At a guess... not building a secure product not requiring updating in the first place?

I agree.

If you follow the second order links down to what Disney actually did, they outsourced their IT to a contracting agency.

When they did this, they laid off 125 full time employees in the process, and between three of the contracting agencies providing the services to replace them, there were apparent;y 65 H1-B applications in the last 3 years. Presumably, not all 65 went to Disney, because the contracting agencies contract services out to companies other than Disney. In fact, a vast number of dark data center porn and shopping sites are located in that area of the country, down by Los Angeles, where the majority of that kind of content is produced.

What this story is actually about, is complaining that the full time workers were replaced with contractors, some of whom were probably in the U.S. working for the contracting agencies on either H1 or L1 visas.

The summary is a gross misrepresentation of the facts here, and going with a contracting agency is a valid mechanism for ensuring "Just In Time" capability, without over-employing in order to handle upsurges in workloads. It's how janitorial and security services are handled (when you have a large company event, you have the contracted agencies put on more security people for the event itself, and added janitorial people post-event to clean up afterward.

That said, the usual route a decent company will follow when out-sourcing to a local agency, as opposed to off-shoring the work entirely, is to require that the contracting agency hire a certain percentage of the workers that are being laid off to replace them with contractors. This has the effect of ensuring continuity of service, providing a built-in mentoring capability to the contracting agency for the processes and procedures being contracted out, and in general providing continuity of employment for at least some of their existing staff.

It falls under the category of "Not Being Dickish About Switching Over To Contractors".

But the idea that they should not be switching over to contractors at all, for something like IT services, which are generally modular, replicable, and have uniformly applicable skill sets, if what you are spending your time doing is pulling wires, spinning up VMs, installing system software on replacement desktop/laptop machines, and so on, is patently absurd. These are "cog jobs", where any sufficiently skilled cog can replace any other sufficiently skilled cog in the machine, and you probably won't lose a marching step over the replacement.

That, and surge scalability, make them rather ideal for out-sourcing.

Frankly, I'm surprised companies like RackSpace are renting out their IT people, rather than forcing everyone to live on RackSpace racks; it's a pretty ideal scenario for them, in terms of profit per employee, and gives them buffer for their own internal surge scalability issues. They get borrowable capacity, and other people pay to maintain that capacity at a certain level.

Add the fact that a lot of deployment is on OpenStack with standard deployment tools, no matter if you're working on your cloud or working on someone else's cloud: all the tools are the same, so all the skills are pretty much transferrable.

This is kind of what happens when you sufficiently commoditize an industry through standardization.

Actually I was thinking nuclear power rather than magic.

I agree with the other commenter, there will be lots of people living in space if they can only get there. Mars is a good start.

People say this, but if you work in the context of a union, you might as work for a contracting agency, and skip a step. For most U.S. states, being in a union is a pretty useless activity, for everyone but the union itself, since most IT jobs are in "at will" states. Do not think that this is not *why* most of those jobs are in those states.

I have *never* sen a successful unionization of a programming shop; they fall apart, and are reformed almost immediately with non-union employees.

Obviously I am missing something, then. Please fill me in on your better information sources. Email to bruce at perens dot com if you don't want to put them on Slashdot.

It's time to start planning another trip to Lompoc. The Motel 6 was sort of yukky last time. Maybe I'll try something else. There was an official visitor observation site that I found and got into last time, but that was for the Delta, and it was on Pad 4 if I remember correctly. This one is all the way on the other side of the base on Pad 7 or 8, isn't it? There are some farm roads that might be good observation sites if they are open.

So like the cops... it shows up only after the crime has been committed, and only protects some of the population (Google passwords) and not the rest of the population (e.g. your banking password isn't protected, because it's not a Google site).

Seems slightly less than useful.

I am not confident that the world will remain a hospitable place for life until we are ready by your standard.

Getting the resources and people there is very close to being within our technical capability. The task ourselves, if we perform it, will take care of the remaining gaps.

Creating a self-sustaining colony outside of the Earth's environment is going to need a lot of work, but it is not work that can ever be achieved on this earth. We have to actually put people in space to achieve this. Our best experience so far is with submarines. Academic research has so far yielded only farcial frauds like Biosphere II.

Technically, making transceivers work when there are 30 of them in vehicles next to each other can get difficult. People wonder why you can buy a dual-band walkie talkie for $60 but the one in the police car costs much more. If it's well engineered, the one in the police car has some RF plumbing that isn't in the $60 walkie talkie.

You are exactly right. One thing though, it's "Ham" or even "ham". It's not an acronym. Thanks!

You do know that science isn't the only reason to go to space, don't you?

There is the issue of continuing the existence of the Human race, and whatever other life we choose to bring with us.

Planets and suns aren't sure things, you know. We sort of take ours for granted, but there is the evidence of the sky around us. And the ominous silence of a galaxy that should be filled with intelligent life...

Is anyone still taking June 7 seriously? And where is it supposed to happen now? Cape Caneveral instead of Vandenberg? I would certiainly drive down if they held it at Vandenberg. I was there for the first try on DISCOVR.

The first test was supposed to come off much earlier than May. There are both commercial launches and government ones in the way, and there was the Helium pressurization issue which put some things off schedule.

It's said that making a mistake in manufacturing work on equipment for the Russian space program could have consequences a lot worse than just being fired.

It's true that we place more value on lives of famous astronauts lost than we place on all of those people inconveniently freezing to death because they have nowhere to sleep but our city sidewalks, etc. Nobody's holding a years-long investigation about them.

And I am totally, totally pissed off at all of the news coverage that goes to a few westerners killed on Everest compared to the 10,000 little people who got buried alive in Nepal.

But I am not sure any of this says a thing about what nation will lead in space.

The Dragon launch may be rescheduled... to avoid space debris. the orbit the craft was in ended up too high; that junks going to be up there a loooooong time.

It's a trite aphorism.

I'd point out that in order to run a marathon, you have to train for a marathon. Walking is not a very suitable means of doing this.

"Smith hopes, of course, that his plan will accelerate IBM's internal development, and make it more competitive against not only its tech-giant competition, but also the host of startups working in common fields such as artificial intelligence."

Well, that's not going to happen.

I was at IBM lin the very early 2000's. They were already using agile development methodology, and using Skype as an incontrollable interrupt source, rather than Lotus Notes is unlikely to do much beyond making executives feel better that you are always reachable so as to be a le to conveniently move the goal posts out from under you.

Also IBM's internal development model is to polish customer facing systems, which tend to be human-centric, while internal systems tend to be held together with spit and bailing wire, while doing the absolute minimum to get them to work, and they tend to be very labor intensive for the humans who have to end up using them. I really don't see this ending up where he wants things to end up.

Example: there were twenty three separate systems that someone had to drive the process through to get an IBM Web Connections account up and running, and a lot of that work had to do with copy/paste between browser Windows, TN3270 terminal Windows, sending email requests via Lotus Notes, and so on. Once these systems were up and running, I did an analysis of all the interactions and steps required, with an aim to reducing the overall complexity and change of error. Management was not interested: once something is barely working well enough to get the job done, there's zero interest in the process of working on the process; among other things, it means less job security.

I don't see this changing wildly, given the reward systems in place for employees have not changed significantly, according to people I know who still work there. The entire business model for IBM Global Services is based on giving people what they ask for, as opposed to what they actually want/need, and then iterating the process in an "Agile" fashion to suck as much money out of the customer as possible. This was true of internal IT systems as much as it was for customer facing contracts.

Once again: I really don't see this ending up where he wants things to end up.