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I'm ambivelent about the H1-B program, but anything that has to get slipped into an appropriations bill to get passed is usually driven by the politics of special interest, not public welfare. If it is such a good idea, lets put it on the floor and debate it. Better yet, let's reform the whole system so that it encourages people who want to stay and contribute rather than taking the jobs back with them offshore.
I found an excellent WiX tutorial that walks through building a sample WiX installer. Good stuff.
Finished another Star City Half Marathon yesterday. It's a fun race - just a few hundred people and goes thorough my neighboorhood. I keep getting faster every year - at this rate of improvement, I might win it in 20 or so years ;-)
CNet's news.blog had an article about Rural Sourcing, a company in Arkansas that is providing low-cost outsourcing by using workers in the rural US. Their prices (quoted at between $38 and $60 per hour, depending on the skill set) are competitive. The woman who is heading it up, Kathy White, is an ex-CIO with all of the right credentials to make it fly.
Maybe we don't need to wait for the dollar to fall after all...
The principle reason for offshoring US software development is economic - programmers overseas are cheaper than those in the US by a large enough margin to make the additional risk worth it. The rates I've seen around for offshore software development are in the $20/hour range. What happens if the dollar falls precipitously over the next years, as seems likely ?
Let's take the optimistic road and say the dollar falls 20% or so in an orderly fashion over the next few years - do the offshoring prices adjust accordingly? If so, a rate of $25 does not seem that compelling for offshored development. I think you could hire a competent US national for about that rate or a little bit more when you add in benefits for a full time employee. If there is a dollar crisis and we see a 40% fall (as we saw in the 70s), then the economic rationale for offshoring software development basically disappears (although with that kind of calamatious fall in the dollar, offshoring definitely won't be in the headlines any more ;-)
The Simple Queue Service that Amazon is firing up is an interesting play - it looks like Amazon wants to become part of the Internet infrastructure. Queing if fundamental to creating scalable and reliable applications of all kinds. The service allows you to use Amazon's redundant and reliable systems to provide an inbox to accept trasactions for systems that are much less reliable (read: expensive). It looks like they are just exposing a facility that they built for running their own systems. Using this, I can run an Internet application with five-nines availability out of my garage. They don't have pricing posted yet, but it is a neat idea and builds on some of their other service offerings (search, e-commerce, etc.) I'm curious to see where this leads.
As a mostly Windows guy, I don't know how accurate this is, but the quiz is fun.Which OS are you?
Just in case anyone was wondering, I had to remove the comments from my weblog because I was getting comment spammed mercilessly. I tried to keep up with it by hand for a while, but 4500+ messages about penis enlargment, refinancing and the best place to purchase viodan on-line get a little tedious. Spam abhors a vacuum.
Business Week weighs in with their take on Microsoft's entry into the search area.
Really nothing to disagree with, but the ownership of the desktop is not to be undersold. Windows XP SP2 included a firewall. Why wouldn't SP3 include a powerful integrated desktop/web search engine?
We will start to see whether Google has real staying power now that people are starting to take the search space seriously. Microsoft has entered the fray. The new MSN search is, imagine that, pretty similar to Google - very plain, very fast.