Russel Roberts quotes legitimate reasons that outsourcing is not good.#
Bladelogic, whose client list includes General Electric and Sprint, outsourced work to India within months of going into business in 2001. But it concluded that projects it farmed out — one to install an operating system across a network, another to keep tabs on changes done to the system — could be done faster and at a lower cost in the United States.
That was true even though programmers in India cost Bladelogic $3,500 a month versus a monthly cost of $10,000 for programmers in the United States. "The cost savings in India were three to one," Mr. Ittycheria said . "But the difference in productivity was six to one."
Julie Leung: "And if I post a picture of myself, I prove I exist! Perhaps people are wondering whether I'm some figment of Ted's imagination, a wife he cooked up and concocted into a blog for some fun dialogue ;-)"#
Doug Miller and Mark Bernstein discuss deleting old files.#
Mark:
In practice, storage costs will be dominated by the time you spend maintaining the system, copying files every three years to a new disk, and pruning unwanted files.
Doug:
I'm increasingly becoming an advocate of the "big pile of stuff" school of hard drive organization. Rather than obsessively organizing files into appropriate folders, I've gone with just a few major folders and toss files into them, relying on Panther's built-in search function and Quicksilver to find stuff quickly. I've stripped most of the hierarchy out of my Tinderbox documents, again relying on the software's excellent agents and search functionality to find notes when I need them - and never, ever throwing a note away. I've created a single mail archive, again using built-in search capabilities to find appropriate e-mail as needed - and I've found myself deleting less e-mail than I used to.
Tyler Cowen links to Your Imaginary Girlfriend:#
This is a service provided by a real life girl where she will pretend to be your long distance girlfriend by sending you personalized love letters, emails, pictures, leave phone messages (if you want), and provide other girlfriend-like services. This relationship appears real to others that may see these things, but it is not. There will be no actual real life meetings or relationship between you and your Imaginary Girlfriend other than that specified in your order
Andrew Grumet describes what is actually wrong with Atom:#
Why isn't there better support for syndicating mp3 playlists? Why don't we have better support for sharing category trees across blog systems? Why was MT-Blacklist, perhaps the best de-spamming tool around, built by a third party on donated time and not the vendor?
Sometimes I'm surprised that weblogs have survived as long as they have given the level of monkeying around. Witness Six Apart's constant changes to the Movable Type default syndication format. Each time they change the default, weblog software developers must scramble to add support for that format whether they like it or not, because Movable Type is free (as in beer) and controls a significant chunk of the market. It doesn't matter that MT supports the other formats, because most users can't be bothered to learn about software sustainability and won't be interested in fiddling with the defaults. I don't get Six Apart. They've built a product that a lot of people like but seem to be doing everything in their power to kill the market in which that product thrives.
Betsy Devine links to George Bush using some woman's shirt to clean his glasses.#
Joi Ito comments on the Japanese Hostages in Iraq.#
I think one of the things that made many Japanese I know upset were the parents of the hostages making public statements about how the government should help get the hostages back without apologizing first about causing trouble for the government. Even if they didn't believe it, it would be proper Japanese etiquette to say this first. It's quite cliche, but it's true that if you get into an automobile accident in Japan, even if you think it's probably the other person's fault, you apologize first. Japanese are warned not to do this in the US because apologizes imply responsibility. In many cases, apologies in Japan are a formality and skipping them is rather rude. I think many people thought these parents were "rude" on a national scale. Another example of a throw-away apology is that when you ask for a waiter in a restaurant, you say, "I'm sorry... or excuse me." We often apologize profusely when in doubt or are requesting any kind of favor.
Alex Tabarrok points out the power the Federal government has over speech that should be free:#
Now we learn that not only do the Feds want to put people in jail for using marijuana, they also want to stop people from talking about reforming the marijuana laws.
[...]
In one way or another, the Federal government has its hand in everything, including the schools, the universities, and the airwaves. If the government can withdraw its funds from anything associated with arguments it doesn't like then free speech will be very expensive.
Jessica gave me The Prince.#
Michael Feldman writes of the Gringo Trail.#
The word "Gringo" itself is the object of polemic and punditry from linguists and pseudo-experts both North and South of the Rio Grande. Largely discounted is the colorful theory that the word derives from the green uniforms worn by US troops who appeared in Texas at the time of the Mexican revolution, prompting popular protest cries of "Green Go Home" (discountable if for no other reason from the unlikelihood of Mexican peasants shouting anything in English). More likely is the derivation from the archaic Spanish word of the same spelling, meaning "speaker of unintelligible gibberish" and itself derived from the Spanish word for Greek (greigo), a seemingly universal generic for an unintelligible language, as in "it's all Greek to me."