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Dell goes crazy hiring 10,000+ workers in India to staff call centers for US-based customers. Dell's India staff will swell to more than 10,000 workers by year end, as the company fills out call center and software development roles. To hit the 10,000 mark, Dell will need to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 workers over the next 8 months, CEO Kevin Rollins told reporters in Bangalore, according to numerous media reports. Despite push-back from customers and some employees, Dell has been relentless about offshoring customer support work. It currently employs far more staffers outside of the US than at home. Should Dell hit the 10,000 mark, then its Indian operations would account for close to one-fifth of the company's total workforce. |
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In "Comments Are More Important Than Code", Jef Raskin rants about why self-documenting code doesn't really exist, and what makes comments useful and informative. He was super smart, and made some good points here. Do not believe any programmer, manager, or salesperson who claims that code can be self-documenting or automatically documented. It ain't so. Good documentation includes background and decision information that cannot be derived from the code. It is hard to imagine any foreseeable software or robot that could collect this information from the people involved with a programming project - at the very least it must understand natural language, which is still the Holy Grail to the AI community. |
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An interesting twist on phishing scams, as seen on slashdot. Two graduate students at Indiana University conducted a phishing study to determine how readily students will give up personal information if the phishing emails appear to come from close friends. Using only publicly available information, they sent out emails to students asking them to click a link that required username/password information. Needless to say, the study has generated lots of attention on campus. The student newspaper has the story and the researchers have created a blog where the participants can vent. |
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Ooooh, I love the Microsoft smack talk. The following taken from Paul Thurrott's WinHEC 2005 Blog: I'm reflecting a bit on Longhorn 5048 [the most recent beta build of Microsoft's next operating system, code-named Longhorn]. My thoughts are not positive, not positive at all. This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves. This has the makings of a train wreck. |
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This is one of the most twisted stories ever. Details available here: Sperm: Court dismisses man's theft claim against lover who kept semen, or through these Google results. What it basically boils down to is a man and woman had a an affair 6 years ago. Affair? Yes. Sexual intercourse? No. But she did perform oral sex on him, and afterward she saved the semen (without telling the man) and used it to artificially inseminate herself (again, without the man's knowledge). She was successful in impregnating herself with his semen, and eventually gave birth to "their" child. Two years would pass before the man found out he was a father, thanks to the woman filing a paternity claim against him. DNA tests confirmed that he was the father, and basically he's been forced to pay $800/month in child support to this lady for the past 3 years (and probably for the remainder of the kid's life). It is absolutely stunning that the courts upheld her side of the story, saying that the semen was "a gift, an absolute and irrevocable transfer of title to property from a donor to a donee." This entire thing is just wrong. |
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This is a bad day for cycling, especially in the U.S., as one of the country's most popular and accomplished cyclists, Tyler Hamilton, was found guilty today of blood doping. I personally don't think he's guilty of anything, and I'm not just saying that out of wishful thinking. On the contrary, I've read quite a bit about this case, and it basically makes no sense for him to have doped in the manner he is accused of doing (even the experts testify this much). Beyond his own details, there are several other incidents (extortion, outside knowledge of events before they happened, various members of the team being implicated) that all suggest somebody deliberately sabotaged the Phonak cycling team. Whatever really happened, the verdict is final, so Tyler's career is over, but there are many unanswered questions still on the table. Tyler Hamilton posted a long entry on his website today (www.tylerhamilton.com), which I copied below. This is pretty big news, and due to the fishy nature of how it all went down, I suspect that Tyler's web entry might be a very interesting read at some point in the future, as I'm assuming this won't be the last we hear of his story. Continue reading "Tyler Hamilton found guilty, suspended for 2 years" |
I saw this in the current issue (#29) of CMYK magazine, it's a student submission from Chicago Portfolio. I don't know who made it, but I thought it was powerful and needed to be spread around. So I'm spreading. |
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Gordon Moore says "Moore's Law is dead", although he clarifies that it won't really die for another 10 or 20 years. |
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From Wired News: Cloned Cows Yummy and Safe: Cattle-cloning scientists at the University of Connecticut say milk and meat from cloned animals are safe for human consumption. |
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Scientific American published a huge article about spam mail and how to stop it ("Stopping Spam"). Not sure if the whole thing is worth reading, since I haven't read more than the first page, but maybe one day I'll finish reading the whole article. |
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Just enabled the Debug menu in Safari 1.2.4, which introduced a bunch of cool browser options, including the "Open Page With..." menu which listed the other browsers currently installed on my machine (Firefox and Internet Explorer). To enable the Debug menu:
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