Doug Ross @ Journal

Greenspan on Outsourcing

I didn't see Alan Greenspan's remarks on outsourcing covered by much of the mainstream press. Even the Journal buried his comments in a small blurb on page A33 (or thereabouts). And yet, one of the smartest financial minds in history had some interesting things to say.

"Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said free trade is still good for the U.S., even though it now includes services such as outsourcing. Over time, employment has risen along with the population and inflation- adjusted wages have steadily gone up 'irrespective if we've had a trade deficit or a trade surplus, whether we've had high outsourcing or low outsourcing,' he told senators Thursday.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) asked if 'in a world with broadband, with an international labor market,' he rejects the traditional view that free trade is win-win for all countries. 'I see no reason to do so,' Mr. Greenspan answered.

President Bush's chief economist, Gregory Mankiw, touched off a political furor Monday when he said outsourcing is just another form of trade which in the long run has been positive for the U.S. economy. While that is a mainstream economic view, Democrats have used the remarks to portray Mr. Bush as favoring the export of U.S. jobs.

Mr. Greenspan, giving the second day of testimony on the central bank's twice- yearly monetary-policy report, said the real problem for U.S. workers isn't trade, but the fact that in the last 20 years highly-educated, high-skilled workers have seen their wages rise briskly while those of low-skilled workers have stagnated.

The solution, he said, is more education for those with few skills. As more workers move from the ranks of the low-skilled to high-skilled, that would boost the wages of the remaining low-skilled workers while lowering the wages of the those 'in the upper-skilled levels, and thereby reduce the degree of income inequality very significantly.'

At the same time, he suggested as demand for high-tech workers in India and China surged, their low-wage advantage would disappear. He said Americans were worried in the 1950s and 1960s about the loss of jobs to highly-educated, lower- paid Japanese, but as demand for those Japanese workers climbed, 'Japanese wage rates just took off. So it's not as though Chinese and Indian software engineers are always going to be at a very significant differential. Eventually the gap will close.'"

Greenspan Defends Free Trade Amid Outsourcing Flap

The Pizza as User Interface

Found another "Doug Ross" who specializes in, among other things, user interface design. His CyberPizza interface uses some interesting gadgets including drag-and-drop ingredients -- all performed without benefit of Flash. While there are some things I would change to streamline the ordering process (e.g., how about being able to double-click on an ingredient to select it?)... there are some neat aspects to the UI.

CyberPizza

Design Advice

From JOS: "I am beginning to do research for a project that requires a highly available Windows service that can handle many requests, pass out jobs to other threads or processes, and then send the results back to the client when the jobs are finished.

The client in this case is also a server because we need to be able to push data down to the users based on events that happen on the back end (like a job finishing, or a message arriving for them).

Furthermore, the service must act as a proxy to another application server in the back-office which can also trigger events that must be pushed back down to the client.

Jobs are things like a database operation or opening a file and running a script..."

JOS - Design Advice Thread

Traceroute Coolness

Two sites worth mentioning for traceroutes:

1) Tracert.com's Multi-Source Trace-Router lets you select multiple sources for your trace-routes to confirm network availability of a server from anywhere on the planet.

2) VisualWare's VisualRoute tool graphs a traceroute and maps it as well (registration required, unfortunately). In addition, VisualWare has a tool and a good tutorial on tracking an email message to its source. Skip the advertising section and go right to the easy-to-understand instructions on email tracing.