I had this with some nice Latvian guys back in 2002 (please note: I have nothing against Latvia - just these guys). My little experience:
Our director decided to "cut costs" as we didn't want to take any permanent staff on for a job (as they are hard to get rid of in the UK) and chucked stuff over to a company in Latvia. They were sent a detailed (900 page) specification to extend our application which was put together with in mod_perl. What we got was something completely different that plainly didn't work and was full of script and SQL injection attacks. As we were in the crap if we didn't deliver, we threw them a load of cash and gave them another chance to fix it. Nothing arrived. We'd paid 2/3 of the agreed total by then.
Our director sent them a nice letter saying that it was a pile of shite and we weren't paying the rest (which was within the contract terms).
That evening, all our VPNs dropped and about 10 minutes later our SDSL connection fell over. Thanks to someone else's (uttery awfully simple) password and their box set up to accept telnet, they'd brute forced it and got into our network. As it was an pam LDAP set up, that was it. Whole LAN down. They ripped everything off and trashed it. We pulled the plug on the interface and cleaned everything up which took about a week.
About 2-3 days later we got a nastygram via email saying that they'd ripped us off and were going to fly over and rape our children. I shit you not. Nice people eh? I slept with a fricking baseball bat and hunting knife for about a year.
Also, after about 9 months we found the application up for sale at $200 on one of those crappy script sharing sites.
Now nearly 10 years later, I'm dealing with the same mess from a larger "more professional" outsourcing company in India. The irony being that I have to QA and clean up half their check ins which are just small packets of shite thrown over the Internet. They don't even write test cases and it's hard to understand what the hell they were thinking in most places. I could have written them myself and checked them in quicker. Also most of them required training in our technology which gave them a professional advantage in India so we basically end up training them and watching them move on. It's just a more professional mess.
Calendar: A moleskine. Based on the amount of times I haven't had access to "the cloud" or my phone is DOA (less of an issue now I've downgraded to a Nokia 6303), this has saved my ass over and over.
Contact management: My phone SIM in my Nokia 6303.
Seriously just buy a damn hardcopy. You can get them cheaper than most Kindle books as well. I find a fair amount of my reading material for less than 1 GBP in charity shops.
Being in Europe (the UK), I am all for SOPA. If it goes through, the EU will get all antsy and we'll end up with our own Internet without the controlling interests of the US.
They're flogging a dead horse here, or perhaps a dead Jobs.
Excuse the bad taste but I think this is getting rediculous and my comment is more tasteful than all the grovelling snot soaked crazy people slithering around trying to make some cash of out it.
There's nothing publically wrong with JDK5, unlike IE6.
Why upgrade and go through a massive QA cycle when it works? I think people have upgrade addictions these days. I still know guys using 15 year old VMS distributions.
The high level architectural patterns he usually deals with will live decades longer than the memory and cache heirarchy problems we have at the moment, so I don't think he's particularly concerned at that level.
Our director decided to "cut costs" as we didn't want to take any permanent staff on for a job (as they are hard to get rid of in the UK) and chucked stuff over to a company in Latvia. They were sent a detailed (900 page) specification to extend our application which was put together with in mod_perl. What we got was something completely different that plainly didn't work and was full of script and SQL injection attacks. As we were in the crap if we didn't deliver, we threw them a load of cash and gave them another chance to fix it. Nothing arrived. We'd paid 2/3 of the agreed total by then.
Our director sent them a nice letter saying that it was a pile of shite and we weren't paying the rest (which was within the contract terms).
That evening, all our VPNs dropped and about 10 minutes later our SDSL connection fell over. Thanks to someone else's (uttery awfully simple) password and their box set up to accept telnet, they'd brute forced it and got into our network. As it was an pam LDAP set up, that was it. Whole LAN down. They ripped everything off and trashed it. We pulled the plug on the interface and cleaned everything up which took about a week.
About 2-3 days later we got a nastygram via email saying that they'd ripped us off and were going to fly over and rape our children. I shit you not. Nice people eh? I slept with a fricking baseball bat and hunting knife for about a year.
Also, after about 9 months we found the application up for sale at $200 on one of those crappy script sharing sites.
Now nearly 10 years later, I'm dealing with the same mess from a larger "more professional" outsourcing company in India. The irony being that I have to QA and clean up half their check ins which are just small packets of shite thrown over the Internet. They don't even write test cases and it's hard to understand what the hell they were thinking in most places. I could have written them myself and checked them in quicker. Also most of them required training in our technology which gave them a professional advantage in India so we basically end up training them and watching them move on. It's just a more professional mess.
Why people don't learn, I don't get.