An Indian journal reporting that Indian outsourcing is good!
The thing that winds me up about India is that it is quite two faced (as a country I mean, this isn't a criticism of any individual Indians). On the one hand, it's happy to take Western high-tech jobs. But on the other hand, it's always after aid and handouts from Western taxpayers. The way I see it, it can be a poor country that gets state aid, or it can be a wealthy country that competes with us, but it can't be both.
India needs to be told once and for all by Western governments, right, you are a high tech country now, you are taking jobs from our taxpayers which proves it, we'll spend our state aid budgets on real poor countries from now on. 'Cos once India needs to start paying for its own vaccination programmes and reading classes, suddenly it'll have to start taxing its own people to pay for it, and the artificial advantage in price will disappear. Then we'll see how well India competes on a level playing field.
Without face to face meetings, projects derail rapidly.
Or even with them. One project I was on, the project manager would ask me every week in a team meeting how development was going. For over 6 weeks I replied "development is stalled until X does Y[1], which I can't do". Now, a competent project manager would have located a resource X and gotten Y from them in the first week, escalating the requirement as necessary 'til it got to someone with the authority to either get X or can the project.
One day the project manager walks in, furious. He's just gotten it in the neck from his manager. He demands to know why no development has been done. 'Course, I'd CC'd his manager on every status update and request for X, they knew I'd done everything required of me, so he was kinda caught between a rock and hard place...
[1] A person with the intricate domain-specific knowledge and experience the software was supposed to encapsulate.
This went on for almost a year before anyone noticed what was going on. When confronted with his actions his response was, "Well I put in a request for more disk space, but never heard back about it."
He did the right thing. Presumably, his job was to keep the system up and running, no matter what. He asked for the resources necessary to do his job, his manager didn't respond, so he did his best.
It's like blaming a DBA with no budget for tapes for not taking backups of the database. We're good, but we can't spontaneously create matter from nothing...
Corporations are accountable only to their shareholders...a handful of wealthy men who care little or or nothing for the welfare of the rest of us.
Sorry, but you are smoking crack. Go to any stock research website and you will find that the biggest shareholders in the world are pension funds and mutual funds, which manage the money of the ordinary "man in the street". There is a term for them, "institutional investors". Who owns American corporations? By and large, 401(K) holders. Who owns British corporations? Those with ISAs and with-profits policies (i.e. pensions and insurance). The same is true in almost every developed country. The idea that a few wealthy shareholders own the world is pure tinfoil-hat conspiracy nonsense.
So, what you're saying is that you want Libya, Syria, Iran and North Korea to have a vote on what you can and can't download onto your own computer? 'Cos, y'know, Libya and Syria, despite both having an appalling record on human rights, were appointed to the UN's Human Rights committee, responsible for monitoring other nations. The UN stands for consensus - but doesn't care about anything else save consensus. Nations like the US and UK get it wrong sometimes but are also willing to ignore consensus in order to do what's right.
Bill Thompson is a regular at this one - check some of his previous missives to get a good grasp of his general tone.
Oh yeah, he's a prize idiot. His position is, basically, "governments should keep their hands off everything I do, and regulate everything that I'm not interested in anyway" and also "all corporations are evil, except the ones that make toys I like". I remember he also wrote an article calling on programmers to more more "professional", with his picture in the article, long unbrushed hair, unshaved, in a stained t-shirt with a stupid leer on his face. Bill Thompson, unrelated I'm sure to our Ken Thompson, is nonetheless an embarassment to the name. Still, he's typical of the quality of recent BBC "journalism".
Why would the government give a $683M break to AMD to get 1000 jobs?
The EU recently decided that it was illegal for local governments to subsidise private companies to do business in their region. Could be that AMD haven't quite thought this through...
Consulting work is for people who know what they're doing, not a beginners market.
Not true at all. Companies like Accenture, EDS, Perot Systems and IBM Global Services hire boatloads of fresh graduates with zero experience, run them through a few weeks of "boot camp" then bill them out at $200/hour. Consulting absolutely is for beginners looking to get their first job. After 5 years of that, maybe you can get an "experienced hire" job.
wish to develop their own indigenous computer technologies industries instead of simply buying it from us and possibly subjecting themselves to this sort of intergovernmental terrorism
You might have a point if the Soviets had actually bought the technology instead of just stealing it. They stole it, they didn't bother to test it or audit it or even understand it.
It'a amazing what the haters of the West will say to make everything bad in the world the West's fault.
he's at the whimsy of both the users and Microsoft as to which.Net runtime his software actually gets dynamically linked to
Well, that only means that.NET is no worse than Java. I don't think it's a big deal. And.NET is smarter about library versioning than JVMs are, which can only do it by manual monkeying with environment variables.
And Computer Science does kill people. Have you ever read the Risks digest? There are hundreds examples there.
The people writing safety-critical code are most likely CEng (PE in the US) which requires a 4-year degree and 4 years of experience. It's the same qualification you'd need to design bridges and the like. It's at least as hard to become a professional engineer as it is to become a doctor, except a doctor will get better pay, higher prestige and more chicks.
In many IT jobs you are old at 40, both because you can't keep up with all the new technology that comes along and because you are less creative at the problem solving that is at the core of many IT jobs.
In every other skilled field - medicine, law, architecture, RF engineering, management, etc etc - you are just about to start being taken seriously at 40. This "old people cannot be creative" line is bullshit. What you mean to say is that 40-year-olds can't be taken in by tech hype, the latest buzzwords - they've seen it all before. Hell, I'm well under 40, and even I can smell that XML is just that old EDI bullshit warmed up and given a shiny lick of paint. (If you instinctively thought then "XML is not bullshit!" then I'm sorry my friend, you are just naive). The drive to get the old-timers out is at least partially driven by vendors who want to get inexperienced people in who can't call them on their hype.
I make WAY MORE than $60/hr for actual programming. Of course I don't get paid at all for sitting at my desk reading Slashdot... it all balances out:-)
And that will protect you from things like this how?
Microsoft's advice makes perfect sense. If you want to visit your bank's web site, type in the URL, don't just blindly click a link in an email that tells you to.
Also, I'm concerned that I would only qualify for an entry-level position if I took an engineering job. Anyone have thoughts/suggestions?
My thoughts are that a fresh graduate is by definition only qualified for an entry-level position in their particular discipline. Gone are the days of 23-year-olds with ridiculous titles like "senior engineer". In the real world, you gotta pay your dues.
The real question is, why are you migrating your hardware? Is it because you want to save some money on infrastructure in the short term? Is it because you're thinking long-term and are worried about the viability of the Sun platform? Is it because performance and/or reliability aren't good enough with your present system? Is it because your company has been acquired and your new owners are in bed with IBM? Or is it because Linux is the buzzword of the day and your boss insists you use it? Forgive my nosiness, but they question you are asking isn't really a tech question that has a straightforward answer. What is the outcome you are looking for? A wise engineer chooses his tools according to the job at hand, not the other way round.
Figure out what you want to accomplish, then figure out what you need to do that. It's easy enough to try all three and see...
Bush himself paints in interviews (with pride it seems) is a guy who has his whole life only found time for sports
Well, duh, of course he does. That's 'cos he's after the votes of people who're like that! Clinton chased the votes of East and West coast Liberals, Bush chases the votes of Midwest Conservatives. If you can't see a facade for what it is, maybe you're the one who can't keep up...
is every reason that our President should read the newspaper every single day -- better yet, several newspapers... better still, several from the U.S. and several from Europe.
Umm, dude, if we're talking broadsheets like The Times (I mean the real Times, of London, not the NYT wannabes), and we're talking several papers, then the President would be doing pretty much nothing all day but read newspapers!
The staff can frame news, issues, and questions in ways that guarantee particular outcomes from the decision-maker. That puts the staff, not the decision-maker, in charge
Well, assuming that all the staff agree. Bush gets opposite viewpoints from say Powell and Rumsfeld, then makes his decision. It's not like all the President's staff are in collusion, they argue with each other quite publicly.
You can be pro-Bush or anti-Bush, but that's hardcore ignorance, especially for a president. I don't think there's much of anything funny about it.
Oh please. He has a country to run, possibly the most complex organization that ever existed. Keeping up with the news himself is a collossally bad use of his time - he has a staff to provide summaries, and he makes decisions based on those summaries. It's the same with CEOs, they are responsible for the company, but do they sign off every purchase for paperclips themselves? Do you think a General worries about the state of the paint on each and every tank? No, at the top, the job is to concentrate on the "big picture", to set policy and to delegate as much as possible.
The relative cost of labor overseas has very little to do with currency exchange rates. It's all to do with the cost of living, and the expected standard of living in the area.
Well, yes and no. It depends if you think of currency as an entity in and of itself, or whether you think of it as a commodity that facilitates exchange.
If you convert a dollar to a quantity of a given commodity, then in India convert that quantity of commodity in a rupees, then you have the true exchange rate.
The dollar, even now, is artificially strong, because there is strong demand for dollars to facilitate the oil trade. Oil is priced and traded in dollars (for now). If it wasn't for this, there's no reason that the dollar and the rupee couldn't get a lot closer. Same with the dollar and the yuan. As another poster mentioned, the Chinese government won't allow that to happen because their economy would collapse if the yuan was allowed to reach its real value.
So, exchange rates don't tell the whole story - but they are a major factor.
If anyone has anything new and interesting to do in the future, there's a good chance they'll start with Linux as a base -- they won't go off and write something new from scratch.
Why do you say that? Linux is based on many of the same assumptions Unix is, and Unix isn't where the research is being done. That is what Tannenbaum meant when he said Torvalds would fail his course - Linux is a reimplementation of Unix, not a new OS in its own right. Take Plan 9 from Bell Labs as an example - it's not a Unix variant like Linux, Solaris, AIX etc, it's completely different.
The fact is, if you need an OS that has been matured over 30 years, Unix isn't a bad choice, but if you have something new and interesting to try, then you are better off starting from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
An Indian journal reporting that Indian outsourcing is good!
The thing that winds me up about India is that it is quite two faced (as a country I mean, this isn't a criticism of any individual Indians). On the one hand, it's happy to take Western high-tech jobs. But on the other hand, it's always after aid and handouts from Western taxpayers. The way I see it, it can be a poor country that gets state aid, or it can be a wealthy country that competes with us, but it can't be both.
India needs to be told once and for all by Western governments, right, you are a high tech country now, you are taking jobs from our taxpayers which proves it, we'll spend our state aid budgets on real poor countries from now on. 'Cos once India needs to start paying for its own vaccination programmes and reading classes, suddenly it'll have to start taxing its own people to pay for it, and the artificial advantage in price will disappear. Then we'll see how well India competes on a level playing field.
Without face to face meetings, projects derail rapidly.
Or even with them. One project I was on, the project manager would ask me every week in a team meeting how development was going. For over 6 weeks I replied "development is stalled until X does Y[1], which I can't do". Now, a competent project manager would have located a resource X and gotten Y from them in the first week, escalating the requirement as necessary 'til it got to someone with the authority to either get X or can the project.
One day the project manager walks in, furious. He's just gotten it in the neck from his manager. He demands to know why no development has been done. 'Course, I'd CC'd his manager on every status update and request for X, they knew I'd done everything required of me, so he was kinda caught between a rock and hard place...
[1] A person with the intricate domain-specific knowledge and experience the software was supposed to encapsulate.
This went on for almost a year before anyone noticed what was going on. When confronted with his actions his response was, "Well I put in a request for more disk space, but never heard back about it."
He did the right thing. Presumably, his job was to keep the system up and running, no matter what. He asked for the resources necessary to do his job, his manager didn't respond, so he did his best.
It's like blaming a DBA with no budget for tapes for not taking backups of the database. We're good, but we can't spontaneously create matter from nothing...
always ask the person calling it if I really need to go
How peculier. I always ask if there will be donuts...
Corporations are accountable only to their shareholders...a handful of wealthy men who care little or or nothing for the welfare of the rest of us.
Sorry, but you are smoking crack. Go to any stock research website and you will find that the biggest shareholders in the world are pension funds and mutual funds, which manage the money of the ordinary "man in the street". There is a term for them, "institutional investors". Who owns American corporations? By and large, 401(K) holders. Who owns British corporations? Those with ISAs and with-profits policies (i.e. pensions and insurance). The same is true in almost every developed country. The idea that a few wealthy shareholders own the world is pure tinfoil-hat conspiracy nonsense.
If it were up to me, i'd give it to a UN body.
So, what you're saying is that you want Libya, Syria, Iran and North Korea to have a vote on what you can and can't download onto your own computer? 'Cos, y'know, Libya and Syria, despite both having an appalling record on human rights, were appointed to the UN's Human Rights committee, responsible for monitoring other nations. The UN stands for consensus - but doesn't care about anything else save consensus. Nations like the US and UK get it wrong sometimes but are also willing to ignore consensus in order to do what's right.
So much for freedom of, well, anything.
Bill Thompson is a regular at this one - check some of his previous missives to get a good grasp of his general tone.
Oh yeah, he's a prize idiot. His position is, basically, "governments should keep their hands off everything I do, and regulate everything that I'm not interested in anyway" and also "all corporations are evil, except the ones that make toys I like". I remember he also wrote an article calling on programmers to more more "professional", with his picture in the article, long unbrushed hair, unshaved, in a stained t-shirt with a stupid leer on his face. Bill Thompson, unrelated I'm sure to our Ken Thompson, is nonetheless an embarassment to the name. Still, he's typical of the quality of recent BBC "journalism".
Why would the government give a $683M break to AMD to get 1000 jobs?
The EU recently decided that it was illegal for local governments to subsidise private companies to do business in their region. Could be that AMD haven't quite thought this through...
Consulting work is for people who know what they're doing, not a beginners market.
Not true at all. Companies like Accenture, EDS, Perot Systems and IBM Global Services hire boatloads of fresh graduates with zero experience, run them through a few weeks of "boot camp" then bill them out at $200/hour. Consulting absolutely is for beginners looking to get their first job. After 5 years of that, maybe you can get an "experienced hire" job.
Will they be benchmarking database performance, GCC compiling speed, I took at look at the methodology page and it wasn't particularly specific.
It's OSNews... they'll be "benchmarking" how quickly you can change the default colour scheme of the desktop.
wish to develop their own indigenous computer technologies industries instead of simply buying it from us and possibly subjecting themselves to this sort of intergovernmental terrorism
You might have a point if the Soviets had actually bought the technology instead of just stealing it. They stole it, they didn't bother to test it or audit it or even understand it.
It'a amazing what the haters of the West will say to make everything bad in the world the West's fault.
he's at the whimsy of both the users and Microsoft as to which .Net runtime his software actually gets dynamically linked to
.NET is no worse than Java. I don't think it's a big deal. And .NET is smarter about library versioning than JVMs are, which can only do it by manual monkeying with environment variables.
Well, that only means that
And Computer Science does kill people. Have you ever read the Risks digest? There are hundreds examples there.
The people writing safety-critical code are most likely CEng (PE in the US) which requires a 4-year degree and 4 years of experience. It's the same qualification you'd need to design bridges and the like. It's at least as hard to become a professional engineer as it is to become a doctor, except a doctor will get better pay, higher prestige and more chicks.
In many IT jobs you are old at 40, both because you can't keep up with all the new technology that comes along and because you are less creative at the problem solving that is at the core of many IT jobs.
In every other skilled field - medicine, law, architecture, RF engineering, management, etc etc - you are just about to start being taken seriously at 40. This "old people cannot be creative" line is bullshit. What you mean to say is that 40-year-olds can't be taken in by tech hype, the latest buzzwords - they've seen it all before. Hell, I'm well under 40, and even I can smell that XML is just that old EDI bullshit warmed up and given a shiny lick of paint. (If you instinctively thought then "XML is not bullshit!" then I'm sorry my friend, you are just naive). The drive to get the old-timers out is at least partially driven by vendors who want to get inexperienced people in who can't call them on their hype.
$60/hr sounds about right.
:-)
I make WAY MORE than $60/hr for actual programming. Of course I don't get paid at all for sitting at my desk reading Slashdot... it all balances out
Install Linux.
And that will protect you from things like this how?
Microsoft's advice makes perfect sense. If you want to visit your bank's web site, type in the URL, don't just blindly click a link in an email that tells you to.
Also, I'm concerned that I would only qualify for an entry-level position if I took an engineering job. Anyone have thoughts/suggestions?
My thoughts are that a fresh graduate is by definition only qualified for an entry-level position in their particular discipline. Gone are the days of 23-year-olds with ridiculous titles like "senior engineer". In the real world, you gotta pay your dues.
The real question is, why are you migrating your hardware? Is it because you want to save some money on infrastructure in the short term? Is it because you're thinking long-term and are worried about the viability of the Sun platform? Is it because performance and/or reliability aren't good enough with your present system? Is it because your company has been acquired and your new owners are in bed with IBM? Or is it because Linux is the buzzword of the day and your boss insists you use it? Forgive my nosiness, but they question you are asking isn't really a tech question that has a straightforward answer. What is the outcome you are looking for? A wise engineer chooses his tools according to the job at hand, not the other way round.
Figure out what you want to accomplish, then figure out what you need to do that. It's easy enough to try all three and see...
Bush himself paints in interviews (with pride it seems) is a guy who has his whole life only found time for sports
Well, duh, of course he does. That's 'cos he's after the votes of people who're like that! Clinton chased the votes of East and West coast Liberals, Bush chases the votes of Midwest Conservatives. If you can't see a facade for what it is, maybe you're the one who can't keep up...
is every reason that our President should read the newspaper every single day -- better yet, several newspapers... better still, several from the U.S. and several from Europe.
Umm, dude, if we're talking broadsheets like The Times (I mean the real Times, of London, not the NYT wannabes), and we're talking several papers, then the President would be doing pretty much nothing all day but read newspapers!
The staff can frame news, issues, and questions in ways that guarantee particular outcomes from the decision-maker. That puts the staff, not the decision-maker, in charge
Well, assuming that all the staff agree. Bush gets opposite viewpoints from say Powell and Rumsfeld, then makes his decision. It's not like all the President's staff are in collusion, they argue with each other quite publicly.
You can be pro-Bush or anti-Bush, but that's hardcore ignorance, especially for a president. I don't think there's much of anything funny about it.
Oh please. He has a country to run, possibly the most complex organization that ever existed. Keeping up with the news himself is a collossally bad use of his time - he has a staff to provide summaries, and he makes decisions based on those summaries. It's the same with CEOs, they are responsible for the company, but do they sign off every purchase for paperclips themselves? Do you think a General worries about the state of the paint on each and every tank? No, at the top, the job is to concentrate on the "big picture", to set policy and to delegate as much as possible.
The relative cost of labor overseas has very little to do with currency exchange rates. It's all to do with the cost of living, and the expected standard of living in the area.
Well, yes and no. It depends if you think of currency as an entity in and of itself, or whether you think of it as a commodity that facilitates exchange.
If you convert a dollar to a quantity of a given commodity, then in India convert that quantity of commodity in a rupees, then you have the true exchange rate.
The dollar, even now, is artificially strong, because there is strong demand for dollars to facilitate the oil trade. Oil is priced and traded in dollars (for now). If it wasn't for this, there's no reason that the dollar and the rupee couldn't get a lot closer. Same with the dollar and the yuan. As another poster mentioned, the Chinese government won't allow that to happen because their economy would collapse if the yuan was allowed to reach its real value.
So, exchange rates don't tell the whole story - but they are a major factor.
If anyone has anything new and interesting to do in the future, there's a good chance they'll start with Linux as a base -- they won't go off and write something new from scratch.
Why do you say that? Linux is based on many of the same assumptions Unix is, and Unix isn't where the research is being done. That is what Tannenbaum meant when he said Torvalds would fail his course - Linux is a reimplementation of Unix, not a new OS in its own right. Take Plan 9 from Bell Labs as an example - it's not a Unix variant like Linux, Solaris, AIX etc, it's completely different.
The fact is, if you need an OS that has been matured over 30 years, Unix isn't a bad choice, but if you have something new and interesting to try, then you are better off starting from scratch.
You're forgetting the cost of compensating ex-executives who are now the president's administration
Let's not talk about the Clintons and their legal bills, shall we?