Our small (under 10 employee) company just offshored a job for one of our clients. All of our clients had been beating us up over offshoring work, because it is fashionable. So we spent more time specking the work and administering it than if we did the work ourselves. But we had to offshore the work because offshoring is this decade's fashion, our generations bell-bottom jeans.
Having spent almost 2 years out of work during this administration, many of the interviews I went on had more than 1000 applicants, of which I ended up in the top 20 (which was the cut off for interviewing) on many, many occasions.
Both times I ended up unemployed, I was unemployed longer than the 26 weeks that my unemployment benefits lasted.
Since the current administration keeps claiming triumph when the jobs grow, it is very relevant to point out that the number of jobs in the economy is growing slower than the number of people entering the workforce.
Florida was similar. But the log of job contacts was one that you had to turn in when you went in for the monthly seminar.
The resource room wasn't very helpful in any state I've been unemployed in. Some companies milk the credits and benefits that they receive for hiring folks on unemployment, so that those companies only post job openings at unemployment offices. Others post openings that they only want to fill with a preselected H1B candidate at those offices.
UO guides had schedules they had to log on for. EQ guides only had to meet a certain amount of time per week (and the guides set their own hours). That is one of the major distinctions that the IRS uses to distinguish between contractors and employees (or, 1099 vs W2). The UO court decision happened several years before the EQ guide program was offshored. While they look the same on the surface, they were quite different programs.
I am over 40. The obsession with youth, or at least folks perceived as willing to work 80+ hour weeks leads to a very strong discrimination here in the midwest.
A few months ago, there was a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal about a shortage of machinists in the US. They were hyping a shortage of Swiss-style machinists. Those are guys who make tiny parts. Small enough for watches which leads to the name. It takes about 10 years of apprenticeship for a machinist to get proficient in this type of machining.
What most readers of WSJ are woefully ignorant of is that most companies require machinists to own their own tools. Not the multi-hundred thousand dollar CNC machines, but the general everyday measuring instruments, clamps, jigs etc that can add up to $20,000 to $50,000 of tools over a lifetime. When these guys retire, part of their retirement income comes from selling off their tools. When they get laid off, many sell off their tools as well. Just like car mechanics, machinists have a huge investment in their own tools.
So all the guys who know how to do this stuff are retiring, or were laid off when their jobs were offshored. Even if we as a country somehow woke up and paid attention, it will take a decade or two to recover from our current insanity. It is the same with engineering and software development.
The Ant works hard in the heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he either dies out in the cold, or begs and receives humiliating charity from the ant he teased
As a country, we seem to be taking the Grasshopper approach to life, instead of the Ant approach. We've combined the eat the seed corn along with the naked emperor approach. However, we've also adopted the "why do you hate America so much" mantra when anyone points out the nudity of the emperor.
I've only had catered lunches for meetings that happened during, and instead of, lunch. I haven't had company subsidized health insurance for more than 4 years, and before that, it was "employee pays more than half of the insurance premium." I've only seen "fridges full of soda" at less than 1 in 10 interviews. The only "benefit" that I've seen since the dotBoom that was even worth remembering were 401k plans.
I don't know of any programmers who make $65/hour. I never met any during the dotBoom. Even at the peak of the dotBoom, I never made more than $30/hour and even $20/hour would be a major pay raise for me here in the USA.
Offshoring is a fad, like bellbottom jeans. Even Sony offshored their volunteer customer support reps because paying Indians to do the in-game customer support was more fashionable than free guides (who only got a free subscription and free expansions). There is no rational business reason that actually paying someone wages can be cheaper than a bunch of suckers/slaves who got $13/month for 6+ hours per week of unpaid labor (oh, go ahead and laugh at me for being a guide for 2 years). Yet that is why offshoring is done: it looks good in the press, no matter if it screws the business bottom line and the country's bottom line.
Neat houseboat? no. There used to be one (a cruise missle boat) for sale in Tampa that had been converted to a restaurant. I'm not kidding, you'd load it with passengers then take them on a tour of the bottom of the harbor. Their business model, shall we say, s(t)unk, and the vessel ended up for sale. A million dollars was the asking price, and you'd need an export permit to sail it out of US waters.
If the navy saw an ex-soviet sub sailing towards the US, I think they would sink it without asking questions.
More than a few of the soviet missiles were liquid fueled: fuming nitric acid and hydrazine. Both chemicals would corrode you and both are quite toxic. Each sub would be a SuperFund site all by itself.
Fidel is only holding on to life out of spite for the US. Within 6 months of the embargo dropping, either he will drop dead, or we will find out he died and was stuffed decades ago.
The distinction made by immigration is that if a Cuban gets one foot above the high tide line (dry foot) before being apprehended, then they can stay in the US. If they get apprehended at sea or below the high tide line (wet foot), then they get deported right away.
No other nationality gets this special treatment. Haitians fleeing death squads get sent back to machine guns: because that dictatorship is run by our evil bastard.
When I lived in South Florida, and before I broke up with my ex (note: she was cuban), she'd have the spanish language TV (from Miami) playing and they would interrupt programs to show immigration racing cubans to the shoreline with commentary. Kind of like the LA stations showing car chases from their helicopters.
The purpose of the OGara piece was to clearly send a message to PJ: We know where you live, we know where your mother lives, we can kick down your door any time we want to.
The chilling and scary message was the one OGara sent, not the response by the public. The public's response was based on the feeling: if they did it to PJ, they can do that to us.
Why should I want my appliances to be hooked up to the internet? So my fridge can order groceries for me? So that JoeHacker can alter the temperature on my fridge remotely? Has anyone bothered tp think of security and privacy?
The auto companies did something similar with OBD2 compliant engine computers. As a result, the association that represented independant repair shops had to sue the automakers and SAE to get the diagnostic information released.
You should also take a look at Lexmark and how they used DMCA to sue Static Control Corp, an aftermarket inkject cartridge manufacturer. Earlier Slashdot story
You have 2 flight crew and some "flight attendants." Let's call the number of crew on the plane 6. When a flight is rescheduled, you have 6 transactions removing them from the old flight, and 6 more transactions adding them to the new flight. Total 12 transactions. When you have bad snow days causing cancellation or rescheduling of 1,000 flights, then you just used up 1/3 of your transactions for the month. Since all the transactions are serialized, restoring from back up tapes would just have a crash again.
With a signed 16-bit integer, you have 1 bit for the sign, and 15-bits for the rest of the number. Depending upon any error handling by the compiler, you could get NaN (not a number), maybe zero, maybe -32767, or maybe just a core dump. In any event, the result is not what you are expecting.
There are a lot of academic projects that vanish when the students graduate, or the professors lose funding (or fail to make tenure). Some of them end up as OpenSource. If you read academic research in computer science/engineering, you'll see it is 5 to 30+ years ahead of mainstream commercial development. Add in a nationwide distaste for All Things Educated, and it becomes clear why FOSS is years ahead of commercial stuff.
One can put almost any conceivable option into a security handler. Most freeware readers and writers of PDFs can deal with the standard security handler. If you want a more secure document, you encrypt it with a different handler. Some reasonable types of restrictions might be to disable obsolete data, such as prescription formularies (fancy word that means "our insurance company will pay for medicine X, but if the patient wants to pay for the name brand version, they can pay the difference"). Since new drugs are released monthly, and some drugs are removed from the market monthly, using an out of date formulary can be a problem.
Adobe decided that they wanted to control the market for access control of PDFs so that they changed the licensing scheme for add-ins that can be used by the free reader software. If you write an add-in for the free reader, the PKI key and license will run you $1k. If your add-in does any access control, the key and license runs $25k/year.
Having worked with a business partner who claimed total XMLosity in their database, I had to rework the parser almost every time we got a data feed from them. Their idea of the data model changed from day to day. Even when we sent nailed down, will never change specs for the structure. They really didn't like the idea that I tossed the raw XML into a memo field every time my components received a message, so when there were nasty fingerpointing meetings, I could drum up a simple SELECT statement and show everyone what was changing each and every week.
XML is kinda nice for some things, and really rotten for some things. Please do yourself a favor and sit down and try to decide what problem you are trying to solve. XML really stinks when it comes to sets: something that SQL based databses excel at.
I think that with the XML fetish we have these days, that we are reverting to the preSQL days of CODASYL or IMS (pre 1980s for those of you young'uns).
I spent a while at the Colorado Springs facility of HP. The downsizing was ludicrous. Every Friday would be the last day of 5-100 people. Many folks wouldn't even show up to work on Fridays because they didn't want to have to say "good bye." Morale was that low.
Routinely, the comments on the latest person to be laid off was "this person was the last person who knew how to [some technology or skill here]."
All because Carly wanted a new bizjet. I guess the ashtrays on the old company jets were full, or the steward/stewardesses were too old/ugly or something. About $50,000,000 each for the new ones. You have to fire a lot of people to raise that sort of cash.
Carly screwed HP big time. It will take a decade or more to rebuild and replace the desctuction of Her Incompetanceness. But as the above poster pointed out, we in the US only reward liars, crooks and idiots. Performance, skill and knowledge have been designated as enemy combatants and are busy being rounded up and destroyed everywhere.
Technically, you are supposed to already pay sales taxes on mail order, magazine subscriptions and internet orders. Tobacco and alcohol are regulated differently, with extra "sin taxes" on them.
Most states prohibit bringing tobacco and alcohol products into their state without an extra tax on them. Take a look at a pack of cigarettes, there is usually some "stamp" on them showing that the taxes were paid for in their state. Bootleggers make a mark up shipping alcohol or tobacco from states with low taxes to states with higher taxes. Sometimes buying cigarettes that are destined for export to other countries. Sometimes hijacking trucks.
I suspect that the states doing this are using the laws against bootlegging rather than trying to implement "internet sales taxes." I also suspect that the reason for the states to get into pursuing this are doing so to suck up to distributors and retailers. Why do you think that wine.com had so much trouble over the years? Because they were stepping on government sanctioned monopolies: the liquor distributors.
This will happen with the new US National ID card system. To verify the validity of each card will require connection to some huge national database. It won't be long before organized crime starts accessing the system to decide who to rob and whose identity is worth stealing. The same with the RFID scheme for US passports: read the passport, run their credit report, and if they are worth bug bucks, kidnap them as they leave the baggage claim area. After all, the smart passports will even have a digital picture to make kidnapping easier.
The Europeans have the correct model for data privacy: the data is the property of the person the data is about. The US model: that data is the property of the owner of the database, is what leads to identity theft and massive credit card fraud.
Identity Theft, and Identity Fraud crimes will only get worse because our underlying assumptions and expectations about data privacy and security are defective. Trying to stop those crimes by making the penalties for Identity Theft and Identity Fraud harsher is like trying to turn a sawhorse into a racehorse by painting it more.
The parent poster is correct. We cannot mitigate or minimize risks to ourselves when someone else refuses to be responsible for data about us. If the credit bureaus end up going out of business rather than correcting the defects in their business model/industry, fine, they deserve to die. Good riddance to them.
The new stage in code bloat is fatware. To go along with spyware, spamware, trojanware, drmware, bigbrotherware, software, hardware, firmware and wetware.
Slashdot Mirror
Our small (under 10 employee) company just offshored a job for one of our clients. All of our clients had been beating us up over offshoring work, because it is fashionable. So we spent more time specking the work and administering it than if we did the work ourselves. But we had to offshore the work because offshoring is this decade's fashion, our generations bell-bottom jeans.
Both times I ended up unemployed, I was unemployed longer than the 26 weeks that my unemployment benefits lasted.
Since the current administration keeps claiming triumph when the jobs grow, it is very relevant to point out that the number of jobs in the economy is growing slower than the number of people entering the workforce.
The resource room wasn't very helpful in any state I've been unemployed in. Some companies milk the credits and benefits that they receive for hiring folks on unemployment, so that those companies only post job openings at unemployment offices. Others post openings that they only want to fill with a preselected H1B candidate at those offices.
UO guides had schedules they had to log on for. EQ guides only had to meet a certain amount of time per week (and the guides set their own hours). That is one of the major distinctions that the IRS uses to distinguish between contractors and employees (or, 1099 vs W2). The UO court decision happened several years before the EQ guide program was offshored. While they look the same on the surface, they were quite different programs.
Yep, I've been in those sort of interviews where the sentence following "hello" concludes with "we were looking for someone a little less senior."
I am over 40. The obsession with youth, or at least folks perceived as willing to work 80+ hour weeks leads to a very strong discrimination here in the midwest.
What most readers of WSJ are woefully ignorant of is that most companies require machinists to own their own tools. Not the multi-hundred thousand dollar CNC machines, but the general everyday measuring instruments, clamps, jigs etc that can add up to $20,000 to $50,000 of tools over a lifetime. When these guys retire, part of their retirement income comes from selling off their tools. When they get laid off, many sell off their tools as well. Just like car mechanics, machinists have a huge investment in their own tools.
So all the guys who know how to do this stuff are retiring, or were laid off when their jobs were offshored. Even if we as a country somehow woke up and paid attention, it will take a decade or two to recover from our current insanity. It is the same with engineering and software development.
As a country, we seem to be taking the Grasshopper approach to life, instead of the Ant approach. We've combined the eat the seed corn along with the naked emperor approach. However, we've also adopted the "why do you hate America so much" mantra when anyone points out the nudity of the emperor.
I've only had catered lunches for meetings that happened during, and instead of, lunch. I haven't had company subsidized health insurance for more than 4 years, and before that, it was "employee pays more than half of the insurance premium." I've only seen "fridges full of soda" at less than 1 in 10 interviews. The only "benefit" that I've seen since the dotBoom that was even worth remembering were 401k plans.
Offshoring is a fad, like bellbottom jeans. Even Sony offshored their volunteer customer support reps because paying Indians to do the in-game customer support was more fashionable than free guides (who only got a free subscription and free expansions). There is no rational business reason that actually paying someone wages can be cheaper than a bunch of suckers/slaves who got $13/month for 6+ hours per week of unpaid labor (oh, go ahead and laugh at me for being a guide for 2 years). Yet that is why offshoring is done: it looks good in the press, no matter if it screws the business bottom line and the country's bottom line.
If the navy saw an ex-soviet sub sailing towards the US, I think they would sink it without asking questions.
More than a few of the soviet missiles were liquid fueled: fuming nitric acid and hydrazine. Both chemicals would corrode you and both are quite toxic. Each sub would be a SuperFund site all by itself.
Fidel is only holding on to life out of spite for the US. Within 6 months of the embargo dropping, either he will drop dead, or we will find out he died and was stuffed decades ago.
No other nationality gets this special treatment. Haitians fleeing death squads get sent back to machine guns: because that dictatorship is run by our evil bastard.
When I lived in South Florida, and before I broke up with my ex (note: she was cuban), she'd have the spanish language TV (from Miami) playing and they would interrupt programs to show immigration racing cubans to the shoreline with commentary. Kind of like the LA stations showing car chases from their helicopters.
The chilling and scary message was the one OGara sent, not the response by the public. The public's response was based on the feeling: if they did it to PJ, they can do that to us.
Why should I want my appliances to be hooked up to the internet? So my fridge can order groceries for me? So that JoeHacker can alter the temperature on my fridge remotely? Has anyone bothered tp think of security and privacy?
You should also take a look at Lexmark and how they used DMCA to sue Static Control Corp, an aftermarket inkject cartridge manufacturer. Earlier Slashdot story
You have 2 flight crew and some "flight attendants." Let's call the number of crew on the plane 6. When a flight is rescheduled, you have 6 transactions removing them from the old flight, and 6 more transactions adding them to the new flight. Total 12 transactions. When you have bad snow days causing cancellation or rescheduling of 1,000 flights, then you just used up 1/3 of your transactions for the month. Since all the transactions are serialized, restoring from back up tapes would just have a crash again.
With a signed 16-bit integer, you have 1 bit for the sign, and 15-bits for the rest of the number. Depending upon any error handling by the compiler, you could get NaN (not a number), maybe zero, maybe -32767, or maybe just a core dump. In any event, the result is not what you are expecting.
There are a lot of academic projects that vanish when the students graduate, or the professors lose funding (or fail to make tenure). Some of them end up as OpenSource. If you read academic research in computer science/engineering, you'll see it is 5 to 30+ years ahead of mainstream commercial development. Add in a nationwide distaste for All Things Educated, and it becomes clear why FOSS is years ahead of commercial stuff.
Adobe decided that they wanted to control the market for access control of PDFs so that they changed the licensing scheme for add-ins that can be used by the free reader software. If you write an add-in for the free reader, the PKI key and license will run you $1k. If your add-in does any access control, the key and license runs $25k/year.
XML is kinda nice for some things, and really rotten for some things. Please do yourself a favor and sit down and try to decide what problem you are trying to solve. XML really stinks when it comes to sets: something that SQL based databses excel at.
I think that with the XML fetish we have these days, that we are reverting to the preSQL days of CODASYL or IMS (pre 1980s for those of you young'uns).
Destroying evidence that you are supposed to hand over during discovery looks extremely bad to judges and lawyers.
Routinely, the comments on the latest person to be laid off was "this person was the last person who knew how to [some technology or skill here]."
All because Carly wanted a new bizjet. I guess the ashtrays on the old company jets were full, or the steward/stewardesses were too old/ugly or something. About $50,000,000 each for the new ones. You have to fire a lot of people to raise that sort of cash.
Carly screwed HP big time. It will take a decade or more to rebuild and replace the desctuction of Her Incompetanceness. But as the above poster pointed out, we in the US only reward liars, crooks and idiots. Performance, skill and knowledge have been designated as enemy combatants and are busy being rounded up and destroyed everywhere.
Most states prohibit bringing tobacco and alcohol products into their state without an extra tax on them. Take a look at a pack of cigarettes, there is usually some "stamp" on them showing that the taxes were paid for in their state. Bootleggers make a mark up shipping alcohol or tobacco from states with low taxes to states with higher taxes. Sometimes buying cigarettes that are destined for export to other countries. Sometimes hijacking trucks.
I suspect that the states doing this are using the laws against bootlegging rather than trying to implement "internet sales taxes." I also suspect that the reason for the states to get into pursuing this are doing so to suck up to distributors and retailers. Why do you think that wine.com had so much trouble over the years? Because they were stepping on government sanctioned monopolies: the liquor distributors.
The Europeans have the correct model for data privacy: the data is the property of the person the data is about. The US model: that data is the property of the owner of the database, is what leads to identity theft and massive credit card fraud.
Identity Theft, and Identity Fraud crimes will only get worse because our underlying assumptions and expectations about data privacy and security are defective. Trying to stop those crimes by making the penalties for Identity Theft and Identity Fraud harsher is like trying to turn a sawhorse into a racehorse by painting it more.
The parent poster is correct. We cannot mitigate or minimize risks to ourselves when someone else refuses to be responsible for data about us. If the credit bureaus end up going out of business rather than correcting the defects in their business model/industry, fine, they deserve to die. Good riddance to them.
The new stage in code bloat is fatware. To go along with spyware, spamware, trojanware, drmware, bigbrotherware, software, hardware, firmware and wetware.