Here's the funny thing about the accent issue: call centers have been outsourcing to India for years. Aside from saving money, 24-7 operations find it useful to have a call center where the time's half a day ahead of the U.S.
So why don't you hear a lot of people complaining that their airline or credit card company customer reps can't talk good American? Because there are plenty of well-educated Indians who speak fluent western English. All they need is a little practice on their idioms and pronunciation, and you can't tell them from a native of Duluth. Not over the phone anyway.
So it's perfectly possible to run an operation out of Bangalore or Dehli without communication problems. And yet you hear all these horror stories. I have a few myself: I subscribe to techwr-l, and we often get lame questions from Indian writers, usually basic grammatical stuff even a American 4th grader or a Slashdot editor would know.
My inference is that the companies driving the offshoring trend aren't satisified with the pay differential between San Jose and Bangalore. So they don't hire people with degrees from India's universities or engineering schools. (Which produce a lot of good people -- I've worked with some of them.) They hire folks whose educational achievements culminated in one of those "learn programming in 2 weeks" schools. Their English is hard to follow, not because of their accents, but because its one of the highly-localized English dialects that Indians use amongst themselves.
Here's another horror story. If you're a tech writer in the San Francisco Bay area, you've noticed a lot of headhunters trying to fill a very strange job in San Ramon. What's in San Ramon? A bunch of engineering outfits that decided that rents in Silicon Valley were too high -- never mind a limited local talent pool, if people want to keep their jobs, they'll commute or move. One of these outfits is the development arm of what used to be Pacific Bell, now a nameless subsidiary of SBC.
You need massive databases to run an RBOC, and this one has fallen way behind on database development. People complain of billing errors and outdated listings. There's a hair salon in San Rafael that can't get SBC to put its Yellow Pages listing in the proper category -- for two years running it's been listed under "Massage". Which sounds funny, until you consider the kind of lowlifes who respond to a massage ad for "Curl Up With Kelly".
So these guys in San Ramon are scrambling to update the software. They need a tech writer who can document their work. Said writer needs to be able to read source code in half a dozen languages, including the venerable Revelation
Basic. Oh yes, and the writer has to work for $25/hour.
Well, I have the skills and I need the work. But that's hardly a reasonable wage, especially considering the two-hour commute. (It's a short term contract, so relocation is not practical.) I'd be better off working at the Starbucks down the street.
When I pointed out the absurdity of offering entry-level pay for a job requiring advanced skills, I was told that all the costs were measured against the alternative of moving the whole operation to India. Which is total nonsense. I'm sure there are plenty of Indian operations that could engineer a fancy database from scratch, and do a good job very cheaply. But SBC doesn't even want to spend that much money. They want to continue hacking 20-year-old code running on legacy platforms. Do they think that India is swarming with experts on the PICK database system?
The whole offshoring thing is just the latest development in a nasty long-term trend. Even before the dotcom bubble burst, Wall Street was dominated more and more by numbers dweebs, people who have no understanding of the industries and businesses they're investing in, and have an idiotic obssession with the bottom line. They hate costs more than anything. Even if you're turning a
Slashdot seems to be mentioning a lot of projects specifically designed to provoke, "But what's the point?" comments. This one has to top the list. First you write a very silly, pointless text-mode game. Then you port it to every platform imaginable -- culminating in Dreamcast, a platform designed for games that are just a little more, uhm, graphic intensive.
Not that I'm sneering. I tried to run RFK on my XP box (my DreamCast is in storage), but the console mode doesn't approve of the DOS version. Had to fire up DOSBox 0.60. Not acceptable! Somebody has to do an NT port! Guess I'm elected...
Well, they also used to have an excellent reputation for high-quality inkjets, a technology they (literally) invented. Which has been spoiled by such stinkers as the 3320.
Current HP management thinks that "reputation" is just another word for "good branding".
Yeah, HP makes better printer hardware than anybody. Alas, their software people are total idiots. I've had printer features stop working because driver updates were issued with an incorrect feature/model table. And if you make the slightest mistake installing a driver (and maybe even if you don't) you end up with some weird version localized for Croation-speaking Fijians.
Some printers now sold under the HP brand started life as Compaq crap.
Actually, the Gopher people tried to cash in on their invention -- which wasn't that different from Sir Tim's work, though much less elegant. I seem to recall reading that licensing issues with Gopher had a lot to do with the Web's invention and sudden growth.
You lose some information when encoding to MP3, but that information you lose may not be important.
But how do you know whether important information has been lost? You'd need a pretty thorough understanding of the theory behind the MP3 algorithm to know that. Which might well lead to a variation that can safely compress a data stream -- but that's an exercise in advanced computer science, not casual hardware hacking.
How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?
Jeesh, next you'll be saying, "More people were killed in Ted Kenedy's car than in nuclear accidents!" Which is neither true nor relevent, but sounds appealing, especially if you're into liberal bashing, the sport of idiots.
People love to reduce environmental issues to simple all-or-nothing choices. If you're a die-hard ecofreak, no environmental problem of any scale is ever tolerable. If you're a my-industry-right-or-wrong type, you never accept that anything you do has environmental consequences. There's actually a kind of symbiotic relationship between these two extremes; each extreme answers all criticism by equating it with the other extreme.
Let's approach this like grownups. Yes, wind turbines probably kill fewer birds than air pollution. But then again, wind turbines don't generate nearly as much electricity as fossil fuel plants. Does somebody have some figures on dead birds per kilowatt hour? On species endangered versus consumers served? That's what we need to talk about, not these stupid cliches.
...interviews were spent defending their past employment.
If you feel a need to defend the indefensible, small wonder nobody wants to hire you.
Anybody who followed the Enron debacle knows that the average employees of the company did not benefit from the criminal activity that brought Enron down. Indeed, they were as badly screwed as anybody, due to 401K ripoffs, nonrefundable childcare fees, etc. But if somebody still subscribes to the mindless groupthink that made this larceny possible, you have to wonder where their head's at. Loyalty is all very well, but there comes a point when you have to acknowledge your mistakes.
Sure, nobody's going to use Konqueror on X. Never mind Mozilla, the default OS X browser is based on Konqueror code! And I don't think KOffice will ever catch on, even among most KDE users.
It's just an interesting hack. That's what hackers do. A few months ago we had a story on a guy who built a CPU out of discrete components. Why bother, when you can buy a CPU that's 100 times as powerful for a few bucks? Because it's interesting, and challenging, and you learn stuff. The fact that nobody will use it is neither here nor there.
You think Zork was the first place anybody said "This Page Intentionally Left Blank"? But then I guess you're not old enough to remember when computer manuals came in three-ring binders. Revisions were distributed as a set of replacement pages. Adding new material usually resulted in a lot of blank pages, which had to be labeled so you'd know there wasn't something missing.
There are also server-side XForms modules that render XForms as HTML forms. For example, Apache project lists JXForms.
Which is probably what everyone will end up using. Hell will freeze over before Microsoft or Netscape get around to implementing existing W3C specs, never mind emerging ones.
I often wonder what the W3C people are thinking. I love all the interesting features that appear in things like CSS3. But what's the point if nobody implements them? Some of their effort should be going to lobbying the vendors and/or creating reference implementations.
So you don't get a wireless card. The only reason to have one is so you don't have to buy a wireless router. But wireless routers are extremely cheap, so why bother? The only job for the PC is to filter packets.
The minute you mention 'money' many get amnesia and offer themselves excuses not to dish out a dime.
True, but there's always a lot of people who are quick to reach into their pockets if asked. Whenever I browse a web site that turns out to be really useful or interesting, and I spot a tip-jar link, I'm good for a few bucks. (Or at least I was when I was employed.) I'm always going to Wikipedia -- you can't really avoid them, not if you use Google at all. But I never contributed, because their "donate" link is small and easy to overlook on those messy pages. Plus it leads to a poorly-maintained click-to-pay page that's hardly encouraging to would-be donors.
I certainly encourage folks to donate, and I would myself if I had any cash at all. A small but eye-catching graphic and a properly maintained donation page would make a lot of difference. They'll probably get all the money they need for this crisis just from Slashdotters. (I mean $20K divided by 100K Slashdot readers, even allowing for a 90% apathy factor...) But I hope they'll put a stronger fundraising strategy in place for the long term.
Well, the only thing people use modems for nowadays is to access the Internet. And even there, a modem's your last choice, provided faster networking is available and within your budget.
I am suprised to hear that people are actually using faxmodems for faxes. I myself much prefer not to have a separate fax machine, but until recently that meant dealing with really awful fax software. Also, people seem to resist the idea of folding fax functions into related devices. I've never worked in office that didn't have dedicated fax machines, even when alternatives were readily available.
Somehow computers actually seem to promote the use faxes, rather than replacing them. For example, law firms often need to send copies of documents (proof that they've been signed, etc.). Faxes are the most common method (provided the document isn't too sensitive, since faxes are easily intercepted). Now, one law firm I know of has gone to using email attachments instead. But the firm's scanners aren't easily accessible or easy to use. Solution: send your secretary to reliable old fax machine and have her send the document to your voice mail phone number. The voice mail system automatically converts the fax to an email attachment, which it sends to the recipient. Who then forward the attachment to the recipient.
That's why the fax continues to be used: it's familiar, intuitive technology. Actually, that's the reason it even exists. When cheap fax machines started to appear in the 80s, a lot of us didn't take them seriously -- we purely digital media as the wave of the future. What we didn't take into account was the severe difficult of converting all those legacy print documents into some easily manipulated online. Tools for creating online documents have improved a lot since then, but they still don't tackle a lot of basic problems, and many (Word, Acrobat) are still biased towards creating hard copy.
Why does the press always uncritically report that DeCSS "cracks DVD copy protection codes"?
Because journalists like to communicate in compact, memorable little catch phrases. The resulting prose is often misleading or one-sided, of course.
But then again, aren't you doing something similar? The phrase "cracks DVD copy protection codes" doesn't actually appear anywhere in the article. What it actually says is: "...[Johansen] helped crack DVD copy protection codes in 1999 and then publicized how he did it." Which is completely true, even if the phrasing is unfortunate. ("Reverse-engineered" is more accurate and less nasty than "cracked", but not a term you use in general-audience journalism.) If you stopped reading there you might think the reporter wasn't interested in a balanced report, but if you read down, you get "He became an instant hero to those who finally could watch DVD films on their computers instead of being forced to buy expensive DVD players..." Grossly oversimplified, by hardly an uncritical acceptance of the RIAA party line.
First it's amazing that publishers are allowing such a thing.
It would be amazing if publishered allowed web users to read the content online. But they don't. You can only search it.
The Google Print FAQ has some vague prose about "experimenting with online content", but no specifics beyond this little search experiment. Which just duplicates a similar feature at Amazon. Bringing the Google search engine to bear isn't that big a deal -- what use is page ranking when nobody can directly link the pages?
It's significant that the main Google Print page just has an "Intentionally Left Blank" message. Obviously this project wasn't meant to go public yet. Apparently Google wants to integrate all this legacy content with the web, but for once they're totally out of their depth. It's pretty naive to not account for the total aversion of media companies to any electronic distribution of their content.
Slashdot Mirror
So why don't you hear a lot of people complaining that their airline or credit card company customer reps can't talk good American? Because there are plenty of well-educated Indians who speak fluent western English. All they need is a little practice on their idioms and pronunciation, and you can't tell them from a native of Duluth. Not over the phone anyway.
So it's perfectly possible to run an operation out of Bangalore or Dehli without communication problems. And yet you hear all these horror stories. I have a few myself: I subscribe to techwr-l, and we often get lame questions from Indian writers, usually basic grammatical stuff even a American 4th grader or a Slashdot editor would know.
My inference is that the companies driving the offshoring trend aren't satisified with the pay differential between San Jose and Bangalore. So they don't hire people with degrees from India's universities or engineering schools. (Which produce a lot of good people -- I've worked with some of them.) They hire folks whose educational achievements culminated in one of those "learn programming in 2 weeks" schools. Their English is hard to follow, not because of their accents, but because its one of the highly-localized English dialects that Indians use amongst themselves.
Here's another horror story. If you're a tech writer in the San Francisco Bay area, you've noticed a lot of headhunters trying to fill a very strange job in San Ramon. What's in San Ramon? A bunch of engineering outfits that decided that rents in Silicon Valley were too high -- never mind a limited local talent pool, if people want to keep their jobs, they'll commute or move. One of these outfits is the development arm of what used to be Pacific Bell, now a nameless subsidiary of SBC.
You need massive databases to run an RBOC, and this one has fallen way behind on database development. People complain of billing errors and outdated listings. There's a hair salon in San Rafael that can't get SBC to put its Yellow Pages listing in the proper category -- for two years running it's been listed under "Massage". Which sounds funny, until you consider the kind of lowlifes who respond to a massage ad for "Curl Up With Kelly".
So these guys in San Ramon are scrambling to update the software. They need a tech writer who can document their work. Said writer needs to be able to read source code in half a dozen languages, including the venerable Revelation Basic. Oh yes, and the writer has to work for $25/hour.
Well, I have the skills and I need the work. But that's hardly a reasonable wage, especially considering the two-hour commute. (It's a short term contract, so relocation is not practical.) I'd be better off working at the Starbucks down the street.
When I pointed out the absurdity of offering entry-level pay for a job requiring advanced skills, I was told that all the costs were measured against the alternative of moving the whole operation to India. Which is total nonsense. I'm sure there are plenty of Indian operations that could engineer a fancy database from scratch, and do a good job very cheaply. But SBC doesn't even want to spend that much money. They want to continue hacking 20-year-old code running on legacy platforms. Do they think that India is swarming with experts on the PICK database system?
The whole offshoring thing is just the latest development in a nasty long-term trend. Even before the dotcom bubble burst, Wall Street was dominated more and more by numbers dweebs, people who have no understanding of the industries and businesses they're investing in, and have an idiotic obssession with the bottom line. They hate costs more than anything. Even if you're turning a
Not that I'm sneering. I tried to run RFK on my XP box (my DreamCast is in storage), but the console mode doesn't approve of the DOS version. Had to fire up DOSBox 0.60. Not acceptable! Somebody has to do an NT port! Guess I'm elected...
Current HP management thinks that "reputation" is just another word for "good branding".
No need for the graphic. I know a total asshole when I see one!
What do you mean "offtopic"? You ever play "shade"?
But did you know that I knew that... oh, never mind.
WTF are those tickets????
It's not for anything. It's a cool hack. Why doesn't anybody on Slashdot appreciate these anymore?
I know that you know. Jeez. ;)
If he's a knight, does he have to fight dragons?
People love to reduce environmental issues to simple all-or-nothing choices. If you're a die-hard ecofreak, no environmental problem of any scale is ever tolerable. If you're a my-industry-right-or-wrong type, you never accept that anything you do has environmental consequences. There's actually a kind of symbiotic relationship between these two extremes; each extreme answers all criticism by equating it with the other extreme.
Let's approach this like grownups. Yes, wind turbines probably kill fewer birds than air pollution. But then again, wind turbines don't generate nearly as much electricity as fossil fuel plants. Does somebody have some figures on dead birds per kilowatt hour? On species endangered versus consumers served? That's what we need to talk about, not these stupid cliches.
Anybody who followed the Enron debacle knows that the average employees of the company did not benefit from the criminal activity that brought Enron down. Indeed, they were as badly screwed as anybody, due to 401K ripoffs, nonrefundable childcare fees, etc. But if somebody still subscribes to the mindless groupthink that made this larceny possible, you have to wonder where their head's at. Loyalty is all very well, but there comes a point when you have to acknowledge your mistakes.
Sure, nobody's going to use Konqueror on X. Never mind Mozilla, the default OS X browser is based on Konqueror code! And I don't think KOffice will ever catch on, even among most KDE users.
It's just an interesting hack. That's what hackers do. A few months ago we had a story on a guy who built a CPU out of discrete components. Why bother, when you can buy a CPU that's 100 times as powerful for a few bucks? Because it's interesting, and challenging, and you learn stuff. The fact that nobody will use it is neither here nor there.
You think Zork was the first place anybody said "This Page Intentionally Left Blank"? But then I guess you're not old enough to remember when computer manuals came in three-ring binders. Revisions were distributed as a set of replacement pages. Adding new material usually resulted in a lot of blank pages, which had to be labeled so you'd know there wasn't something missing.
I often wonder what the W3C people are thinking. I love all the interesting features that appear in things like CSS3. But what's the point if nobody implements them? Some of their effort should be going to lobbying the vendors and/or creating reference implementations.
So you don't get a wireless card. The only reason to have one is so you don't have to buy a wireless router. But wireless routers are extremely cheap, so why bother? The only job for the PC is to filter packets.
Such as?
I certainly encourage folks to donate, and I would myself if I had any cash at all. A small but eye-catching graphic and a properly maintained donation page would make a lot of difference. They'll probably get all the money they need for this crisis just from Slashdotters. (I mean $20K divided by 100K Slashdot readers, even allowing for a 90% apathy factor...) But I hope they'll put a stronger fundraising strategy in place for the long term.
I am suprised to hear that people are actually using faxmodems for faxes. I myself much prefer not to have a separate fax machine, but until recently that meant dealing with really awful fax software. Also, people seem to resist the idea of folding fax functions into related devices. I've never worked in office that didn't have dedicated fax machines, even when alternatives were readily available.
That's why the fax continues to be used: it's familiar, intuitive technology. Actually, that's the reason it even exists. When cheap fax machines started to appear in the 80s, a lot of us didn't take them seriously -- we purely digital media as the wave of the future. What we didn't take into account was the severe difficult of converting all those legacy print documents into some easily manipulated online. Tools for creating online documents have improved a lot since then, but they still don't tackle a lot of basic problems, and many (Word, Acrobat) are still biased towards creating hard copy.
But then again, aren't you doing something similar? The phrase "cracks DVD copy protection codes" doesn't actually appear anywhere in the article. What it actually says is: "...[Johansen] helped crack DVD copy protection codes in 1999 and then publicized how he did it." Which is completely true, even if the phrasing is unfortunate. ("Reverse-engineered" is more accurate and less nasty than "cracked", but not a term you use in general-audience journalism.) If you stopped reading there you might think the reporter wasn't interested in a balanced report, but if you read down, you get "He became an instant hero to those who finally could watch DVD films on their computers instead of being forced to buy expensive DVD players..." Grossly oversimplified, by hardly an uncritical acceptance of the RIAA party line.
The Google Print FAQ has some vague prose about "experimenting with online content", but no specifics beyond this little search experiment. Which just duplicates a similar feature at Amazon. Bringing the Google search engine to bear isn't that big a deal -- what use is page ranking when nobody can directly link the pages?
It's significant that the main Google Print page just has an "Intentionally Left Blank" message. Obviously this project wasn't meant to go public yet. Apparently Google wants to integrate all this legacy content with the web, but for once they're totally out of their depth. It's pretty naive to not account for the total aversion of media companies to any electronic distribution of their content.