In 2020....

95% of the Indian population will still be living in poverty as the new middle class step over the destitute on their way to work.

Wealth distribution is a Western burden it seems. Outsourcing transfers national wealth from the poor of the West to the wealthy of the East, think about it before you sign that contract.

Not worth it anymore

It takes a lot of hard work and determination to become a good developer. You need to be well motivated and self-study in your free time - a lot.

Employers don't want to pay for this, they want cheap because it looks good on paper.

Simply put, it just doesn't seem worth the effort anymore and that's dangerous for the industry because the same rot is affecting the developers in India now (where everyone want's to be a project manager).

I'm about to start a new contract gig and they are paying every developer the same rate. Somehow I doubt we will all be as productive or as knowledgeable.

The cloud is just a bunch of PCs in a rack. Did anyone tell him it's not fairies?

Conversely

A few years ago I built a website for a customer in the jewellery business and used a graphics designer friend to do the imagery. This friend used royalty free images gained from sites on the web that supply such images as "tasters" for their portfolios. These imaged were heavily cropped and shopped, as they say as part of the overall design.

Several years later I got an irate email from the client who had received a threatening letter from a large American company claiming copyright infringement for the images and requiring eye-popping fees for their use. We took them down.

Research revealed that the original company based in the UK that had provided the images royalty-free had been bought by the US company who was now on the warpath. I do think there needs to be some protection against this sort of behaviour.

Bloodbath of the Contractors

I don't suppose its anything to do with the current sacking-spree they are instigating across the board?

Bored of Space Already?

How are those space missions going now then?

I don't hold out much hope

It’s a great idea but I have a nasty feeling that like most interoperability technologies it will take years for devices to seamlessly talk to each others as manufacturers dither and squabble.

I think the focus on mobile devices is wrong too. It would be better to be able to send my PC content to a screen over powerline/homeplug/WiFi as that's where I have my music, video and the most pixel-pushing grunt.

Does no correlate with experience

Myself and my whole team have just been given notice. All work is going to India.

This article doesn't agree with my experiences or those of colleagues in other banks right now who are in a similar position.

Stay with 2010

I've been using the Office 365 preview for the last month. While I'm quite happy with the move to the ribbon the colour schemes and flat-styling is dreadful to use, its very hard on the eyes and difficult to navigate. Office 2010 was perfect, I just don't know why they didn't stay with that design.

Most of you just aren't listening to what he's [really] saying

C++ does seem to be the Marmite of the development community, I do wish people would keep calm about these things.

I have made a living as a consultant brought in usually at the last minute or after the fact to save projects that have gone awry for various reasons. These have been with a broad range of languages so over the years I've got to see the many ways that languages can be abused.

The problem with C++ is that it holds the mirror up to the face of the developer at an early stage, and a weak programmer is not likely to like what he sees. Other languages delude by hiding implementation weakness and its this obsequiousness that wins over generations of developers.

I Remember...

When the Japs were going to take over the world and we were all going to have to learn Japanese.

As it turned out their economy imploded and it all went sour. The funny thing is, the whole China/India Asian tiger thing now looks ten times more unstable than the Japanese gadget empire ever did.

We may be crap but their crap is much crappier than our crap ever was. Even on a bad day.

Think I'll just wait for this to blow over thanks.

Very poor analysis.

Apple shares peaked in late September and have been on the way down since, baring some volatility on the way.

If that had anything to do with the company's performance then why does the plot for Google shares have pretty much the same shape??

Indeed, even the gold spot price has been on the wane since then.

There is a reason…

All these asset classes are "safe haven" instruments and with the financials in doubt since 2008 thanks to the crisis and now sovereigns in crisis thanks to the financials these "blue chip asset parks" have been more important than ever.

So why the big sell-off now you may ask?

Something wicked this way comes.

Same Old, same old

My snake oil is better than his snake oil.

Blah, blah.

Here we go again

Chronic middle management killed British industry and now the same mind-set is killing IT.

I'm not sure the country will have any means of survival after that.

Seen it all before

Microsoft seem to have become what all large companies eventually become, bereft of any coherent leadership and ransomed by ambitious senior managers and their continual infighting. Steven Sinofsky seems to smell strongly of the latter as he has taken Microsoft from a very strong position with the immense popularity and acclaim of Windows 7 and vigorously thrown the baby out with the proverbial bath-water simply so he (and his internal followers) can try and steal some of Apple's thunder while getting the credit for it. I'm sure he will do a lot of harm to the company before he is ousted.

Internally Windows 8 is good but the removal of popular and attractive interface features was egotistical and unnecessary.

Providers and Manufacturers need to sort it out

3G roaming charges are still extortionate but worst of all you will get a tiny inclusive charge allowance (after which you require a mortgage) which because all your apps now expect a limitless cloud you will hit within 40 minutes of usage and come home to a shocking bill for sending a handful of text only emails to some clients.

P.S. I do find wireless telecoms much better in Spain [than France].

All very lovely but support and tools for OpenCL are still disappearing between the cracks while CUDA is given the hard sell.

Listen up Nvidia - developers want to use OpenCL; we need portability!

I was quick off the mark but not quick enough (which seemed odd to me)

The name I wanted was gone so I grabbed a similar one. Nevermind, its not that important.

After reading it had a good iPad interface I was surprised to find it was little more that just text + box. Seems like they are taking the "clean and minimal" thing a bit far.

I see hubris ahead.

There is much that makes no sense

To most of the people on this planet, and many of them use IT services in many forms on a regular basis, the whole "Twit-Face" social media obsession is an utterly childish waste of time.

Smoke and Mirrors

Given that they are in fact anonymous how do we know that this was perpetrated by them and not our own government(s)? Sometimes it seems to me that they have an incongruous collection of targets; I'd advise that we should not believe everything we read.

Narrow Band Strategy

Well it all makes perfect sense if you only judge your IT projects by cost, so should satisfy the current generation of useless, consistently failing project managers. For those old-school amongst us who like to deliver solutions I think the problems are abundantly clear and this little spat underlines them.

Grow up, the lot of you [two]

Looks like both these companies are behaving like fools. Can you imagine the benefit if you could compile Java code for Android to all concerned?

Besides where will this end? There are only so many ways simple algorithms can be expressed anyway. Can Google really not afford a few patent costs?

Missed the Ball

On the train this morning on my way to work I couldn't help but notice that all the commuter grown-ups were using iPod Classics of various generations. Adults need storage and a simple device that they can operate by touch - not with touch. Should have released a 250G Classic and if they drop it entirely it will kill the goose I tell you.

Easy Really

All this talk about how hard parallel processing or multi-tasking software development is just a load of balderdash. I've never had any problem writing it and my code has stood the test of time in many client environments. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

The vendors want a paradigm that can be used by the outsourced, low-pay half-wits that the software houses favour. That's what this is all about but the reality is that with these sort of problems you require a specialised solution for every problem, that is you need to actually be reasonably smart and those horrid smart people demand a living wage for their efforts damn them.

Little by little

Please can I just have word-wrap in the Outlook calendar month view? Is it too much to ask for? How many overpriced micro-updates am I going to have to pay for to get my crumb of useful improvement this time?