lack of communication
no feedback
dissimulation
no involvement
no ideas
minimal work
bad code
inflated costs
delays

All the money that your company will spare, you'll spend it in testing, analyzing, debugging, guessing, hair pulling, rewriting specs, re-asking, reworking, correcting, etc, etc, etc... And indeed, all this takes a lot of time...

You end up with something over which you have no control, that's not "yours" and that's not really what you asked for.

If you company strategy is all based on an offshore software product, then it is at risk.
The day it realizes that and decides to step back, then it wil be a pain in the ass to get source code that compiles and that you understand. It'll be better off rewriting clean code from scratch by your standards...

I'm talking about outsourcing to foreign countries such as China, India or Eastern countries, with which cultural issues are far from being a detail. Don't do that!

Like during this huge and often ridiculous witch hunt in the USA during cold-war. Fear your neighbor, frear!
(Not that the other party was without well imaged propaganda against evil US imperialism)

... always :-)

An atmosphere? Why??

+1
keep the domain, put a redirect. I've done it with a 1000+ users forum.

Right, black box testing and exploration testing are the most interesting, it can be like a game. Detective work where good analysis and diagnostics skills are required.

When you find a failure, you have to investigate further to pin point the defect, to have something tangible and accurate to report to the developers (so that they have no other choice than to believe you ;-).

You're not the guy who made the code, but as a developer yourself, you know how it works, and you know where developers sometimes neglet to shield their code or what is likely to fail. You don't see what's inside that "box", but you guess. You have a totally different point of view than the coders who made it, so you see things they don't see.

It can even happen that you end up explaining them how what they wrote works, that you gain a better understanding of what their software does in reality! Think networking for example: with modern high level OO languages, networking is completely burried into many software layers. Opening a remote connection at high level is easy-peasy nowadays, but many programmers (especially youngest ones) don't know (or are not interested to know) what's going on down there on the cable. Your tool will be Wireshark and with it you'll see the live connection, you'll see in details how it works or fails, not how the developer expected it would work.

Software testing can be much more than pressing buttons and ticking PASS/FAIL checkboxes. It's a domain where you can have plenty of freedom and can use all your imagination and skills. Some tasks such as preparing test cases or writing reports can be boring but it's not worse that documenting code for a developer. Some coders will see you as a fellow who helps them while some others with a large ego might not like you very much, especially when they cause many defects and see your name too often! But being a good tester is rewarding. If you can share this job with some programming, you'll be a happy guy.

A book I recommend is "Lessons Learned in Software Testing": http://tinyurl.com/86f9q48

Similar situation here, with tons of documents (Word, Excel, PDF, etc) scattered everywhere, along with project specific personal web pages on users stations, etc...
I've set up a portal for our intranet and a project management system, but so far the most useful tool is an indexer (Xapian) and a search page (à la Google, available on the portal) since it allows easy recovery of "archived" (read "lost") older documents...

The most difficult task is to convince some colleagues reluctant to changes that it's better to "publish" their documentation (using online tools) rather than to "archive" MS Word files, deep into some directory trees, in locations only known by them... Management support is required...

3am "local time", they say on NASA web page... What "local" time?! Come on, NASA!

...
There is a close and natural relation between Breitling and aviation since nearly one century. They make chronographs and watches that are more aeronautical flight intruments than watches, and which have been widely adopted in aviation not for bling-bling reasons but for their specialization and their high-perf.

There is no marketing need to "try to associate" some James Bond image to watches that are used by astronauts in space (since NASA's Mercury program)...

Breitling is sponsoring many aviation projects (e.g. , aerobatic squads, warbird restoration, Orbiter solar aircraft, etc). It owes much to aviation but repays it well in return.

It's not like if it was Cartier (or Budweiser) that was sponsoring Rossy.

PS: I don't wear any watch

"I shudder anytime anytime I get asked to look at someone elses Perl code. That has NEVER been a good experience."

Again, this depends on the programmer who wrote the code, not the language.
It surely can happen that Perl has nothing to forgive..

Anyway Perl was ment as a "Practical Extraction and Report Language". Imho, in this domain it remains the best!

I couldn't agree more!
The more this stuff would learn about you, the less you 'd have chances to learn new stuff that could interest you, to open your mind to other opinions and other ideas. It's kind of positive closed-loop that'll lock your mind and prevent you to evolve (well, fortunately the rest of the world will continue to interact with you by other means).

I'd never permit a real person, even my mother who knows me well, to select what I should be interested in, so an archaic AI program, a bonehead maker? never!...

Evolution needs stimulation, not confortation.

Apparently MS resold a bunch of 3D graphics patents it bought from SGI in 2001-2002.
SGI was is urgent need of cash at this time, and MS was working on the xbox. It was like SGI selling its soul to MS...

Silicon Graphics graphics technology, Linux, not bad...

"Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser. "

Should be true if we considere the many sites that got their code screwed up with non-standard stuff to be compatible with older IE versions. It's the internet that unfortunately had to be made compatible with IE, not the opposite.

IE8 is compatible with standard web as well as with now deprecated IE6 non-standard crap. No glory...