Personally, my focus isn't nearly so much a client-usage issue as it is a server issue. Right now, the only reason we have any MS boxes on our production network is for windows media streaming.
If I could replace those WM boxes running w2k (which still need frequent rebooting despite the best efforts of what are presumably skilled MS tinkerers) with a couple sturdy linux boxes capable of handling more clients, and more pliable to my security requirements, it's an all ways around win for myself on an headache level, and for the company on a maintenance level.
Besides, and correct me if I'm wrong here, the helix server has reverse-engineered and therefore emulates the WM media streams... which means that the WMP should be able to play those streams anyways.
So, all current clients supported, new realmedia 9 format supported, single point for ease of maintenance, future open sourcing (in whole or in part) and I get to yank out the last remnants of microsoft from my network.
I'm personally having a hard time seeing how this is going to be a negative, unless the helix server is terribly insecure (which I'll mitigate by chrooting et al if possible), doesn't work as advertised or gets yanked by future lawsuitage.
Artists get dicked by the labels and distributors, making mere pennies per album sold in the store. Bands go on tour not just to promote the album (which predominantly helps the labels), but also to actually make some real coin, as a much larger chunk from the concert proceeds end up in the artists pockets.
Why do you think so many bands create thier own labels as SOON as they can? It isn't a hobby. They're cutting out useless deadweight in order to make more coin for themselves. It's after they reach that point and start playing the "big money game" is when they start getting uppity about napster. (PS - Lars, I hope you get eye cancer you lame pussified pantywaist excuse of an ex-metal icon)
As for digital distribution, sure, I've napstered stuff. Much of it sucked and was subsequently turf. The ones that didn't suck I went to the store and purchased when I could (One album, Jethro Tull's "Songs from the Wood" took me two years to find). If I didn't have napster for those occasions, I'da ended up buying albums that suck based on one or two good singles. Maybe that's what is really pissing them off... they can't make 'sucker sales' to people based on a good single any more.
If there were an online store that'd whip up CD images for me from original media (ie: not sampled to mp3 and back again) at a reasonable price, I'd probably buy my music from them and love 'em for it.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Andromeda = "Herc in Space"
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 1
First time I watched the show I thought "Oh look, Hercules has acheived orbital capabilities."
Nothing I've seen since has changed that thought.
There's way better stuff on TV. Now if only HBO could package up the second season of the Sopranos for DVD, I could put my home entertainment system to good use again... damn Canadian cable companies =P
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Not necessarily true. As I understand the GPL (my understanding of which may be flawed, but...) you could also give a copy of the code you personally made to that other group under a different license. You couldn't take back your GPLed version, of course, but you are free to hand out your personal endeavours in any manner and under any license restrictions you see fit.
You could NOT, however, hand out the entire original code that you'd patched as a non-gpl'd product.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
I think there's some inherent limitations to BT (at least in its current incarnation) which would keep it from being as popular as maybe they'd like, as well.
For example, the guy doing the presentation was talking about a scenario where someone with a BT enabled device could walk into a room, and his device would know about the other devices available to be used as BT peers. That sounds great, except that you can only have so many devices in a room before things fall down and go boom... thus, BT would not be suitable for applications that might need to scale.
Problems like that would present nasty obstacles for widespread commercial adoption. If every TV and VCR and cel phone is going to have one of these things in 'em (the BT "grand vision of the future"), I can tell you that in MY 10 meter radius, my home, I'd have easily enough devices to overload the levels that are currently being discussed.
Security needs to be definitively addressed too. The concept of someone camping on my doorstep and using my printer doesn't much appeal to me...;)
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
At a recent presentation of bluetooth to the local users group, I made a comment to a colleage that even though the presenter made it pretty obvious that things were still clumsy and in development I still thought that bluetooth would probably make it to widespread commercial rollout with at least moderate success.
Within the last week though, finding out that A> the devices don't interoperate properly and B> one of the major players in the game doesn't wanna play any more has made me think otherwise... and it makes me wonder about what's going to happen with all that sticky 'intellectual property' crap the presenter was talking about being all tangled and impossible to discern whose was which. Fuss over that could scuttle things in a heartbeat.
Unless some major positive things happen for BT real soon, I'll be suprised if anything more than a bare few handfuls of peripherals will be made available commercially.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
I even went so far as to run the Amiga emulator on my box so I can get my DM fix from time to time;) Man, that game was a classic. Sucked back more puter hours than even Elite did.
Bad timing though, now I have another new thing to suck back my nonexistant free time. The wife may not see me for a month!
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Or maybe we could just shake mars on a plate and give it stronger bones.
... and if I were any taller, I'd have to try out for pro basketball. And duck when I walked in my door. There is a point beyond 6 feet where additional height doesn't do much but decrease the available footroom during commercial air travel.
You'd swear those seats were designed to hold munchkins. Or those impossibly thin flight attendants. They look like they could use some bone strengthening to keep them from snapping in two from a strong breeze.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Here I just went and upgraded to a Duron 700 and Asus A7V. Already had the GeForce.
Fortunately, the overclocking possibilities of the duron/asus combo means that I don't have to stick with 700. Running it at around 850 right now, and with the GeForce it screams through round after round of counter-strike.
Duron + Asus is nicely affordable too. Why pay more when you get more or less comparable FPS performance anyways?
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
That's complete crap. So any company that keeps tight control over its resources is being subservient to its vendors?
Read more carefully. I said "Typically". I'm certain there are other companies that DO need tight control over its resources for reasons far more appropriate than simple fear of knocking the network over, or sniffing (as the original article implies).
But yes, there is a large contingent of management who simply suck up vendor sludge simply because it seems to be an easier solution than getting direct input from employees who often have conflicting and varied requirements. Needless to say, that sort of policy is considered somewhere between a "bad joke" and a "faustian nightmare" by the poor plebs in the trenches.
Any IT manager worth his salt knows not to sign a blanket contract that prevents you from using anything other than a single vendor. It's called good business practice. And any IT manager that wants to stay an IT manager will at least touch base with his subordinates before committing them to anything at all.
Many IT managers then must not be worth her(or her) salt then. I've seen a great many companies "standardize" on single vendor solutions, and claim that doing so is good business practice. Hark back to your history lessons... noone ever got fired for buying IBM^H^H^HNovell^H^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoft.
In a perfect world, IT services is set up to serve the needs of the people requiring the use of IT. They get a clear picture of what's needed and make every attempt to serve that need within the confines of a well structured and managable environment. In the real world, IT is far more likely to dictate terms than accept requests. People don't like asking permission when they know that thier request will be rejected out of hand by people that fear change... the rejection of which is just a symptom of a larger scale problem of fear and laziness in a company, not typically an "anti-linux" sentiment (although I've seen that in some places too).
I think you're missing the boat with your question. I'm not complaining that Linux is being outlawed... frankly, I don't work in corporate environments any more partially due to myopic management strategies such as this. I'm talking about draconian policies that leave employees feeling powerless if they go through "authorized channels". Perhaps the question should be why don't employees feel they can get their needs met by following policy?
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
However, if someone comes along and installs their own Linux distro suddenly you've got someone other than the admins with root privileges on at least one machine in the network. Hello, nmap. Hello, packet sniffers. Yes, you can encrypt everything to death, but it's better to keep prying eyes from ever seeing the sensitive data in the first place.
Hello, anyone with a laptop taken to work on any given day.
The idea of 'keeping prying eyes from seeing the data' and enforcing that idea with draconian IT rules is ludicrous. Anyone who wants to see that data will be able to. If internal security is that big an issue, you've got WAY more problems than if linux is 'sneaking in', and probably need to do retinal identification to enter the workplace as it is. For the vast majority of COMMON workplaces though, it's real hard to enforce security-through-obscurity when people have physical access to the hardware.
Typically, companies with "very very strict rules" are those ones who's upper echelons are so totally in the pocket of some major vendor that they swallow EVERY bit of crap, no matter how outrageous, that is in that vendor's interest. If vendor says "Don't let any other operating systems on your network, it could destroy everything!" many policy makers are too ignorant/lazy/busy to know otherwise, and simply make that law. I'm not aware of any IT department who has a CTO/CIO who knows more about details than his/her subordinates.
Companies with FLEXIBLE arrangements are the ones who demonstrate at least some knowledge in what's going on, and a willingness to pad their bottom line through the optimizations and research (unpaid) of employees... or at least, it's a hallmark of a CTO/CIO who realizes that better answers come from employees than from vendors. True, sometimes these things fall down and go boom, but that sort of thing happens even with the most seasoned professional or group.
Any company living in fear of 'rogue OSes destroying the world' suffers from a lack of robust IS planning and needs an overhaul far more than it needs gestapo policies.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
I second the note for royal bank. I was just on there last night transferring some funds to my Visa and credit lines. The 1-800-ROYAL-55 number always seems to have clueful people on the other end (for those times when things don't work quite as planned... like you forgot your password, say;).
RBOC's website also does appear to be totally browser agnostic (with the caveat mentioned that it has to do HTTPS).
I also use it to import account activities into a format my accountant likes to see, which is hella easier than re-entering statements. =P
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Well, they managed to fix all those little rendering glitches which were annoying as hell in M17 and earlier releases, it seems to handle TT fonts better this time around... crunches and grinds a little bit for the BIG LONG PAGES that slashdot likes to generate (chokes on the comment pages for 5-10 seconds before letting me scroll) but once they get layed out scrolling is smooth and slick. The java plugin is also suprisingly stable (perhaps even more so than NS4.x and MSIE) so I might just adopt M18 as my new java viewing platform if it hangs in there.
Nice work guys. If you can let me scroll before those long pages are entirely rendered, or at least just display the first screenfull statically, it'd make things even more slick.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
I'd say that stress and burnout in the techie fields goes WAY beyond 1 out of every 10 people. It's more likely that 1 out of every 10 people are stressed and burning away at any point in time, and that as they cycle out to recoup, the next set goes into high burn.
Having run the cycle of burnout, bounceback, stress, repeat many many times and watched my coworkers do the same, I said to hell with it and started working for myself doing remote admin and programming. Now I still burn out, but the cycle usually takes longer, doesn't hit as hard, and I can do it in the luxury of my own environment with all the time-wasting enjoyable minutiae nearby to play with when I do.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Nope, I meant CPAN, the Canuckian Parliamentary Affairs Channel (or something similar). That's where most of the algae, lichens and occasional slime moulds gather around, throw down and wiggle their pseudopods (or whatever) at each other menacingly.
I suppose noone would notice the few minutes of round trip time if they starts shooting CPAN on mars... for all we know, they're already out there.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
One of the companies I'm under contract to currently runs a 18 server webfarm (p3-600's, single CPU, 512MB RAM each) which consolidates around 60 websites, load balanced using an LVS box from VA Linux. If you'd like more information on this setup, feel free to mail me.
The average throughput of traffic runs at around 120mbps, with peak times pushing 180mpbs. The last estimate of hits per day is around 25 million from around 200 thousand visitors. Hits are, of course, predominantly static (static webpage graphic art and the like) but a large contingent is dynamic, using PHP for most of the 'high impact' stuff and C or Perl based CGI for older goodies. Database goodies are handled on thier own machines.
Initial installation did cost a bit, as it was a conversion issue from sites running on single machines going to a unified environment in such a way that service wasn't interrupted. While static information can be served up easily, there was some rewriting involved for the dynamic pages (pushing DB lookups to remote machines, changing things so state data could be accessed from any of the machines in the farm, etc). Sites designed with distributed computing in mind would have none of those issues.
On the average, each machine serves up 1.3-1.5 million hits a day, and the webservers themselves barely break a sweat while running Apache running perhaps 200-250 processes at peak times (the only bottleneck worry is the TB data warehouse serving the machines right now). Thus, an affordable, fault tolerant, high performance arrangement using commodity parts that's reliable enough to let me go on vacation for two weeks or more without monitoring and not have me worrying if everything will be okay when I get back.
I'd suggest that you take any ads by Dell in the spirit they were written in... that of a Microsoft Lap Dog. The idea that even a default Apache install can only serve up 200k hits a day (which translates to a mere 3.5 hits a second!) is ludicrous and deserves scorn and ridicule.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Basically I was reading on there, followed a link from some article (one of those 'recent news' type boxes they have down the side) and found out that not only does MS want to drag things on forever, but that the DoJ had a hissyfit over it.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
I'm at the stage in my financial development when I'm able to start pondering house purchases 'n stuff. While I'd like to buy a house for the Ms. and myself, the idea of tricking out a house for geek occupation and turning it into revenue property sounds pretty sweet... Seems to me that geek rentors would be close to the optimum tenant (little or no party action, too many toys around to be the kind that would engage in property destruction, and more than likely to be able to come up with rent money on a regular basis).
Hm. I think I'll start scouting around for some places that can be fixed up right.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
... "Throwing more people at a late project only makes it later."
I'd suggest getting your PHBs to read through Mythical Man Month (or give them an executive summary thereof). For what can now be considered an ancient text, it's still pretty damn accurate in a lot of what it says.
For what it's worth, if the concepts this code is meant to address have substantial learning curves, your management may be a little disappointed with the outsourcing results... particularly if the contractees have to harass the on staff coders to get up to speed with background stuff.
-- rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, my focus isn't nearly so much a client-usage issue as it is a server issue. Right now, the only reason we have any MS boxes on our production network is for windows media streaming.
If I could replace those WM boxes running w2k (which still need frequent rebooting despite the best efforts of what are presumably skilled MS tinkerers) with a couple sturdy linux boxes capable of handling more clients, and more pliable to my security requirements, it's an all ways around win for myself on an headache level, and for the company on a maintenance level.
Besides, and correct me if I'm wrong here, the helix server has reverse-engineered and therefore emulates the WM media streams... which means that the WMP should be able to play those streams anyways.
So, all current clients supported, new realmedia 9 format supported, single point for ease of maintenance, future open sourcing (in whole or in part) and I get to yank out the last remnants of microsoft from my network.
I'm personally having a hard time seeing how this is going to be a negative, unless the helix server is terribly insecure (which I'll mitigate by chrooting et al if possible), doesn't work as advertised or gets yanked by future lawsuitage.
As for digital distribution, sure, I've napstered stuff. Much of it sucked and was subsequently turf. The ones that didn't suck I went to the store and purchased when I could (One album, Jethro Tull's "Songs from the Wood" took me two years to find). If I didn't have napster for those occasions, I'da ended up buying albums that suck based on one or two good singles. Maybe that's what is really pissing them off... they can't make 'sucker sales' to people based on a good single any more.
If there were an online store that'd whip up CD images for me from original media (ie: not sampled to mp3 and back again) at a reasonable price, I'd probably buy my music from them and love 'em for it.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Nothing I've seen since has changed that thought.
There's way better stuff on TV. Now if only HBO could package up the second season of the Sopranos for DVD, I could put my home entertainment system to good use again... damn Canadian cable companies =P
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You could NOT, however, hand out the entire original code that you'd patched as a non-gpl'd product.
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For example, the guy doing the presentation was talking about a scenario where someone with a BT enabled device could walk into a room, and his device would know about the other devices available to be used as BT peers. That sounds great, except that you can only have so many devices in a room before things fall down and go boom... thus, BT would not be suitable for applications that might need to scale.
Problems like that would present nasty obstacles for widespread commercial adoption. If every TV and VCR and cel phone is going to have one of these things in 'em (the BT "grand vision of the future"), I can tell you that in MY 10 meter radius, my home, I'd have easily enough devices to overload the levels that are currently being discussed.
Security needs to be definitively addressed too. The concept of someone camping on my doorstep and using my printer doesn't much appeal to me... ;)
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Within the last week though, finding out that A> the devices don't interoperate properly and B> one of the major players in the game doesn't wanna play any more has made me think otherwise... and it makes me wonder about what's going to happen with all that sticky 'intellectual property' crap the presenter was talking about being all tangled and impossible to discern whose was which. Fuss over that could scuttle things in a heartbeat.
Unless some major positive things happen for BT real soon, I'll be suprised if anything more than a bare few handfuls of peripherals will be made available commercially.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Doh, you're on to me. I better burn all my chicken heads and put the quazits to bed early.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
I even went so far as to run the Amiga emulator on my box so I can get my DM fix from time to time ;) Man, that game was a classic. Sucked back more puter hours than even Elite did.
Bad timing though, now I have another new thing to suck back my nonexistant free time. The wife may not see me for a month!
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
You'd swear those seats were designed to hold munchkins. Or those impossibly thin flight attendants. They look like they could use some bone strengthening to keep them from snapping in two from a strong breeze.
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Fortunately, the overclocking possibilities of the duron/asus combo means that I don't have to stick with 700. Running it at around 850 right now, and with the GeForce it screams through round after round of counter-strike.
Duron + Asus is nicely affordable too. Why pay more when you get more or less comparable FPS performance anyways?
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Read more carefully. I said "Typically". I'm certain there are other companies that DO need tight control over its resources for reasons far more appropriate than simple fear of knocking the network over, or sniffing (as the original article implies).
But yes, there is a large contingent of management who simply suck up vendor sludge simply because it seems to be an easier solution than getting direct input from employees who often have conflicting and varied requirements. Needless to say, that sort of policy is considered somewhere between a "bad joke" and a "faustian nightmare" by the poor plebs in the trenches.
Many IT managers then must not be worth her(or her) salt then. I've seen a great many companies "standardize" on single vendor solutions, and claim that doing so is good business practice. Hark back to your history lessons... noone ever got fired for buying IBM^H^H^HNovell^H^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoft.
In a perfect world, IT services is set up to serve the needs of the people requiring the use of IT. They get a clear picture of what's needed and make every attempt to serve that need within the confines of a well structured and managable environment. In the real world, IT is far more likely to dictate terms than accept requests. People don't like asking permission when they know that thier request will be rejected out of hand by people that fear change... the rejection of which is just a symptom of a larger scale problem of fear and laziness in a company, not typically an "anti-linux" sentiment (although I've seen that in some places too).
I think you're missing the boat with your question. I'm not complaining that Linux is being outlawed... frankly, I don't work in corporate environments any more partially due to myopic management strategies such as this. I'm talking about draconian policies that leave employees feeling powerless if they go through "authorized channels". Perhaps the question should be why don't employees feel they can get their needs met by following policy?
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Hello, anyone with a laptop taken to work on any given day.
The idea of 'keeping prying eyes from seeing the data' and enforcing that idea with draconian IT rules is ludicrous. Anyone who wants to see that data will be able to. If internal security is that big an issue, you've got WAY more problems than if linux is 'sneaking in', and probably need to do retinal identification to enter the workplace as it is. For the vast majority of COMMON workplaces though, it's real hard to enforce security-through-obscurity when people have physical access to the hardware.
Typically, companies with "very very strict rules" are those ones who's upper echelons are so totally in the pocket of some major vendor that they swallow EVERY bit of crap, no matter how outrageous, that is in that vendor's interest. If vendor says "Don't let any other operating systems on your network, it could destroy everything!" many policy makers are too ignorant/lazy/busy to know otherwise, and simply make that law. I'm not aware of any IT department who has a CTO/CIO who knows more about details than his/her subordinates.
Companies with FLEXIBLE arrangements are the ones who demonstrate at least some knowledge in what's going on, and a willingness to pad their bottom line through the optimizations and research (unpaid) of employees... or at least, it's a hallmark of a CTO/CIO who realizes that better answers come from employees than from vendors. True, sometimes these things fall down and go boom, but that sort of thing happens even with the most seasoned professional or group.
Any company living in fear of 'rogue OSes destroying the world' suffers from a lack of robust IS planning and needs an overhaul far more than it needs gestapo policies.
--
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RBOC's website also does appear to be totally browser agnostic (with the caveat mentioned that it has to do HTTPS).
I also use it to import account activities into a format my accountant likes to see, which is hella easier than re-entering statements. =P
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Nice work guys. If you can let me scroll before those long pages are entirely rendered, or at least just display the first screenfull statically, it'd make things even more slick.
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Having run the cycle of burnout, bounceback, stress, repeat many many times and watched my coworkers do the same, I said to hell with it and started working for myself doing remote admin and programming. Now I still burn out, but the cycle usually takes longer, doesn't hit as hard, and I can do it in the luxury of my own environment with all the time-wasting enjoyable minutiae nearby to play with when I do.
--
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I suppose noone would notice the few minutes of round trip time if they starts shooting CPAN on mars... for all we know, they're already out there.
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If you're slimey and green, you're an algae. If you're fuzzy and clingy, you're a lichen. ;)
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Have you wacky yanks been watching CPAN again? ;)
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Maybe iPlanet is all repackaged IIS? ;)
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
Whoop. Make that a mere 2.5 hits a second. Damn rented fingers. ;)
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
The average throughput of traffic runs at around 120mbps, with peak times pushing 180mpbs. The last estimate of hits per day is around 25 million from around 200 thousand visitors. Hits are, of course, predominantly static (static webpage graphic art and the like) but a large contingent is dynamic, using PHP for most of the 'high impact' stuff and C or Perl based CGI for older goodies. Database goodies are handled on thier own machines.
Initial installation did cost a bit, as it was a conversion issue from sites running on single machines going to a unified environment in such a way that service wasn't interrupted. While static information can be served up easily, there was some rewriting involved for the dynamic pages (pushing DB lookups to remote machines, changing things so state data could be accessed from any of the machines in the farm, etc). Sites designed with distributed computing in mind would have none of those issues.
On the average, each machine serves up 1.3-1.5 million hits a day, and the webservers themselves barely break a sweat while running Apache running perhaps 200-250 processes at peak times (the only bottleneck worry is the TB data warehouse serving the machines right now). Thus, an affordable, fault tolerant, high performance arrangement using commodity parts that's reliable enough to let me go on vacation for two weeks or more without monitoring and not have me worrying if everything will be okay when I get back.
I'd suggest that you take any ads by Dell in the spirit they were written in... that of a Microsoft Lap Dog. The idea that even a default Apache install can only serve up 200k hits a day (which translates to a mere 3.5 hits a second!) is ludicrous and deserves scorn and ridicule.
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Basically I was reading on there, followed a link from some article (one of those 'recent news' type boxes they have down the side) and found out that not only does MS want to drag things on forever, but that the DoJ had a hissyfit over it.
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I knew about this monday. ZDNet has a DOJ vs MS website at http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/spec ial /msdojendgame.html that keeps people who just gotta know up to speed.
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Hm. I think I'll start scouting around for some places that can be fixed up right.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
I'd suggest getting your PHBs to read through Mythical Man Month (or give them an executive summary thereof). For what can now be considered an ancient text, it's still pretty damn accurate in a lot of what it says.
For what it's worth, if the concepts this code is meant to address have substantial learning curves, your management may be a little disappointed with the outsourcing results... particularly if the contractees have to harass the on staff coders to get up to speed with background stuff.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)