Will India price itself out of offshore market? | CNET News.com – Tata Consultancy Services, one of India’s four largest exporters of software, has begun to offshore its staff, the American Electronics Association says in a new report. By 2005, TCS plans to have 3,000 software engineers in China, or 15 percent of their global work force. China’s universities, like those in India, award more bachelor’s degrees in engineering than their counterparts in the United States. Yet China’s wage growth rate for technology jobs was about half as much as India’s, according to the Hewitt study. U.S. pay rose 3.3 percent to 3.5 percent, the lowest increases ever recorded for American technology positions in the annual survey.

Interesting to hear about large Indian firms already beginning to outsource FROM India. Seems the big trend here is actually the growth of global conglomerates and mobile factors of production.

Atheist Presents Case for Taking God From Pledge – Dr. Newdow replied: “That is a view that you may choose to take and the majority of Americans may choose to take. But it’s not the view I take, and when I see the flag and I think of pledging allegiance, it’s like I’m getting slapped in the face every time, bam, you know, `this is a nation under God, your religious belief system is wrong.’ ” Before the justices can decide the merits of the case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, No. 02-1624, they must resolve doubts about whether Dr. Newdow had standing to bring his lawsuit, either on his own behalf or on behalf of his daughter, who is now 9 years old. A court does not have jurisdiction in the absence of a plaintiff with standing. Dr. Newdow was never married to the child’s mother, Sandra Banning, who has custody and has told the court in a brief filed by Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel, that she is giving her daughter a religious upbringing and wants her to say the pledge with “under God.” The justices spent about half of the one-hour argument posing questions about standing and sparring with Dr. Newdow on the subject.

The item I find most interesting about this case is that the father both does not have custody his daughter (he was never married to the mother who has sole custody) and the mother in fact feels exactly opposite, that her child should say the pledge with the phrase “under God.” Continue Reading »

Wired News: Pay Once, Share Often With LWDRM – LWDRM gives consumers more freedom. Like any other digital-rights system, it starts with a payment that gives consumers the right to use the song or video clip on their PC. But with LWDRM, from that point on consumers decide what may be done with it. They can copy the clip to another device like an MP3 player or distribute the file to a limited number of friends and relatives. In order to do so, the buyer has to download a digital certificate from a certification authority. The certificate attaches itself to the file like a watermark and records exactly what is done with it.

I can live with the Fraunhaufer version of DRM because it doesn’t attempt to code policy into the technology. It would allow tracking of individual digital copies, but not prevent actions, just show if you’ve been sharing illegally.

If Fraunhaufer were to disappear 2 years later, or discontinue the project, you would have no problems using your DRM’d files. Also, thing like selling digital files, giving them as gifts, media shifting, etc. should all be possible without limits.

Salon.com News | 9/11 panel cites Clinton, Bush inaction – Bush officials, meanwhile, failed to act immediately on increasing intelligence chatter and urgent warnings in early 2001 by its counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, to take out al-Qaida targets, according to preliminary findings by the commission reviewing the attacks.

The 9/11 panel has criticized both the Bush and Clinton administrations of inaction regarding terrorist threats. In the absence of 9/11 however, I wonder what the reaction of Americans going out and abducting the citizens of foreign nations would have been. Even with the tragedy of the WTC bombings, many have argued that international terrorism is a problem to be solved by police, exactly the approach which is being criticized as too slowly acting. Continue Reading »

business2blog: Buy One OS, Get the Second One Free – Well, the answer, due to be announced later today, is breathtakingly simple. Novell will … sell Netware and Linux simultaneously. When a customer licenses Netware, he’ll also get a license for Novell’s recently acquired SuSe Linux included in the price. For Novell, it’s a sensible move: It’s unlikely SuSe will lose many sales through this program, since any customer who’s conservative enough to have held on to Netware all these years is unlikely to leap into Linux. Accordingly, Novell’s making it easy for customers to switch. All the Novell network services that currently come with Netware will work identically on Linux, and with the new licensing program, customers won’t have to buy a new operating system. In essence, they’ll just flip a switch when they’re ready.

Novell seems to be positioning Linux as a straight transition product, much the same way that Apple transitioned Mac users to OSX. It’s interesting that companies are increasingly using Open Sourced foundation API’s to build their value added infrastructure on top of.

I wonder if eventually the industry will look like Microsoft on one end vs. everybody else? Open source lets everyone start off on a current, mature code base and add their value on top. It prevents any kind of hijacking (as seen by “(extlink)Nokia in the Symbian group”:http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,39149465,00.htm right now.)

I wonder if Open-Sourced API’s will become the lingua-franca of programming? Perhaps this is Software’s reaction to commoditization. When projects are no longer profitible, but have a sizable user base, just open-source them to take the strain of maintaining loss leaders off of your corporate record books.

Daring Fireball: Markdown – Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Markdown looks interesting. I’ve been using “(extlink)Textile”:http://www.textism.com/textile pretty heavily for its convenience. The unfiltered text of markdown looks like it may be a little cleaner, and handle things like hard returns in text much better than textile. I’m going to have to try it out and see how well it works.

G.I. Seeks Conscientious Objector Status – Shaken by a gunfight in Iraq that killed innocent civilians, a 28-year-old U.S. soldier declared the invasion “an oil-driven war” and said he won’t return to the Middle East and fight. Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, of Miami Beach, surrendered Monday at an air force base in Massachusetts, where he was ordered to report to his unit Tuesday at the North Miami Armory in suburban Miami.

A Florida college student went AWOL during leave and has publicly aligned himself with anti-war demonstrators, declaring that he will not return to Iraq for “an oil-driven war.” He has expressed his intention to declare himself a conscientious objector to avoid returning.

Many people have thrown the term Conscientious objector around, but few people use it in the term used by the Military. A “(extlink)conscientious objector has to reject war in all forms”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Anti-War-Soldier.html not just be opposed to a particular war. The Army, for all that it serves a democracy is not one, and refusal to obey particular lawful orders is a punishible offense, whether you agree with the orders or not.

While it’s possible that the article portrays Mr. Mejia out of context, it seems more likely that he is latching onto conscientious objector status in order to avoid going back to Iraq, for whatever reason. Since he belongs to the Active Army now that he has been activated, I suppose if his request were granted he could be shuffled off somewhere else. I wonder if he would be willing to serve the remainder of his activation in Kosovo enforcing the disarmament?

Agency initiates steps for selective draft – WASHINGTON — The government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is adamant that he will not ask Congress to authorize a draft, and officials at the Selective Service System, the independent federal agency that would organize any conscription, stress that the possibility of a so-called “special skills draft” is remote.

While languages and medicine are both generalized skills where people drafted for (relatively) short 1-2 year enlistments might be expected to immediately pitch in and start contributing, I wonder if computer skills are really in the same category. Since the variety of software and hardware solutions is so varied, and especially in the military so customized, it seems that much of a draftees enlistment would be spent trying to sort heads or tails out of things. Continue Reading »

John Robb’s Weblog – Here’s a BIG problem that if corrected can help our trade deficit and slow offshoring. Health insurance costs are expensive in the US. It makes US workers much more expensive relative to competitors globally (which in turn drives our trade deficit and offshoring). So why do we allow US pharms to charge us twice as much as they charge international customers? Drug costs are a HUGE part of healthcare costs. We need some drug price arbitrage fast (!) or some legislation that says that US prices for patented drugs (as a prerequisite for the patent protection)must be the same as the lowest price charged globally. [ John Robb ]

This seems like a great idea to me. It even seems to have a legalistic model in the “Most Favored Nation”:http://www.itds.treas.gov/mfn.html trading status. Why not apply a similar standard to patented items? Patent holders rights could be protected as long as the price of their governmentally guaranteed US monopoly match the lowest price they charge anyone anywhere in the world? Continue Reading »

Apex Digital and bargain culture | PVRblog – It is incredible to think of a company less than 5 years old, with about 100 employees, selling over $1 billion, being second in marketshare to Sony (at least within the category of DVD players.) Apex seems to have converged at a point between the globalization of manufacturing and labor, the distribution of big-box retailers in America, and this “bargain culture,” by providing product cheaper than any other competitor. We have had low-cost brands in the past, but Apex seems to be a different beast. They seem to be exploiting every possible advantage in the most efficient manner. It is very impressive.

It seems that Apex’s value add is their knowledge of cheap manufacturing sources in China combined with access to the channel in the US. Since so many Chinese nationals undoubtably have equal or better knowledge of the manufacturing climate, I wonder how long it is until the channel decides to cut out the middleman. What happens to Apex if next year Wal-Mart decides to go straight to a large Chinese manufacturer to shave off a few dollars? Continue Reading »