How many people are living a life of laptops and tablets and (functionally) unlimited bandwidth, and consume all their entertainment on these devices?
Now, how many people own a television and a disc player?
Also, popping in a disc is inconvenient? [Kids today, get off my lawn, etc.]
Man, no kidding. After years of waiting for a laserdisc to spin down so I could turn it over, DVDs seemed pretty darn convenient.
And don't get me started about trying to unjam a VHS player that's ate a tape.
As soon as DVDs became generally available, we bought them in droves, as loading and playing a disc was something a grade school kid could easily be expected to do, and replaying a movie dozens of times didn't wear out the media. And if the media got sticky, you could wash it in the sink. Again, pretty darn convenient.
> Better yet, use a camera that automatically uploads the photos somewhere. That way you still have a copy to *prove* what was in the image (and that the image existed) if it does happen.
I discovered something recently -- Dropbox can be configured (at least on Android) to automatically copy your photos to "the cloud", where it's synced to any number of computers of your choosing. I have this set up now. In tests, photos I take with the phone are uploaded within seconds. I'm pretty sure erasing them would take a court order and more forensic work than most police stations have at their disposal.
I'd like to say I got the idea from the Veronica Mars movie, but I actually figured it out before seeing the film.:-)
> the replacements are under heavy duress. They quality will drop for a little bit, but they'll work 80 hours a week to catch up since the alternative is abject poverty and starvation. If the first batch doesn't do it the next one will.
That brings up another point. In our case, the outsource service were seemingly hiring random people off the street. We no longer had the root password (because the offshore admins were supposed to take care of everything) and the first batch of admins did not know how to use the su command.
But eventually they either learned, or got fired (and starved to death possibly) but then we saw another phenomenon: After the street urchin has gotten a little experience, he suddenly realizes that he can get paid a little more working somewhere else, so he leaves. This gives you a high degree of churn. By the time you've got your admin trained, he's gone and you have a store clerk in his place. This happens over and over. The solution is to pay them more, but that wouldn't be cost effective.
Right as I was getting laid off from IBM, they came out with this idea were they would transfer Americans to India, and pay you an Indian wage! Then they used it as PR saying "well, we offered EVERYONE the chance to 'keep their job!'" even though it required uprooting your entire family and leaving the country. Now, if your single and adventurous it might be fun, and even at an "equal wage" in India an American can have a colonial England lifestyle (maids, butlers, etc) but still...to me it sounded like an idea cooked up by a bunch of drunk frat-boy marketers.
I was laid off from IBM at I presume the same time (after boom.dot.bust) and can confirm that they were indeed making that offer. But from a little investigation and having been there a couple of times, I have to disagree with your assessment that an IT professional's wages could buy you the life of a lord there. IT professionals in India get paid much less than you imagine. You might be able to afford a small apartment but you may have to share a bathroom. They may *charge* a substantial wage, but most of that goes to the contracting company. (So someone is getting rich, but it ain't you.)
At about the same time, IBM tried another tack: 3 to 6 months after massive layoffs, they offered to hire some of us high five and low six figure employees back to jobs in the US at $16/hour. I don't know how successful that was.
I think the problem with that thinking, at least in my experience, is that productivity has gone down, not up, after outsourcing. People follow process without any insight into how the environment is put together or what they're trying to accomplish. "mistakes" include bricking servers, patching servers in the wrong order (Prod first, inevitably leading to production outages when patching fails) a DBA misinterpreting a procedure and dropping a production database and then discovering that backups have been silently failing because the backup admins only knew to follow the procedures, which had an error (I believe this nearly killed a bank in Britain, and it happened to us as well -- fortunately we were able to load most of the data from other sources). They never did figure out how to keep BES running and we largely abandoned it. Minor changes to A/D take three to five days. The admins are forever calling local desks at local dark times (2 AM to 4 AM) for permission for an emergency reboot or to take down a system, because they never really figured out that when it's light over there, it's dark over here.
Because of churn and other factors, very little knowledge becomes "tribal", and things like contact lists, responsibility lists, hotline numbers and so forth don't get passed along. First line support tends to call the employee they last talked to in the hopes that person knows who to call. And on and on. Several years after cutover, it's still a mess.
Aaaand, the company we outsourced to blames it on us, of course, for not having a good enough process in place when they took over. (We did, they apparently lost it. I have a handful of documents that we've passed to them several times, and six months later they don't know of their existence.) The solution is always to pay more money, hire more contractors to stay onsite at higher cost (many being former company employees, and good for them for coming back at higher pay) and I really can't imagine it's saving any money at this point.
The reason CEOs and CIOs can get away with it is (a) it's often a gradual downward spiral, enough time to jump to a more lucrative job, and (b) much of the cost is hidden. The company is doing badly, but nobody knows why. The reason is, the people who should be creating new products are busy managing their own machines and networks.
It's truly a mess. A good way to turn a big company into a smaller company. But it may look good the first one or two quarters. If that's all you're after, you're golden.
Major game company: "Ok ok, all the scientists and leaders are women and only men are put in harm's way. Everyone wears baggy clothes and there are no cleavage or ankles showing. Will you please let go of my throat now?"
Independent game company: "Sure, we're the author of Cheerleader Chainsaw Cage Match. Go ahead and picket us, it's free publicity. We'll send out a couple girls in cosplay to give out coupons."
Hm. As I write that, it sounds like a lucrative business model.
And even if somehow all mainstream games are scrubbed clean, wouldn't that open new markets amongst independent game creators? "You won't find any of that perv stuff in Grand Theft Auto XXVII, not much of anything really, except stiffing generic looking taxi drivers. But i know a guy who's writing a game in his basement that you might like..."
Well, specifically, he seems trapped in the mindset that outsourcing companies spend so much marketing energy promoting -- that IT isn't really a skill, it's a set of procedures that any primate could do.
Right in both cases. I narrowly avoided a layoff by learning a new skill and jumping at the right time. But the issue in our case wasn't retraining (the company ended up blowing time and money training the H1-B "guests" anyway) it was simply the desire to pay third world salaries.
> "The biggest slap in the face to all of us here is we have to train all of our replacements," said the IT worker.
I saw this happen in person, during a huge outsourcing of which I was one of the few survivors. This "training our replacements" thing... the problem is, it's difficult to quantify, the "trainers" have little motivation to comply, and the trainees don't have any way of knowing if they're receiving adequate training. So you cutover, and, well in our case it had all the elegance of driving a tour bus off a cliff. But I'm told that in many cases, if the outsourced team was good, things might trundle along for a little while on inertia. Until things start to go wrong, and you suddenly discover, you don't know exactly what has failed or where it's located.
> Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software.
I bet she would. Because money going into school budgets is more easily absorbed by the union, (especially in Chicago) whereas free software and essentially any supplies or resources that go directly to the classroom, are less easily turned into higher wages for union bosses.
Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, without liver side effects statin pills. Yet FDA bans sale of supplements calibrated to have enough active components.
If people who believe vitamin supplements work were included in this study, that number would be a hell of a lot higher than "nearly 50%".
Psst. The FDA controls the import of Red Rice Yeast because it *contains a statin*. Any red rice yeast you can buy on the shelf has had the naturally occurring statin removed.
Hang on, Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, because red rice yeast contains a statin. Lovastatin, in fact, which is a naturally occuring statin as opposed to a synthetic. (Some people think this is a good thing; personally I have a bad reaction to all statins, including lovastatin.)
You should add Thiomersal to the mix. The US is lagging behind a bit in that area. (Still in flu shots, and in animal vaccines.)
The whole family was looking forward to this film to an extent not seen since Serenity. It came out in limited release, only playing at a handful of theaters. We managed to see it at an upscale movie house not too far away, and had a great time. It's quite good. Although I'm not an "investor", I was attracted by the idea that it was kickstarter-financed, partly because this would be a good precedent to get films going that need to be made but would be considered too risky by studios.
...but leave it to Warner to screw their customers. Not only is this unfair to fans who contributed to the kickstart campaign, it's also unfair to the people involved in making the film, which was clearly a labor of love and is now besmirched by this crap.
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OP is missing the point entirely IMHO.
How many people are living a life of laptops and tablets and (functionally) unlimited bandwidth, and consume all their entertainment on these devices?
Now, how many people own a television and a disc player?
Also, popping in a disc is inconvenient? [Kids today, get off my lawn, etc.]
Man, no kidding. After years of waiting for a laserdisc to spin down so I could turn it over, DVDs seemed pretty darn convenient.
And don't get me started about trying to unjam a VHS player that's ate a tape.
As soon as DVDs became generally available, we bought them in droves, as loading and playing a disc was something a grade school kid could easily be expected to do, and replaying a movie dozens of times didn't wear out the media. And if the media got sticky, you could wash it in the sink. Again, pretty darn convenient.
That explains a lot. The first time I heard the offshore admin say "greetings and happy holidays" I nearly swallowed my gum.
> Better yet, use a camera that automatically uploads the photos somewhere. That way you still have a copy to *prove* what was in the image (and that the image existed) if it does happen.
I discovered something recently -- Dropbox can be configured (at least on Android) to automatically copy your photos to "the cloud", where it's synced to any number of computers of your choosing. I have this set up now. In tests, photos I take with the phone are uploaded within seconds. I'm pretty sure erasing them would take a court order and more forensic work than most police stations have at their disposal.
I'd like to say I got the idea from the Veronica Mars movie, but I actually figured it out before seeing the film. :-)
> the replacements are under heavy duress. They quality will drop for a little bit, but they'll work 80 hours a week to catch up since the alternative is abject poverty and starvation. If the first batch doesn't do it the next one will.
That brings up another point. In our case, the outsource service were seemingly hiring random people off the street. We no longer had the root password (because the offshore admins were supposed to take care of everything) and the first batch of admins did not know how to use the su command.
But eventually they either learned, or got fired (and starved to death possibly) but then we saw another phenomenon: After the street urchin has gotten a little experience, he suddenly realizes that he can get paid a little more working somewhere else, so he leaves. This gives you a high degree of churn. By the time you've got your admin trained, he's gone and you have a store clerk in his place. This happens over and over. The solution is to pay them more, but that wouldn't be cost effective.
Right as I was getting laid off from IBM, they came out with this idea were they would transfer Americans to India, and pay you an Indian wage! Then they used it as PR saying "well, we offered EVERYONE the chance to 'keep their job!'" even though it required uprooting your entire family and leaving the country. Now, if your single and adventurous it might be fun, and even at an "equal wage" in India an American can have a colonial England lifestyle (maids, butlers, etc) but still...to me it sounded like an idea cooked up by a bunch of drunk frat-boy marketers.
I was laid off from IBM at I presume the same time (after boom.dot.bust) and can confirm that they were indeed making that offer. But from a little investigation and having been there a couple of times, I have to disagree with your assessment that an IT professional's wages could buy you the life of a lord there. IT professionals in India get paid much less than you imagine. You might be able to afford a small apartment but you may have to share a bathroom. They may *charge* a substantial wage, but most of that goes to the contracting company. (So someone is getting rich, but it ain't you.)
At about the same time, IBM tried another tack: 3 to 6 months after massive layoffs, they offered to hire some of us high five and low six figure employees back to jobs in the US at $16/hour. I don't know how successful that was.
I think the problem with that thinking, at least in my experience, is that productivity has gone down, not up, after outsourcing. People follow process without any insight into how the environment is put together or what they're trying to accomplish. "mistakes" include bricking servers, patching servers in the wrong order (Prod first, inevitably leading to production outages when patching fails) a DBA misinterpreting a procedure and dropping a production database and then discovering that backups have been silently failing because the backup admins only knew to follow the procedures, which had an error (I believe this nearly killed a bank in Britain, and it happened to us as well -- fortunately we were able to load most of the data from other sources). They never did figure out how to keep BES running and we largely abandoned it. Minor changes to A/D take three to five days. The admins are forever calling local desks at local dark times (2 AM to 4 AM) for permission for an emergency reboot or to take down a system, because they never really figured out that when it's light over there, it's dark over here.
Because of churn and other factors, very little knowledge becomes "tribal", and things like contact lists, responsibility lists, hotline numbers and so forth don't get passed along. First line support tends to call the employee they last talked to in the hopes that person knows who to call. And on and on. Several years after cutover, it's still a mess.
Aaaand, the company we outsourced to blames it on us, of course, for not having a good enough process in place when they took over. (We did, they apparently lost it. I have a handful of documents that we've passed to them several times, and six months later they don't know of their existence.) The solution is always to pay more money, hire more contractors to stay onsite at higher cost (many being former company employees, and good for them for coming back at higher pay) and I really can't imagine it's saving any money at this point.
The reason CEOs and CIOs can get away with it is (a) it's often a gradual downward spiral, enough time to jump to a more lucrative job, and (b) much of the cost is hidden. The company is doing badly, but nobody knows why. The reason is, the people who should be creating new products are busy managing their own machines and networks.
It's truly a mess. A good way to turn a big company into a smaller company. But it may look good the first one or two quarters. If that's all you're after, you're golden.
So, to placate these people, what you end up is no women at all in movies or games.
So, I'm thinking, it'll end up being:
Major game company: "Ok ok, all the scientists and leaders are women and only men are put in harm's way. Everyone wears baggy clothes and there are no cleavage or ankles showing. Will you please let go of my throat now?"
Independent game company: "Sure, we're the author of Cheerleader Chainsaw Cage Match. Go ahead and picket us, it's free publicity. We'll send out a couple girls in cosplay to give out coupons."
Hm. As I write that, it sounds like a lucrative business model.
And even if somehow all mainstream games are scrubbed clean, wouldn't that open new markets amongst independent game creators? "You won't find any of that perv stuff in Grand Theft Auto XXVII, not much of anything really, except stiffing generic looking taxi drivers. But i know a guy who's writing a game in his basement that you might like..."
I wonder, who gets to decide? Does this mean that all game avatars will be wearing grey coveralls like THX1138?
Well, specifically, he seems trapped in the mindset that outsourcing companies spend so much marketing energy promoting -- that IT isn't really a skill, it's a set of procedures that any primate could do.
Right in both cases. I narrowly avoided a layoff by learning a new skill and jumping at the right time. But the issue in our case wasn't retraining (the company ended up blowing time and money training the H1-B "guests" anyway) it was simply the desire to pay third world salaries.
Maybe not, in the long run.
> "The biggest slap in the face to all of us here is we have to train all of our replacements," said the IT worker.
I saw this happen in person, during a huge outsourcing of which I was one of the few survivors. This "training our replacements" thing... the problem is, it's difficult to quantify, the "trainers" have little motivation to comply, and the trainees don't have any way of knowing if they're receiving adequate training. So you cutover, and, well in our case it had all the elegance of driving a tour bus off a cliff. But I'm told that in many cases, if the outsourced team was good, things might trundle along for a little while on inertia. Until things start to go wrong, and you suddenly discover, you don't know exactly what has failed or where it's located.
And discarded companies, possibly.
It rolls downstairs
alone or in pairs
rolls over the neighbor's dog
It's great for a snack
It fits on your back
it's log log log!
I'm more than a little disturbed I still remember that.
> Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software.
I bet she would. Because money going into school budgets is more easily absorbed by the union, (especially in Chicago) whereas free software and essentially any supplies or resources that go directly to the classroom, are less easily turned into higher wages for union bosses.
Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, without liver side effects statin pills. Yet FDA bans sale of supplements calibrated to have enough active components.
If people who believe vitamin supplements work were included in this study, that number would be a hell of a lot higher than "nearly 50%".
Psst. The FDA controls the import of Red Rice Yeast because it *contains a statin*. Any red rice yeast you can buy on the shelf has had the naturally occurring statin removed.
Hang on, Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, because red rice yeast contains a statin. Lovastatin, in fact, which is a naturally occuring statin as opposed to a synthetic. (Some people think this is a good thing; personally I have a bad reaction to all statins, including lovastatin.)
You should add Thiomersal to the mix. The US is lagging behind a bit in that area. (Still in flu shots, and in animal vaccines.)
This just gets more and more entertaining.
It's a scene from Blade Runner.
The whole family was looking forward to this film to an extent not seen since Serenity. It came out in limited release, only playing at a handful of theaters. We managed to see it at an upscale movie house not too far away, and had a great time. It's quite good. Although I'm not an "investor", I was attracted by the idea that it was kickstarter-financed, partly because this would be a good precedent to get films going that need to be made but would be considered too risky by studios.
Thanks, Warner. Go to hell.
I see what you did there.
> I really love hitting on my enhanced patdown specialists.
If that isn't a youtube moment, I don't know what is.