B-1 "workers" are not supposed to be workers, so it IS about importing cheap labour. And the guy knew it, and fully participated in it for the 2 years he worked there. FTFA:
Indian employees he had placed as full-time programmers on projects he managed told him they were struggling to survive in the United States on Indian wages. "The B-1 workers were fully employed in this country, and Infosys was charging its customers full-time wages," he said.
1. He placed the workers.
2. He managed the projects.
3. He knew they weren't allowed to work locally.
He only got cold feet when asked to write a few letters to help cover up the situation. In other words, the manure was about to hit the ventilator, and he didn't want to accept his responsibility for his role in it.
So when I see the summary say "the sad case of...", and all the people who, without reading the article itself, think this is a case of whistle-blowing and not cowardice and trying to blame others (plus all the mod-bombing I'm taking), it makes me really wonder. Maybe I should go and become a drunken pill-popping paranoid gun-waving leech who complains about how mean the company is for paying almost $2,000 a week to sit at home too - after all, it's what the mindless slashbots want.
First, that is NOT what I wrote. Please read it again, and avoid "reading in" what you want.
Now, as to the right to know, the public had the right to know that the "babies ripped from incubators in Kuwait" story was a lie, that Colin Powell intentionally lied to the UN about the "aluminium tubes" and other stuff (funny how the rest of the world got to watch the UN inspectors debunking it hours before Powell went and lied, but it was blocked in the US), that the US was conducting a secret war in the middle east well before Vietnam, that the Japanese had offered to surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:
Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries. Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction. Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan. Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war. Release of all prisoners of war and internees. Surrender of designated war criminals.
Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):
The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.
and
"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.
The ultimate death toll from just the two a-bombs was 200,000. If the censored stories of surrender offers had been published, the American public would have demanded that the surrender be accepted.
Neither: It's based on the idea that companies that want to participate in the local economy should do so by the local rules. And that if they only want to cheat they should be stopped.
This guy is a crook. B-1 visa holders are not supposed to be working locally full-time, and yet - FTFA:
Indian employees he had placed as full-time programmers on projects he managed told him they were struggling to survive in the United States on Indian wages. "The B-1 workers were fully employed in this country, and Infosys was charging its customers full-time wages," he said.
He placed them. He managed them. To do so, he had to know what the job was, and that they weren't legit. To all of a sudden get cold feet when he's asked to write some cover letters, because THAT would leave a paper trail pointing clearly to him, is just another facet of his character flaws - the same flaws that have him now whining about how, because they're still paying him $1,800 a week, "he can't quit so that means they're torturing him."
The same flaws that are also exposed in his drug and alcohol abuse, and his paranoia, and pointing a gun at a total stranger for no reason.
And 1/2 of women get actual death threats? Really?
I think you missed the point - after all, actions count for more than words, and we don't hear all that much about men being stalked, groped in the subway, etc. Sure, there are the nut-case exceptions, like the "NASA stalker woman in a diaper" Lisa Nowak, but even she was trying to kidnap another woman.
So this guy - who had no problem doing illegal stuff as long as he didn't leave a clear paper trail pointing to him - I have no sympathy for. FTFA:
Indian employees he had placed as full-time programmers on projects he managed told him they were struggling to survive in the United States on Indian wages. "The B-1 workers were fully employed in this country, and Infosys was charging its customers full-time wages," he said.
His own statements show that he knew the B-1 workers were not allowed to do that - but he not only placed them - he managed them. It's only when he was asked to write some cover letters that he had his "on the road to Damascus moment".
So again, why should I, or anyone else, have any sympathy for a crook who abused the system to deprive local workers of jobs for his own financial benefit? Let him eat his gun, for all I care - nothing of value will be lost.
This guy was doing illegal crap and said nothing - it was only after they asked him to sign some letters - which would have left a paper trail pointing to him - that he got cold feet.
FTFA:
Indian employees he had placed as full-time programmers on projects he managed told him they were struggling to survive in the United States on Indian wages. "The B-1 workers were fully employed in this country, and Infosys was charging its customers full-time wages," he said.
So he's just as crooked as them. He placed them as full-time employees, knowing that they were not allowed to be.
Again, I have zero sympathy for him, or his employer. They deserve each other.
No, I did not. But YOU have made it clear that you think it's okay to outsource jobs to other countries even if it harms your neighbours, by trying a really lame straw-man argument.
For the record? Tell any company selling product here that they have 2 choices - either also invest in jobs here, or pay up to a 100% import duty. "Free" trade isn't free when its' hidden costs are the decimation of whole sectors of the economy, and when companies can off-shore the problems of pollution, etc. to havens where everyone is looking the other way.
Imagine a leak resulting in a New York Times front page in 1943, "Allies Crack German Enigma Code Machine!" when the Germans thought it was secure in a practical sense through the end of the war. How many battles would we have lost? Maybe even the war.
Actually, what could have been done was to publish stories about the code being cracked well before it was. DIsinformation is a very effective wartime tool.
From that point on, every failed plan would be attributed to the imaginary "they cracked the code!"
And then when it was finally cracked, even if someone leaked the truth, they wouldn't be believed, because by then it would be "obvious" that the stories were just a plant designed to encourage FUD.
Similar to how the brits published bogus accounts of german attacks (v1, v2) that caused high casualties when they missed their targets, to encourage them to keep missing...
It's even worse - he has a duty to mitigate any long-term loss to his own income. So he can't just say, in the damages portion of his ongoing lawsuit, that when they finally get around to stopping his paycheck that he's going to lose future revenue for $x number of years down the line.
He absolutely should be using the $1,800 a week they're paying him to prepare for a new career, or to set himself up to work independently, rather than complaining that he can't quit because... wait for it... they're paying him good money to do nothing but sit around his home.
Instead, he's abusing anti-depression meds and traquilizers, boozing it up, and pointing guns at strangers.
White trash about sums it up. "I can't try to do something else because then I'll lose my corporate 'welfare' check." Call me a whaaaamulance.
His job deprived some of his fellow citizens of work AND a pay-check.
Did you just say that you approve of illegal activity if it results in a paycheck?
Hey, I can play at that game too. Did you just say that you approve of continuing to outsource jobs illegally because what happens to your fellow citizens is not your problem so long as you're making the bucks?
So you believe that a note left on his office chair and a couple of crank phone calls, and then sitting at home and being paid $1,800 a week to do NOTHING should turn someone into a paranoid gun-toting pill-popping drunk? Wow. Just.... wow...
You obviously didn't read the story. The guy has turned into a paranoid drunk on anti-depression meds (nasty combo) who is a menace to the safety of passers-by.
Not the sort of person who should be carrying a gun, especially since he HAS since used it carelessly.
Sitting at home while being paid $90,000 a year to do nothing is hardly an excuse for his current actions. Most sane people would love to have that sort of opportunity, to have time for self-improvement, follow up on a pet project or two, write a book, check out new career options, party a bit, travel, do some outside consulting, whatever.
As for your claim that he's whining "hw has no real work to do" please provide a link. Otherwise I have to reject your claim as having no basis.
It's right there in the NY Times story that the summary linked to.
Mr. Palmer is still on the Infosys payroll, but with no work and little communication from the company, and his moods swing erratically, he said. He has struggled with drinking, gained and lost 20 pounds and taken medication for anger and depression.
â€oeYouâ€(TM)re around people every day, and then all of a sudden you are staring at four walls,†Mr. Palmer wrote in an e-mail. â€oeNo one will hire me and I canâ€(TM)t quit, so they just torture me. I have become numb and cumbersome to this world.â€
Menacing calls to his home and his motherâ€(TM)s nearby prompted him to buy a handgun, which he straps to his ankle whenever he goes out. Always on edge, he drew the gun in February on a salesman who tried to approach his house to offer cleaning goods.
He's getting full base pay - $90,000 a year - to sit at home and do NOTHING!
His job deprived some of his fellow citizens of work AND a pay-check. So no, he has no work, but he keeps the pay? Call me back when they've stopped paying him, so I can make a point about karma.
And no, one death threat and a few crank phone calls is not a reason to go all paranoid, hit the booze (it's in the story), and become a risk to passers-by. If that were the case, most women would be be toting complete body armour, an RPG launcher, and a mini-gatling gun.
And nowhere did I advocate falsifying visas, so STFU and DIAF. Oh, look - now you can go around and get a gun too!!!
Perhaps he thought they were above-board and honest in their proceedings.
It doesn't change the fact that this guy is sitting at home being paid $90,000 a year (yes, I read the article) and whining about how he is going nuts because he doesn't have any real work to do.
He deserves it - over the last 7 years his job put plenty of his fellow citizens in the same position, minus the pay-check. I'd have the same level of sympathy for a crack dealer who complains about someone selling them fake drugs. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Rien.
He knew the details of the visas - that they were for people who were not supposed to be working in the country - and let's face it, he placed them anyway. So now he's going around with a gun strapped to his ankle (again, I read the story). He's in fear of his life and ready to blow people away (he drew down on a door-to-door salesman) because someone taped a print-out death threat to his office chair, and he's gotten a couple of crank phone calls?
He must have led a really, *really* sheltered life. Even high school would have been too much.
I guess you didn't read the article - he's already sued them.
They're also paying him $90,000 a year to sit at home and do NOTHING.
In the meantime, he's turned into a nutcase. He bought a gun and keeps it strapped to his ankle when he goes out. He even drew down on a door-to-door salesman.
So someone taped a death threat to his chair at work, and he's gotten a few crank phone calls. Big. Bloody. Deal. Get a dozen women in a room and you'll hear at least six have gone through a lot worse without ending up pointing guns at unarmed strangers.
I have NO sympathy for this guy. He cries about how he can't stand not having real work to do. He outsourced plenty of jobs - let him experience some small measure of the misery he's caused in other people's lives. Karma's a b*tch.
It's an Apple marketing success to convince the general public that "lots of choices" should be stated in media articles as "fragmentation". Android has phones and tablets far cheaper than any iOS device, with more options for peripherals, more user interface options, etc... and it's been spun into a problem instead of an advantage.
It is fragmentation, and it's not Apple who is say it - it's developers, who say that because of the way that there is no standard to address all the different customizations for each version of each phone from each vendor (not just the manufacturers) that it's simply not economical to develop for Android. Contrast that to over a $Billion a month paid out by Apple to iApp developers.
In terms of money, Android is a serious investment in Google's long term future.
No - actually, one of the problems that Android has is that Google hasn't put enough people on the project. One of the devs at Google mentioned this as being one of the reasons for the back-logs in fixes, etc.
Google bought Android Inc. in 2005 for $50 million. Total cost, all in, for all development, promotion, etc., of the Android platform to date is an addtional $650 million (Oracle vs Google). That's not just developer pay, but everything - co-op advertising deals with manufacturers and telcos, product give-aways, inducements to hardware manufacturers, overhead charged to the Android business unit, administrators salaries, you name it. Actual money spent on development by Google is well under $20 million a year. That's hardly a "serious investment" in today's world, and one of the drivers behind acquiring Motorola. Moto had 3 options - Android, doing a Nokiasoft, or merging their phone biz with another manufacturer.
Google simply doesn't "get" hardware. Just look at the stupidly-priced chromebooks. For less money, you can buy an iPad2 with much better battery life and a lot less weight, or a much nicer laptop.
Advertising revenue is Google's lifeblood,
Oh, I agree - and that's why they have a problem. The more advertising out there, the less revenue from each ad. The market is saturated.
and smart phones offer more lucrative targeted advertising
And Google had to enter into a deal with Apple to power Siri searches ***for free*** or Microsoft would have done it - and guess what? Google doesn't get any revenue from that. It's called "buying market presence", and is a sign that you're not as able to dominate your market as you want people to think you are.
- instead of showing a user a Walmart ad when they're shopping for things online, you show them an ad for the Walmart two blocks away when they just did a search for nearby stores. Walmart and everyone else will pay more money per ad under those circumstances.
Not in a saturated market. It's the same as computers - once something becomes a commodity, the only way to keep market share is to throw in more features at less cost. Location-aware services won't command a premium, they'll just help delay price erosion on ad sales, especially since Microsoft is entering the same market, and Microsoft has a lot more money to play around with. And Apple could jump into the market with both feet by buying or developing their own search tech at any time - we now know what it takes to make a decent search offering.
In ten years there will be two billion smart phone users around the globe, and if half of them are using Android devices
Sure, but they'll be the bottom half of the market, same as they are now. The half that generates $5 of revenue for Google per phone as compared to over 100x that for Apple. Google would have been smarter to sell Android to Motorola - or Nokia - instead of buying Motoro
This behavior was so strange, we're dropping the price to $175,000!
Throw in a $200,000 "pre-bate" and I'm in!
(in other words, you'll have to pay me to use it. DotCom is just fine, and this is just a shake-down by ICANN, the same as the "OMG we need to 'protect' our name by reserving the.xxx tld or else!")
Here's a better idea - give everyone a bunch of 1p6 addresses and kill off the domain name system entirely. It's only a hack to allow translation between human-friendly "names" and ip addresses anyway. Someone wants to find my web site let them bookmark it's IPv6 addy and the title of whatever resource is found there...
It would also get rid of the domain name servers as an effective choke point, and also let anyone and everyone operate their own servers anywhere - like it was was before Berners-Lee screwed it up.
Obviously, if the sale had been a huge success, there would be no need to pretend-and-extend the original timeline.
All this is is a money grab, to try to get companies with deep pockets to "OMG WE NEED TO OWN OUR OWN TLD BEFORE A COMPETITOR DOES." So what if PepsiCo buys.coke? The dot.com is still #1.
The marketing is poor and the hardware is behind the times. I grant both, and both are damning.
They really are damning, but in a much more significant fashion - Google is a marketing company first, a tech company second (everything else is third). They don't "get" hardware at all. "The chromebooks, they sucketh", and Android is so fragmented (gee, who would have thunk it - open source something and every manufacturer will fragment it. It's not like there weren't over 1,000 different linux distros to provide an example) that it's always going to be seen as less than the iDevices.
All Google did was badly wound competitors like Microsoft, Nokia, HP, and RIM, leaving Apple to take 95% of the profits on ~50% of the sales.
Oh well - at least it makes for interesting times:-)
Google may soon be hitting the upper bounds of growth. It's not like there's unlimited demand for on-line (or any other) advertising. As more pages get viewed, the average cost per ad has to drop.
They've managed to do some price support by mailing $100 adword credit vouchers to anyone and everyone (I've thrown two of them out so far) - the idea being not so much to get new customers as to help generate more of a bidding competition in each market. After all, if you're spending "free money", you can bid higher - and whoever was bidding for the same term now has to fork over more real money.
However, that just means in the long run that there's less meat on the bone in terms of results per dollar spent, so while it gives a short-term bump, long-term, it encourages people to look at the competition.
And the competition, in this case, is Microsoft. They've pretty much killed! off! Yahoo! with! a! fake! bid! that they later withdrew... so who's left?
I installed ghostery, and it's a bit of a shock to see up to two dozen ad trackers, ad servers, and analytics packages on a page load - this is out of control. One or two ads, I don't mind - but that sort of invasion of privacy, waste of bandwidth, and making everything load slower, I'm more than happy to block the peeping toms.
The OP sounds like they work for a relatively small company - one where it's possible for people to push brain farts like astro-turfing and illegal product "endorsements." That's the sort of place you end up half-hoping you'll be fired, and surprised when you make it through another week.
But again - what costly battle? You file a complaint, the government investigates, you get $$$$. As for their friends at work - if they'll go along with making the posters' life miserable, they're not friends, so to heck with them.
You don't have to put up with crap for a pay check.
Your argument is entirely bogus. This is a job situation, where if suddenly the employer turns around and starts doing what you said, you have the right to quit and sue for constructive dismissal.
And any time your employer comes up to you and asks you to sign something that none of your other co-workers is being asked to sign, that's when you take the paper and walk out and say "I'm going home - and you're going to pay me for it - until such time as you reverse this or I'll see you in court." And make sure that several co-workers see it (and if you have half a brain, record it as well).
Then start looking for another job, knowing that they can't do anything in retaliation from that point on. The only way to clean out the bad actors is for employees to up and quit - otherwise, you make it harder for employers who don't want to engage in such stupidity to say "we don't do this because not only is it wrong, but it often backfires."
Anyone who doesn't stand up against this when asked is part and parcel of the problem.
right now Chrome OS is aimed at schools and businesses
Judging from the ultra-lame marketing, it's not aimed at any particular market - it was just another Google "let's throw some more web sh*t at the wall and see if it sticks" experiment. And it's failed.
Schools won't buy them - they weigh almost 3x as much as an iPad, and battery life sucks. And they're more expensive than either the iPad2 or a full-blown laptop, so forget schools.
Businesses? Same deal and then some - add in that not every business wants to trust Google with their internal documents - financial forecasts, marketing plans, internal emails, client price lists, legal consultations, hiring and firing decisions, training manuals, product specs and proprietary formulas. Now throw in that in some fields it's not even legal to share information with any 3rd party because of the types of data involved. Heck, many businesses don't want employees on the web at all during business hours.
So no, take this stupid chromebook, throw a red shirt on it, and have Dr. McCoy come out and say it's dead, already.
And what you described is grounds for a claim of constructive dismissal when you get fed up and quit - and constructive dismissal is a lot easier to prove than that they harassed you because they think you blew the whistle.
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1. He placed the workers.
2. He managed the projects.
3. He knew they weren't allowed to work locally.
He only got cold feet when asked to write a few letters to help cover up the situation. In other words, the manure was about to hit the ventilator, and he didn't want to accept his responsibility for his role in it.
So when I see the summary say "the sad case of ...", and all the people who, without reading the article itself, think this is a case of whistle-blowing and not cowardice and trying to blame others (plus all the mod-bombing I'm taking), it makes me really wonder. Maybe I should go and become a drunken pill-popping paranoid gun-waving leech who complains about how mean the company is for paying almost $2,000 a week to sit at home too - after all, it's what the mindless slashbots want.
First, that is NOT what I wrote. Please read it again, and avoid "reading in" what you want.
Now, as to the right to know, the public had the right to know that the "babies ripped from incubators in Kuwait" story was a lie, that Colin Powell intentionally lied to the UN about the "aluminium tubes" and other stuff (funny how the rest of the world got to watch the UN inspectors debunking it hours before Powell went and lied, but it was blocked in the US), that the US was conducting a secret war in the middle east well before Vietnam, that the Japanese had offered to surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
and
The ultimate death toll from just the two a-bombs was 200,000. If the censored stories of surrender offers had been published, the American public would have demanded that the surrender be accepted.
This guy is a crook. B-1 visa holders are not supposed to be working locally full-time, and yet - FTFA:
He placed them. He managed them. To do so, he had to know what the job was, and that they weren't legit. To all of a sudden get cold feet when he's asked to write some cover letters, because THAT would leave a paper trail pointing clearly to him, is just another facet of his character flaws - the same flaws that have him now whining about how, because they're still paying him $1,800 a week, "he can't quit so that means they're torturing him."
The same flaws that are also exposed in his drug and alcohol abuse, and his paranoia, and pointing a gun at a total stranger for no reason.
I think you missed the point - after all, actions count for more than words, and we don't hear all that much about men being stalked, groped in the subway, etc. Sure, there are the nut-case exceptions, like the "NASA stalker woman in a diaper" Lisa Nowak, but even she was trying to kidnap another woman.
So this guy - who had no problem doing illegal stuff as long as he didn't leave a clear paper trail pointing to him - I have no sympathy for. FTFA:
His own statements show that he knew the B-1 workers were not allowed to do that - but he not only placed them - he managed them. It's only when he was asked to write some cover letters that he had his "on the road to Damascus moment".
So again, why should I, or anyone else, have any sympathy for a crook who abused the system to deprive local workers of jobs for his own financial benefit? Let him eat his gun, for all I care - nothing of value will be lost.
This guy was doing illegal crap and said nothing - it was only after they asked him to sign some letters - which would have left a paper trail pointing to him - that he got cold feet.
FTFA:
So he's just as crooked as them. He placed them as full-time employees, knowing that they were not allowed to be.
Again, I have zero sympathy for him, or his employer. They deserve each other.
No, I did not. But YOU have made it clear that you think it's okay to outsource jobs to other countries even if it harms your neighbours, by trying a really lame straw-man argument.
For the record? Tell any company selling product here that they have 2 choices - either also invest in jobs here, or pay up to a 100% import duty. "Free" trade isn't free when its' hidden costs are the decimation of whole sectors of the economy, and when companies can off-shore the problems of pollution, etc. to havens where everyone is looking the other way.
Actually, what could have been done was to publish stories about the code being cracked well before it was. DIsinformation is a very effective wartime tool.
From that point on, every failed plan would be attributed to the imaginary "they cracked the code!"
And then when it was finally cracked, even if someone leaked the truth, they wouldn't be believed, because by then it would be "obvious" that the stories were just a plant designed to encourage FUD.
Similar to how the brits published bogus accounts of german attacks (v1, v2) that caused high casualties when they missed their targets, to encourage them to keep missing ...
He absolutely should be using the $1,800 a week they're paying him to prepare for a new career, or to set himself up to work independently, rather than complaining that he can't quit because ... wait for it ... they're paying him good money to do nothing but sit around his home.
Instead, he's abusing anti-depression meds and traquilizers, boozing it up, and pointing guns at strangers.
White trash about sums it up. "I can't try to do something else because then I'll lose my corporate 'welfare' check." Call me a whaaaamulance.
Hey, I can play at that game too. Did you just say that you approve of continuing to outsource jobs illegally because what happens to your fellow citizens is not your problem so long as you're making the bucks?
So you believe that a note left on his office chair and a couple of crank phone calls, and then sitting at home and being paid $1,800 a week to do NOTHING should turn someone into a paranoid gun-toting pill-popping drunk? Wow. Just .... wow ...
You obviously didn't read the story. The guy has turned into a paranoid drunk on anti-depression meds (nasty combo) who is a menace to the safety of passers-by.
Not the sort of person who should be carrying a gun, especially since he HAS since used it carelessly.
Sitting at home while being paid $90,000 a year to do nothing is hardly an excuse for his current actions. Most sane people would love to have that sort of opportunity, to have time for self-improvement, follow up on a pet project or two, write a book, check out new career options, party a bit, travel, do some outside consulting, whatever.
It's right there in the NY Times story that the summary linked to.
He's getting full base pay - $90,000 a year - to sit at home and do NOTHING!
His job deprived some of his fellow citizens of work AND a pay-check. So no, he has no work, but he keeps the pay? Call me back when they've stopped paying him, so I can make a point about karma.
And no, one death threat and a few crank phone calls is not a reason to go all paranoid, hit the booze (it's in the story), and become a risk to passers-by. If that were the case, most women would be be toting complete body armour, an RPG launcher, and a mini-gatling gun.
And nowhere did I advocate falsifying visas, so STFU and DIAF. Oh, look - now you can go around and get a gun too!!!
It doesn't change the fact that this guy is sitting at home being paid $90,000 a year (yes, I read the article) and whining about how he is going nuts because he doesn't have any real work to do.
He deserves it - over the last 7 years his job put plenty of his fellow citizens in the same position, minus the pay-check. I'd have the same level of sympathy for a crack dealer who complains about someone selling them fake drugs. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Rien.
He knew the details of the visas - that they were for people who were not supposed to be working in the country - and let's face it, he placed them anyway. So now he's going around with a gun strapped to his ankle (again, I read the story). He's in fear of his life and ready to blow people away (he drew down on a door-to-door salesman) because someone taped a print-out death threat to his office chair, and he's gotten a couple of crank phone calls?
He must have led a really, *really* sheltered life. Even high school would have been too much.
I guess you didn't read the article - he's already sued them.
They're also paying him $90,000 a year to sit at home and do NOTHING.
In the meantime, he's turned into a nutcase. He bought a gun and keeps it strapped to his ankle when he goes out. He even drew down on a door-to-door salesman.
So someone taped a death threat to his chair at work, and he's gotten a few crank phone calls. Big. Bloody. Deal. Get a dozen women in a room and you'll hear at least six have gone through a lot worse without ending up pointing guns at unarmed strangers.
I have NO sympathy for this guy. He cries about how he can't stand not having real work to do. He outsourced plenty of jobs - let him experience some small measure of the misery he's caused in other people's lives. Karma's a b*tch.
"the sad story of Jack B. Palmer, an employee of Infosys, the giant Indian outsourcing firm ..."
Sorry, but this is karma at work. No worse than one crook killing another ...
I'll try to deal with your points one at a time.
It is fragmentation, and it's not Apple who is say it - it's developers, who say that because of the way that there is no standard to address all the different customizations for each version of each phone from each vendor (not just the manufacturers) that it's simply not economical to develop for Android. Contrast that to over a $Billion a month paid out by Apple to iApp developers.
No - actually, one of the problems that Android has is that Google hasn't put enough people on the project. One of the devs at Google mentioned this as being one of the reasons for the back-logs in fixes, etc.
Google bought Android Inc. in 2005 for $50 million. Total cost, all in, for all development, promotion, etc., of the Android platform to date is an addtional $650 million (Oracle vs Google). That's not just developer pay, but everything - co-op advertising deals with manufacturers and telcos, product give-aways, inducements to hardware manufacturers, overhead charged to the Android business unit, administrators salaries, you name it. Actual money spent on development by Google is well under $20 million a year. That's hardly a "serious investment" in today's world, and one of the drivers behind acquiring Motorola. Moto had 3 options - Android, doing a Nokiasoft, or merging their phone biz with another manufacturer.
Google simply doesn't "get" hardware. Just look at the stupidly-priced chromebooks. For less money, you can buy an iPad2 with much better battery life and a lot less weight, or a much nicer laptop.
Oh, I agree - and that's why they have a problem. The more advertising out there, the less revenue from each ad. The market is saturated.
And Google had to enter into a deal with Apple to power Siri searches ***for free*** or Microsoft would have done it - and guess what? Google doesn't get any revenue from that. It's called "buying market presence", and is a sign that you're not as able to dominate your market as you want people to think you are.
Not in a saturated market. It's the same as computers - once something becomes a commodity, the only way to keep market share is to throw in more features at less cost. Location-aware services won't command a premium, they'll just help delay price erosion on ad sales, especially since Microsoft is entering the same market, and Microsoft has a lot more money to play around with. And Apple could jump into the market with both feet by buying or developing their own search tech at any time - we now know what it takes to make a decent search offering.
Sure, but they'll be the bottom half of the market, same as they are now. The half that generates $5 of revenue for Google per phone as compared to over 100x that for Apple. Google would have been smarter to sell Android to Motorola - or Nokia - instead of buying Motoro
Throw in a $200,000 "pre-bate" and I'm in!
(in other words, you'll have to pay me to use it. DotCom is just fine, and this is just a shake-down by ICANN, the same as the "OMG we need to 'protect' our name by reserving the .xxx tld or else!")
Here's a better idea - give everyone a bunch of 1p6 addresses and kill off the domain name system entirely. It's only a hack to allow translation between human-friendly "names" and ip addresses anyway. Someone wants to find my web site let them bookmark it's IPv6 addy and the title of whatever resource is found there ...
It would also get rid of the domain name servers as an effective choke point, and also let anyone and everyone operate their own servers anywhere - like it was was before Berners-Lee screwed it up.
All this is is a money grab, to try to get companies with deep pockets to "OMG WE NEED TO OWN OUR OWN TLD BEFORE A COMPETITOR DOES." So what if PepsiCo buys .coke? The dot.com is still #1.
They really are damning, but in a much more significant fashion - Google is a marketing company first, a tech company second (everything else is third). They don't "get" hardware at all. "The chromebooks, they sucketh", and Android is so fragmented (gee, who would have thunk it - open source something and every manufacturer will fragment it. It's not like there weren't over 1,000 different linux distros to provide an example) that it's always going to be seen as less than the iDevices.
All Google did was badly wound competitors like Microsoft, Nokia, HP, and RIM, leaving Apple to take 95% of the profits on ~50% of the sales.
Oh well - at least it makes for interesting times :-)
They've managed to do some price support by mailing $100 adword credit vouchers to anyone and everyone (I've thrown two of them out so far) - the idea being not so much to get new customers as to help generate more of a bidding competition in each market. After all, if you're spending "free money", you can bid higher - and whoever was bidding for the same term now has to fork over more real money.
However, that just means in the long run that there's less meat on the bone in terms of results per dollar spent, so while it gives a short-term bump, long-term, it encourages people to look at the competition.
And the competition, in this case, is Microsoft. They've pretty much killed! off! Yahoo! with! a! fake! bid! that they later withdrew ... so who's left?
I installed ghostery, and it's a bit of a shock to see up to two dozen ad trackers, ad servers, and analytics packages on a page load - this is out of control. One or two ads, I don't mind - but that sort of invasion of privacy, waste of bandwidth, and making everything load slower, I'm more than happy to block the peeping toms.
But again - what costly battle? You file a complaint, the government investigates, you get $$$$. As for their friends at work - if they'll go along with making the posters' life miserable, they're not friends, so to heck with them.
You don't have to put up with crap for a pay check.
So you mean mom was right - you are evil alien spawn?
And any time your employer comes up to you and asks you to sign something that none of your other co-workers is being asked to sign, that's when you take the paper and walk out and say "I'm going home - and you're going to pay me for it - until such time as you reverse this or I'll see you in court." And make sure that several co-workers see it (and if you have half a brain, record it as well).
Then start looking for another job, knowing that they can't do anything in retaliation from that point on. The only way to clean out the bad actors is for employees to up and quit - otherwise, you make it harder for employers who don't want to engage in such stupidity to say "we don't do this because not only is it wrong, but it often backfires."
Anyone who doesn't stand up against this when asked is part and parcel of the problem.
Judging from the ultra-lame marketing, it's not aimed at any particular market - it was just another Google "let's throw some more web sh*t at the wall and see if it sticks" experiment. And it's failed.
Schools won't buy them - they weigh almost 3x as much as an iPad, and battery life sucks. And they're more expensive than either the iPad2 or a full-blown laptop, so forget schools.
Businesses? Same deal and then some - add in that not every business wants to trust Google with their internal documents - financial forecasts, marketing plans, internal emails, client price lists, legal consultations, hiring and firing decisions, training manuals, product specs and proprietary formulas. Now throw in that in some fields it's not even legal to share information with any 3rd party because of the types of data involved. Heck, many businesses don't want employees on the web at all during business hours.
So no, take this stupid chromebook, throw a red shirt on it, and have Dr. McCoy come out and say it's dead, already.
And what you described is grounds for a claim of constructive dismissal when you get fed up and quit - and constructive dismissal is a lot easier to prove than that they harassed you because they think you blew the whistle.