WI, MI.
I would assume none of them can load apps from the Play store. Based on the now common wisdom - you're (more or less) safe if you only ever install apps from the Google Play Store, and if not, you're not ever going to get software updates, so consider yourself hacked - these things are all malware vectors from the get go. Their vendors just gave them a head start...
But they're only cheaper if they can (pretend to) do the work. And that bit of sleight of hand is where the H1-B onsite workers come in. They facilitate the firing of the American workers by documenting their work processes. Those H1-B workers are not augmenting the Americans based on a shortage of available workers. It's a sham - allowed, apparently, by the H1-B law. But a sham nonetheless.
The problem is that the job the H1-B workers were brought in to do was not software development. They didn't hire H1-B workers to replace American workers - they hired them to train offshore workers to replace American workers. The role of the H1-B's is to work temporarily onsite, recording everything the American workers do - and then use those materials to train offshore workers, leaving one person behind to mediate between the product design folks and the offshore developers.
Without the ability to mirror the Americans the whole process falls apart. To be honest, the whole process is a shitstorm even when it 'works' as planned. Productivity goes absolutely to hell - but that's another story. The mirroring process is in direct conflict with the stated goals of the H1-B program. And make no mistake about it, the stated purpose of H1-B is to lower the wages of American tech workers - hiding behind the occasional desire to hire the brilliant foreign Stanford graduate (which nobody objects to).
In any case, this Indian outsourcing model is a perversion even of that, but one that is enabled by a loophole put into the H1-B law for precisely that purpose. Anybody want to take bets on whether Trump's 'America First' rhetoric will extend to closing that loophole?
Slashdot Mirror
The proof of their partisanship is the timing of their releases. Assange pretty much declared that he was releasing stuff in dribs and drabs to keep the flow of anti-Clinton stuff more or less constant. That's not 'release the information and let the chips fall where they may'. That's agenda-driven media manipulation. Who knows what Assange's actual agenda is - but he most certainly has shown that he's agenda driven, and that agenda included harming Clinton or helping Trump or both. Whether he cares about Russia and Putin one way or another is a different point - and he hasn't revealed anything about that yet...
And it's not just that the exposure was applied only to one side. It's also that it was strategically timed for maximum damage and/or to distract from other exposures of stuff about the other side. This wasn't making information freely available - it was partisan media manipulation, in cahoots with (or at least, in the best super-PAC tradition, in sync with) a particular party.
that updates are guaranteed for at least two years from the sale date
Who out there thinks 2 years is enough? If people keep using these things after 2 years, then they'd better get updates. I think 3-4 years is a more reasonable lifespan for a phone these days. At some point, of course, they're going to stop getting updates - and maybe they should lose their ability to connect to the internet at that point. But having them become disposable after 2 years makes them a lot less of a bargain.
That said, many of today's flagship phones don't provide much better support - in many cases worse. But that's no excuse for making Android One insecure and/or disposable. The whole point of Android One is to make sure that there's a secure alternative at the low end - rather than the utter crap that's being sold into that market now.
Right. PC's aren't dying. But the market for new PC's is drying up. Most PC users are well served by the machine they have, and their sexy new purchase is a new smartphone. PC's will still continue to be made and sold - it's just that the market is saturated, and there's nothing new worth buying a new PC for. Windows 10? Not likely.
If PC's actually do morph into a locked-down platform, then maybe stuff like System76 will actually find a market. For now, their stuff is way more expensive than a comparable PC with Windows 'thrown in'. And since it's relatively easy to set up a dual boot on those things, very few people will buy a System76 machine for cost saving reasons. Why those companies don't try to compete on price eludes me. But I guess it's a very hard thing to do to compete with Dell and HP strictly on price with a platform that limits what you can do with it. I essentially never boot Windows on my 4-year old HP box, but it was cheap, and Windows is there if I ever need it. If that box had been $1000, I'd never have bought it. But I paid $400, and it runs Linux great.
People run RedHat for the long-term support. Enterprises don't like being forced to upgrade on a vendor's schedule, and RedHat was the first Linux provider to recognize that and cater to it. Timely security upgrades for a consistent platform - over years - is what enterprise users want. And like it or not, that is a technological meaning.
Y'know what the problem really is with this. They're coming up with an arguably new screen technology, getting a patent monopoly on it, and then applying that monopoly to the whole device, so that only Apple can build 'micro-hole OLED' smartphones.
I could see them being granted a patent on the screen manufacturing process - and collecting royalties from anyone who wants to build such a screen. Or even insisting on being the sole source for such screens. But when they then limit the universe of available devices using those screens to themselves, the patent system has started going overboard.
Imagine if Apple had invented fingerprint scanning - or if Samsung had. Then no other device could use a fingerprint scanner - because Apple or Samsung wants to maintain a monopoly on smartphones with that useful feature, not just the fingerprint scanner monopoly the patent office granted them. Whoever invented the fingerprint scanner has come up with a true invention, which they arguably have the right to collect payments on. But when you start letting them dictate who they'll sell that invention to and how that invention may be used, you're limiting innovation instead of encouraging it.
- It specifically mentions that it must be an OLED screen.
So they don't own OLED screens. They don't own micro-holes. But they get to patent putting micro-holes in an OLED screen. I see...
They're not really patenting how to make such a screen - they're patenting the idea of having a screen with micro-holes providing access to controls underneath - and then getting a monopoly on the only way to implement such a thing using today's off-the-shelf components, none of which they invented or own. Sounds like a classic 'do A on a B' patent. Rejected (In our dreams).
I guess they could have been doing something like this - and the Safari bug would've still skewed the results enough to matter, though.
Disabling the cache seems reasonable for testing the battery life of one PC vs another, but not to produce a real-world battery life statistic. To some extent, all tests of this sort produce 'performance in testing mode' stats that differ from real life performance, but shouldn't some attempt be made to measure the real life values as well. I normally do something like
1. wipe the cache
2. perform the test
3. perform the test again, assuming the cache is now improving the results.
Some mathematical combination of the step 2 and 3 timings would be a more useful stat than either of them alone.
Well Miamians may not feel that way when it rains hard, but I guess you have a point. A valid one if you happen to think "oh, fuck it, humanity's not going to be around in a hundred years anyway..."
Kind of like those assholes that say "there's nothing preventing you from paying more taxes than is asked". Sidesteps the collective moral issue - and doesn't really provide you with anything solid to fall back on. Unless you think the reason you're not doing those things is that they don't need to be done. Having allowed our greed-driven political system to turn this into a political issue - given the idiotic tribalism of our politics - has guaranteed nothing will be done until it's too late, and the Koch Brothers have retreated to their inland estates behind their high security fences.
By the way, plenty of people voluntarily do all the things you mention - and it's not enough. Yes, people sometimes need to be compelled (or at least prodded - or flattered) into doing the right thing. And it doesn't help to have people profiting off of telling them that they don't need to do anything.
Why it's almost as if fossil fuel-funded pols wanted us to reach a tipping point so that they could then say - there's no point attempting to stop it now. Party on and build those big seawalls. I wonder if they're investing in seawall technology now...
Nothing in that tipping point argument says that it's useless to stop throwing fuel on the fire. Yes, the tipping point means that we've got our work cut out for us, and we should be preparing in addition to trying our best not to add to the problem, but based on how well we 'prepared' for preventing getting to this point, I don't see much happening there either.
Because what the party was up to wasn't nearly as nefarious as you seem to want to paint it. Yes, they had a preferred candidate going in - and a strategy for her to glide through to the nomination with as little damage as possible. They chose her because of her name recognition, her popularity at the time (believe it or not), and yes, her connections - in the sense that she and her husband had done a lot to promote other Democrats. But they played it mostly straight once a viable challenger emerged.
If you were privy to the internal private emails of almost any organization (not just political parties) you'd see plenty that would be embarrassing - maybe even compromising. But you only saw the DNC stuff - and yet you're prepared to think that the Russians did us all a service. Well they didn't. Sure the DNC preferred Clinton to Sanders - largely because they thought she'd be more likely to win (being wrong on that doesn't make them criminal). But they didn't do anything significant to stymie Sanders. Even if they did the things they were accused of (and there's no proof they did), they wouldn't have affected the outcome in any state. Sure, there were the superdelegates - but they were there in 2008 too, and they flipped to the winner of the primary delegates, and would've flipped in 2016 had Sanders won more primary delegates than Clinton did. And you know what - if Trump hadn't won the Republican nomination, Sanders probably would've lost to any other Republican - though I agree he might well have won against Trump. Though, you know, Clinton probably would've won against Trump too had Comey, the Russians, and yes, folks like you - who trashed her for being her party's preferred choice - not had their way.
Snowden was an actual whistle blower - providing information kept from the public about what their government was actually doing. The DNC hackers were just trying to stir up trouble - using information that didn't belong to the public in the same way that the government does.
That's not really unlike the way the situation has always been for older Nexus models. The new model comes out with the latest stuff, and that stuff rolls out to the older models over the next few months. They still generally get it ahead of practically all other OEM devices.
Considering that the Pixel is a new phenomenon, and the latest Nexus devices are still being supported like they always were, "making it worse every day" is overstating things a bit. And the Pixel is what it is due to the success of the midrange Android market, which removed some of the appeal of the Nexus line. Android is fragmented because it's open source. That's got all the good and bad aspects. A lot of innovation in Android came from various OEMs, and were eventually incorporated into the mainstream Android - as well as copied by Apple.
The main problem with Android fragmentation is orphaned devices. Most Android versions will run most apps - and that's due to Googles 'lockdown' efforts as much as anything. But OEMs are still operating on a planned obsolescence model. OnePlus, Moto, and some others to varying extents (ZTE?) are (or were) trying to support the idea of allowing the ROM community to keep their devices alive longer than they're able (or willing) to do themselves. Hell, I had to turn to CyanogenMod to keep my Nexus 4 going longer that Google would too. Google never had a problem with CyanogenMod existing - and it made its gapps stuff available to load on top of it - if not bundled inside it. I'm sure they weren't happy about the "take Android away from Google" crap that the CM CEO was feeding to the press. But CM will live on as LineageOS - and very little will have changed.
Well, actually there was a plan at one time for Microsoft to invest in Cyanogen, Inc. And there was much speculation that the reason for that investment was to prepare a Microsoft-friendly mainstream Android spin that would be there in case Windows Mobile tanked (it hadn't completely tanked yet at the time). The resultant outcry caused them to back off, but you don't go making statements like CM, Inc's CEO did about 'wresting Android from Google' without some viable alternative in the wings for Google services - which are a big part of what makes Android work.
So at one point M$ had some contingency plans involving Cyanogenmod, Inc. Those didn't pan out - but they definitely have Android in their sights. Less so as a 'rival' OS these days, because MS is less and less in the OS business any more. But they sure want to get their mobile search, email and other apps to be standard issue on Android devices.
Because he's actively gaslighting the public with contradictory statements - and appointments that would seem to contradict everything that got him votes in the election. If he'd just shut up until he actually is in office, maybe people would stop bitching about the 'job' he is doing, but currently the only job he's doing is keeping the public - including his own voters - off balance about the job he intends to do.
Except that calling, say iOS sales 'generated overseas' when the software was written in the US, using US infrastructure, etc. And the company is making the bogus claim that their Irish subsidiary owns the rights to that software. It's a scam - not a loophole.
The point of this effort has nothing to do with existing .Net code. It's an acknowledgement that the desire to be cross-platform was preventing people from using .Net. And yes, now that Microsoft's priority is Azure (or perhaps, preventing Amazon from rendering Microsoft irrelevant as a future platform), they're less worried about making money selling .Net tools than they are about developer mindshare. That's not a bad thing, I guess - though you share your mind with Microsoft at your own peril...
They were in a lose-lose situation. The information was out there - and it was real information. Most of it was simply embarrassing stuff, but it played into the public's dislike of Clinton. Of course the Republican national committee's emails probably contained stuff that was at least as 'bad', but the public never saw that.
If Obama complained too loudly, he'd have been seen as using his office to influence the election - and that would've cast doubt on its legitimacy. They thought Clinton was going to win, so why cast that into doubt. And she would've won without Comey's interference. Her resulting drop in the polls was more than the margin she lost by in the states that swung.
But to suggest that complaining now is inappropriate is to suggest doing nothing about a foreign government breaking into the US political machine and using that material to influence the election. I.e., Watergate on steroids. They can't ignore that. And if that casts doubt on Trump's legitimacy, well, they're real doubts. He should be preparing to govern accordingly. But he won't - just like G.W.B, who governed as if he had a mandate, despite losing the popular vote - as well as the EC, had there not been the Pat Buchanan stupid ballot problem in Broward County,
Less than 20 percent voted for Obama too. The fact that most of the US land mass is rural and Republican is irrelevant. Most US citizens live in the small patches that vote Democratic. One person, one vote - except for the extra 2 votes that give rural states an extra 60 or so EC votes. Yep, that's the system - but don't claim it means that most Americans want Trump as President. Only the barest majority wanted him in some of the biggest states he won. FL, PA, WI, MI.
I would assume none of them can load apps from the Play store. Based on the now common wisdom - you're (more or less) safe if you only ever install apps from the Google Play Store, and if not, you're not ever going to get software updates, so consider yourself hacked - these things are all malware vectors from the get go. Their vendors just gave them a head start...
But they're only cheaper if they can (pretend to) do the work. And that bit of sleight of hand is where the H1-B onsite workers come in. They facilitate the firing of the American workers by documenting their work processes. Those H1-B workers are not augmenting the Americans based on a shortage of available workers. It's a sham - allowed, apparently, by the H1-B law. But a sham nonetheless.
The problem is that the job the H1-B workers were brought in to do was not software development. They didn't hire H1-B workers to replace American workers - they hired them to train offshore workers to replace American workers. The role of the H1-B's is to work temporarily onsite, recording everything the American workers do - and then use those materials to train offshore workers, leaving one person behind to mediate between the product design folks and the offshore developers.
Without the ability to mirror the Americans the whole process falls apart. To be honest, the whole process is a shitstorm even when it 'works' as planned. Productivity goes absolutely to hell - but that's another story. The mirroring process is in direct conflict with the stated goals of the H1-B program. And make no mistake about it, the stated purpose of H1-B is to lower the wages of American tech workers - hiding behind the occasional desire to hire the brilliant foreign Stanford graduate (which nobody objects to).
In any case, this Indian outsourcing model is a perversion even of that, but one that is enabled by a loophole put into the H1-B law for precisely that purpose. Anybody want to take bets on whether Trump's 'America First' rhetoric will extend to closing that loophole?