In all seriousness, any process that is so well understood with an unchanging problem domain should be shoved overseas to keep the outsource companies busy and a high turnover of limited skilled coders believing that all software development is mind-numbingly dull:) __PLEASE__ keep doing this!!! That means when the hot-shot business idiot realizes he missed the call, that the problem domain isn't that easy he'll either get the axe or quit and do the same stupid thing somewhere else. Meanwhile, the time and distance, cultural communication problems and the BLATANT conflict of interest between customer and outsource company (e.g. "Oh yes! we will do that feature right away!" - wow.. that's a horrible idea:) these guys will pay us to re-write it because they're idiots! Whoo-hoo!) will make the solution that's no longer working easy to throw away and re-start with a minimum 50-50 local/offshore team. More job opportunities for people who stick around because outsource partners can't be trusted.
If the project can be speced and doesn't fail and doesn't need to change, great! That means it was a crap problem domain with nothing interesting to work through or solve - let the offshore company developers' eyes bleed with stupid feature changes for the next n years. If it does, it's job security for those of us who have stuck through this outsource stupidity (which is only a short-sighted cost savings move - the IT world equivalent of sinking all your money into credit default swaps).
For the past decade, 100% "cheap" outsourcing has gotten more and more expensive and has proved to be a bad idea for fast moving, competitive, REVENUE GENERATING projects. Failures have lead people to keep some level of local skills to address communication and quality aspects that are vital to success. But here's the fun part: how do you become a competent Senior Software Engineer when increasingly all the entry level positions are available in India and China? You don't:) That means I become a rare commodity as corporate America digs it's own human resource grave.
No matter the physical environment, nothing is an intense and scary as the pressure that mounts above you as you attempt to code on a customer's premises, on production code, trying to find a problem you didn't cause and barely understand, with no connectivity and no source control and no opportunity for QA.
I don't care if this is personal time and you're gripping from the hotel WiFi. That contract brings in a ton of money and we in middle management will keep blaming techies and throwing them under the bus to cover our incompetence. Now get back to work! I've got hookers and blow to attend to:)
The key term here is "web apps". I recognize the MVC pattern has been around for quite some time. It's a question of when they bothered to bless something in web application stack. Also, given the nature of MVP (model-view-presenter) example you cite (User Interface Process Application Block) relying on small state interaction it seems like a complete and total mis-application of the pattern to the domain of web applications. Unfortunatly, I should know: I've worked on a code base that used a home grown MVP framework in Java. It sucked. I hope for the sake of those poor ASP developers they're not touting MVP on the web as a reasonable way to build applications....
Yes I have. And dear dog, do I wish I were lucky enough to have used it professionally. Although it looks like Seaside has been around longer than that the web site says:
Is Seaside free? What license does Seaside use?
As of the Seaside 2.5 (8 January 2004), Seaside has been under the MIT license. This means that you can use it to build commercial apps, royalty free, with no restrictions. Note that, besides Squeak, this also applies to commercial Smalltalks such as Cincom Smalltalk and Dolphin Smalltalk.
So out of sheer luck in speaking in broad generalisims, I'll stick with my 2004 number:)
As a professional developer with a little over a decade of commercial experience, I can assure you that the jobs where you have to write TPS reports, attend constant meetings, write reports about attending meetings, attend meetings about reports, and occasionally meetings about meetings or reports about reports are toxic worthless environments. About 5 years ago now this trendy thing called "Agile" happened to the software development world as a way to put a bullet in crap like this.
One of four things is going on with software companies now 1.) Agile is understood and people will find creative ways to fire anyone who want's to build a Dilbert empire 2.) Agile is being adopted and the toxic environments get transformed into livable ventures as Agile practices get successfully adopted and the toxic people are pushed out, 3.) Agile is subverted by PHBs and the toxic sources kill it's adoption while all the worthwhile people leave it to fester 4.) Agile is ignored/blocked - the environment is already dead AND toxic.
You can fight like hell to get into or stay in company #1, pitch in to help company #2, avoid or flee from company #3, and short sell the stock on company #4. Also, as a programmer, you should be writing code that either makes money or reduces costs in a niche or market that is growing. If the market isn't growing, move on to another domain. If there is no revenue associated with the lines of code you write, go where there is. As a buddy of mine says, "NEVER be part of the cost center - ALWAYS be in the profit center!".
At any rate, if you don't want to write code - no offense, but get the hell out of the way and make room for those of us who do.
There's still the "continuous improvement" problem. Where schools with 98% testing and content standards have no way to improve more and face funding cuts because they haven't shown year over year improvement. How the hell that bit of logic made it in the originally, I'll never understand..
My wife is a HS English teacher in Washington state. If Obama want to seriously help schools, priority 1 should be to put a bullet in Bush's collossal screw up that is "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). It's too flawed to "fix" other than flat out removal. Bush has been too stupid to admit it's a failure and correct it (just like everything else he's done), so this is the only option.
Next, in Washington state there's a bill called the Becca bill that requires the little monsters to be contained by the state in schools up until age 18 because some stupid brat ran away from school and got herself killed. Unfortunately, this also means that kids that would rather quit and go jockey a McRegister between times passing the bong are instead required to stay in school and suck up resources they don't care about. Get rid of this in Washington state (and similar laws in other states) and teachers can look the kids in the eye and tell them to leave and come back when (if) they care about learning something. Then, get back to helping the kids that are going to do something with themselves.
Last but not least, get rid of the stupid state teaching certificates in all 50 flavors. There's a shockingly fantastic National Board Certification (federal gov't too... go figure!) program that uses a peer evaluation system to focus teachers on becoming good teachers IN PRACTICE in their own environment. My wife did this certification and is now contributing to the mentoring portion. Interestingly enough, teachers who can't "reach these keeds" don't cut it in these programs because it requires them to learn, grow, and be self-reflective about how they teach and continue to grow, unlike the the rubber stamp Master's degree (a.k.a "Masters in Ed.") programs that set teachers up for either a check-mark in the "has masters" box and unwarranted pay raise or a future as yet another worthless administrator (and a MUCH greater unwarranted pay raise).
Bottom line, schools need more funding to train and retain good teachers. "Education" has a latin root word "educare" meaning "to bring out". It's not about throwing stuff at kids and hoping it sticks. It's about bringing out the best. You've never needed broadband or computers to do that.
Comments that are wrong or outdated are worse than comments that are missing. Both are crap compared to well written unit tests. I didn't notice anywhere in the article a mention of weather or not this analysis took unit testing into consideration. Perhaps Palamida's VP of Product Marketing should quit telling people to build software like it's 1999 and perhaps rebuild some of the tools they're trying to sell to the public so they check for test coverage. I'll bet open source developers could go out over the next 3 months and start adding:/* Palamida's coverage tools are crap */
To every function and method in C/C++ apps and they could get a glowing reversal on what wonderful improvements have been made to documentation.
I swear. People who think about software like this should be kept away from computers. And perhaps sharp objects for their own good...
I notice you didn't even try to defend the other three points regarding embrace-extend-extinguish, refusal to interoperate, or reluctance to follow US or EU law (as convicted monopolists).
And while we're at it, let's try and go for at least a Fox style "fair and balanced" view of Microsoft: we can start with the patent threats against Linux, move on to Balmer calling Open Source a "cancer", and then dig into all of the stuff that's behind them now like "cutting off Netscape's air supply" and flat out stealing technology from Stac, Inc. back in the DOS days.
Tell you what: we Slashdot drones will clean up and play nice with Microsoft and the warchest in billions of USD worth of ill-gotten monopoly money it has to spread FUD er.. I mean "marketing" as soon as they stop attacking Open Source and Linux to perhaps do a little more of that "cutting off air supply" style behavior. Until then, I say we SlashTrolls simply FUD away for the pure enjoyment and Google cache filling satisfaction of it all in our miserable little lives.
P.S. I hear with all the chairs Balmer is throwing these days in Redmond, that it's starting to get old hat for him. Rumor is, the local humane society is being cleaned out so he can have some puppies and kitten to use as "chair targets". Now that could be all made up FUD, but we're talking Microsoft and Balmer here so... well, you never know...
There are a number of Open Source contributors working for Yahoo and allowed flexibility in the office to contribute back to little things like PHP (Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP is an infrastructure engineer), FreeBSD, Apache, and Perl. I have trouble seeing these individuals wasting time doing a like-to-like conversion from open to proprietary tools and platforms just because there's money waved in front of them. At that point, what Microsoft has purchased is yesterdays tools sans the minds that made them work. Balmer's business blinded rush to "shareholder value" has him pissing in the well of Yahoo's technical culture. I speculate the folks at Google are flooding e-mail and voice mail inboxes to internal and external recruiters and candidates, licking their chops to let Microsoft force top technical talent into their waiting arms.
In the meantime, I guess I need to run a checklist and remember what services to possibly switch over to the Google equivalent of if this goes through. Microsoft can't have my money, and they can't have my eyeballs directly for marketing bucks either.
They're trying to move into content to keep from being marginalized by the carriers as "just another handset vendor". The carriers want to do their own content stuff and Nokia are pissing them off (see the recently launched http://nokia.music.co.uk./ The fact that they want to cheer for DRM is just a reflection of their attempt to switch revenue models.
When you're just selling hardware it's "Go! Go! Do what you want! Just buy our hardware!". When you're selling "content" it's "No! No! Mine! Mine! Pay Me or I'll sue you!"
Guess Nokia thinks that mobile music is "the future" and they'll ride the corpses of the record company catalogs off into the sunset..
Just my $0.07 USD speculation (I'd say two cents, but with the way the dollar is going... well... you know..)
You to can go to India now and be considered "senior" but only if you have "BS degree in computer science with at least 2 years of relevant experience, no more than 4 years experience."
Stuff like that is too priceless to be made up.
Please Indian outsourcers, keep considering people with 2-4 years of experience "senior". It makes the rest of us with real senior experience in the US, UK & Europe who are merely good, look fucking great!
I commend you on your example. All of those thousands of companies out there intending to build software to control expensive hardware to do great things!!! Why when the job market heated up, I was just TIRED of telling 23-legged underwater spider manufacturers quit calling me!!
How about a dose of reality. As technology has become exponentially more complex, business people risking companies on delivering it have become exponentially more stupid. And this one simple line of your statement shows why it's wrong:
Software can be produced in any country, anywhere at all, and the only thing it requires is the competent personnel to execute the project.
Show me company with "competent personnel" managing and directing a business critical software project 100% outsourced and I'll show you a company that is either working with glacial specifications or rolling the dice on total failure. The nature of business changes, requirements change, politics change, and nothing worth a damn is going to get built via "throw it over the wall to an outsourcer". Back in the pre-agile days, this was how the world ran. Stupid things were written down in thick specifications that nobody read, then budget and time ran out while unforeseen forces made whatever might have been stared worthless. With the way people operated, "over the wall" didn't matter if software development was in the next cubicle or on the next continent.
And that's where the critical issue comes in. As I jokingly indicated above, most software developers aren't building hardware/software 23 legged spiders. They're working on some internal project that enhances some other part of the business, or accelerates profitability or efficiency, or has the potential to create a new competitive edge. They're not spending millions on it either. They've got a direction and they're spending thousands over six months here on a new initiative, or a couple hundred thousand over a year on some other new initiative. They need people working WITH them to understand the business domain and leverage technology to build opportunities and MAKE MONEY.
Building software is about communication and change management. Putting 5,000 miles, 9 time zones and the history of human civilizations language and MOST importantly culture differences on top of your standard business risk is retarded. Even companies that want to pinch pennies so the CXO's expense accounts can stay fat aren't rushing off to throw stuff over the wall without identical (no, better) local personel.
That's why the job outlook is what it is for "programmers" vs. "software engineers" and "analysts". Nobody in their right mind is going to be a looser in the principal-agent problem that is outsourcing for any small to medium sized business. Oh, and any large company? What do they do? They set up their own local shop to mind the company interests.
The real problem with this, is that nobody is going to become competent at building software on a large scale until they understand what's happening on a medium and small scale. Corporate America and Europe are sowing the seeds of economic destruction by creating an environment where nobody can be paid to be a beginner or novice in building software when the only job positions open are for lucky intermediates, advanced and experts. My crystal ball prediction? In about 15 years, the US will have great greencard programs for "software engineers" with 5 or more years "programming" experience since US corporate short-sighted greed will have poisoned the well for anyone considering fighting through to find entry level work "programming" to become a "software engineer" here at home...
Your example is an all too classic The problem with applying "business tools" to education. My wife is a high school English teacher. Do you know how well an outlook calendar "maps" onto a class schedule? It doesn't. However, that doesn't stop the all too stupid administration from expecting teachers to use it because it's "a calendaring tool we have already paid for".
The great potential about the OLPC Linux distribution is that only applications relevant to education need be written, packaged, and included. There's no 3rd party trying to tell/sell applications that don't work for education. At least, that's my hope.
In the grad scheme of things, I fear you may be right. Perhaps of the XO Linux distribution includes a PowerPoint knock-off and no math plotting packages it will level the global playing field down to one stupid common denominator...
Before the US becomes a 3rd world country due to competition from India and China who can get the OLPC Laptop in special deals to make their next generation of children more competitive?
You sign a contract, they don't give a crap what the hell you put a SIM in. Just that you pay your bill (and perhaps rack up some overage). In fact, if you didn't buy the phone from them, they have less to deal with if you have hardware problems. T-Mobile has no issues with doing that what so ever.
Give me a break. People are fleeing/blocking/ignoring as best as possible the bulk of advertisements thrown at them. Pundits have been predicting a shake-up in the video game industry for a while now.
Excuse me?!?! Hey kdawson, if you don't like porn or gambling, then don't indulge in them.
On-line or in the real world. If you had paid attention, you would find there is NO
reference in the article to Organized Crime and nowhere does it call anyone or anything "bad".
At best, there's links the site shoved in to other articles regarding cybercrime and the mob. Furthermore, the article passes no judgment in terms of depicting
porn or gambling as bad (it's a business article- they're just forms of business after all).
So the next time you approve an article, how about bothering with at least an accurate assessment?
And lay off the criticism of porn. This is/. after all, it's the only lovin' some of the loyal
readers get..
Employers expect (as professional courtesy) two weeks notice prior to leaving your job. You'll notice that they never extend that courtesy in return when laying people off...
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness, any process that is so well understood with an unchanging problem domain should be shoved overseas to keep the outsource companies busy and a high turnover of limited skilled coders believing that all software development is mind-numbingly dull:) __PLEASE__ keep doing this!!! That means when the hot-shot business idiot realizes he missed the call, that the problem domain isn't that easy he'll either get the axe or quit and do the same stupid thing somewhere else. Meanwhile, the time and distance, cultural communication problems and the BLATANT conflict of interest between customer and outsource company (e.g. "Oh yes! we will do that feature right away!" - wow.. that's a horrible idea:) these guys will pay us to re-write it because they're idiots! Whoo-hoo!) will make the solution that's no longer working easy to throw away and re-start with a minimum 50-50 local/offshore team. More job opportunities for people who stick around because outsource partners can't be trusted.
If the project can be speced and doesn't fail and doesn't need to change, great! That means it was a crap problem domain with nothing interesting to work through or solve - let the offshore company developers' eyes bleed with stupid feature changes for the next n years. If it does, it's job security for those of us who have stuck through this outsource stupidity (which is only a short-sighted cost savings move - the IT world equivalent of sinking all your money into credit default swaps).
For the past decade, 100% "cheap" outsourcing has gotten more and more expensive and has proved to be a bad idea for fast moving, competitive, REVENUE GENERATING projects. Failures have lead people to keep some level of local skills to address communication and quality aspects that are vital to success. But here's the fun part: how do you become a competent Senior Software Engineer when increasingly all the entry level positions are available in India and China? You don't:) That means I become a rare commodity as corporate America digs it's own human resource grave.
Keep digging corporate America... keep digging...
No matter the physical environment, nothing is an intense and scary as the pressure that mounts above you as you attempt to code on a customer's premises, on production code, trying to find a problem you didn't cause and barely understand, with no connectivity and no source control and no opportunity for QA.
I don't care if this is personal time and you're gripping from the hotel WiFi. That contract brings in a ton of money and we in middle management will keep blaming techies and throwing them under the bus to cover our incompetence. Now get back to work! I've got hookers and blow to attend to:)
Sincerely,
--Your boss' boss
The key term here is "web apps". I recognize the MVC pattern has been around for quite some time. It's a question of when they bothered to bless something in web application stack. Also, given the nature of MVP (model-view-presenter) example you cite (User Interface Process Application Block) relying on small state interaction it seems like a complete and total mis-application of the pattern to the domain of web applications. Unfortunatly, I should know: I've worked on a code base that used a home grown MVP framework in Java. It sucked. I hope for the sake of those poor ASP developers they're not touting MVP on the web as a reasonable way to build applications....
2004? Ever heard of smalltalk?
Yes I have. And dear dog, do I wish I were lucky enough to have used it professionally. Although it looks like Seaside has been around longer than that the web site says:
Is Seaside free? What license does Seaside use?
As of the Seaside 2.5 (8 January 2004), Seaside has been under the MIT license. This means that you can use it to build commercial apps, royalty free, with no restrictions. Note that, besides Squeak, this also applies to commercial Smalltalks such as Cincom Smalltalk and Dolphin Smalltalk.
So out of sheer luck in speaking in broad generalisims, I'll stick with my 2004 number:)
Glad to see Microshaft is on the cutting edge of software development practices as usual...
Don't show them all the bad offshore outsourcing news either...
As a professional developer with a little over a decade of commercial experience, I can assure you that the jobs where you have to write TPS reports, attend constant meetings, write reports about attending meetings, attend meetings about reports, and occasionally meetings about meetings or reports about reports are toxic worthless environments. About 5 years ago now this trendy thing called "Agile" happened to the software development world as a way to put a bullet in crap like this.
One of four things is going on with software companies now 1.) Agile is understood and people will find creative ways to fire anyone who want's to build a Dilbert empire 2.) Agile is being adopted and the toxic environments get transformed into livable ventures as Agile practices get successfully adopted and the toxic people are pushed out, 3.) Agile is subverted by PHBs and the toxic sources kill it's adoption while all the worthwhile people leave it to fester 4.) Agile is ignored/blocked - the environment is already dead AND toxic.
You can fight like hell to get into or stay in company #1, pitch in to help company #2, avoid or flee from company #3, and short sell the stock on company #4. Also, as a programmer, you should be writing code that either makes money or reduces costs in a niche or market that is growing. If the market isn't growing, move on to another domain. If there is no revenue associated with the lines of code you write, go where there is. As a buddy of mine says, "NEVER be part of the cost center - ALWAYS be in the profit center!".
At any rate, if you don't want to write code - no offense, but get the hell out of the way and make room for those of us who do.
There's still the "continuous improvement"
problem. Where schools with 98% testing and
content standards have no way to improve more and face funding cuts because they haven't shown year over year improvement. How the hell that bit of logic made it in the originally, I'll never understand..
My wife is a HS English teacher in Washington state. If Obama want to seriously help schools, priority 1 should be to put a bullet in Bush's collossal screw up that is "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). It's too flawed to "fix" other than flat out removal. Bush has been too stupid to admit it's a failure and correct it (just like everything else he's done), so this is the only option.
Next, in Washington state there's a bill called the Becca bill that requires the little monsters to be contained by the state in schools up until age 18 because some stupid brat ran away from school and got herself killed. Unfortunately, this also means that kids that would rather quit and go jockey a McRegister between times passing the bong are instead required to stay in school and suck up resources they don't care about. Get rid of this in Washington state (and similar laws in other states) and teachers can look the kids in the eye and tell them to leave and come back when (if) they care about learning something.
Then, get back to helping the kids that are going to do something with themselves.
Last but not least, get rid of the stupid state teaching certificates in all 50 flavors. There's a shockingly fantastic National Board Certification (federal gov't too... go figure!) program that uses a peer evaluation system to focus teachers on becoming good teachers IN PRACTICE in their own environment. My wife did this certification and is now contributing to the mentoring portion. Interestingly enough, teachers who can't "reach these keeds" don't cut it in these programs because it requires them to learn, grow, and be self-reflective about how they teach and continue to grow, unlike the the rubber stamp Master's degree (a.k.a "Masters in Ed.") programs that set teachers up for either a check-mark in the "has masters" box and unwarranted pay raise or a future as yet another worthless administrator (and a MUCH greater unwarranted pay raise).
Bottom line, schools need more funding to train and retain good teachers. "Education" has a latin root word "educare" meaning "to bring out". It's not about throwing stuff at kids and hoping it sticks. It's about bringing out the best. You've never needed broadband or computers to do that.
...return the money to the shareholders.
Right?
Isn't that what Microsoft executives suggest be done when a company has run out of capable new ideas and is losing market share?
Comments that are wrong or outdated are worse than comments that are missing. Both are crap compared to well written unit tests. I didn't notice anywhere in the article a mention of weather or not this analysis took unit testing into consideration. Perhaps Palamida's VP of Product Marketing should quit telling people to build software like it's 1999 and perhaps rebuild some of the tools they're trying to sell to the public so they check for test coverage. I'll bet open source developers could go out over the next 3 months and start adding: /* Palamida's coverage tools are crap */
To every function and method in C/C++ apps and they could get a glowing reversal on what wonderful improvements have been made to documentation.
I swear. People who think about software like this should be kept away from computers. And perhaps sharp objects for their own good...
I notice you didn't even try to defend the other three points regarding embrace-extend-extinguish, refusal to interoperate, or reluctance to follow US or EU law (as convicted monopolists).
And while we're at it, let's try and go for at least a Fox style "fair and balanced" view of Microsoft: we can start with the patent threats against Linux, move on to Balmer calling Open Source a "cancer", and then dig into all of the stuff that's behind them now like "cutting off Netscape's air supply" and flat out stealing technology from Stac, Inc. back in the DOS days.
Tell you what: we Slashdot drones will clean up and play nice with Microsoft and the warchest in billions of USD worth of ill-gotten monopoly money it has to spread FUD er.. I mean "marketing" as soon as they stop attacking Open Source and Linux to perhaps do a little more of that "cutting off air supply" style behavior. Until then, I say we SlashTrolls simply FUD away for the pure enjoyment and Google cache filling satisfaction of it all in our miserable little lives.
P.S. I hear with all the chairs Balmer is throwing these days in Redmond, that it's starting to get old hat for him.
Rumor is, the local humane society is being cleaned out so he can have some puppies and kitten to use as
"chair targets". Now that could be all made up FUD, but we're talking Microsoft and Balmer here so... well, you never know...
There. I feel better already.
There are a number of Open Source contributors working for Yahoo and allowed flexibility in the office to contribute
back to little things like PHP (Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP is an infrastructure engineer), FreeBSD, Apache, and Perl.
I have trouble seeing these individuals wasting time doing a like-to-like conversion from open to proprietary
tools and platforms just because there's money waved in front of them. At that point, what Microsoft has purchased
is yesterdays tools sans the minds that made them work. Balmer's business blinded rush to "shareholder value"
has him pissing in the well of Yahoo's technical culture. I speculate the folks at Google are flooding e-mail and
voice mail inboxes to internal and external recruiters and candidates, licking their chops to let Microsoft force top
technical talent into their waiting arms.
In the meantime, I guess I need to run a checklist and remember what services to possibly switch over
to the Google equivalent of if this goes through. Microsoft can't have my money, and they can't have my
eyeballs directly for marketing bucks either.
"I tried an OS based on a microkernel and I observed it was decades out of date first hand."
And that was for a COBOL programming class in college 10 years ago while Linux was just
starting to ramp up and kick ass;)
They're trying to move into content to keep from being marginalized by the carriers as "just another handset vendor".
The carriers want to do their own content stuff and Nokia are pissing them off (see the recently launched http://nokia.music.co.uk./
The fact that they want to cheer for DRM is just a reflection of their attempt to switch revenue models.
When you're just selling hardware it's "Go! Go! Do what you want! Just buy our hardware!".
When you're selling "content" it's "No! No! Mine! Mine! Pay Me or I'll sue you!"
Guess Nokia thinks that mobile music is "the future" and they'll ride the corpses of the record company catalogs
off into the sunset..
Just my $0.07 USD speculation (I'd say two cents, but with the way the dollar is going... well... you know..)
Somebody must be astroturfing hard to not rate the parrent comment Insightfull.
Now this comment I'm making, that you should mark as Flamebait;)
http://www.sco.com/company/jobs/
You to can go to India now and be considered "senior" but
only if you have "BS degree in computer science with at least 2
years of relevant experience, no more than 4 years experience."
Stuff like that is too priceless to be made up.
Please Indian outsourcers, keep considering people with 2-4 years
of experience "senior". It makes the rest of us with real
senior experience in the US, UK & Europe who are merely good, look fucking great!
How about a dose of reality. As technology has become exponentially more complex, business people risking companies on delivering it have become exponentially more stupid. And this one simple line of your statement shows why it's wrong:
Software can be produced in any country, anywhere at all, and the only thing it requires is the competent personnel to execute the project.
Show me company with "competent personnel" managing and directing a business critical software project 100% outsourced and I'll show you a company that is either working with glacial specifications or rolling the dice on total failure. The nature of business changes, requirements change, politics change, and nothing worth a damn is going to get built via "throw it over the wall to an outsourcer". Back in the pre-agile days, this was how the world ran. Stupid things were written down in thick specifications that nobody read, then budget and time ran out while unforeseen forces made whatever might have been stared worthless. With the way people operated, "over the wall" didn't matter if software development was in the next cubicle or on the next continent.
And that's where the critical issue comes in. As I jokingly indicated above, most software developers aren't building hardware/software 23 legged spiders. They're working on some internal project that enhances some other part of the business, or accelerates profitability or efficiency, or has the potential to create a new competitive edge. They're not spending millions on it either. They've got a direction and they're spending thousands over six months here on a new initiative, or a couple hundred thousand over a year on some other new initiative. They need people working WITH them to understand the business domain and leverage technology to build opportunities and MAKE MONEY.
Building software is about communication and change management. Putting 5,000 miles, 9 time zones and the history of human civilizations language and MOST importantly culture differences on top of your standard business risk is retarded. Even companies that want to pinch pennies so the CXO's expense accounts can stay fat aren't rushing off to throw stuff over the wall without identical (no, better) local personel.
That's why the job outlook is what it is for "programmers" vs. "software engineers" and "analysts". Nobody in their right mind is going to be a looser in the principal-agent problem that is outsourcing for any small to medium sized business. Oh, and any large company? What do they do? They set up their own local shop to mind the company interests.
The real problem with this, is that nobody is going to become competent at building software on a large scale until they understand what's happening on a medium and small scale. Corporate America and Europe are sowing the seeds of economic destruction by creating an environment where nobody can be paid to be a beginner or novice in building software when the only job positions open are for lucky intermediates, advanced and experts. My crystal ball prediction? In about 15 years, the US will have great greencard programs for "software engineers" with 5 or more years "programming" experience since US corporate short-sighted greed will have poisoned the well for anyone considering fighting through to find entry level work "programming" to become a "software engineer" here at home...
Your example is an all too classic The problem with applying "business tools"
to education. My wife is a high school English teacher. Do you know how well an
outlook calendar "maps" onto a class schedule? It doesn't. However, that doesn't
stop the all too stupid administration from expecting teachers to use it because it's
"a calendaring tool we have already paid for".
The great potential about the OLPC Linux distribution is that only applications
relevant to education need be written, packaged, and included. There's no 3rd party
trying to tell/sell applications that don't work for education. At least, that's
my hope.
In the grad scheme of things, I fear you may be right. Perhaps of the XO Linux
distribution includes a PowerPoint knock-off and no math plotting packages it will level
the global playing field down to one stupid common denominator...
Before the US becomes a 3rd world country due to competition from
India and China who can get the OLPC Laptop in special deals to
make their next generation of children more competitive?
You sign a contract, they don't give a crap what the hell you put a SIM in.
Just that you pay your bill (and perhaps rack up some overage).
In fact, if you didn't buy the phone from them, they have less to deal with
if you have hardware problems. T-Mobile has no issues with doing that
what so ever.
Give me a break. People are fleeing/blocking/ignoring as best as possible the bulk of advertisements
thrown at them. Pundits have been predicting a shake-up in the video game industry for a while now.
Straw? Camel? Back?
We'll see...
Yeah. I'll risk the karma...
Excuse me?!?! Hey kdawson, if you don't like porn or gambling, then don't indulge in them. On-line or in the real world. If you had paid attention, you would find there is NO reference in the article to Organized Crime and nowhere does it call anyone or anything "bad". At best, there's links the site shoved in to other articles regarding cybercrime and the mob. Furthermore, the article passes no judgment in terms of depicting porn or gambling as bad (it's a business article- they're just forms of business after all). So the next time you approve an article, how about bothering with at least an accurate assessment? And lay off the criticism of porn. This is /. after all, it's the only lovin' some of the loyal
readers get..
Employers expect (as professional courtesy) two weeks notice prior to leaving your job.
You'll notice that they never extend that courtesy in return when laying people off...