I am a software developer and I was hired for my current job to bring back all development from India. I was tasked with bringing all development back in-house because the offshore projects were behind schedule and suspect quality, not to mention the communication issues.
What we do now is do a combination of in-house development and rural sourcing, which is hiring U.S. developers in the midwest and midsouth in areas of lower cost of living. They are more expensive than offshore developers, but much cheaper than developers in major cities and these rural developers are in the same timezone.
I think you will see more and more rural sourcing cutting in to the offshoring of jobs. I don't think there will ever be a full reversal of offshoring jobs, just that rural sourcing will become more and more viable and desirable.
I'm glad I am not the only one who found it painful to read the transcript. I tried telling myself that the chat reads the way it does because English is not their first language. English or not, there seemed to be a lot of crosstalk and irrelevant chit chat. So much so that I don't see how they can really accomplish much of anything in such a format. I suppose that is why they were talking about geting a face-to-face meeting together.
I remember back when outsourcing and offshorting really started to ramp up and the whole mentality was, "The U.S. will become a nation of intellectual property holders and high-level managers while the rest of the world does the grunt work".
China is known for making knock-offs and stealing intellectual property. If China controls the majority of manufacturing and "grunt" work, then they ultimately have complete access to everything and nothing will really stop them from yanking the rug out from under the idiot outsourcers who didn't see it coming and assumed they could maintain all the power and wealth without doing any of the real work.
When all the "smart" devices (that cannot be patched or updated) shift their clocks on April 8th, not knowing of the 2007 DST changes. Makes me wish all devices that had such functionality had some sort of "ignore DST" setting.
The amount of bandwidth and storage they offer at such low prices, I cannot understand how they offer what they do for the price. Perhaps I am being a bit too cynical.
I can't speak for metropolitan areas, but in the smaller cities and rural areas the teachers make out like bandits compared to others in the community. This is starting to come to light now that schools are forced to make their budgets accessible to anybody in the public.
I live in a town where the average pay is $29k per year and there are many teachers making $50k and above. Someone might says that perhaps they have put in a lot of years to get that high, but how many other small-town industries allow you to move up in pay like that?
It's not just teachers, it's government workers in general. I think the era of, "The government doesn't offer great pay, but has great benefits", is over and we are now in the era of, "The government pays great and offers great benefits too!".
Secretaries to county officials making $40-50k, county officials making near six figures, etc.
I can't be the only person who notices this, as the last several attempts of raising millage rates and property taxes have been voted down by a large margin.
I place my trust in natural evolution rather than trying to cheat at life and death.
Its all about a delicate balance, and that balance is an ever-evolving, self-correcting force.
I figure it is a lot like Final Destination... sure you may sidestep death, but only long enough for nature to catch its breath and come after you with a vengeance.
For all the talk of CSS and XHTML making content more accessible, I find it funny that color-blind people are brushed under the rug with all the low-contrast designs most of these Web 2.0 sites are sporting.
There is an optional update at Windows Update that says something to the effect of "This update changes the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX... blah blah blah".
I figure they'll move it from optional to required when the deadline is reached.
I've already installed the update so I can get my sites ready.
ActiveX controls cause a little dialog box to appear that makes you hit either "Ok" or "Yes" in order to use an ActiveX control. Honestly this is fairly rare occurance when browsing most sites.
The big thing that is going to trip people up are flash movies. All flash movies now have a border around them when you mouse over them with a tooltip that says "click to activate and use this control".
The good news is that non-interactive flash movies work regardless of whether or not you activate the controls. Not sure why that is, but that has been my expeience. The bad news is that flash menus (unfortunately some clients want that junk) no longer work until you click on the flash movie to activate the control. This also goes for interactive flash movies that track mouse movement and whatnot.
The workaround is to write the flash movie using javascript.
you can do something simple like document.write() each line of the object tag or use something like UFO (http://osflash.org/ufo) that is XHTML compliant.
My god the VHS tape is barely over 20 years old, but you'd think the way he talks people have been breaking VHS tapes and buying replacements for over 100 years.
Also I never knew it was illegal to copy VHS tapes that you already owned. All the FBI blurb at the begining of almost every U.S.-made movie says is that it is illegal to copy for distribution or showing in front of an audience. I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
My biggest pet peeve with Microsoft is for some weird reason none of their tools put quotes around HTML tag parameters. Not sure if the Gecko engine can handle that, but it caused havoc with older Netscapes.
I beleive the standard says to quote all parameters, and it's not like there is any advantage to not quoting html tag paramers (if anything, it makes things a bit cleaner). SO WHY THE HECK DOES MICROSOFT INSIST ON LEAVING OUT QUOTES?!
shell choices? You have lost me there, since Linux and BSD use the same shells.
I honestly don't see how the installation program is difficult to use. I have heard many people complain about it, but it's not hard to use at all. Of course I haven't used any recent Linux installers (last Linux I used was Slackware 7) with all the dumbed-down GUI luvin', but I still fail to see how a straightforward ANSI menu system is confusing and difficult?!
Let's not even get into kernel compilations where FreeBSD wins hands down.
I mean, all you have to do is edit one single text file and then type "make buildkernel" and "make installkernel" and viola! No lilo or anything like that to deal with.
I do admit that the whole slice/partition thing baffles me a little bit, as I don't understand why someone would want multiple slices? Partitions are good enough for me when it comes to organizing a disk. Does anybody out there actually use multiple slices? If so, why (I'd honestly like to know!)
Why are we so obsessed with going to Mars when we haven't even done much with the Moon yet? I say we're trying to walk without crawling first.
I've been saying all this time that we need to fully explore (and exploit!) the Moon before we set our sights any further.
At the very least we will gain more knowledge about space travel and other-world living through trial and error when dealing with the Moon. This will better prepare us for deep space travel and colonizing other planets.
I sure hope this move by China does infact spur another space race.
We have 200+ domains hosted at work, and I don't want to wade through all the letters and emails that Verisign sends me (since they send multiple mailings per domain... and even mail you warning notices AFTER you've registered the domain).
I wrote a Perl script that goes through the entire/etc/namedb directory, does a whois, and writes the expiration dates to a file, ordered by expiration date from soon to far-far-away.
Having a nicely formatted list of all the expiration dates is much nicer than wading through individual (and possibly duplicate) peices of mail.
Also, I have used the contact (email and phone) information to get ahold of current Technical and Administrative contacts to request domain transfers by request of the domain owner/holder (most customers don't want to deal with stuff themselves... they want the world handled by everybody else)
So, in conclusion, the WHOIS information is invaluable. It is unfortunate that it's misused and abused, though.
My PHB often comes in with letters from register.com and always says, "I didn't think we had domains with them? How did they get our domains?!" and I have to tell him that those renewal letters are just gimmicks to trick you into changing registrars.
I'm not one who is satisfied with the incompetence of Verisign, but I can't let them take the blame for coming up with this scam.
I don't mind DVD's being a bit more expensive than VHS tapes. Atleast not the DVD's that is packed full of extras. Not to mention it probably takes alot of effort on the studios part to get some of the older movies looking good on DVD.
CD's on the other hand don't really offer much over cassettes other than superior sound quality and the ability to skip back and forth to songs. DVD's do this and more.
I don't buy cassettes anymore, but I wonder if CD's made cassettes any more inexpensive? I know VHS tapes have gotten alot cheaper to buy now that everybody is pushing DVD's. Of course it's interesting that they do that since as you mentioned it's more expensive to make cassettes.
The MPAA is blaming everything and anything that can record television (but not the economy). Remember, Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, was the genius in the 80's that was saying that VHS would destroy Hollywood and the movie industry.
Maybe it's just me Jack, but I beleive VHS not only helped the movie industry, but it also provided a new revenue stream (rentals).
Of course now he is at it again trying to control the digital medium while arguing that it will destroy Hollywood. Wow, what a visionary!
Unfortunately with any sort of government regulation, we will sacrifice even more freedoms for security.
However, a simple solution is to legislate that all e-mail must originate from a valid account on a valid domain. Granted this means that all mail server software will have to be updated to handle these checks, but it's a "safer" solution than having the government legislate the e-mails themselves.
Email software that does not have these checks will be blacklisted from those with the checks. Of course the procedure to be taken off the black list is easy, just update your server and contact the proper authorities and have your server automatically checked and tested to see if it's a compliant mail server.
This will take away the advantage that spammers have now of not easily being tracked down.
The only real downside is that people like myself who have mail servers running on broadband/dialup will no longer be able to use them to send out mail (not unless we had a static IP or somesuch).
Just a thought. I'd prefer that over giving the government an excuse to scan all emails.
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I am a software developer and I was hired for my current job to bring back all development from India. I was tasked with bringing all development back in-house because the offshore projects were behind schedule and suspect quality, not to mention the communication issues.
What we do now is do a combination of in-house development and rural sourcing, which is hiring U.S. developers in the midwest and midsouth in areas of lower cost of living. They are more expensive than offshore developers, but much cheaper than developers in major cities and these rural developers are in the same timezone.
I think you will see more and more rural sourcing cutting in to the offshoring of jobs. I don't think there will ever be a full reversal of offshoring jobs, just that rural sourcing will become more and more viable and desirable.
Perhaps I am being a paranoid security freak, but directory upload sounds like a dangerous feature.
I'm glad I am not the only one who found it painful to read the transcript. I tried telling myself that the chat reads the way it does because English is not their first language. English or not, there seemed to be a lot of crosstalk and irrelevant chit chat. So much so that I don't see how they can really accomplish much of anything in such a format. I suppose that is why they were talking about geting a face-to-face meeting together.
I remember back when outsourcing and offshorting really started to ramp up and the whole mentality was, "The U.S. will become a nation of intellectual property holders and high-level managers while the rest of the world does the grunt work".
China is known for making knock-offs and stealing intellectual property. If China controls the majority of manufacturing and "grunt" work, then they ultimately have complete access to everything and nothing will really stop them from yanking the rug out from under the idiot outsourcers who didn't see it coming and assumed they could maintain all the power and wealth without doing any of the real work.
Who run Bartertown?
Does this mean it'll be littered with pop and soft rock music?
One of the things I like about Pixar is the more traditional score approach they take instead of a "Best of" soundtrack approach of Dreamworks.
When all the "smart" devices (that cannot be patched or updated) shift their clocks on April 8th, not knowing of the 2007 DST changes. Makes me wish all devices that had such functionality had some sort of "ignore DST" setting.
The amount of bandwidth and storage they offer at such low prices, I cannot understand how they offer what they do for the price. Perhaps I am being a bit too cynical.
I can't speak for metropolitan areas, but in the smaller cities and rural areas the teachers make out like bandits compared to others in the community. This is starting to come to light now that schools are forced to make their budgets accessible to anybody in the public.
I live in a town where the average pay is $29k per year and there are many teachers making $50k and above. Someone might says that perhaps they have put in a lot of years to get that high, but how many other small-town industries allow you to move up in pay like that?
It's not just teachers, it's government workers in general. I think the era of, "The government doesn't offer great pay, but has great benefits", is over and we are now in the era of, "The government pays great and offers great benefits too!".
Secretaries to county officials making $40-50k, county officials making near six figures, etc.
I can't be the only person who notices this, as the last several attempts of raising millage rates and property taxes have been voted down by a large margin.
This seems like something that down the line people will go, "OMG?! What were we thinking?!", like they do with asbestos and lead paint.
Hopefully I am wrong, but man has a terrible track record at creating things that kill us in the long term.
I place my trust in natural evolution rather than trying to cheat at life and death.
... sure you may sidestep death, but only long enough for nature to catch its breath and come after you with a vengeance.
Its all about a delicate balance, and that balance is an ever-evolving, self-correcting force.
I figure it is a lot like Final Destination
People are using the word "semantic" left and right like it's going out of style
"So l toasted the dated directory, tweaked the P-RAM ... and reglazed your subroutine."
- Pauly Shore
For all the talk of CSS and XHTML making content more accessible, I find it funny that color-blind people are brushed under the rug with all the low-contrast designs most of these Web 2.0 sites are sporting.
There is an optional update at Windows Update that says something to the effect of "This update changes the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX ... blah blah blah".
I figure they'll move it from optional to required when the deadline is reached.
I've already installed the update so I can get my sites ready.
ActiveX controls cause a little dialog box to appear that makes you hit either "Ok" or "Yes" in order to use an ActiveX control. Honestly this is fairly rare occurance when browsing most sites.
The big thing that is going to trip people up are flash movies. All flash movies now have a border around them when you mouse over them with a tooltip that says "click to activate and use this control".
The good news is that non-interactive flash movies work regardless of whether or not you activate the controls. Not sure why that is, but that has been my expeience. The bad news is that flash menus (unfortunately some clients want that junk) no longer work until you click on the flash movie to activate the control. This also goes for interactive flash movies that track mouse movement and whatnot.
The workaround is to write the flash movie using javascript.
you can do something simple like document.write() each line of the object tag or use something like UFO (http://osflash.org/ufo) that is XHTML compliant.
My god the VHS tape is barely over 20 years old, but you'd think the way he talks people have been breaking VHS tapes and buying replacements for over 100 years.
Also I never knew it was illegal to copy VHS tapes that you already owned. All the FBI blurb at the begining of almost every U.S.-made movie says is that it is illegal to copy for distribution or showing in front of an audience. I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
My biggest pet peeve with Microsoft is for some weird reason none of their tools put quotes around HTML tag parameters. Not sure if the Gecko engine can handle that, but it caused havoc with older Netscapes.
I beleive the standard says to quote all parameters, and it's not like there is any advantage to not quoting html tag paramers (if anything, it makes things a bit cleaner). SO WHY THE HECK DOES MICROSOFT INSIST ON LEAVING OUT QUOTES?!
We implemented Spamassassin at our ISP and people actually called up complaining that they were not receiving their junk mail (yes, they wanted it).
So we took down the system-wide implementation and now protect domains and users on a customer-by-customer basis (when they ask for it).
Makes me wonder if some sick individuals out there love getting telemarketing calls? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
ports system hard to use?!
/usr/ports/type/program
... mind-bending work!
cd
make install
damn
shell choices? You have lost me there, since Linux and BSD use the same shells.
I honestly don't see how the installation program is difficult to use. I have heard many people complain about it, but it's not hard to use at all. Of course I haven't used any recent Linux installers (last Linux I used was Slackware 7) with all the dumbed-down GUI luvin', but I still fail to see how a straightforward ANSI menu system is confusing and difficult?!
Let's not even get into kernel compilations where FreeBSD wins hands down.
I mean, all you have to do is edit one single text file and then type "make buildkernel" and "make installkernel" and viola! No lilo or anything like that to deal with.
I do admit that the whole slice/partition thing baffles me a little bit, as I don't understand why someone would want multiple slices? Partitions are good enough for me when it comes to organizing a disk. Does anybody out there actually use multiple slices? If so, why (I'd honestly like to know!)
Why are we so obsessed with going to Mars when we haven't even done much with the Moon yet? I say we're trying to walk without crawling first.
I've been saying all this time that we need to fully explore (and exploit!) the Moon before we set our sights any further.
At the very least we will gain more knowledge about space travel and other-world living through trial and error when dealing with the Moon. This will better prepare us for deep space travel and colonizing other planets.
I sure hope this move by China does infact spur another space race.
I beg to differ:
http://www.sasami2k.com/
Pink website aside, it's excellent software and is much better IMHO than Media Player when it comes to movies.
We have 200+ domains hosted at work, and I don't want to wade through all the letters and emails that Verisign sends me (since they send multiple mailings per domain... and even mail you warning notices AFTER you've registered the domain).
/etc/namedb directory, does a whois, and writes the expiration dates to a file, ordered by expiration date from soon to far-far-away.
I wrote a Perl script that goes through the entire
Having a nicely formatted list of all the expiration dates is much nicer than wading through individual (and possibly duplicate) peices of mail.
Also, I have used the contact (email and phone) information to get ahold of current Technical and Administrative contacts to request domain transfers by request of the domain owner/holder (most customers don't want to deal with stuff themselves... they want the world handled by everybody else)
So, in conclusion, the WHOIS information is invaluable. It is unfortunate that it's misused and abused, though.
My PHB often comes in with letters from register.com and always says, "I didn't think we had domains with them? How did they get our domains?!" and I have to tell him that those renewal letters are just gimmicks to trick you into changing registrars.
I'm not one who is satisfied with the incompetence of Verisign, but I can't let them take the blame for coming up with this scam.
I don't mind DVD's being a bit more expensive than VHS tapes. Atleast not the DVD's that is packed full of extras. Not to mention it probably takes alot of effort on the studios part to get some of the older movies looking good on DVD.
CD's on the other hand don't really offer much over cassettes other than superior sound quality and the ability to skip back and forth to songs. DVD's do this and more.
I don't buy cassettes anymore, but I wonder if CD's made cassettes any more inexpensive? I know VHS tapes have gotten alot cheaper to buy now that everybody is pushing DVD's. Of course it's interesting that they do that since as you mentioned it's more expensive to make cassettes.
The MPAA is blaming everything and anything that can record television (but not the economy). Remember, Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, was the genius in the 80's that was saying that VHS would destroy Hollywood and the movie industry.
Maybe it's just me Jack, but I beleive VHS not only helped the movie industry, but it also provided a new revenue stream (rentals).
Of course now he is at it again trying to control the digital medium while arguing that it will destroy Hollywood. Wow, what a visionary!
Unfortunately with any sort of government regulation, we will sacrifice even more freedoms for security.
However, a simple solution is to legislate that all e-mail must originate from a valid account on a valid domain. Granted this means that all mail server software will have to be updated to handle these checks, but it's a "safer" solution than having the government legislate the e-mails themselves.
Email software that does not have these checks will be blacklisted from those with the checks. Of course the procedure to be taken off the black list is easy, just update your server and contact the proper authorities and have your server automatically checked and tested to see if it's a compliant mail server.
This will take away the advantage that spammers have now of not easily being tracked down.
The only real downside is that people like myself who have mail servers running on broadband/dialup will no longer be able to use them to send out mail (not unless we had a static IP or somesuch).
Just a thought. I'd prefer that over giving the government an excuse to scan all emails.