Re:How to tell whether you're outsourcing
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Outsourcing Evolving
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't buy that argument at all. A senior engineer at a CS firm in Omaha Nebraska is probably making less money than a mid-level engineer in San Francisco. The flat dollar amount of salaries are determined by the cost of living in that area - it costs more to live in SF or NYC than it does to live in the midwest. As such, the cost of doing business there is substantially higher.
The same applies to international workers. The question to ask is "What is the buying power of the salary provided". If a senior level engineer in India is making the same salary as a junior level engineer in the US, you might think they're getting paid less. From a payroll perspective they are. But the buying power of that quantity of money in India is substantially greater - in fact, the overall quality of living for someone collecting 65k per year in India is going to be much higher than someone collecting twice that in the US.
Outsourcing shouldn't be defined based on salary. Whether or not a job is outsourced should be defined on this simple question - Is the job in the other country a new job, or was it a position that previously existed elsewhere that was relocated without the prior occupant? In other words, did someone in the US lose their jobs so that jobs in India could open? If not, then its simply global expansion. Take for instance Microsoft - Microsoft has been hiring like crazy in India, China and Ireland. No one in the US is losing their job for these positions though, so no job is being outsourced. An international company is simply growing in international locations. IBM on the other hand laid off a substantial number of engineers in the US, and hired a large number of Indian programmers to fill the positions priorly held by Americans. Those jobs were outsourced.
I don't think the ability to create content is affected. The purpose of this lockdown is the ensure that software with the capacity to remove the DRM from a secure stream is using that stream in a manner consistent with the liscense. It shouldn't affect inputs, or non-DRM'd outputs at all.
Media will be able to enter the system in whatever format the input devices supply. I find it pretty unlikely that input devices would DRM the content. Once the raw stream is on the PC, it can be encoded into whatever format suits the content provider, and at that point, if the content provider chose the Windows Media format, then DRM can be added to the data source if that is what the artist wants to. Windows does NOT automatically add DRM to anything.
The statement in the article does not mean that Microsoft does not like hobbyists producing software - indeed, if you look at the billions of dollars Microsoft has invested in hobbyist level tools, I think its pretty clear that they encourage hobbyist developers. What they don't encourage is hobbyist developers distributing DRM keys on devices in an unmanageable way.
Whatever you may feel about DRM, Microsoft's position on the potential use of DRM is pretty clear - they believe, right or wrong, that consumers can have access to the best content if and only if that content can be protected.
Honestly, what would hobbyists do with a truly open DRM SDK for devices? The secure path audio only applies to media sources LEAVING the PC, not input sources, so it doesn't affect microphones, instruments and the types of devices that casual users might actually be developing. Hobbyists won't have the substantial financial backing to produce their own playback device. Any small company who has the desire and financial resources is going to have the cash to spend on this liscensing scheme, especially considering that Microsoft has always employed hefty discounts for small ISVs. This doesn't prevent hobbyists from working with DRM'd media streams on devices they purchased - if the device manufacturer liscensed the DRM from Microsoft (which it would have to, or you couldn't enjoy media on the device), then you can still use a healthy amount of the Windows Media SDK to work with media stream, limitted to some extent by the secure path, but that's a different gripe.
Given the financial difficulty of building a full device capable of full media playback, what would hobbyists do with an SDK that allowed raw access to protected content - most of them would write software the emulates a virtual device to circumvent the DRM. That's exactly what Microsoft is attempting to prevent.
Unless, that is, you subscribe to one of Microsoft's pay security services, in which case your machine will have the worm removed in advance.
Or, if you had read the very article you're posting, "Both the company's free online security service, Windows Live Safety, and its in-beta OneCare Live software, however, will disinfect compromised computers, Microsoft said."
Exactly, especially given that this is the same Sony that still has stability problems maintaining EQ/EQ2/SWG and Planetside 6 years after they entered the MMO space.
I know I'm just feeding to the trolls with this, but name one part of IE that's in the kernel. IE is not in the kernel and it is not in the Win32 subsystem. Is it embedded into the overall product? Yes, IE's COM components are everywhere, and a plethora of system tools rely on those components, but that simply means that IE is integral to the overall DESKTOP system based on external dependencies in the shell to IE.
Am I the only one who is amazed that the French Military Police Force has 100,000 personnel working for it? The United States has approximately 840,000 police total, including military police, state police, county police, and federal law enforcement agencies. France's population is only 60.5 million compared to the US' 296 million. Is the military police force in France used for more than just policing members of the French military?
Actually, there's a fantastic book about the Windows internals called Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition by Mark Russinovich. Every Windows programmer should have this book. Even if your work is entirely in.NET, its important to know why some of the decisions in.NET were made as they were, and its also vitally important to know exactly how Windows handles process security.
Windows which has some security is designed to bypass that secuirty to give users an edge.
What the hell are you talking about? If you're referring to the fact that default home users run as a Administrator or Poweruser by default, you're right, that's a mistake, but its a policy mistake, not a technology mistake. Windows lets you run as a lesser user, its just that by default you don't. Internet Explorer runs 100% in userland. There is no part of Internet Explorer which runs in the kernel. None. Although Internet Explorer certainly has more holes than Firefox, they are both limitted to the same order of magnitude of potential damage. The same as on other "real OSes".
Not to be nitpicky, but the graphics rendering engine is not entirely in the kernel on 2000/XP/2003. Most of it is in the Win32 subsystem which runs in userspace.
The graphics rendering engine is divided between the Win32 subsystem which is a user process (csrss.exe), and the Win32 executive (Win32.sys) which actually runs in kernel space. The portion of the graphics system in the executive is limitted almost exclusively to the actual displaying of images and direct interaction with the drivers that interface with the display hardware. I'm not 100% sure, but I can't ever recall there being a vulnerability found in this part of the executive.
This specific vulnerability, like almost all image processing vulnerabilities, occurs in the image format parser, which is in the Win32 subsystem. As such its not in the kernel and runs in standard user scope. I know this doesn't change the point you were trying to make, which was the vulnerability doesn't occur on other systems. I just wanted to correct the statement about it being a kernel vulnerability.
If you pop open WMP10, you'll see it integrates nicely with CinemaNow, which let you rent or purchase full movies a year and a half ago. To the best of my knowledge, outside BBC shows, there's not really a place in the Windows world where you can download tv shows, but if you have a Tivo or a Windows Media Center (or any of the free and open DVRs) you can certainly spaceshift shows you recorded.
Most tech analysts list Apple's market share in the US as about 3.6% as of June of this year - Apple claims higher, about 4.5% - if we give Apple the benefit of the doubt and assume they're 100% correct, you're still only talking about less than 5% in the US. Apple's worldwide numbers are approximately 1.8% market share.
If your friend is using virtualization for Q&A on a product written for Windows, I suspect your friend's firm has a MSDN subscription. Although it varies by subscription type, liscensing for development and testing purposes is handled much differently, and quite possibly is covered completely by the subscription.
You should look into the Terminal Services enhancements in Windows Vista. They are allowing single applications to be remoted, very similar to what you can do with X today only with integrated authentication and session management. Furthermore, the Vista client integrates full desktop integration, including drag and drop support and mapping to file types. On a LAN, you can double click on a Word doc on machine A without a copy of Word installed, machine A will search the domain for a server with open liscenses of Word, AD windows authentication will transparently authenticate the connection for you, and Word will open on machine A - the user likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
I don't know if the next version of TS works like this, but in theory given their new drawing system, all of the rendering for animations could be send as XAML instructions from the server and rendered through on the client, which would decrease server load and make the system more responsive to the user. No server delay when you open a menu because the XAML for the menus was already pushed to the client.
The way they've put it together, you would be able to distribute Office in much the same way Google could, but with a significantly better user experience. Enterprises would probably still go with MS. Foreign governments are a stretch, but I doubt they'd trust Google any more than Microsoft - if they bail on Office and Windows, it'll be for OO.org and an open source desktop.
From all indications, the Office 12 file format is open enough to satisfy almost everyone's requirements. In a bind, MS could make that file format available to previous versions of Office as a free download to keep people in the Office brand.
I don't think Microsoft is scared about the competition in the Office space, because they haven't started priceslashing Office yet. Remember - if OO.org or Google starts putting them into a bind, they can reduce the purchase cost of Office to beat the TCO savings you get from a competitor. Office 2003 paid itself off a long time ago - they could always offer Office 12 at a premium, and continue to sell Office 2003, only at a significant markdown rate to certain markets if the going gets tough for them.
I'm afraid you're incorrect - Microsoft does in fact make the code to just about every Microsoft product (including Windows back through 95 I think) available on a very limitted basis.
Yes, Microsoft has a Shared Source program. I'm not 100% sure of the exact requirements to join the Shared Source program (you could look it up on their website I'm sure) but the requirements are fairly hefty. You have to sign some pretty thorough NDAs, of course. To the best of my knowledge, an individual acting by themself rarely gets access, although I'm pretty sure that several book authors got access to Windows source. Companies can gain access, but they normally have to pay for the priveledge (if you recall the Win2k source code getting lose a year or so back, that was on account of a company that had purchased a liscense to the code losing it). A large number of Universities have access to the code, as do governments and government contractors.
Functions like strlen have been depricated - in fact, Microsoft depricated most of the standard C library in favor of what they call the "Safe C libraries" which simply replace strlen with range limitted functions like strnlen. Its a pain in the butt to move, but honestly, its a good idea.
Using the old functions generates a compiler warning that you are linking against the old unsafe libraries. It should only generate an error if you have signalled the compiler to treat warnings as errors. You can suppress the warnings and ignore them, or leave them in place and slowly migrate your code to the safer runtime library. That said, there are a few compiler errors (especially related to scope of variables on the stack) you can get now as they tightened up their standards a bit.
I prefer Labels over Folders as well, but Labels lack one thing Folders possess that many users care deeply about - the ability to organize hierarchically.
I use Gmail for my personal email, and I just don't have a need for nested folders in my personal mail. At work, though, labels just wouldn't cut it.
I can't think of a reason why labels can't be nested save that it might be a little confusing for some users
VCR's, and DVD players have deep market penetration already - there is continuing growth, but its not what it was, and its much lower margin than when the technology is new and booming. Same with PS and PS2 - most everyone who wanted one has one by now.
The phone market right now is being dominated by the mobile manufacturers, and Sony doesn't have a piece of that. Their walkman and MP3 player line was a complete bust because of their ridiculously greedy DRM system and its probably too late to try and compete against Apple in that market now unless they jump on the relatively unprofitable WMP bandwagon. PSPs have sold okay, but they're not the market leader there.
I'm pretty sure that they're still doing okay in the TV market which is a solid growth market, but they have serious competitors that take a large portion of that pie.
I'm no expert in media sales, but I don't think Sony's music and movies have been too high on the charts this year. I might be wrong, I just haven't noticed much of the Sony label. Their content business is huge, and when it takes a hit, the whole company does.
I think this is important because it means that Google is beginning to differentiate between blogs and other internet content. Now that they have divided it internally, perhaps they could assign a lower weight to blog material in a normal web search, so that searches are completely cluttered with blog noise.
On a side note, this is proof that competition between Google and MSN is improving them both - Microsoft has had a blog search attached to start.com for a number of months now. At the moment, I still prefer MSN's version just for searching syndicated feeds, but hopefully competition in this space with force both to improve themselves.
Not yet - Microsoft has been trying to run the secret PR campaign with Office that helped Apple so much. The first public revealing of ANYTHING Office 12 is today, and we should see alot more over the course of this week.
Given that they haven't announced anything about Office 12 except that the new file format and Metro support, how do you proclaim to know that it brings no significant value to the customer?
That makes no sense at all - you use the tool that's best for the job at hand.
Windows 2003 server is a great server system, but it costs money. If my website didn't need ASP.NET because I was just going to run a php forum module, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to spend the extra money to buy Windows Server.
A person could own a BMW, work for BMW, run a BMW enthusiasts website, and that doesn't change the fact that if they're going to Home Depot to pick up a bunch of mulch, they'd probably borrow their neighbor's Ford truck.
How many other real innovations lately have come from the US?
Outside of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Oracle, Novell, Adobe, Red Hat and Sun off the top of my head, you're right, the US is really lacking in large, influential and innovative tech companies. I find it interesting looking at that list that, of that list, Microsoft is the only one locked into Microsoft software.
I'm glad to see the international contributions to the OSS effort coming out of Europe, Japan, China and Russia in recent years, but it might be premature to write off American tech companies.
In the US, Microsoft was one of the biggest contributors to George Bush's two campaigns,
With just a little bit of research, you'd find out that Microsoft donated approximately equal to both Presidential candidates in both the 2000 and the 2004 election. They slightly favored the Republican candidate in terms of donations, but not by much.
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The same applies to international workers. The question to ask is "What is the buying power of the salary provided". If a senior level engineer in India is making the same salary as a junior level engineer in the US, you might think they're getting paid less. From a payroll perspective they are. But the buying power of that quantity of money in India is substantially greater - in fact, the overall quality of living for someone collecting 65k per year in India is going to be much higher than someone collecting twice that in the US.
Outsourcing shouldn't be defined based on salary. Whether or not a job is outsourced should be defined on this simple question - Is the job in the other country a new job, or was it a position that previously existed elsewhere that was relocated without the prior occupant? In other words, did someone in the US lose their jobs so that jobs in India could open? If not, then its simply global expansion. Take for instance Microsoft - Microsoft has been hiring like crazy in India, China and Ireland. No one in the US is losing their job for these positions though, so no job is being outsourced. An international company is simply growing in international locations. IBM on the other hand laid off a substantial number of engineers in the US, and hired a large number of Indian programmers to fill the positions priorly held by Americans. Those jobs were outsourced.
Media will be able to enter the system in whatever format the input devices supply. I find it pretty unlikely that input devices would DRM the content. Once the raw stream is on the PC, it can be encoded into whatever format suits the content provider, and at that point, if the content provider chose the Windows Media format, then DRM can be added to the data source if that is what the artist wants to. Windows does NOT automatically add DRM to anything.
Whatever you may feel about DRM, Microsoft's position on the potential use of DRM is pretty clear - they believe, right or wrong, that consumers can have access to the best content if and only if that content can be protected.
Honestly, what would hobbyists do with a truly open DRM SDK for devices? The secure path audio only applies to media sources LEAVING the PC, not input sources, so it doesn't affect microphones, instruments and the types of devices that casual users might actually be developing. Hobbyists won't have the substantial financial backing to produce their own playback device. Any small company who has the desire and financial resources is going to have the cash to spend on this liscensing scheme, especially considering that Microsoft has always employed hefty discounts for small ISVs. This doesn't prevent hobbyists from working with DRM'd media streams on devices they purchased - if the device manufacturer liscensed the DRM from Microsoft (which it would have to, or you couldn't enjoy media on the device), then you can still use a healthy amount of the Windows Media SDK to work with media stream, limitted to some extent by the secure path, but that's a different gripe.
Given the financial difficulty of building a full device capable of full media playback, what would hobbyists do with an SDK that allowed raw access to protected content - most of them would write software the emulates a virtual device to circumvent the DRM. That's exactly what Microsoft is attempting to prevent.
Or, if you had read the very article you're posting, "Both the company's free online security service, Windows Live Safety, and its in-beta OneCare Live software, however, will disinfect compromised computers, Microsoft said."
Exactly, especially given that this is the same Sony that still has stability problems maintaining EQ/EQ2/SWG and Planetside 6 years after they entered the MMO space.
I know I'm just feeding to the trolls with this, but name one part of IE that's in the kernel. IE is not in the kernel and it is not in the Win32 subsystem. Is it embedded into the overall product? Yes, IE's COM components are everywhere, and a plethora of system tools rely on those components, but that simply means that IE is integral to the overall DESKTOP system based on external dependencies in the shell to IE.
Am I the only one who is amazed that the French Military Police Force has 100,000 personnel working for it? The United States has approximately 840,000 police total, including military police, state police, county police, and federal law enforcement agencies. France's population is only 60.5 million compared to the US' 296 million. Is the military police force in France used for more than just policing members of the French military?
Actually, there's a fantastic book about the Windows internals called Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition by Mark Russinovich. Every Windows programmer should have this book. Even if your work is entirely in .NET, its important to know why some of the decisions in .NET were made as they were, and its also vitally important to know exactly how Windows handles process security.
What the hell are you talking about? If you're referring to the fact that default home users run as a Administrator or Poweruser by default, you're right, that's a mistake, but its a policy mistake, not a technology mistake. Windows lets you run as a lesser user, its just that by default you don't. Internet Explorer runs 100% in userland. There is no part of Internet Explorer which runs in the kernel. None. Although Internet Explorer certainly has more holes than Firefox, they are both limitted to the same order of magnitude of potential damage. The same as on other "real OSes".
The graphics rendering engine is divided between the Win32 subsystem which is a user process (csrss.exe), and the Win32 executive (Win32.sys) which actually runs in kernel space. The portion of the graphics system in the executive is limitted almost exclusively to the actual displaying of images and direct interaction with the drivers that interface with the display hardware. I'm not 100% sure, but I can't ever recall there being a vulnerability found in this part of the executive.
This specific vulnerability, like almost all image processing vulnerabilities, occurs in the image format parser, which is in the Win32 subsystem. As such its not in the kernel and runs in standard user scope. I know this doesn't change the point you were trying to make, which was the vulnerability doesn't occur on other systems. I just wanted to correct the statement about it being a kernel vulnerability.
If you pop open WMP10, you'll see it integrates nicely with CinemaNow, which let you rent or purchase full movies a year and a half ago. To the best of my knowledge, outside BBC shows, there's not really a place in the Windows world where you can download tv shows, but if you have a Tivo or a Windows Media Center (or any of the free and open DVRs) you can certainly spaceshift shows you recorded.
Where did you get that number from?
Most tech analysts list Apple's market share in the US as about 3.6% as of June of this year - Apple claims higher, about 4.5% - if we give Apple the benefit of the doubt and assume they're 100% correct, you're still only talking about less than 5% in the US. Apple's worldwide numbers are approximately 1.8% market share.
If your friend is using virtualization for Q&A on a product written for Windows, I suspect your friend's firm has a MSDN subscription. Although it varies by subscription type, liscensing for development and testing purposes is handled much differently, and quite possibly is covered completely by the subscription.
I don't know if the next version of TS works like this, but in theory given their new drawing system, all of the rendering for animations could be send as XAML instructions from the server and rendered through on the client, which would decrease server load and make the system more responsive to the user. No server delay when you open a menu because the XAML for the menus was already pushed to the client.
The way they've put it together, you would be able to distribute Office in much the same way Google could, but with a significantly better user experience. Enterprises would probably still go with MS. Foreign governments are a stretch, but I doubt they'd trust Google any more than Microsoft - if they bail on Office and Windows, it'll be for OO.org and an open source desktop.
From all indications, the Office 12 file format is open enough to satisfy almost everyone's requirements. In a bind, MS could make that file format available to previous versions of Office as a free download to keep people in the Office brand.
I don't think Microsoft is scared about the competition in the Office space, because they haven't started priceslashing Office yet. Remember - if OO.org or Google starts putting them into a bind, they can reduce the purchase cost of Office to beat the TCO savings you get from a competitor. Office 2003 paid itself off a long time ago - they could always offer Office 12 at a premium, and continue to sell Office 2003, only at a significant markdown rate to certain markets if the going gets tough for them.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/li censing/windows.mspx
It is NOT open source, and shouldn't be confused with that. But it does allow direct readonly access to Windows source code.
Thanks for correcting me, though - one day I'll finally get it right.
Yes, Microsoft has a Shared Source program. I'm not 100% sure of the exact requirements to join the Shared Source program (you could look it up on their website I'm sure) but the requirements are fairly hefty. You have to sign some pretty thorough NDAs, of course. To the best of my knowledge, an individual acting by themself rarely gets access, although I'm pretty sure that several book authors got access to Windows source. Companies can gain access, but they normally have to pay for the priveledge (if you recall the Win2k source code getting lose a year or so back, that was on account of a company that had purchased a liscense to the code losing it). A large number of Universities have access to the code, as do governments and government contractors.
Using the old functions generates a compiler warning that you are linking against the old unsafe libraries. It should only generate an error if you have signalled the compiler to treat warnings as errors. You can suppress the warnings and ignore them, or leave them in place and slowly migrate your code to the safer runtime library. That said, there are a few compiler errors (especially related to scope of variables on the stack) you can get now as they tightened up their standards a bit.
I use Gmail for my personal email, and I just don't have a need for nested folders in my personal mail. At work, though, labels just wouldn't cut it.
I can't think of a reason why labels can't be nested save that it might be a little confusing for some users
The phone market right now is being dominated by the mobile manufacturers, and Sony doesn't have a piece of that. Their walkman and MP3 player line was a complete bust because of their ridiculously greedy DRM system and its probably too late to try and compete against Apple in that market now unless they jump on the relatively unprofitable WMP bandwagon. PSPs have sold okay, but they're not the market leader there.
I'm pretty sure that they're still doing okay in the TV market which is a solid growth market, but they have serious competitors that take a large portion of that pie.
I'm no expert in media sales, but I don't think Sony's music and movies have been too high on the charts this year. I might be wrong, I just haven't noticed much of the Sony label. Their content business is huge, and when it takes a hit, the whole company does.
On a side note, this is proof that competition between Google and MSN is improving them both - Microsoft has had a blog search attached to start.com for a number of months now. At the moment, I still prefer MSN's version just for searching syndicated feeds, but hopefully competition in this space with force both to improve themselves.
Not yet - Microsoft has been trying to run the secret PR campaign with Office that helped Apple so much. The first public revealing of ANYTHING Office 12 is today, and we should see alot more over the course of this week.
Given that they haven't announced anything about Office 12 except that the new file format and Metro support, how do you proclaim to know that it brings no significant value to the customer?
Windows 2003 server is a great server system, but it costs money. If my website didn't need ASP.NET because I was just going to run a php forum module, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to spend the extra money to buy Windows Server.
A person could own a BMW, work for BMW, run a BMW enthusiasts website, and that doesn't change the fact that if they're going to Home Depot to pick up a bunch of mulch, they'd probably borrow their neighbor's Ford truck.
Outside of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Oracle, Novell, Adobe, Red Hat and Sun off the top of my head, you're right, the US is really lacking in large, influential and innovative tech companies. I find it interesting looking at that list that, of that list, Microsoft is the only one locked into Microsoft software.
I'm glad to see the international contributions to the OSS effort coming out of Europe, Japan, China and Russia in recent years, but it might be premature to write off American tech companies.
In the US, Microsoft was one of the biggest contributors to George Bush's two campaigns,
With just a little bit of research, you'd find out that Microsoft donated approximately equal to both Presidential candidates in both the 2000 and the 2004 election. They slightly favored the Republican candidate in terms of donations, but not by much.