I use them rather heavily. Since I have an 8-port KVM switch at home, I can use a rather large mix of boxes on a regular basis, and I find that I tend to bounce between Warp 4 and Win95 OSR2 most of the time.
One of the Win95 OSR2 boxes is my secondary desktop box at home which I use almost daily (mainly things like Word 97, StarOffice 5.1a, FireFox, various MIDI apps for my Yamaha keyboard, Visio, etc.) and which is still my main gaming box (I play a lot of classics like UT, Tribes 1, TA, SC, AOE2, HomeWorld, NFS 3/4, Madden 2001, etc).
A second Win95 OSR2 box is my main fileserver (a Proliant 2500), and a third is smaller fileserver dedicated to MP3 files (an IBM IntelliStation 6899, which is a VERY nice PPro box).
Most of the others are multiboot boxes which are booted into other things most of the time (Linux variants, eCS, or OS/2), but which are booted to Windows 95 OSR2 with a QuikMenu 4 desktop if I want to put together a gaming LAN, so those copies are mostly idle. That much less reason to upgrade them, though.
Vista's problem has nothing to do with legacy support and everything to do with an apparent lack of good software design and development practices at Microsoft (coupled with a long-term strategy of planned obsolescence).
Real programmers don't work on toy platforms (like UNIX) at all.:-) We use tools like ED, DOWNDATER, IACULL, and LISTER to generate CCFs in a proper format which our compilers understand (not that "diff" crap), use SGSs written in SymStream to control our product compiles, read dumps in octal (hex is for long-haired bean-sprout-eating UNIX freaks and peecee weenies, and interactive debuggers are for slopeheads who lack the mental capacity to write real programs), and don't use formal change management. Real programmers can keep track of potential merge errors and fix them manually if one occurs at GEN time, and we drink Mountain Dew, not that hot smelly crap made from beans.
As a possible counter-argument, OS/2 has (at least) two different actively maintained Firefox trees, multiple SeaMonkey trees, etc., and it (Warp 4) dates from 1996.:-)
Even if the official version stopped, though, I'm sure an unofficial one will appear. If the OS/2 folks can do it with their much smaller numbers, I'm sure the Win9x folks can do it.
I used to also use CSCOPE, but I can't fine Solaris/Sparc binaries which don't require root access to install (pkg format isn't helpful for me -- I'm just a developer on the box, not an admin).
On the mainframe side, I usually use a combination of FINDREF, IACULL, and CULL, which together form a sort of superpowered CSCOPE, but I'm not aware of a similar tool in the UNIX world other than things like CSCOPE (which are useful but rather basic in functionality).
I use Windows 95 OSR2 on several boxes at home, and nasties don't happen. Why? Because OSR2 doesn't support many of the infection vectors present in newer Win32 flavors. It's too old.
Who is claiming moral superiority? Just because "W" isn't smart enough to recognize shades of grey in the world doesn't mean that almost 300 million US citizens have the same limited grasp of reality.
All I was implying is that it's FOOLISH for the US not to act in its own interest, just as it would be foolish for any other country not to act in its own interest. To think otherwise is hypocrisy, nothing more.
The only thing it takes for the US to stir up hate in many quarters of the world is to exist. No action is required in order attract that kind of attention -- the fact that we're supposedly the one and only "superpower" guarantees a certain amount of hostility from those who aren't in that position, as does the fact that we aren't a fundamentalist Muslim state, the fact that we aren't located in Europe, the fact that the majority of our population is Caucasian, etc. Such feelings are the natural course of things.
Of course, the current administration has seemingly done its best by stirring things uop as much as possible, but that's a symptom of the anti-intellectual ultra-conservative neo-puritans who have seemingly take over one of the two major parties in this country. Expect a backlash against those idiots soon...
I should have put the UI part of my comment first, since it's in that area that TA really shines in my book.
The UI in Total Annihilation is all about minimizing mouse clicks, allowing the player to queue up orders for various key units beforehand and then let them handle things on their own.
That lets the player concentrate on higher-level strategy rather than having to tell every unit what to do every single damn time.
Not only can almost very type of action (build, move, attack, guard, start patrol route, etc.) be queued up for any unit or group of units using the SHIFT key, but you can mix and match those things.
You can send spotter aircraft in on suicide missions, using the T key to center in on their flight path, then switching command focus away from that unit to some other group (while retaining view focus on the scout) and using their brief instant of observation time to perform precision targetting on (via shift-click) of multiple facilities for the real combined air assault coming in several seconds behind.
Multiple waves of this can be fun.:-)
You can tell an aircraft plant to assign group #4 to all of the aircraft it produces, tell the aircraft yet to be built which aggressiveness settings to have on by default, where to move initially, which patrol route to follow, etc. That means you can set things up to create some basic air coverage without having to micromanage ANY of it outside of the building of the aircraft plant.
If you build at least one repair platform, any aircraft on patrol when built will also heal themselves automatically and go back to their defined patrol route.
Patrolling construction vehicles will heal damaged units in passing automatically, will gather energy from plants or metal from rocks if those resources are needed, will automatically help with construction projects that they happen to pass by, etc.
It's all about leaving the player free to handle more important things like queueing up further orders on other units or maybe micromanaging some battle where precise unit positioning is important.
So she's on the job market again and has been for the last 2 months. Bachelor's degree, high quality experience in --AN-- industry and nothing. Why? Because companies and organizations no longer gauge the value of applicants by their credentials or educational degrees. All they want to see is hard experience directly working with the company database or "... at least 3+ years working knowledge of ".
Yup. That's why it's so hard for folks who have lots of legitimate experience to find work in some markets. Many hiring companies don't care any more that you've been designing/writing code for a decade -- people with ten years of experience in something are a dime a dozen.
Instead, they want to know if you've been writing code that directly relates to their line of business.
If not, your experience doesn't have value to them. It's in some other industry; how could it possibly apply?
(We know that most types of programming cross industry lines, but *they* don't, and that's the key).
Thanks for that objective evaluation. I agree that a skill that an engineer or tech employee should have is project management. However, they are being hired for a tech skill, if the company wants a project manager, they will hire a project manager.
The hard separation of Project Managment from technical function is often not a very good idea, since a thorough understanding of the technical environment and its impact on the project is often critical to being able to bring most projects to a successful conclusion (especially if schedules are tight).
At most of the places I've worked, the role of "Project Manager" was played by a senior member of the development staff on most projects -- a dedicated Project Manager was only brought in when complex multi-platform or multi-team coordination was required. That approach seemed to work very well.
At places I've worked where a decidated Project Manager was used, the misunderstandings/miscommunications with that person often outweighed the benefits his position could have otherwise brought to the project.
Most established companies follow that pattern -- there tends to be a core of older developers around to keep things sane (and act as general resources for the others), and younger folks are brought in as needed and are slowly brought up to speed with the applications and environment using a classic mentor/student relationship.
This is particularly true of industries which have used IT for a long time (e.g., the airline industry), but it can also be true in smaller shops. I contracted with a glass-making company a few years ago, and they had 25 or so people in their IT department, but I'd say roughly half were my age or older and half were younger.
When I was at NWA, I was the youngest on my team of a dozen or so folks even though I had over 13 years of experience and had just turned 39 when I left. Currently, I'm 43, but my mentor/manager here (who also writes code and is a programmer in all but name) is almost 20 years my senior, and almost everyone here I've met is at least my age. Most are substantially older. Many have been in the airline communications industry for 20 years or more and know all about weird communications protocols like MATIP and P1024.:-)
I didn't realize that the 5500-series hardware was gone from the market. That's a bummer.:-\
The article is incorrect regarding ReplayTV.
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
TFA states the following:
One example is ReplayTV's TiVo-like devices which featured sharing capabilities, along with automatic ad skipping; the company was sued to bankruptcy, and the reincarnated device supported neither sharing nor ad skipping.
I don't think SonicBlue actually went into bankruptcy, and its ReplayTV product was purchased by Digital Networks North America Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of D&M Holdings U.S., Inc. They own things like the Denon, Marantz, and Boston Acoustics brands as well as Rio and ReplayTV.
SonicBlue 5000-series models supported internet and local program sharing and both manual (Show/Nav) and automatic commercial skipping as well as a 30-second FF button (QuickSkip). The commercial skipping features navigate between marks which are created at the start and end of commercial advertising blocks that the unit detects and marks at show recording time (it isn't just a simple time skip). Those units still perform as they did when initially purchased.
Current 5500-series models still mark commercial blockss while recording and still fully support both Show/Nav (manual movement between block markers) and QuickSkip, so manual commercial skipping and the 30-second FF is still present, but the automatic commercial skip has been removed. Also, the internet sharing capabilities were removed.
I believe a 5500-series ReplayTV can be made to temporarily regain both automatic commercial skipping and internet sharing capabilities if the disk is reimaged with a 5000-series formatted disk, but I can't personally vouch for that (I own a 5000-series box myself).
While true, there are pieces of software out there which have been in heavy use in production for a long time (sometimes multiple decades), which are bug-free as far as the users and developers are aware, and which are fixed in a matter of days (if not hours) when a problem is detected on a production system.
I suspect defects still exist in such systems, but if the defects are not encountered in heavy use (and remain undetected) they're almost as good as nonexistent. Not *quite* the same, but very close...
Software creation is unlike every other engineering profession in the world for a couple of reasons:
(1) Testing software is a nontrivial process, and can depend quite heavily on the nature of the computing environmment in use as well as the nature of the software project itself.
You can't simply measure a software system against a few standard benchmarks (color, weight, volume, acceleration, fuel economy, etc.) and kick its tires (symbolically speaking) like you can an automobile, and some aspects of software engineering are a lot more complex than mechanical engineering because the virtual environment is not as limited as the physical one.
Try creating a car with multiple engines and 1 to n virtual passenger compartments which requires different fuels on paved and unpaved roads and which acts as either an automatic or a 5-speed stick depending on the color of the shirt the driver is wearing. That's easy with sofrware. Now, take that car for a test drive. Does it work as designed? What did you do to test it? Was it easier or harder than test-driving a normal physical car?
(2) There are an almost infinite variety of languages, environments, and platforms in use out there somewhere, some of them very limited/dated, and the tools available for use in any given project by those doing the software design and implementation are usually not the ones those software engineers would choose to use if the decision was up to them.
What types of knowledge would you test an engineer for? Which languages should they know? On which platforms? Would someone writing specialized code for ACARS communications devices in the aerospace industry in some obscure language developed by Allied Signal be penalized because they don't know the latest Java IDE under Windows or the latest way to interface CICS/IMS programs with an Oracle database via WebSphere? How could you even compare the competence level of people with those three skillsets?
I dunno, just some thoughts about accreditation. I like the idea, but view it as unworkable.
great until you develop software for a living. How would I support myself?
Work for a company that can actually charge its clients what its software and support are worth. Such companies obviously exist. Governments and large corporations don't contract out large software development efforts for free.:-)
Dont give me the argument that I could work for a corporation devloping inhouse apps?
Why not? Specialized application knowledge can pay quite well in some circles. The trick is to make sure that you don't hitch your pony to a failing industry like I did with my airline expertise. It's still doable, given sufficient experience and a bit of luck, but it makes the ride a bit bumpier than it would otherwise be.
Last its more expensive to design everything in house than to buy proprietary and customizable proprietary software.
That depends completely on the nature of the software.
Having worked on software projects related to the operations of several major airlines over the past 18 years, for example, I would defy anyone to replace the existing specialized core applications in various areas (yield management, various flight ops functions, reservations systems, etc) with existing proprietary solutions.
For more generic business functions, warehousing/inventory functions, etc., you certainly have a point, but that is only part of the total software business.
Since the producers of those types of software seem to be undergoing a continuous process of consolidation through corporate buy-outs, product failures, etc., it seems to me that your choice to remove in-house development from consideration might end up seriously limiting your future employment options. Besides, some of the most interesting projects to be found are ones which are done in-house. No insult intended, but we aren't all working on payroll systems, believe me.:-)
Basic economics teaches that if a proprietary product is a piece of crap then it will die and be replaced by someone else.
Then make it a point to work for a company that doesn't create crappy software. Good software is well worth paying for. Companies and governments prove that every year by shelling out millions (if not billions) of dollars for such software.
Software people have been getting off too easy for too long.
Those who write/market/support shrinkwrapped software (who I suspect you are referring to) are a minority.
Many of us write software under contract to fairly precise specifications which must conform to specific SLAs and which can generate fairly hefty penalties if it doesn't meet the stated performance, reliability, or functionality expectations.
Please don't paint "all software people" with the same brush. You're taking about an extremely diverse group of people, processes, clients, and technologies.
I agree that underemployment isn't the same as unemployment, but the economic impact it has on families is very similar. When one is living paycheck-to-paycheck, or working but still slowly losing money, one isn't saving for one's retirement or investing back into the economy by making large purchases, etc. It hurts everyone in the long run.
I also agree that there were a lot of folks working in IT that didn't really belong there, and that a correction was sorely needed. It's too bad, though, that many of those corrections were not a little more selective in the people the effected.
See my comments on the impersonal/sweeping nature of organizational layoffs above.
When a company is forced to shed people due to management incompetence or misstep, or due to extraordinary circumstances which were largely outside the company's control, the level of each employee's individual productivity is often a complete nonfactor in related layoffs because such decisions are often made on the organization/LOB/team level, not the individual level.
You may have been a brillant performer in your area, but if that area is deemed non-critical then your past performance really doesn't matter. Your area is gone. You aren't needed.
If you haven't encountered this situation yet in your career, mark my words: you will. If it doesn't directly involve you, then you will know someone else to whom the above applies.
When a branch is lopped off, the fruit on the branch is usually variable in quality, but all of the fruit is equally unemployed...
Slashdot Mirror
I use them rather heavily. Since I have an 8-port KVM switch at home, I can use a rather large mix of boxes on a regular basis, and I find that I tend to bounce between Warp 4 and Win95 OSR2 most of the time.
One of the Win95 OSR2 boxes is my secondary desktop box at home which I use almost daily (mainly things like Word 97, StarOffice 5.1a, FireFox, various MIDI apps for my Yamaha keyboard, Visio, etc.) and which is still my main gaming box (I play a lot of classics like UT, Tribes 1, TA, SC, AOE2, HomeWorld, NFS 3/4, Madden 2001, etc).
A second Win95 OSR2 box is my main fileserver (a Proliant 2500), and a third is smaller fileserver dedicated to MP3 files (an IBM IntelliStation 6899, which is a VERY nice PPro box).
Most of the others are multiboot boxes which are booted into other things most of the time (Linux variants, eCS, or OS/2), but which are booted to Windows 95 OSR2 with a QuikMenu 4 desktop if I want to put together a gaming LAN, so those copies are mostly idle. That much less reason to upgrade them, though.
Vista's problem has nothing to do with legacy support and everything to do with an apparent lack of good software design and development practices at Microsoft (coupled with a long-term strategy of planned obsolescence).
OS/2? Nobody uses OS/2. :-)
Real programmers don't work on toy platforms (like UNIX) at all. :-) We use tools like ED, DOWNDATER, IACULL, and LISTER to generate CCFs in a proper format which our compilers understand (not that "diff" crap), use SGSs written in SymStream to control our product compiles, read dumps in octal (hex is for long-haired bean-sprout-eating UNIX freaks and peecee weenies, and interactive debuggers are for slopeheads who lack the mental capacity to write real programs), and don't use formal change management. Real programmers can keep track of potential merge errors and fix them manually if one occurs at GEN time, and we drink Mountain Dew, not that hot smelly crap made from beans.
In my experience, the Win95 OSR2/OSR2.1/OSR2.5 variants are at least as stable as Win98. I prefer OSR2, personally.
As a possible counter-argument, OS/2 has (at least) two different actively maintained Firefox trees, multiple SeaMonkey trees, etc., and it (Warp 4) dates from 1996. :-)
Even if the official version stopped, though, I'm sure an unofficial one will appear. If the OS/2 folks can do it with their much smaller numbers, I'm sure the Win9x folks can do it.
(1) NEdit combined with exuberant ctags.
(2) Red Hat's SourceNavigator.
(3) GNU Global to generate a nice clickable HTML version of a source tree.
I used to also use CSCOPE, but I can't fine Solaris/Sparc binaries which don't require root access to install (pkg format isn't helpful for me -- I'm just a developer on the box, not an admin).
On the mainframe side, I usually use a combination of FINDREF, IACULL, and CULL, which together form a sort of superpowered CSCOPE, but I'm not aware of a similar tool in the UNIX world other than things like CSCOPE (which are useful but rather basic in functionality).
I use Windows 95 OSR2 on several boxes at home, and nasties don't happen. Why? Because OSR2 doesn't support many of the infection vectors present in newer Win32 flavors. It's too old.
Who is claiming moral superiority? Just because "W" isn't smart enough to recognize shades of grey in the world doesn't mean that almost 300 million US citizens have the same limited grasp of reality.
All I was implying is that it's FOOLISH for the US not to act in its own interest, just as it would be foolish for any other country not to act in its own interest. To think otherwise is hypocrisy, nothing more.
The only thing it takes for the US to stir up hate in many quarters of the world is to exist. No action is required in order attract that kind of attention -- the fact that we're supposedly the one and only "superpower" guarantees a certain amount of hostility from those who aren't in that position, as does the fact that we aren't a fundamentalist Muslim state, the fact that we aren't located in Europe, the fact that the majority of our population is Caucasian, etc. Such feelings are the natural course of things.
Of course, the current administration has seemingly done its best by stirring things uop as much as possible, but that's a symptom of the anti-intellectual ultra-conservative neo-puritans who have seemingly take over one of the two major parties in this country. Expect a backlash against those idiots soon...
Some of us wish he still was... Then again, I'm in Atlanta, so I'm stuck in a very different political climate these days. :-(
That's right
I should have put the UI part of my comment first, since it's in that area that TA really shines in my book.
:-)
The UI in Total Annihilation is all about minimizing mouse clicks, allowing the player to queue up orders for various key units beforehand and then let them handle things on their own.
That lets the player concentrate on higher-level strategy rather than having to tell every unit what to do every single damn time.
Not only can almost very type of action (build, move, attack, guard, start patrol route, etc.) be queued up for any unit or group of units using the SHIFT key, but you can mix and match those things.
You can send spotter aircraft in on suicide missions, using the T key to center in on their flight path, then switching command focus away from that unit to some other group (while retaining view focus on the scout) and using their brief instant of observation time to perform precision targetting on (via shift-click) of multiple facilities for the real combined air assault coming in several seconds behind.
Multiple waves of this can be fun.
You can tell an aircraft plant to assign group #4 to all of the aircraft it produces, tell the aircraft yet to be built which aggressiveness settings to have on by default, where to move initially, which patrol route to follow, etc. That means you can set things up to create some basic air coverage without having to micromanage ANY of it outside of the building of the aircraft plant.
If you build at least one repair platform, any aircraft on patrol when built will also heal themselves automatically and go back to their defined patrol route.
Patrolling construction vehicles will heal damaged units in passing automatically, will gather energy from plants or metal from rocks if those resources are needed, will automatically help with construction projects that they happen to pass by, etc.
It's all about leaving the player free to handle more important things like queueing up further orders on other units or maybe micromanaging some battle where precise unit positioning is important.
Some folks would argue that games like TA outshone Blizzard's offerings on several fronts, including extensibility and basic UI concepts.
Yup, and further research reveals a lot more:
0 0.asp
:-)
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109951,
Hmmm. It didn't impact me as a customer, so I had no idea. Guess I gotta shut up about stuff I don't know about.
Yup. That's why it's so hard for folks who have lots of legitimate experience to find work in some markets. Many hiring companies don't care any more that you've been designing/writing code for a decade -- people with ten years of experience in something are a dime a dozen.
Instead, they want to know if you've been writing code that directly relates to their line of business.
If not, your experience doesn't have value to them. It's in some other industry; how could it possibly apply?
(We know that most types of programming cross industry lines, but *they* don't, and that's the key).
The hard separation of Project Managment from technical function is often not a very good idea, since a thorough understanding of the technical environment and its impact on the project is often critical to being able to bring most projects to a successful conclusion (especially if schedules are tight).
At most of the places I've worked, the role of "Project Manager" was played by a senior member of the development staff on most projects -- a dedicated Project Manager was only brought in when complex multi-platform or multi-team coordination was required. That approach seemed to work very well.
At places I've worked where a decidated Project Manager was used, the misunderstandings/miscommunications with that person often outweighed the benefits his position could have otherwise brought to the project.
Most established companies follow that pattern -- there tends to be a core of older developers around to keep things sane (and act as general resources for the others), and younger folks are brought in as needed and are slowly brought up to speed with the applications and environment using a classic mentor/student relationship.
:-)
This is particularly true of industries which have used IT for a long time (e.g., the airline industry), but it can also be true in smaller shops. I contracted with a glass-making company a few years ago, and they had 25 or so people in their IT department, but I'd say roughly half were my age or older and half were younger.
When I was at NWA, I was the youngest on my team of a dozen or so folks even though I had over 13 years of experience and had just turned 39 when I left. Currently, I'm 43, but my mentor/manager here (who also writes code and is a programmer in all but name) is almost 20 years my senior, and almost everyone here I've met is at least my age. Most are substantially older. Many have been in the airline communications industry for 20 years or more and know all about weird communications protocols like MATIP and P1024.
I didn't realize that the 5500-series hardware was gone from the market. That's a bummer. :-\
One example is ReplayTV's TiVo-like devices which featured sharing capabilities, along with automatic ad skipping; the company was sued to bankruptcy, and the reincarnated device supported neither sharing nor ad skipping.
I don't think SonicBlue actually went into bankruptcy, and its ReplayTV product was purchased by Digital Networks North America Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of D&M Holdings U.S., Inc. They own things like the Denon, Marantz, and Boston Acoustics brands as well as Rio and ReplayTV.
SonicBlue 5000-series models supported internet and local program sharing and both manual (Show/Nav) and automatic commercial skipping as well as a 30-second FF button (QuickSkip). The commercial skipping features navigate between marks which are created at the start and end of commercial advertising blocks that the unit detects and marks at show recording time (it isn't just a simple time skip). Those units still perform as they did when initially purchased.
Current 5500-series models still mark commercial blockss while recording and still fully support both Show/Nav (manual movement between block markers) and QuickSkip, so manual commercial skipping and the 30-second FF is still present, but the automatic commercial skip has been removed. Also, the internet sharing capabilities were removed.
I believe a 5500-series ReplayTV can be made to temporarily regain both automatic commercial skipping and internet sharing capabilities if the disk is reimaged with a 5000-series formatted disk, but I can't personally vouch for that (I own a 5000-series box myself).
While true, there are pieces of software out there which have been in heavy use in production for a long time (sometimes multiple decades), which are bug-free as far as the users and developers are aware, and which are fixed in a matter of days (if not hours) when a problem is detected on a production system.
I suspect defects still exist in such systems, but if the defects are not encountered in heavy use (and remain undetected) they're almost as good as nonexistent. Not *quite* the same, but very close...
Software creation is unlike every other engineering profession in the world for a couple of reasons:
(1) Testing software is a nontrivial process, and can depend quite heavily on the nature of the computing environmment in use as well as the nature of the software project itself.
You can't simply measure a software system against a few standard benchmarks (color, weight, volume, acceleration, fuel economy, etc.) and kick its tires (symbolically speaking) like you can an automobile, and some aspects of software engineering are a lot more complex than mechanical engineering because the virtual environment is not as limited as the physical one.
Try creating a car with multiple engines and 1 to n virtual passenger compartments which requires different fuels on paved and unpaved roads and which acts as either an automatic or a 5-speed stick depending on the color of the shirt the driver is wearing. That's easy with sofrware. Now, take that car for a test drive. Does it work as designed? What did you do to test it? Was it easier or harder than test-driving a normal physical car?
(2) There are an almost infinite variety of languages, environments, and platforms in use out there somewhere, some of them very limited/dated, and the tools available for use in any given project by those doing the software design and implementation are usually not the ones those software engineers would choose to use if the decision was up to them.
What types of knowledge would you test an engineer for? Which languages should they know? On which platforms? Would someone writing specialized code for ACARS communications devices in the aerospace industry in some obscure language developed by Allied Signal be penalized because they don't know the latest Java IDE under Windows or the latest way to interface CICS/IMS programs with an Oracle database via WebSphere? How could you even compare the competence level of people with those three skillsets?
I dunno, just some thoughts about accreditation. I like the idea, but view it as unworkable.
Work for a company that can actually charge its clients what its software and support are worth. Such companies obviously exist. Governments and large corporations don't contract out large software development efforts for free. :-)
Dont give me the argument that I could work for a corporation devloping inhouse apps?
Why not? Specialized application knowledge can pay quite well in some circles. The trick is to make sure that you don't hitch your pony to a failing industry like I did with my airline expertise. It's still doable, given sufficient experience and a bit of luck, but it makes the ride a bit bumpier than it would otherwise be.
Last its more expensive to design everything in house than to buy proprietary and customizable proprietary software.
That depends completely on the nature of the software.
Having worked on software projects related to the operations of several major airlines over the past 18 years, for example, I would defy anyone to replace the existing specialized core applications in various areas (yield management, various flight ops functions, reservations systems, etc) with existing proprietary solutions.
For more generic business functions, warehousing/inventory functions, etc., you certainly have a point, but that is only part of the total software business.
Since the producers of those types of software seem to be undergoing a continuous process of consolidation through corporate buy-outs, product failures, etc., it seems to me that your choice to remove in-house development from consideration might end up seriously limiting your future employment options. Besides, some of the most interesting projects to be found are ones which are done in-house. No insult intended, but we aren't all working on payroll systems, believe me. :-)
Basic economics teaches that if a proprietary product is a piece of crap then it will die and be replaced by someone else.
Then make it a point to work for a company that doesn't create crappy software. Good software is well worth paying for. Companies and governments prove that every year by shelling out millions (if not billions) of dollars for such software.
Those who write/market/support shrinkwrapped software (who I suspect you are referring to) are a minority.
Many of us write software under contract to fairly precise specifications which must conform to specific SLAs and which can generate fairly hefty penalties if it doesn't meet the stated performance, reliability, or functionality expectations.
Please don't paint "all software people" with the same brush. You're taking about an extremely diverse group of people, processes, clients, and technologies.
I agree that underemployment isn't the same as unemployment, but the economic impact it has on families is very similar. When one is living paycheck-to-paycheck, or working but still slowly losing money, one isn't saving for one's retirement or investing back into the economy by making large purchases, etc. It hurts everyone in the long run.
I also agree that there were a lot of folks working in IT that didn't really belong there, and that a correction was sorely needed. It's too bad, though, that many of those corrections were not a little more selective in the people the effected.
See my comments on the impersonal/sweeping nature of organizational layoffs above.
When a company is forced to shed people due to management incompetence or misstep, or due to extraordinary circumstances which were largely outside the company's control, the level of each employee's individual productivity is often a complete nonfactor in related layoffs because such decisions are often made on the organization/LOB/team level, not the individual level.
You may have been a brillant performer in your area, but if that area is deemed non-critical then your past performance really doesn't matter. Your area is gone. You aren't needed.
If you haven't encountered this situation yet in your career, mark my words: you will. If it doesn't directly involve you, then you will know someone else to whom the above applies.
When a branch is lopped off, the fruit on the branch is usually variable in quality, but all of the fruit is equally unemployed...