It's funny you calling it a business. It would be a wonderful turn of events if Firefox/Mozilla became a juggernaut again and put the hurt on MS. It would be like Netscape's Revenge--10 years later, it's decision to open the codebase comes back to haunt and harass MS when they are battling so many fronts.
COTS means ready-made components, with very little custom parts or systems. Most gear sent into space is custom designed for the task (down to custom circuits, boards, and even processors). The Mars rovers were the first project to use COTS hardware (I believe their modems were COTS for example), and it saved a bunch compared with how they would usually build a similar system.
So yes, building this with available components and not using custom-designed circuit boards and parts could significantly save money.
Is it any wonder that we have raised a generation of young adults who have a highly inflated opinion of themselves with insatiable egos who think that the world is their oyster and should dance to their tune?
Wow, I knew they were deluded, but to think they actually see the world as a dancing oyster... wow, that's screwed up.
I don't know what this means for OLPC, but I hope it doesn't fragment it or hurt the movement. I just bought mine yesterday through the "Give one, get one" (or however that goes). I figure I'll either hack a little on mine or give it to a local family I know who could use it (and not be able to afford it). I think it's a great idea. I know some criticize and go one about providing basic needs--but why can't we do both? These computers represent a quantum leap in education--which will hopefully translate into a significant improvement in living conditions for many. If we all step up and try to support programs that provide food, water, and health care, imagine the possibilities!
Not to criticize OLPC, but I think they should just keep the "Give One, Get One" program going. They could even drop the price a little and use the success of the project overall to purchase free ones for third world populations. Maybe it wouldn't be as direct or immediate as the 1/1 ratio now, but it would keep things moving. But I get why they are doing what they are doing--I just hope it succeeds and that people are as giving as they give them credit for;-)
Come on people. I know it's all sensational and stuff to talk about bricking, but this ain't bricking. Bricking is when the device is now as "useful as a brick" or could literally be used only as a paper weight or a door stop. When it cannot be recovered or fixed, that's a brick. This is just a fouled up machine. Which viruses have been giving us since the early 90s when hard drives became standard in PCs.
It's like there's a bunch of kiddies out there who heard all the sensation about iPhones getting bricked (now that seemed like a genuine brick for quite a while) and now think that the cool term for screwed up is now "brick". Use some precision, for crying out loud.
Yeah, I saw recursive patterns and thought, "Crap, now I'm going to have to relearn how to look at regexes so that I see those too." Still, I'm excited about the power (while being daunted by the readability).
I'm not sure how much difference this will make because of the various open source blogging packages (in half a dozen languages), but I also don't know how big a deal it is when compared with Blogger (now owned by Google). Using Google Apps to publish a blog under your own domain is pretty powerful. Sure it might not give you all the features of X or Y, but it works really well and it is only a DNS entry. For many of us maintaining our own boxes, adding a record to DNS is much simpler than installing (and maintaining) another web application. Some blogger apps are pretty trivial, but they still require database setup and maintenance. Setups like Blogger plus a custom domain are hard to beat. And for those who don't like it, there are all the other established, open-source blogging engines.
This sounds more like the moves made when a product isn't doing as well as it used to. You know, the desperate, last gasp type open source moves. It worked out well for Mozilla, but I'm not so sure about Moveable Type.
I have to agree with the parent. Is using Eclipse on Mac OS X, something you could easily for 3 years, really news? I mean hell, I've been writing Java for paying gigs on a Mac for three years now--right when I got my first PowerBook. This article doesn't even describe anything new. Maybe this is all revolutionary for XCode users, but there aren't that many XCode Java users on the Mac. Even WebObjects uses Eclipse.
So where the heck is the news here? You might as well post an article about how Linux is a great platform for C development.
This is article is almost a big "duh".
Now what *would* merit an article is if MyEclipse and the Apple Java team buried the hatchet and fixed MyEclipse so that it worked flawlessly and with every feature it has for Windows and Linux. Right now, Apple says it is MyEclipse at fault and MyEclipse says it is Apple at fault. I was in two separate Java sessions at the WWDC where people basically asked Apple flat out to just get it working, no matter whose fault it is. If MyEclipse worked completely on the Mac JVM, *that* would be news for nerds, stuff that matters.
Wow, can't get ISDN either? Man, your lines must be awful out there. I know ours had signal boosters and everything on them and they still managed to get ISDN to us. But then 5 miles down the mountain is a major town--so maybe that's a mitigating factor for me.
Ascend P50s?!? Oh man, you made my day. I haven't seen those in years. I actually tried to find those when I first realized I was going to have to use ISDN. I just couldn't seem to secure them; I had a hard enough time buying my 3Com after market. Back in the day, I worked at a Boston health care org that hooked up all its satellite offices with ISDN and Ascend P50s. Ah, them were the days (expensive days too--stupid Bell Atlantic).
ISDN is what you need. It sucks, it is expensive, but it is much, much better than 26k dialup. I moved to an area with no DSL or broadband and made do with ISDN and then iDSL (DSL protocols over a bonded ISDN circuit) for 4 years. Sure, you aren't doing YouTube a lot or download ISO images, but you are connected well enough for remote work, including SSH. RDC is doable, but pretty awful in my experience.
The problem is finding decent ISDN equipment. I just threw out my old ISDN modem (I'm moving and I have DSL now). It took me forever to find it, but it was really useful. Little 3COM router with auto-dialing of the second line on demand. I used it for my voice and data for the first 2 years and then realized it was pointless and went with iDSL. It was pretty expensive, but got me even more bandwidth (144 up and down instead of 128 if I remember right).
If you really are as remote as you say, there's going to be a telco engineer somewhere who knows how to help you. You just have to find him.
*If* you have enough neighbors, you can start petitioning your telco for DSL. I live 5 miles up a road leading to a national park, well outside the range of DSL. They put some "magic box" in at the end of the road to serve me an my 20 neighbors. I get 1.5/768 now. Life is so much better;-)
I waited at the AT&T in the Kitsap Mall (Silverdale, WA). The people manning the store there were great. They even ran little contests with snacks (Apple pies or Apple dips from McDonald's). They let you in one at a time because there was no point in letting people mob the store--plus it built up anticipation, I'm sure. When I got in, the only hitch were that all the computers were getting smashed with the traffic. These were AT&T's machines.
I then had to wait for a full hour and a half (driving time back to my house) to activate it. At that point, I downloaded iTunes 7.3 (reasonably quick) and then tried to activate it. This process seemed to take quite a while. At one point, I got an error message about the iTunes store being swamped, but that went away. Then my number port seemed to hang, but then the activation went forward (albeit slowly). I got a few emails 5 minutes after I finished the process, and everything was working.
So for my part, servers were slow, but no one botched the job. I found the AT&T people really helpful at my location. But then we only had 100, maybe 150 people waiting in line. They ran out of 8Gs quickly, but I was within the 1st 15 people in, so I just didn't care--I knew I was getting mine:-)
I'd agree with you except that's a lot (and I do mean a lot) of US workers getting screwed. You can't possibly hire them all.
There was a comment in one of the articles about this where the lawyer said he didn't know how common this was. Considering that three past employers of mine did it (who knows how many I didn't know about), I'd say it is pretty darn common. There is a lot of work that US workers aren't even given a chance to apply for because the company has already decided to fill it with an H1-B. They hire the H1-B because it is cheaper, when the visa runs out, they game the system to get the green card. It's a crock from beginning to end.
Ok, I'm a big hater when it comes to M$ and I don't miss a chance to beat on them when I can. But I have to agree with the guy here:
I really take issue with those who would characterize a client-side crash as a denial of service.
A file crashing because of a bug isn't technically a DoS flaw--it's just a true, honest bug. Which doesn't mean that Word is some quality app, it just means that a crash here or there doesn't equate to a security problem or DoS. When I go to some sites with flash (or WMV, I'm not sure), it crashes Safari. Would I classify that as a DoS? No, that would just be silly. So I'm going to judge MS by the same standard.
I suppose a client-side crash, under certain circumstances, could be used for a DoS. But this doesn't look to be very exploitable. I think it's just a normal bug/issue.
Either spend all their time working and don't learn new stuff to a usable degree...
Why would that be the case? Are you saying that people can only learn if they are on-site with their co-workers? Most people in this industry are self-taught to one degree or another. Even if you have a degree you have to train yourself because of the pace of new technologies. I would think that someone who doesn't learn anything while telecommuting isn't going to learn that much chatting over lunch with you--they sound like they have bigger issues than not being their for "1-on-1 time".
I'm not saying you can't have some interesting conversations on-site. But most of my time on my last project was spent fielding questions from junior team members. I mentored quite a few of them. So clearly the information flowed from me to them just fine over the phone. And I know I learned stuff--I designed 3 new frameworks based on some new design patterns and created a build system by learning all the ins and outs of Ant (heck, I'm an Ant "expert" now--too bad that's not a lucrative thing to be an expert in!).
But I will grant you that I am also very senior. I had 7 years of experience when I moved to my new location in the boonies and started working remotely. So if you are saying "Kids fresh out of college shouldn't tele-commute" I might agree with you there. If only because they lack experience and usually need a lot of mentoring, in terms of the corporate culture of the actual craft of software engineering.
That said, I have worked for a lot of "virtual copanies" and I have mentored junior coders in those situations--they seemed to learn a lot and grow in their skill. So I'm still not sure this applies.
I will grant you this: there are quite a few people who telecommute who suck. But I believe they would suck in person too. And that's been my experience. Telecommuting just distills it all down. If you are good, you prosper and contribute. If you are not very good, telecommuting does not hide it--it exposes it even more. Telecommuting seems to expose all your weaknesses, rather than hide them.
That said, it is awful quite and you get a LOT done. I was usually 2x as productive as my on-site counter-parts. Not because I was working longer, but because I could actually work a solid 7 hours out of 8 instead of the 4.5 - 5 they were working (with constant interruption).
I'm not trying to be glib. It's just that I have been in situations like that. If the company isn't willing to pay you close to market value, regardless of location, you are almost always going to get the shaft. I bet they would shaft you even if you were on-site.
I've been doing it for five years, but I have always done it hourly. I *never* do fixed bid contracts. There are so many reasons not to, but let's just cite the obvious one that 90% of software projects are both over budget and late. Which means that 90% of the time you are going to get shafted--hard.
Now, if you can't get other contract work, you need to re-evaluate. You need to sit down and decide what you want and how you want to do it. Do a business plan. Work at getting a new contract from a different client. Because what you described is a bad client--and they are not going to start treating you better. It isn't 2001 with a crappy market. Go find someone else.
The only thing that will hamper your career if you tele-commute is if you suck at tele-commuting.
I have been working from a remote location for 5 years now. For 3 of those years, I would travel once a month or once every two months for a week on-site. The rest of my time (that is at least 40, but usually 46, of the 52 weeks of the year) I was working out of my home. And during those three years, my clients were 3 time zones away. I was a senior technical lead and I usual lead teams from 2-5 people. I was a senior contributor and I received 2 "absolute best" team awards on one project. During the other two years, I worked exclusively from my home.
The only time telecommuting hurts your career is if:
You have poor interpersonal skills (well, this will hurt you regardless, but it tends to lead to even more misunderstandings if you are remote)
You are not self-motivated. If you can't stick with the code instead of catching ST:DS9 on G4 because you are bored or frustrated, telecommuting is going to expose this weakness.
You do not have a dedicated workspace. If you are trying to do 10 things at once AND work, you are screwed.
Your company isn't telecommuter friendly (kind of a "duh", but it needs to be said). You can't force a company to accept you as a telecommuter if they hate telecommuters.
I find a lot of companies that are "family friendly" are usually good telecommuting places. They usually have the infrastructure and have good speaker phones in their conference rooms. They are set up for it and they don't look down on you if you attend a meeting by phone.
You can also mitigate a lot of issues by coming in for face time on a regular basis. While it isn't my favorite approach, it tends to make most employers happy. Just having a good chat program and a dedicated phone will work wonders. If people can almost always get ahold of you exactly when they want to, they usually don't mind the telecommuting. It's when they can never get a hold of you and you never seem to be "on-line" that they get fiesty.
To be clear, I usually work the schedule of the company, not my own. So even if I could wake up at 12p and work till 8p, I don't do it. I work 8a-4p so that people in different time zones can reach me at a reasonable hour their time. And since most coders come in late and work late, that works pretty good when I am three hours behind them;-)
All that said, I have never wanted to be a manager. Sr. technical lead is as far as I let a company promote me. So maybe I don't care about career advancement in the technical sense. I'm happy cranking out quality code, and companies continue to hire me for exactly that reason. Even if I had worked on-site all these years, my career would be pretty much the same, since I would never take a management position.
I don't think you can be a manager and tele-commute--unless your whole company is virtual or network based. There is just too much that goes wrong on a daily basis, and if 90% of your workers are in one place and you only see them once a week... well, stuff is going to go bad.
Sometimes design or brainstorming meetings are difficult. But this could be solved with tech too--it's just that most companies don't want to be bothered with true teleconferencing setups and virtual whiteboards. I find this forces people to be a bit clearer when explaining things over the phone--which can be an added bonus. Or you just make sure you are on site for important design meetings.
I'm so glad to already see a bunch of comments to the effect of "well duh!" I've been wondering how long it would take the military's strong sense of self-preservation to kick in. It's one thing to be all for free markets to the extent of selling out your own population. But when you give away your military advantages to you potential adversaries for a quick market gain...
A friend of mine and I have both been wondering when the US policy on off-shoring would change. My constant source of confusion is how we can have a War on Terror but continue to off-load most of our IT work and skills to China. No, we aren't at war with them. But they are a concern from a military strategy perspective. And to continue to become dependent on them in our current security state seems kind of stupid to me.
You can be for free markets and still choose to do things nationally to change your stance in the market. That's what trade agreements are for, etc. We hear over and over about how Japan choose to become the number one producer in X and made it happen. Sure we aren't Japan, but why not choose to defend our economy a little more aggressively? Especially if it is going to jeopardize our military standing?
We started churning out engineers for Apollo. That effort and our competition with the USSR is probably what created our current Information Economy. So why not take the long view of things (as opposed to the short view only concerned with this year's corporate profits) and choose to do something like Apollo to continue our engineering lead or to make the next big thing happen? Investing in science and engineering as a whole is only going to help the economy.
And low and behold, it makes really nifty weapons too. It's a two-fer!
The two are very different. The href link is right, but the text isn't. I typed in the text (because I was reading from a news feed) and got a VERY different site:-)
Intel has different historical problems that they are responding to, particularly, the inability to trademark a number,...
Its not really the same thing as Java versioning thing at all, I'd say.
I assume you are referring to the inability to trademark 386, 486, etc. But I don't see how that problem has to do with them coming up with the brilliant brandname "Core 2". And don't dismiss branding as an issue--the Core 2 line could be the biggest thing to happend to Intel since the original Pentium.
So the issue is one of branding (at least that is what I have always been referring to). Core 2 Solo and Core 2 Duo is just a mess from a branding perspective--never mind when you start to really lay on the numbers (like they did in the article). And it is this "two numbers that refer to two different things" branding issue I was referring to from the very beginning. Sun found that Java2 1.X was confusing people instead of getting them on the band wagon. I suspect that Intel will discover the same thing with "Core 2 [CORE_NUMBER]". Hell, most people didn't even know there was an original "Core" platform. So what does branding everything with Core 2 get them if 90% of the consumer market never heard of "Core 1" to begin with?
Ok, maybe they never called Java2 1.4 Java 4, but that's my point: with Java2 1.5, they officially changed this approach. There will never be anything called "1.6" when it is released (well, maybe somewhere buried in the code or in some arcane property)--it will be called Java 6. It's not a guess that they will be Java 6 or Java 7--that's the new naming scheme.
Which is what I was trying to get at--naming something FooBar2 3.4 is absolutely crazy from a branding and public relations perspective. Sure, it all makes sense from a code/product version number thing. But that stuff should be internal. And the fact that Intel isn't getting that is just weird to me--they made tons of money off of Pentium branding. How could they have thought Core 2 Duo was a good thing? Even something lame like CoreExtreme would have been better than the confusion that is going to come from Core 2 branding.
I have always felt Sun made a mistake calling Java 1.2 Java2/Java 1.2. They should have just called it Java 2.0. Sure, it was very similar, but it's not like code for 1.1 or 1.2 was easily interchangable. Then they could have had Java 1.3 be Java 2.1 and Java 1.4 be Java 2.2--because that's what they were like. Anything Java 1.2.x or greater was mostly compatible (save for library calls). But the differences between 1.1-1.2 and differences between 1.2-1.3-1.4 aren't even the same kind of differences.
Which means Java 5 would have been Java 3.0--and let's face it, with generics and autoboxing, it merits a new major revision number to communicate severe incompabilities.
Anyways, as a Java programmer who always wondered what Sun was thinking with their whole Java2 campaign, I'm just flabbergasted that Intel would fall in the same trap.
What the hell is with this Core2 Quad crap? It should be Core2 and Core4. You would have thought Intel would have learned from the nightmare Sun/Java went through with the whole "Java2 1.4" branding nightmare. Sun finally wized up and started calling everything Java 4, Java 5, and Java 6. Why would Intel start such a fiasco?
I get that they are trying to say "Hey look, it is a totally different architecture!" But calling it Core2 isn't going to do that. People will just end up calling them Dual Core or Quad Core anyways, not Dual Core2 and Quad Core2. It's just going to detract from their branding, not help it.
My Macs have done this for years. You can't change the Apple machine startup sound, and no one has ever complained about it. Yes, you have to turn down the sound and then turn it back up. It's been a horribly crippling flaw in design for years. Now all those Vista users are going to suffer just like the Mac users. Whatever will they do?
Just a thought: when your parenthetical statements make up more of your paragraph than your actyal sentences, you should probably drop the parantheses:-)
My wife had the same problem with her iBook. But in her case, everything was fine and then she tried to upgrade to Tiger 3 months after she got it. She thought it was Tiger, and then Panther wouldn't run (i.e. it wouldn't run after being restored to factory). Turns out she had a bad hard drive AND a bad board.
She got that one sent back, it came back in a week, and has been running fine now for over a year. I just upgraded her to Tiger last week (after many assurances that the last time was a fluke) and she is happily running Tiger now.
Hang in there! If my wife's experience is any indicator, if you send it in for repair, it should probably resolve all your problems.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny you calling it a business. It would be a wonderful turn of events if Firefox/Mozilla became a juggernaut again and put the hurt on MS. It would be like Netscape's Revenge--10 years later, it's decision to open the codebase comes back to haunt and harass MS when they are battling so many fronts.
COTS means ready-made components, with very little custom parts or systems. Most gear sent into space is custom designed for the task (down to custom circuits, boards, and even processors). The Mars rovers were the first project to use COTS hardware (I believe their modems were COTS for example), and it saved a bunch compared with how they would usually build a similar system.
So yes, building this with available components and not using custom-designed circuit boards and parts could significantly save money.
Wow, I knew they were deluded, but to think they actually see the world as a dancing oyster
I don't know what this means for OLPC, but I hope it doesn't fragment it or hurt the movement. I just bought mine yesterday through the "Give one, get one" (or however that goes). I figure I'll either hack a little on mine or give it to a local family I know who could use it (and not be able to afford it). I think it's a great idea. I know some criticize and go one about providing basic needs--but why can't we do both? These computers represent a quantum leap in education--which will hopefully translate into a significant improvement in living conditions for many. If we all step up and try to support programs that provide food, water, and health care, imagine the possibilities!
;-)
Not to criticize OLPC, but I think they should just keep the "Give One, Get One" program going. They could even drop the price a little and use the success of the project overall to purchase free ones for third world populations. Maybe it wouldn't be as direct or immediate as the 1/1 ratio now, but it would keep things moving. But I get why they are doing what they are doing--I just hope it succeeds and that people are as giving as they give them credit for
Come on people. I know it's all sensational and stuff to talk about bricking, but this ain't bricking. Bricking is when the device is now as "useful as a brick" or could literally be used only as a paper weight or a door stop. When it cannot be recovered or fixed, that's a brick. This is just a fouled up machine. Which viruses have been giving us since the early 90s when hard drives became standard in PCs.
It's like there's a bunch of kiddies out there who heard all the sensation about iPhones getting bricked (now that seemed like a genuine brick for quite a while) and now think that the cool term for screwed up is now "brick". Use some precision, for crying out loud.
What? No mod +funny yet? Come on people!
Yeah, I saw recursive patterns and thought, "Crap, now I'm going to have to relearn how to look at regexes so that I see those too." Still, I'm excited about the power (while being daunted by the readability).
I'm not sure how much difference this will make because of the various open source blogging packages (in half a dozen languages), but I also don't know how big a deal it is when compared with Blogger (now owned by Google). Using Google Apps to publish a blog under your own domain is pretty powerful. Sure it might not give you all the features of X or Y, but it works really well and it is only a DNS entry. For many of us maintaining our own boxes, adding a record to DNS is much simpler than installing (and maintaining) another web application. Some blogger apps are pretty trivial, but they still require database setup and maintenance. Setups like Blogger plus a custom domain are hard to beat. And for those who don't like it, there are all the other established, open-source blogging engines.
This sounds more like the moves made when a product isn't doing as well as it used to. You know, the desperate, last gasp type open source moves. It worked out well for Mozilla, but I'm not so sure about Moveable Type.
I have to agree with the parent. Is using Eclipse on Mac OS X, something you could easily for 3 years, really news? I mean hell, I've been writing Java for paying gigs on a Mac for three years now--right when I got my first PowerBook. This article doesn't even describe anything new. Maybe this is all revolutionary for XCode users, but there aren't that many XCode Java users on the Mac. Even WebObjects uses Eclipse.
So where the heck is the news here? You might as well post an article about how Linux is a great platform for C development.
This is article is almost a big "duh".
Now what *would* merit an article is if MyEclipse and the Apple Java team buried the hatchet and fixed MyEclipse so that it worked flawlessly and with every feature it has for Windows and Linux. Right now, Apple says it is MyEclipse at fault and MyEclipse says it is Apple at fault. I was in two separate Java sessions at the WWDC where people basically asked Apple flat out to just get it working, no matter whose fault it is. If MyEclipse worked completely on the Mac JVM, *that* would be news for nerds, stuff that matters.
Wow, can't get ISDN either? Man, your lines must be awful out there. I know ours had signal boosters and everything on them and they still managed to get ISDN to us. But then 5 miles down the mountain is a major town--so maybe that's a mitigating factor for me.
Ascend P50s?!? Oh man, you made my day. I haven't seen those in years. I actually tried to find those when I first realized I was going to have to use ISDN. I just couldn't seem to secure them; I had a hard enough time buying my 3Com after market. Back in the day, I worked at a Boston health care org that hooked up all its satellite offices with ISDN and Ascend P50s. Ah, them were the days (expensive days too--stupid Bell Atlantic).
ISDN is what you need. It sucks, it is expensive, but it is much, much better than 26k dialup. I moved to an area with no DSL or broadband and made do with ISDN and then iDSL (DSL protocols over a bonded ISDN circuit) for 4 years. Sure, you aren't doing YouTube a lot or download ISO images, but you are connected well enough for remote work, including SSH. RDC is doable, but pretty awful in my experience.
;-)
The problem is finding decent ISDN equipment. I just threw out my old ISDN modem (I'm moving and I have DSL now). It took me forever to find it, but it was really useful. Little 3COM router with auto-dialing of the second line on demand. I used it for my voice and data for the first 2 years and then realized it was pointless and went with iDSL. It was pretty expensive, but got me even more bandwidth (144 up and down instead of 128 if I remember right).
If you really are as remote as you say, there's going to be a telco engineer somewhere who knows how to help you. You just have to find him.
*If* you have enough neighbors, you can start petitioning your telco for DSL. I live 5 miles up a road leading to a national park, well outside the range of DSL. They put some "magic box" in at the end of the road to serve me an my 20 neighbors. I get 1.5/768 now. Life is so much better
I waited at the AT&T in the Kitsap Mall (Silverdale, WA). The people manning the store there were great. They even ran little contests with snacks (Apple pies or Apple dips from McDonald's). They let you in one at a time because there was no point in letting people mob the store--plus it built up anticipation, I'm sure. When I got in, the only hitch were that all the computers were getting smashed with the traffic. These were AT&T's machines.
:-)
I then had to wait for a full hour and a half (driving time back to my house) to activate it. At that point, I downloaded iTunes 7.3 (reasonably quick) and then tried to activate it. This process seemed to take quite a while. At one point, I got an error message about the iTunes store being swamped, but that went away. Then my number port seemed to hang, but then the activation went forward (albeit slowly). I got a few emails 5 minutes after I finished the process, and everything was working.
So for my part, servers were slow, but no one botched the job. I found the AT&T people really helpful at my location. But then we only had 100, maybe 150 people waiting in line. They ran out of 8Gs quickly, but I was within the 1st 15 people in, so I just didn't care--I knew I was getting mine
I'd agree with you except that's a lot (and I do mean a lot) of US workers getting screwed. You can't possibly hire them all.
There was a comment in one of the articles about this where the lawyer said he didn't know how common this was. Considering that three past employers of mine did it (who knows how many I didn't know about), I'd say it is pretty darn common. There is a lot of work that US workers aren't even given a chance to apply for because the company has already decided to fill it with an H1-B. They hire the H1-B because it is cheaper, when the visa runs out, they game the system to get the green card. It's a crock from beginning to end.
A file crashing because of a bug isn't technically a DoS flaw--it's just a true, honest bug. Which doesn't mean that Word is some quality app, it just means that a crash here or there doesn't equate to a security problem or DoS. When I go to some sites with flash (or WMV, I'm not sure), it crashes Safari. Would I classify that as a DoS? No, that would just be silly. So I'm going to judge MS by the same standard.
I suppose a client-side crash, under certain circumstances, could be used for a DoS. But this doesn't look to be very exploitable. I think it's just a normal bug/issue.
Still think their apps are crap though
Why would that be the case? Are you saying that people can only learn if they are on-site with their co-workers? Most people in this industry are self-taught to one degree or another. Even if you have a degree you have to train yourself because of the pace of new technologies. I would think that someone who doesn't learn anything while telecommuting isn't going to learn that much chatting over lunch with you--they sound like they have bigger issues than not being their for "1-on-1 time".
I'm not saying you can't have some interesting conversations on-site. But most of my time on my last project was spent fielding questions from junior team members. I mentored quite a few of them. So clearly the information flowed from me to them just fine over the phone. And I know I learned stuff--I designed 3 new frameworks based on some new design patterns and created a build system by learning all the ins and outs of Ant (heck, I'm an Ant "expert" now--too bad that's not a lucrative thing to be an expert in!).
But I will grant you that I am also very senior. I had 7 years of experience when I moved to my new location in the boonies and started working remotely. So if you are saying "Kids fresh out of college shouldn't tele-commute" I might agree with you there. If only because they lack experience and usually need a lot of mentoring, in terms of the corporate culture of the actual craft of software engineering.
That said, I have worked for a lot of "virtual copanies" and I have mentored junior coders in those situations--they seemed to learn a lot and grow in their skill. So I'm still not sure this applies.
I will grant you this: there are quite a few people who telecommute who suck. But I believe they would suck in person too. And that's been my experience. Telecommuting just distills it all down. If you are good, you prosper and contribute. If you are not very good, telecommuting does not hide it--it exposes it even more. Telecommuting seems to expose all your weaknesses, rather than hide them.
That said, it is awful quite and you get a LOT done. I was usually 2x as productive as my on-site counter-parts. Not because I was working longer, but because I could actually work a solid 7 hours out of 8 instead of the 4.5 - 5 they were working (with constant interruption).
Sounds to me like your client sucks.
I'm not trying to be glib. It's just that I have been in situations like that. If the company isn't willing to pay you close to market value, regardless of location, you are almost always going to get the shaft. I bet they would shaft you even if you were on-site.
I've been doing it for five years, but I have always done it hourly. I *never* do fixed bid contracts. There are so many reasons not to, but let's just cite the obvious one that 90% of software projects are both over budget and late. Which means that 90% of the time you are going to get shafted--hard.
Now, if you can't get other contract work, you need to re-evaluate. You need to sit down and decide what you want and how you want to do it. Do a business plan. Work at getting a new contract from a different client. Because what you described is a bad client--and they are not going to start treating you better. It isn't 2001 with a crappy market. Go find someone else.
The only thing that will hamper your career if you tele-commute is if you suck at tele-commuting.
I have been working from a remote location for 5 years now. For 3 of those years, I would travel once a month or once every two months for a week on-site. The rest of my time (that is at least 40, but usually 46, of the 52 weeks of the year) I was working out of my home. And during those three years, my clients were 3 time zones away. I was a senior technical lead and I usual lead teams from 2-5 people. I was a senior contributor and I received 2 "absolute best" team awards on one project. During the other two years, I worked exclusively from my home.
The only time telecommuting hurts your career is if:
- You have poor interpersonal skills (well, this will hurt you regardless, but it tends to lead to even more misunderstandings if you are remote)
- You are not self-motivated. If you can't stick with the code instead of catching ST:DS9 on G4 because you are bored or frustrated, telecommuting is going to expose this weakness.
- You do not have a dedicated workspace. If you are trying to do 10 things at once AND work, you are screwed.
- Your company isn't telecommuter friendly (kind of a "duh", but it needs to be said). You can't force a company to accept you as a telecommuter if they hate telecommuters.
I find a lot of companies that are "family friendly" are usually good telecommuting places. They usually have the infrastructure and have good speaker phones in their conference rooms. They are set up for it and they don't look down on you if you attend a meeting by phone.You can also mitigate a lot of issues by coming in for face time on a regular basis. While it isn't my favorite approach, it tends to make most employers happy. Just having a good chat program and a dedicated phone will work wonders. If people can almost always get ahold of you exactly when they want to, they usually don't mind the telecommuting. It's when they can never get a hold of you and you never seem to be "on-line" that they get fiesty.
To be clear, I usually work the schedule of the company, not my own. So even if I could wake up at 12p and work till 8p, I don't do it. I work 8a-4p so that people in different time zones can reach me at a reasonable hour their time. And since most coders come in late and work late, that works pretty good when I am three hours behind them ;-)
All that said, I have never wanted to be a manager. Sr. technical lead is as far as I let a company promote me. So maybe I don't care about career advancement in the technical sense. I'm happy cranking out quality code, and companies continue to hire me for exactly that reason. Even if I had worked on-site all these years, my career would be pretty much the same, since I would never take a management position.
I don't think you can be a manager and tele-commute--unless your whole company is virtual or network based. There is just too much that goes wrong on a daily basis, and if 90% of your workers are in one place and you only see them once a week ... well, stuff is going to go bad.
Sometimes design or brainstorming meetings are difficult. But this could be solved with tech too--it's just that most companies don't want to be bothered with true teleconferencing setups and virtual whiteboards. I find this forces people to be a bit clearer when explaining things over the phone--which can be an added bonus. Or you just make sure you are on site for important design meetings.
Oh, yah. If you can't tell, I'm REALLY excited about the return of Futurama.
Amen. It's worse if you own dogs and they are laying at your feet when you watch it. Hell, I'm choking up even thinking about it.
I'm so glad to already see a bunch of comments to the effect of "well duh!" I've been wondering how long it would take the military's strong sense of self-preservation to kick in. It's one thing to be all for free markets to the extent of selling out your own population. But when you give away your military advantages to you potential adversaries for a quick market gain ...
A friend of mine and I have both been wondering when the US policy on off-shoring would change. My constant source of confusion is how we can have a War on Terror but continue to off-load most of our IT work and skills to China. No, we aren't at war with them. But they are a concern from a military strategy perspective. And to continue to become dependent on them in our current security state seems kind of stupid to me.
You can be for free markets and still choose to do things nationally to change your stance in the market. That's what trade agreements are for, etc. We hear over and over about how Japan choose to become the number one producer in X and made it happen. Sure we aren't Japan, but why not choose to defend our economy a little more aggressively? Especially if it is going to jeopardize our military standing?
We started churning out engineers for Apollo. That effort and our competition with the USSR is probably what created our current Information Economy. So why not take the long view of things (as opposed to the short view only concerned with this year's corporate profits) and choose to do something like Apollo to continue our engineering lead or to make the next big thing happen? Investing in science and engineering as a whole is only going to help the economy.
And low and behold, it makes really nifty weapons too. It's a two-fer!
The two are very different. The href link is right, but the text isn't. I typed in the text (because I was reading from a news feed) and got a VERY different site :-)
I assume you are referring to the inability to trademark 386, 486, etc. But I don't see how that problem has to do with them coming up with the brilliant brandname "Core 2". And don't dismiss branding as an issue--the Core 2 line could be the biggest thing to happend to Intel since the original Pentium.
So the issue is one of branding (at least that is what I have always been referring to). Core 2 Solo and Core 2 Duo is just a mess from a branding perspective--never mind when you start to really lay on the numbers (like they did in the article). And it is this "two numbers that refer to two different things" branding issue I was referring to from the very beginning. Sun found that Java2 1.X was confusing people instead of getting them on the band wagon. I suspect that Intel will discover the same thing with "Core 2 [CORE_NUMBER]". Hell, most people didn't even know there was an original "Core" platform. So what does branding everything with Core 2 get them if 90% of the consumer market never heard of "Core 1" to begin with?
Ok, maybe they never called Java2 1.4 Java 4, but that's my point: with Java2 1.5, they officially changed this approach. There will never be anything called "1.6" when it is released (well, maybe somewhere buried in the code or in some arcane property)--it will be called Java 6. It's not a guess that they will be Java 6 or Java 7--that's the new naming scheme.
Which is what I was trying to get at--naming something FooBar2 3.4 is absolutely crazy from a branding and public relations perspective. Sure, it all makes sense from a code/product version number thing. But that stuff should be internal. And the fact that Intel isn't getting that is just weird to me--they made tons of money off of Pentium branding. How could they have thought Core 2 Duo was a good thing? Even something lame like CoreExtreme would have been better than the confusion that is going to come from Core 2 branding.
I have always felt Sun made a mistake calling Java 1.2 Java2/Java 1.2. They should have just called it Java 2.0. Sure, it was very similar, but it's not like code for 1.1 or 1.2 was easily interchangable. Then they could have had Java 1.3 be Java 2.1 and Java 1.4 be Java 2.2--because that's what they were like. Anything Java 1.2.x or greater was mostly compatible (save for library calls). But the differences between 1.1-1.2 and differences between 1.2-1.3-1.4 aren't even the same kind of differences.
Which means Java 5 would have been Java 3.0--and let's face it, with generics and autoboxing, it merits a new major revision number to communicate severe incompabilities.
Anyways, as a Java programmer who always wondered what Sun was thinking with their whole Java2 campaign, I'm just flabbergasted that Intel would fall in the same trap.
What the hell is with this Core2 Quad crap? It should be Core2 and Core4. You would have thought Intel would have learned from the nightmare Sun/Java went through with the whole "Java2 1.4" branding nightmare. Sun finally wized up and started calling everything Java 4, Java 5, and Java 6. Why would Intel start such a fiasco?
I get that they are trying to say "Hey look, it is a totally different architecture!" But calling it Core2 isn't going to do that. People will just end up calling them Dual Core or Quad Core anyways, not Dual Core2 and Quad Core2. It's just going to detract from their branding, not help it.
My Macs have done this for years. You can't change the Apple machine startup sound, and no one has ever complained about it. Yes, you have to turn down the sound and then turn it back up. It's been a horribly crippling flaw in design for years. Now all those Vista users are going to suffer just like the Mac users. Whatever will they do?
Just a thought: when your parenthetical statements make up more of your paragraph than your actyal sentences, you should probably drop the parantheses :-)
My wife had the same problem with her iBook. But in her case, everything was fine and then she tried to upgrade to Tiger 3 months after she got it. She thought it was Tiger, and then Panther wouldn't run (i.e. it wouldn't run after being restored to factory). Turns out she had a bad hard drive AND a bad board.
She got that one sent back, it came back in a week, and has been running fine now for over a year. I just upgraded her to Tiger last week (after many assurances that the last time was a fluke) and she is happily running Tiger now.
Hang in there! If my wife's experience is any indicator, if you send it in for repair, it should probably resolve all your problems.