wasn’t i just writing about

an impending backlash

against the “offshoring is the answer to every question” mindset?
business week

joins the club by looking at the

the hidden costs of it outsourcing

:

“On paper, it looks extremely attractive. A Russian
programmer charges 80% less than an American. But when you parse it
all out, the total cost of offshoring a given IT job is generally
comparable to getting the work done domestically, says Tom
Weakland, a partner at management consultancy DiamondCluster. It’s
just that few companies are aware of these real costs. “Most
companies can’t accurately measure their productivity and costs
prior to and after outsourcing,” says Weakland. “Most look just at
wages.””

i’ve found that people who think offshoring is a
panacea for cost reduction also subscribe to the

“masses of asses”

school of thought:

“”Masses of asses” refers to the old-school IBM way of
programming, just throwing a whole lot of average programmers on a
project, because surely more programmers means it will get done
more quickly. If you want a road built quickly, you add more
construction workers. Unfortunately, its a bad analogy to software
— adding more programmers to make software quicker is like adding
more mothers to have a baby quicker. Again, this is nothing new.

The key is small focused teams of good people. If a project is big,
subdivide into well-defined components with small teams developing
them. “

if you read

“OS X Conference: Pixar talks OS X migration”

you’ll discover that
pixar

has reduced their “total cost of ownership” by moving from os 9 and
they’ve been nice enough to put their
geeky admin tools
online

:

“Rollout – A python script that will scour an OS 9
drive for user data and copy it onto a FireWire drive in an OS X
like home directory. It will also copy the data back from the
FireWire drive onto an actual user’s home directory!”

because you can. mozilla-ad-blocker:

“Block image, java, and flash ads based upon common sizes and url parts.
* This uses Mozilla’s support for CSS3 selectors and user style sheets, but
* this should work with any browser that supports both.”

[ via decafbad ]

can be that wilco’s jeff tweedy has stealthily been building p diddy’s sweatshop-based clothing empire?

“Jeff Tweedy, executive vice president of Sean John, the New York-based apparel company run by Mr. Combs, who performs as P. Diddy, said: “We have absolutely no knowledge of this situation. However, we take these matters very seriously, and we will have our director of compliance look into the matter immediately.””

it’s funnier if you try to imagine jeff “wilco” tweedy uttering that bit of corporate speak.

olivier travers eloquently illustrates a music business model that is closely aligned with my own music listening habits:

“Here’s the product I want: 200GB hard drives full of fully meta-tagged mp3 files that I can transfer to whatever device or media I want. Let me create my selection online and ship me the hard drive. I’d buy such a product for $1,500 (the price of the included hardware is just 10% and falling), and I’d buy one every 18 months. Basically an “All You Can Listen To” package geared to collectors and people who like me hate to know songs by heart and are in discovery mode day in, day out.

Why should anyone pay $50K+ to have a decent collection to enjoy with their friends and family when we’re talking about a product that is mostly already amortized (we’re talking about huge sleeping catalogs here) and that for the most part isn’t generating any revenue anymore (because the backlist is unavailable online or even in most record stores). Put music in the fabric of people’s lives, make it really pervasive, and you’ll increase both the number of buyers and the absolute dollar value you’ll extract from them. “

the $1,500 price point would hurt, but i think there are several ways you could slice and dice the payments . the basic point is a good one; some of the music industry’s best customers are waiting to be served. we are cut from the “the more we listen to the more we want to listen to” camp. we are in constant discovery mode and are drooling at the prospect of working out ways where we can discover hidden jems.

i’ve played with
xul

on and off

over the years

and while it’s easy to see the potential of a markup language for
describing user interfaces, my general impression has been that it
has been languishing on the vine. i think there are a lot of
reasons for this not least of them is the fact that there are some
fairly big disincentives for learning and developing a
mozilla

-specific technology [ no offense intended ].

so i was a bit surprised to see that
apple

has put a little

xul support

in safari 1.1 which comes with
panther

. and if that’s not enough, if looks like
microsoft

is putting together its own competing effort called

xaml

, which is sure to create a brave new world of competing
implementations and cross-browser compatibility issues. dave shea does a good job of summarizing the stakes.

so i’m reading
danny o’brien’s

very amusing bit on being tasked with compiling a list of the

secrets of the well-organized geek

and i’m thinking when i’m reading the

discussion topic

that it’s appropriate that
morbus

is on danny’s list of suspects. i have no idea if morbus has any
secret geeky tools underlying his prolificness

, but there have been times over the years that i could be
convinced that he’s in about eight different places at once while
being inordinately productive and helpful.

i’m thinking this while i hop over to his
disobey nonsense network

and i see that he’s taken the

polical compass test

and appears to be solidly

leftist/libertarian

. curious to see how my own political and economic views might be
categorized, i take the test and discover that i’m also

leftist/libertarian

. that’s when kris reminds me that i’m apparently a
leftist/libertarian with a bad memory since since she claims that i
already took the test “a long time ago”. a quick

search

proves that i have indeed just taken a test that i took

nearly two years ago

. i guess the

old results

prove that some things will never change. and amusingly, it also
highlights my secret “geek” efficiency tool – a wife with a better
memory than myself.

at this point, i’m chuckling at the
small pieces loosely
joined

quality of unintentially illustrating an efficiency tool while
pondering efficient people while hopping from website to website.
and then i realize as i’m browsing around to see what else i was
doing around two years ago that i might have forgotten about that i rolled about my

syndication feeds

at around the same time.

now things are just
getting unecessarily wierd for a saturday morning since i had just
written about the

script i wrote to create the feeds

last night. and who has a hand in helping me to make sense of rss
via email? mr.
morbus iff

[ go back and read the beginning of the article to see how this
mess started ].

frightened by where this multi-layered recursive wierdness might
end, i decide that it’s probably a good idea to shut the laptop and
go play the part of the

milk maid

.