Hear hear! Two of the goals of government should be to remain open/transparent and save taxpayer money.... at what point does paying for office software (hosted or not) become beneficial to taxpayers over the high quality free versions readily available and well maintained? If they're not good ennough it would be far cheaper to staff a couple of LibreOffice developers to make required mods.

What? Most companies doing this outsourcing don't realize it's not an apples-to-apples tradeoff. One of the core issues is that IT education in India is different than in the U.S. In India they spend much of their time on the technical aspects of a broad range of languages and platforms, but that training lacks the depth and the thought training that universities in the U.S. use in their curriculums. That shifts the burden of design and management from the average U.S. CS degreed developer who can do it all, to a tiered project structure where you have to insert a layer of project leads to manage the to-do lists for the outsourced developers.

So we have layers are added by necessity, process time is increased as a result, and in an industry where timing is everything, that short term cost savings is negated by the lost opportunities. Let's not forget that adding one more layer of indirection between the developers and the product owners just gives the developers a lesser feeling of ownership and they have less reason to stick around. In an industry that takes wokers 6 months to come up to speed, and high aquisition costs to find replace them, the costs continue to mount for any outsourcing effort.

True, but lets extend that accuracy a bit... U.S. Corporations are "world leaders in tax avoidance". A Government Accountability Office study released in 2008 found that 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/economy/03rates.html

True, if plugged into the grid. However, if the car is charged with a solar charging station then the gas mileage would be infinity.

There is a similar, and well known situation that comes up in database optimization. For example, the Oracle database has over the years optimized its internal disk cache based on its own LRU algorithms, and performance tuning involves a combination of finding the right cache size (there is a point where too much causes performance issues), and manually pinning objects to the cache. If the database is back-ended by a SAN with its own cache and LRU algorithms, you wind up with the same data needlessly cached in multiple places and performance statistics reported incorrectly.

As a result I've run across recommendations from Oracle and other tuning experts to disable the SAN cache completely in favor of the database disk cache. That, or perhaps keep the SAN write dache and disable read cache, because the fact is that Oracle knows better than the SAN the best way to cache data for the application. Add in caching at the application server level, which involves much of the same data, and we have caching of the same information needlessly cached at many tiers.

Then, of course, every vendor at every tier will tell you that you should keep their cache enabled because caching is good and of course it doesn't comflict with other caching, but reality is that caching is not 100% free... there is overhead to manage the LRU chains, do garbage collection, etc. So in the end you wind up dealing with a very similar database buffer bloat issue to Cringely's network buffer bloat. Let's not discount the fact that many serverdisk communications are migrating toward similar communications protocols as networks (NAS, iSCSI, etc). Buffer bloat is not a big deal at home or even a mid-sized corporate intranet, but for super high speed communications like on-demand video, and mission critical multi terrabyte databases, these things matter

I have not found promotions into management to happen among the most competent. Companies lean toward keeping good employees in their position, and those with less competence get moved around, many times into management positions. In my experience I've come to believe that management is very difficult because most people don't get it. Out of all the companies I've worked for and all the management I've worked under or with, I'd say less than 10% are competent, and and the best was female.

Why was she best? Because she was good at organizing, good at following up on performance reviews, good at letting her team do what they were best at, and good at making decisions because her communication with her team allowed her a good pulse of what was going on. A large portion of male managers I've worked with want to be too hands on, and shirk some of the most basic organization and coordination that is needed to run a team. Lets face it, the bulk of a manager's responsibilities are secretarial tasks -- calendaring, organizing, scheduling, basically keeping their team on task. Some people get that, some people don't.

It is ideal to have a manager who was competent in a skills position at one point in their career, and work their way up as does a manager of a loading dock, but it isn't a requirement. For example in contrast to most other countries, many Chinese government officials have engineering backgrounds, and they "get" technology, and thus they seem to make much more intelligent decisions for their countries in many areas, e.g. manufacturing. In contrast, U.S. politicians are all lawyers, who are adept only at diverting and twisting issues for their own agenda rather than a pure sense of "good" and "not as good".

So background is important, but based on the high failure rate of managers I've seen in my decades of work experience, I'd just like someone who is a competent organizer and decision maker. Asking for someone who is good at that and who truly understands the jobs and skills of those underneath them is nearly impossible to find. That is largely because managers are hired by "Directors"--career management straight out of school, who don't have a clue how the world works above or below them... and Executives are skilled at sales. No one really gets it, and thus my opinion of corporate organization is very poor, so the most competent skilled workers have no desire to get "promoted" into a position largely occupied by incompetents.

This is why we have "director's cuts" and "theatrical versions" of many films... a single person's vision vs a product toned down for the masses.

Time slots do make or break shows. I've seen plenty of shows who did fantastic in their time slot, then moved to a different slot to subsequently get the ax due to reduced viewership. The issue is lessened a bit by the advent of DVRs, but there's still a very high live viewing audience.

Using Android as the phone UI is an indication that Unity will remain a keyboard centric UI. There's enough FUD surrounding Unity without the need to muddy up that simple fact.

Unity was designed for notebook computers with keyboards, not phones and touchpad devices.