ID cards won't prove your ID - it'll just be another massive pain in the arse. "ooh, I've lost my wallet, I'd better get myself some new eyeballs and a finger transplant"

Agreed. One of my guys at my previous company rewrote something, from the user requirements, in 4 weeks. The client had spent £750,000 on it (I'm sure that their shareholders would like to have known that) and it cost £20k to rewrite. The politics of the situation meant that the Indian outsourcer were praised for getting it in on time...

Not so bad:

1) I've been putting in a new ecommerce architecture for one of my clients using Mule and ATG at the front end. We need to call an external Webservice so had the usual Java debate, CXF vs Axis 1 vs Axis 2. As I'm getting old, I'm more pragmatic than I used to be I advised their tech team to use the same method as their large Indian offshore company so that they would only have one technology to teach their developers (support and maintenance being a major concern). The internal architect came back to tell me they had hard coded each call using DOM to build and read the services - with it taking 50 man days per call (over 2 man years). By that afternoon, we'd chosen a framework and built all the calls, as well as refactoring their code to use our Mule services, and have built test scripts to test it all! This was frustrating for their finance dept.

Worse

2) At a previous client we were asked (as a niche supplier) to code review the work coming back from offshore. Again it was Java and the code showed a total lack of knowledge of the language or object orientation. Example issues were - all instance attributes declared as public which led to a total lack of encapsulation - classes directly referenced other variable classes with impunity, no use of interfaces at all, copy and paste code where inheritance may have worked, I say may as the code was written as if Java was a procedural language - one massive class, one main method...

Appalling

3) A 2nd hand story. I worked with an architect who was sent to India by a retail bank in the UK as code wouldn't compile when returned to the client (Java again). He arrived and asked what IDE they used to which they replied Notepad - "ok" he said, not sure why, but I assume you use Ant or Maven to build your projects. "No, we just write it in Notepad and send it to you"... That explained a lot.

Anyway, all the above led me to start my own company (shameless plug) and we get quite a bit of work fixing offshore issues, or actually helping large consultancies improve their project quality before the client sees examples like the above. I would like to point out though, the issue IMHO is not with India or the countries in question, it's with the mentality of large companies who stuff in as many graduates into the mincer as possible, whether they have IT / programming qualifications or not, with little or no programming training with the hope that "it'll be ok". Grads are of course, some of the most profitable resources for a big company as they're paid peanuts. Having been in this situation at Cambridge Technology Partners in the UK, I saw tonnes of similar mistakes being made by arts graduates with no programming experience (including somebody using 2 digit years in code in 1998!).

Finally, coming back to the original topic, unless something major has changed in the States in the last ten years the CEO is talking utter rubbish - the USA is where tech innovation happens, with the valley still a major centre of this. Also, every US CTP technical person I met was utterly excellent at their job (Boston and San Matteo offices for me). Vineet Nayer is just peddling lies

I've used it both on touch screen and keyboard driven phones and each time it's led to a Basil Fawlty-esque anger management problem on my part.

It looks great, but in my experience it's always been too slow to respond to user commands, a better PDA than phone and the most annoying thing (that I've ranted about before) is the fact that it constantly pops up windows to tell me it's found a wireless network, or that a memory card is full, or... in the middle of a call, in the middle of writing an SMS, nope, it doesn't care - here's my modal window for you to disrupt your day for the 27th time.

For Slashdot I'm actually probably not that anti-MS - my company's an MS partner and I run Windows for servers and PCs (while preferring Linux - I was brought up on Solaris and HP-UX so...), and I even did Windows API programming back in the days of NT, but as a phone OS, CE / Mobile currently sucks.

Now my new Blackberry Curve - man alive I never realised a phone could be a PDA and work at the same time.

but he annoys too many people to be effective.

http://www.markthomasinfo.com/
I have to admit I find him amusing, even if I don't agree with all his politics...

Which is a shame really. My first commercial software writing experience was in ObjectPAL in Paradox for Windows for IBM on a Federal Project.

It was easy to build small relational databases with great GUI front ends and it blew my customers away.

Moved on from that to C, C++ and PowerBuilder in the banks before moving to Java then the normal LAMP set up. I've also used VisualStudio.

Maybe it's just my age, but nothing seems to touch Delphi, Powerbuilder or Paradox for Windows for ease of use in terms of building a rich client interface - something like it for Web 2.0 world would kick some serious...

I have a great memory, and to be honest it's a massive PITA. I can remember when people wanted MS to succeed against the might and nastiness of Big Blue (IBM). Now it's all comers against MS, with Apple and Google getting most of the plaudits and building an empire. If it continues, Apple and Google will be the big bad corporations in a couple of years and us, the nerds, will either fondly remember "good old MS" or hang on hard to a new trend / company.

Or Linux will be ready for the desktop :-) *

* I troll, I troll, I'm typing this on my Centos machine

the bloke in the office opposite me is a part of this. Trust me, they have the money and the track record to make sure it's done properly.

and he gets to live and work in Cornwall on big science - I hate him..... :-)

We've built our company website (Sceneric in CMS Made Simple which we thought had a good balance of Joomla features and functionality with Wordpress usability (i.e. the CEO could use it if need be). In addition, at the time Joomla insisted on a little bit of table layout in the presentation template and we wanted CSS layouts only (has this changed?)

Joomla's admin interface usability is poor in my opinion, though it does score a big win for shopping carts and eCommerce functionality - the modules that do this tend to be fairly easy to use, and include SEO plugins etc.

Over the last 10 years I've had 3 different versions of Windows Mobile and every time initial "shinyness" has worn off very quickly to be replaced by annoyance at stupid, stupid user experience mistakes.

The worst of these is Windows constant delivery of messages to the user. On a desktop the "you have unused desktop icons" bubble is annoying - on a Windows mobile device, a bubble that takes the user focus away from, say

• typing an SMS
• typing a number
• typing a note
• accepting a call

is a serious barrier to usage.

The other thing that finally caused me to switch to a Crackberry (which is fantastic) was that it would crash on receiving a call occasionally - brilliant. It was the HTC Tytan if anybody cares.

Does this meant that my blind friends who use JAWS to read websites are breaking the law or infringing copyrights? Another excuse for a lawsuit or settlement...

Heh, this got me thinking, there was already an ARM Laptop in 1992:

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Pics/A4A1.jpg

and the post I referred to above was something like this one:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1122971&cid=26803605

but I'm sure it was comp.sys.os...

Basically, in 1991 I was an Acorn geek and had a good knowledge of ARM assembler. I'd had a A310 (an ARM2 I believe) and I'd just upgraded to a RISCPC (with the ARM3 and the FPU I think) for university, while also learning *nix in the Sun lab.

While browsing comp.sys.os I found a post from some bloke called Linus who was offering a *nix kernel that could be compiled for x86 and we started having an email chat with him about how I'd go about porting it to the ARM hardware. I took it know further when all he asked for was $20 or so as, frankly, I was a student (so had little cash) and I didn't know how to get a bankers cheque in USD.

And that, my son, is why I didn't surf a wave of Linux on ARM...

The mantra in UK TV at the moment is interactivity; "phone this number", "press the red button now", "our website is...". The amusing thing is that, like the interactive web, execs only support it when it brings in business or is "on message".

The public, who know all along that the show is an excuse for a bit of fun, got increasingly annoyed with the show (the judges) taking it all too seriously and just kept voting for him.

That and his dance partner had an amazing rack - it's why I kept voting :)