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Submission + - The U.S. Is Becoming A Hot Spot For Outsourcing

cdreimer writes: According to a report from The New York Times (possibly paywalled, free version), companies are now outsourcing in the United States, hiring from Michigan instead Mumbai.

For years, American companies have been saving money by “offshoring” jobs — hiring people in India and other distant cubicle farms. Today, some of those jobs are being outsourced again — in the United States. Nexient, a software outsourcing company, reflects the evolving geography of technology work. It holds daily video meetings with one of its clients, Bill.com, where team members stand up and say into the camera what they accomplished yesterday for Bill.com, and what they plan to do tomorrow. The difference is, they are phoning in from Michigan, not Mumbai. “It’s the first time we’ve been happy outsourcing,” said René Lacerte, the chief executive of Bill.com, a bill payment-and-collection service based in Palo Alto, Calif. Nexient is a domestic outsourcer, a flourishing niche in the tech world as some American companies pull back from the idea of hiring programmers a world away. Salaries have risen in places like South Asia, making outsourcing there less of a bargain. In addition, as brands pour energy and money into their websites and mobile apps, more of them are deciding that there is value in having developers in the same time zone, or at least on the same continent.

The Internet

Bufferbloat — the Submarine That's Sinking the Net 525

gottabeme writes "Jim Gettys, one of the original X Window System developers and editor of the HTTP/1.1 spec, has posted a series of articles on his blog detailing his research on the relatively unknown problem of bufferbloat. Bufferbloat is affecting the entire Internet, slowly worsening as RAM prices drop and buffers enlarge, and is causing latency and jitter to spike, especially for home broadband users. Unchecked, this problem may continue to deteriorate the usability of interactive applications like VOIP and gaming, and being so widespread, will take years of engineering and education efforts to resolve. Being like 'frogs in heating water,' few people are even aware of the problem. Can bufferbloat be fixed before the Internet and 3G networks become nearly unusable for interactive apps?"
The Internet

Race Pits Pigeons Against Poor UK Rural Broadband 298

Mark.JUK writes "Rural internet access in the United Kingdom, like many other countries around the world, is slow. So slow in fact that Trefor Davies, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at business ISP Timico, has decided to pit a typical rural broadband connection against homing pigeons (with attached memory cards) to see which can get 200MB of HD video data across an 84 mile trip the fastest. Meanwhile a farmer will attempt to upload the same video file to YouTube before the pigeons can complete their journey. The comical stunt is designed to raise awareness of the often woeful broadband speed experienced by many people who live in remote and rural parts of their country. However Davies does admit that 'there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds,' yet."
Space

Boeing Teams To Offer Spaceflight Trips 59

coondoggie writes "Aerospace giant Boeing and outer space tourism proprietors Space Adventures teamed up today to offer low Earth orbit (LEO) flight services onboard Boeing's future commercial crew spacecraft. Under this agreement, Space Adventures will market passenger seats on commercial flights aboard the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) spacecraft. Boeing's CST-100, which is under development, can hold seven and is bigger than NASA's Apollo orbiter but smaller than NASA's Orion."
United States

Public Clearinghouse Proposed For Evoting Failures 114

Hugh Pickens writes "Alice Lipowicz writes in Federal Computer Week that Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, has reviewed hundreds of reports of problems with electronic voting systems during the last eight years. He is recommending a new regulatory system with a national database, accessible by election officials and others, that identifies voting system malfunctions reported by vendors or election officials and new legislation that requires vendors report evoting failures to the clearinghouse. 'We need a new and better regulatory structure to ensure that voting system defects are caught early, officials in affected jurisdictions are notified immediately, and action is taken to make certain that they will be corrected for all such systems, wherever they are used in the United States,' writes Norden. Adding that election officials rely on vendors to keep them aware of potential problems with voting machines, which is often done voluntarily and that voting system failures in one jurisdiction tend to be repeated in other areas, resulting in reduced public confidence and lost votes."

Comment Re:More info (Score 1) 249

Japan has short runs and good quality cables. The US has long runs and bad quality cables. Most "Broadband" DSL rates I have seen quoted (And this is in Metropolitan Seattle; Not a luddite town) are "Up to" 5Mb/s "In Qualified Areas", and when you actually call they try to sell you on a 768/128 line because that's the max they can actually get to you (unless you live right next to their junction box).

Comment Re:For all his complaints (Score 1) 482

It depends. Just like with any issue, this is far from black and white. New homes need to be built: Houses have a half-life, a wear and tear limit. Further, the population is constantly increasing. Just to house everybody, we've got to be constantly building new homes. Certainly, there are plenty of unoccupied residences. But over the 30-100 years that the average new, energy efficient residence will last, it may well pay off it's energy cost as compared to continuing to power and heat the old, leaky houses.

Comment Re:Not completely accurate (Score 1, Troll) 77

Holy crap. I just gave it the mac of my parent's router, on a private road in the forests ~30 minutes outside Seattle, and it gave back the correct street address. Then again, what use does this have? Maybe a disoriented traveller could use it to find his way, but other than that I see no reason anyone would be able to abuse mapping MAC address to location. It's a new form of phone book; nothing more.

Comment Re:Already Done (Score 1) 344

Modern video cards already have TV out hardware; DVI -> HDMI adapters come in the box of nearly ever video card I've seen in the past 2 years. Seeing more computer manufacturers go out of their way to make certain they've also got sound cards with S/PDIF digital out and that such are attached to the video cards for full HDMI awesomeness is the important step

Comment Re:Bogus outdated thinking (Score 2, Informative) 444

That's why the smart money is based on node-based storage: Multiple boxes that are interchangeable. It's a shameless product plug, but I work for Isilon Systems, and our solution is that the whole system is considered replaceable: We don't sell a configuration that doesn't allow you to yank an entire box transparently. A drive failure is rebuilt and ready for swapping as soon as it comes up: Most of our admins don't know about disk failures until their data is already reprotected.

Granted, our smallest config is 9TB; We're somewhat overkill for a home user. But if you need a company-wide NAS...

Commodity hardware, standard networking (Gig and 10Gig Ethernet frontend, Infiniband backend), and a very smart filesystem (Capable of protecting from up to 4 simultaneous whole-node failures) == a killer combination; It takes some seriously bad luck for data-loss to become a problem.

Comment Re:But it could be! (Score 1) 171

Generally, that should be obvious based on what it's returning; If it's returning a copy, it should return a static User object, if it's returning a the original it will be a pointer to it. That's also what the documentation is for, in the event that it is returning a reference to a copy it needs to make clear that it's the caller's job to destroy the object. In Java, you refer to that as an "implementation detail"; In C++, you generally realize that /you are the implementer/ and need to pay attention to details.

The Courts

Adult Website Use At Work Leads To Hacker Conviction 361

safesorry notes that several sources are talking about a recent tale of woe about Richard Wolf, a lonely guy looking for love in all the wrong places. Wolf used his work computer to visit the Adult Friend Finder website and upload personal nudes to prospective "friends." Now he's been convicted under a "hacker" law targeted at employees who steal data or access information they shouldn't. "Richard Wolf acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate when he used his work computer to upload nude photos of himself to an adult web site and view other photos on porn sites, but he didn't think he should be convicted of hacking for doing so."

Comment Re:Shutup you commie (Score 1) 433

Those that operate above the normal legal standards also need to be held to a higher moral standard: Being a military serviceman is not something to take lightly. I don't agree with all the policies (Seriously, no porn? Yeah, right, get right on that), but the reduced freedom of speech, the need to verify potential associates, etc, are part of the tradeoffs that come with the position.

Thank you, though, for making them.

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