IT Outsourcing came to foray as a means for corporations to focus on critical business operations while having a specialized IT company take over the responsibility of managing the IT infrastructure and application development. For corporations especially in the developed countries, IT outsourcing provided two fold advantages, one was access to a highly talented pool of engineers and that too at a lower cost since countries like India were quickly growing their stature as an IT outsourcing hub.

IT Outsourcing is now as mainstream as ever and almost every leading organization outsources some or all parts of its IT infrastructure to a specialized company. It makes pure business sense and with tightening budget controls, IT outsourcing has become one of the strategic cost reduction driver for most organizations. Moreover, IT outsourcing is no more restricted to companies in USA & Europe outsourcing their IT projects to countries like India. Domestic companies within India itself actively use IT outsourcing including the Indian government like the India Post project given to TCS.

Is it then a no brainer that IT Outsourcing is critical to your business? Well, if it is cheaper and does not seem to have any inherent disadvantages why not!! Not really, IT Outsourcing despite proven benefits has its limitations and you should be cognizant be of the same before considering outsourcing your IT operations.

·         Limitations in estimating the actual cost of IT outsourcing:Let’s tackle the biggest driver of IT Outsourcing-Cost Savings. For anyone to estimate the cost savings from IT Outsourcing one needs to be able to predict the cost of outsourcing which then helps understand the cost savings from the same. Yes, at a higher level it is a matter of a simple $ per man-hour costs and IT outsourcing will appear to be cheaper in almost all cases. However, “hidden costs” are commonplace with IT outsourcing and it can be immensely difficult to accurately predict these hidden costs. For example, you need to be able to identify the costs of transitioning your in-house IT to an outsourcer, management overhead needed to manage the outsourcing relationship etc. In addition, IT outsourcing contracts are fixed at the start of the contract and as a result any additional requirement/change tends to be charged additionally. It is no surprise that IT requirements can change frequently and if your outsourcing contract doesn’t account for flexibility, you might be limited in the actual cost savings you might make. There is no surprise that there have been so many instances of IT outsourcing projects overshooting their budgets by a huge margin such as the one government shared services project going 500 million pounds over budget

Studying a functional programming language is a good way to discover new approaches to problems and different ways of thinking. Although functional programming has much in common with logic and imperative programming, it uses unique abstractions and a different toolset for solving problems. Likewise, many current mainstream languages are beginning to pick up and integrate various techniques and features from functional programming.

Many authorities feel that Haskell is a great introductory language for learning functional programming. However, there are various other possibilities, including Scheme, F#, Scala, Clojure, Erlang and others.

Haskell is widely recognized as a beautiful, concise and high-performing programming language. It is statically typed and supports various cool features that augment language expressivity, including currying and pattern matching. In addition to monads, the language support a type-class system based on methods; this enables higher encapsulation and abstraction. Advanced Haskell will require learning about combinators, lambda calculus and category theory. Haskell allows programmers to create extremely elegant solutions.

Scheme is another good learning language -- it has an extensive history in academia and a vast body of instructional documents. Based on the oldest functional language -- Lisp -- Scheme is actually very small and elegant. Studying Scheme will allow the programmer to master iteration and recursion, lambda functions and first-class functions, closures, and bottom-up design.

Supported by Microsoft and growing in popularity, F# is a multi-paradigm, functional-first programming language that derives from ML and incorporates features from numerous languages, including OCaml, Scala, Haskell and Erlang. F# is described as a functional language that also supports object-oriented and imperative techniques. It is a .NET family member. F# allows the programmer to create succinct, type-safe, expressive and efficient solutions. It excels at parallel I/O and parallel CPU programming, data-oriented programming, and algorithmic development.

Scala is a general-purpose programming and scripting language that is both functional and object-oriented. It has strong static types and supports numerous functional language techniques such as pattern matching, lazy evaluation, currying, algebraic types, immutability and tail recursion. Scala -- from "scalable language" -- enables coders to write extremely concise source code. The code is compiled into Java bytecode and executes on the ubiquitous JVM (Java virtual machine).

Like Scala, Clojure also runs on the Java virtual machine. Because it is based on Lisp, it treats code like data and supports macros. Clojure's immutability features and time-progression constructs enable the creation of robust multithreaded programs.

Erlang is a highly concurrent language and runtime. Initially created by Ericsson to enable real-time, fault-tolerant, distributed applications, Erlang code can be altered without halting the system. The language has a functional subset with single assignment, dynamic typing, and eager evaluation. Erlang has powerful explicit support for concurrent processes.

Computer Programming as a Career?

What little habits make you a better software engineer?

When eCommerce companies want to optimize information security, password management tools enable users to create strong passwords for every login.

Better than a Master Pass
A two-factor authentication, a security process in which the user provides two means of identification, one of which is typically a physical token, such as a card, and the other of which is typically something memorized, such as a security code can drastically reduce online fraud such as identity theft . A common example of two-factor authenticationis a bank card: the card itself is the physical item and the personal identification number (PIN) is the data that goes with it.

LastPass 3.0 Premium and RoboForm, security downloads offer fingerprint-based authentication features that can be configured to any computer PC or mobile application.  Both are supported by the Google Authenticator mobile app for smart phone and device integration.

LastPass 3.0 is most powerful on-demand password manager on the market. LastPass 3.0 Premium includes mobile support and more features. Dashlane 2.0 is is not as robust, but includes a user-friendly interface. F-Secure Key is a free, one-device version of these top competitors. F-Secure Key is for exclusive use on an installed device, so password safe retention is dependent on proprietary use of the device itself. The application can be upgraded for a small annual fee.

Password Manager App Cross-Portability
F-Secure Key syncs with Mac, PC Android, and iOS devices simultaneously. A transient code is generated on mobile devices, in addition to the two-factor authentication default of the F-Secure Key master password security product.

Password capture and replay in case of lost credentials is made possible with a password manager. Integration of a password manager app with a browser allows a user to capture login credentials, and replay on revisit to a site. Dashlane, LastPass, Norton Identity Safe, Password Genie 4.0 offer continuous detection and management of password change events, automatically capturing credentials each time a new Web-based, service registration sign up is completed.

Other applications like F-Secure Key, KeePass, and My1login replay passwords via a bookmarklet, supported by any Java-equipped browser. KeePass ups the ante for would be keyloggers, with a unique replay technology.

Personal Data and Auto-Fill Forms
Most password managers fill username and password credentials into login forms automatically. Password managers also retain personal data for form fill interfaces with applications, and other HTML forms online. The RoboForm app is one of the most popular for its flexibility in multi-form password and personal data management, but the others also capture and reuse at least a portion of what has been entered in a form manually.

The 1Password app for Windows stores the most types of personal data for use to fill out forms. Dashlane, LastPass, and Password Genie store the various types of ID data used for form fill-in, like passport and driver's license numbers and other key details to HTML acknowledgement of discretionary password and personal information.

The Cost of Protection
LastPass Premium and Password Box are the lowest monthly password manager plans on the market, going for $1 a month. Annual plans offered by other password manager sources vary according to internal plan: Dashlane $20, F-Secure Key $16, and Password Genie, $15.
All password manager companies and their products may not be alike in the end.

Security checks on security products like password managers have become more sophisticated in response to product cross-portability and open source app interface volatility. Norton, RoboForm, KeePass, generate strong, random passwords on-demand. Some security procedures now require three-factor authentication, which involves possession of a physical token and a password, used in conjunction with biometricdata, such as finger-scanningor a voiceprint.

What are the best languages for getting into functional programming?

Computer Programming as a Career?

Writing Python in Java syntax is possible with a semi-automatic tool. Programming code translation tools pick up about 75% of dynamically typed language. Conversion of Python to a statically typed language like Java requires some manual translation. The modern Java IDE can be used to infer local variable type definitions for each class attribute and local variable.


Translation of Syntax
Both Python and Java are OO imperative languages with sizable syntax constructs. Python is larger, and more competent for functional programming concepts. Using the source translator tool, parsing of the original Python source language will allow for construction of an Abstract Source Tree (AST), followed by conversion of the AST to Java.

Python will parse itself. This capability is exhibited in the ast module, which includes skeleton classes. The latter can be expanded to parse and source each node of an AST. Extension of the ast.NodeVisitor class enables python syntax constructs to be customized using translate.py and parser.py coding structure.

The Concrete Syntax Tree (CST) for Java is based on visit to the AST. Java string templates can be output at AST nodes with visitor.py code. Comment blocks are not retained by the Python ast Parser. Conversion of Python to multi-line string constructs with the translator reduces time to script.


Scripting Python Type Inference in Java
Programmers using Python source know that the language does not contain type information. The fact that Python is a dynamic type language means object type is determined at run time. Python is also not enforced at compile time, as the source is not specified. Runtime type information of an object can be determined by inspecting the __class__.__name__ attribute.

Python’s inspect module is used for constructing profilers and debugging.
Implementation of def traceit (frame, event, arg) method in Python, and connecting it to the interpreter with sys.settrace (traceit) allows for integration of multiple events during application runtime.

Method call events prompt inspect and indexing of runtime type. Inspection of all method arguments can be conducted. By running the application profiler and exercising the code, captured trace files for each source file can be modified with the translator. Generating method syntax can be done with the translator by search and addition of type information. Results in set or returned variables disseminate the dynamic code in static taxonomy.

The final step in the Python to Java scrip integration is to administer unsupported concepts such as value object creation. There is also the task of porting library client code, for reproduction in Java equivalents. Java API stubs can be created to account for Python APIs. Once converted to Java the final clean-up of the script is far easier.

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