Most howtos focus on basic installation of the OS and getting around the GUI. No basic administration, no information about installing new apps, no map of the file system so you know where your programs store shit. It's as bad as Microsoft, except that I happen to have lived with MS OSes since '85 and have mostly followed where the keep hiding the useful stuff (i.e. I know it's there, I just have to find the new widget they've hidden it under).
I installed Ubuntu for my daughter, and it worked well. Then I tried to figure out how to install a wireless driver. I gave up and bought a different wireless card that was supported out of the box - it was far easier and cheaper than the hours spent on line. Then I tried to install an application. I was stuck. You either had GUI howtos or you were into forums with power users.
Of course I had to bail on the install - a program I got from school (which she really likes) is windows only. There's no way I'm going to fight with wine on a full-screen DX app that barely plays nice on native software.
If this book really does tell me where everything is stored, and how it runs, and can take me from newbie (old-school CLI apple/ibm/ms) linux to power user that can troubleshoot the OS, I'm in.
I actually have no idea what it takes to run a small ISP. I just know what people cost, and it's bugger-all expensive. Odd but true - it costs between three and four times your salary for your company to break even on you (unless you're on a long-term 40-hour contract, in which case they can break even in as little as 1.8x your salary). So for what you make, you can afford to pay someone of your salary level only 2-3 hours a day. Pretty inefficient.
Anyway, you don't want users helping users most of the time. No, scratch that. Users helping users is good most of the time, but all it takes is one asshole to screw up somebody's system and then it's your fault. You can't have PR like that. "ABC ISP has users helping users, but you have to be careful of their free service or you might get scammed." People want an intelligent voice they can trust on the other end. Actually, they'll settle for basically competent if the trust is there.
I'm not sure what you get in the metro areas, but outside those areas you're looking at a bookkeeper/administrative asst/phone desk/misc helper at about $30k-$35k/yr, An admin/helpdesk/second coder that knows what he/she is doing at $75k/yr, the owner/second admin/prime coder/marketing guru/everything else at $75k/yr, plus office/rack space at $20/SF/yr (say $2k-4k/yr), power (yikes!), phone, janitor, taxes,... And then you get to pay for your product - bandwidth. You might be in for $250k a year before you get your first client signed up. At $25 per client, you're 10,000 clients away from just breaking even. And, really, how many 10Mb pipes can you guarantee service on for $50k in annual line fees? I doubt it's 1,000, much less the 10,000 break-even number.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but the financial rewards are pretty slender in the down-market areas. Now, if you want to specialize in getting high-dollar clients up and running, where $1000/mo retainer plus $150/hr for 4 hour support guarantee is typical, and $500-1000 in guaranteed QOS b/w is in the offing, then you've got a potential market to support a business.
My guess is to do the research to find out who makes the panels for the model you might want and go from there.
I got a cheap 19" LCD which clearly has a smaller color space based on watching video simultaneously on the LCD and on a HT projector. The LCD clearly has marked color transitions where the (also LCD) projector does not. At least, I presume that's the issue. I don't really care, as the screen is mainly for setup of the HT computer, not watching, but I can see how somebody might be pretty disappointed if it was a primary monitor.
Sorry, but people cost money. Lots of money. That's why tech support sucks. Think about it, a good tech support person who knows his/her stuff will run you $80k+ per year including overhead if you live outside of a major metro area. So for 80k you're going to be in for about $20 for each 1/2 hour help desk call. If you price your service competitively, the low end will be $20/month baseline charge and 80% of your customers will never use more (my unlimited 768k at home is $17.99, fwiw). Since your help desk probably shouldn't be more than 5% of your operating costs due to the cost of plant, bandwidth, capital, etc., you've got one help desk call per user every 20 months at break even. That's mighty low usage.
Don't even get me started on custom programming. Eveything seems easy until you have to amortize a team of $100k-200k/yr developers over a bunch of $20-$40/mo service contracts.
The issue is primarily one of convenience and plant cost. To get you 10Mb/s is mostly capital costs, so you pay a fixed rate. Overselling is done because average users don't saturate their channels. Businesses, otoh, do and they pay for the luxury. Pay per bit service would be difficult to structure without a fixed cost. Once you cover billing, tech support, and plant, you're up to nearly what everyone is already paying. Adding per-bit charges will only make it more expensive. Sure, you can pay more for a guarantee but the value of that guarantee is far less to the consumer than to the operator. And if you put your guaranteeds on the same line as your basic oversold, you're going to have to actively sort them out.
BTW - how much data does $35 buy you? Maybe you're getting $100 worth of data for the $70 you pay Comcast, and you just don't realize it. I would venture to guess that if you divided the entire data stream by the revenue, most slashdotters are getting more bits per dollar than the overall system average. Even if you just camp on the throttled ports, you may still be getting more bits than a dollar of Comcast plant depreciation.
C'mon folks, if you're getting your "hard facts" from blogs, you're already toast. Everybody has an agenda, it's just that some folks get paid for it. Don't think of them as military propaganda arms, think of them as paid public lobbiests (aka astroturfers) . Whole different form of slime, but slime nonetheless.
Most people with decent IT can access their servers from anywhere. Even those with so-so IT can have a modicum of access in several ways (offline files, web access services) without needing Google. The thing is, anyone with nazis for IT who won't let in any outside access to their servers would have a stroke if they found you were storing data on an external machine.
It seems useful for companies too small to have "real" IT and who don't care much about data security (corp secrets and such). For much of the market, though, it's a toy. For now, at least.
Most of the complaints seem to be about the drudgery of work and the unfairness of grading. I thought that, too, for a while. Then I realized that there were 4.0 GPA aerospace engineers in my class, and most of them really liked what they were doing. I did too, mostly, but barely made top 1/4 of my class. It wasn't that the grading was harder than high school - the people were smarter. As a result, I was lower on the population bell curve than I'd been, and I had to do a lot more work just to keep up.
If engineering is too hard, go play in one of the other majors. You'll probably find a couple where you're higher on the IQ chart than most. Big fish in a little pond - then you can slack a bit and get marks like you did in High School. Just hope you've got an "in" in the business world, because after you get you first job, nobody will care what your GPA was in college. Then you'll be back to fighting with the smart ones who took the hard classes in college - or worst yet, the so-so students who have family in your chosen business. Then you're truly screwed. Unless, of course, you're a genius and you start your own company and make a fortune...but if you were, you'd probably be doing better in your engineering classes. Bummer.
If you want a top tier, non-in-state school. Of course, if you're really smart, you should go to your in-state school and do a lot of extra-curricular stuff in-major. Then, presuming you don't start your own company right out of school, you can get your deep-pocketed employer to spring for an expensive second degree. Then go start that company.
If you (should reasonably) know that an infringing item is on the market, you must defend you patent immediately or lose rights to it. If Seagate suspects that the SSDs are infringing, they should be required to move now and not be allowed wait until the competitive item is successful.
Why would you bother to write to BD-R, unless you're selling or loaning (and don't trust friends to keep your discs in good condition)?
The most legitimate reasons for ripping is for using a media server, which more and more of us own. I've got about 270DVDs on mine - I built it when I found out that my Sony DVD jukebox was scratching the hell out of some of my discs, leaving them unplayable. Now all the discs are safe from both faulty mechanisms and greasy fingers in a closet. I've been avoiding getting a BR/HD player since I can't get the discs onto my server, and I'm not willing to jump through the hoops necessary to run a pc-based player. A recent update of PowerDVD prevented playback of bluray/hd-dvd images from the hard drive. Screw that.
Until now, if I wanted to see something in HD, I've just downloaded it - often pre-transcoded to 720p, since that's the resolution of my "best" playback device. I try to feel bad about the dozen or so I've done this with, but just can't seem to bring myself to feel guilty. Actually, I think I own about 6-8 of them on DVD, and just wanted to see what they looked like in HD; or I watched them before they were released, and subsequently bought the DVD when it was available, but didn't feel like ripping the dvd.
As for your question, I would presume it would take less than 3 hours, since that would be a 1x transfer.
You'll get a letter stating that your share has been applied to the more than half-trillion dollar shortfall between revenue and expenses this year.
Actually, now that I come to think of it, you may just get that check. $600 x 143M = $85B, so you can just figure that 1/4 of your "rebate" check from Dubya came from this auction. See how efficient government is? (excuse my while I go throw up)
I believe current is constant in this case, so that the power decreases with the square of V. By reducing the voltage to 1/3.3 the typcial usage, a theoretical power decrease to (1/3.3)^2 or 1/10 is achieved. Again , in theory, and provided that they can get the transistors to work at that voltage. Then again, IANAEE, so I wouldn't take that as genuine truth.
The satellite is covered with retroreflectors, aka corner cubes. It is a property of three perpendicular planes that any light is returned along its incident path. Reflectors are used on bikes and cars, and highway signs (and high-gain front projection screens).
The sphere, LAGEOS, is covered with corner cubes. For scale, I think it's about 60cm in diameter. To send a single photon up and receive it is amazingly accurate, and lucky. Divergence of a laser results in many orders of magnitude loss of signal over those distances. I believe we know the orbits of these inert satellites to better than 5cm, at least we did two decades ago when I worked on TLRS and MOBLAS station stuff at Goddard. We would send 200 ps pulses (Nd:YAG laser) and then gather the returns in a telescope - sometimes of only several photons out of the entire pulse - which were then used to calculate time-if-flight and determine the exact location on earth. This was done to track motion of the tectonic plates.
The FCC doesn't know how to bluff, or more to the point, can't tell when somebody else is bluffing. You see, anytime the FCC has the opportunity to make a tough decision (say, ATSC) they call in industry groups to figure out the way that will work the best for them and go with that. If the industry says it will send them out of business, or make their costs so high that people will see triple digit increases, then the FCC believes them.
What the FCC is missing is that it is irrelevant what the cable companies say. They may very well go out of business, but that is also irrelevant because the American public places a high value on entertainment, and new companies will be fighting to fill any gap that opens up, given the opportunity.
Personally, I think the government (or governmental corporation, like the USPS, Fannie Mae, etc) should take over the infrastructure - or require divestiture of all physical plant operations - and allow for real competition in the content market. Imagine the rates for information becoming like the telephone long distance market.
You missed the point. Not everyone has computers as a "hobby," and can invest their limited time in learning all about them. It's not about building, it's about the thousands of fields with which we interact every day. How much do you know about farming? About amino acids? About detailed nutritional analysis? You eat every day, it's critical to your health, and it's a small fraction of your expenses. What about exercise techniques? Are you following a traditional regimen of walking, lifting, and stretching, or are you up on the latest trends in low-impact cardio and tailoring to your physical attributes?
As I get older, I find more and more things of interest, and yet my day seems cruelly fixed at 24 hours, 7 of which I must spend sleeping in order to get the most out of the other 17. I have to make conscious decisions what I give up and what I pursue. I'm || this close to giving up golf altogether, though I find it enjoyable. I just don't have time for it.
I bill $130 an hour. How many hours would it take to be as proficient in Open Office as I am in Word, or better yet Excel, I wonder? I would suggest that to be as proficient in either would likely take between 60 and 100 hours. Just a couple of weeks of training, which is far less than a single college course, but even if the training were free, it has an opportunity cost of around $10,000. For a "free" upgrade.
Besides, not all construction is replacement. If you add a deck or a sunroom, or remodel the basement, you're looking at new things. Of course, like all analogies - mine is nowhere near 1:1. The point is that new things take time and effort (and often money), and we all can't be abreast of the latest (or even recent) developments in all fields. There aren't enough hours in the day. To think everyone will find interest in _your_ field or hobby is a bit vain.
Interesting. So, what is your take on the recent developments in moment and portal frames in engineered wood construction? I find many people woefully ignorant of even the most simple principles of home construction, and yet practically everyone owns a home. Flashing? EIFS? That's not even getting into energy recovery ventilators and the latest developments in composite lumber products. Nearly every computer tech I know still lives in a house with a common furnace or heat pump, and *gasp* an unreinforced concrete masonry foundation, even though there are far more modern and superior systems which do so much more.
What was that? You just use your house to live in and it works just fine? Oh...
Wow, that touched a nerve. IT is, generally, an expense. It is primarily a support role. A valuable one, but still a support role, just like HR, accounting, finance, marketing, and plant maintenance. Everything would go to hell in a handbasket if any one of those functions was omitted, too. Saying each is critical to the company is true, but is also sensationalistic.
Now, there are times when IT can generate revenue - such as driving outside sales. They can assist in increasing productivity, too. But it is no more strategic than any other support role, on average.
Slashdot Mirror
Most howtos focus on basic installation of the OS and getting around the GUI. No basic administration, no information about installing new apps, no map of the file system so you know where your programs store shit. It's as bad as Microsoft, except that I happen to have lived with MS OSes since '85 and have mostly followed where the keep hiding the useful stuff (i.e. I know it's there, I just have to find the new widget they've hidden it under).
I installed Ubuntu for my daughter, and it worked well. Then I tried to figure out how to install a wireless driver. I gave up and bought a different wireless card that was supported out of the box - it was far easier and cheaper than the hours spent on line. Then I tried to install an application. I was stuck. You either had GUI howtos or you were into forums with power users.
Of course I had to bail on the install - a program I got from school (which she really likes) is windows only. There's no way I'm going to fight with wine on a full-screen DX app that barely plays nice on native software.
If this book really does tell me where everything is stored, and how it runs, and can take me from newbie (old-school CLI apple/ibm/ms) linux to power user that can troubleshoot the OS, I'm in.
I actually have no idea what it takes to run a small ISP. I just know what people cost, and it's bugger-all expensive. Odd but true - it costs between three and four times your salary for your company to break even on you (unless you're on a long-term 40-hour contract, in which case they can break even in as little as 1.8x your salary). So for what you make, you can afford to pay someone of your salary level only 2-3 hours a day. Pretty inefficient.
Anyway, you don't want users helping users most of the time. No, scratch that. Users helping users is good most of the time, but all it takes is one asshole to screw up somebody's system and then it's your fault. You can't have PR like that. "ABC ISP has users helping users, but you have to be careful of their free service or you might get scammed." People want an intelligent voice they can trust on the other end. Actually, they'll settle for basically competent if the trust is there.
I'm not sure what you get in the metro areas, but outside those areas you're looking at a bookkeeper/administrative asst/phone desk/misc helper at about $30k-$35k/yr, An admin/helpdesk/second coder that knows what he/she is doing at $75k/yr, the owner/second admin/prime coder/marketing guru/everything else at $75k/yr, plus office/rack space at $20/SF/yr (say $2k-4k/yr), power (yikes!), phone, janitor, taxes,... And then you get to pay for your product - bandwidth. You might be in for $250k a year before you get your first client signed up. At $25 per client, you're 10,000 clients away from just breaking even. And, really, how many 10Mb pipes can you guarantee service on for $50k in annual line fees? I doubt it's 1,000, much less the 10,000 break-even number.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but the financial rewards are pretty slender in the down-market areas. Now, if you want to specialize in getting high-dollar clients up and running, where $1000/mo retainer plus $150/hr for 4 hour support guarantee is typical, and $500-1000 in guaranteed QOS b/w is in the offing, then you've got a potential market to support a business.
My guess is to do the research to find out who makes the panels for the model you might want and go from there.
I got a cheap 19" LCD which clearly has a smaller color space based on watching video simultaneously on the LCD and on a HT projector. The LCD clearly has marked color transitions where the (also LCD) projector does not. At least, I presume that's the issue. I don't really care, as the screen is mainly for setup of the HT computer, not watching, but I can see how somebody might be pretty disappointed if it was a primary monitor.
Sorry, but people cost money. Lots of money. That's why tech support sucks. Think about it, a good tech support person who knows his/her stuff will run you $80k+ per year including overhead if you live outside of a major metro area. So for 80k you're going to be in for about $20 for each 1/2 hour help desk call. If you price your service competitively, the low end will be $20/month baseline charge and 80% of your customers will never use more (my unlimited 768k at home is $17.99, fwiw). Since your help desk probably shouldn't be more than 5% of your operating costs due to the cost of plant, bandwidth, capital, etc., you've got one help desk call per user every 20 months at break even. That's mighty low usage.
Don't even get me started on custom programming. Eveything seems easy until you have to amortize a team of $100k-200k/yr developers over a bunch of $20-$40/mo service contracts.
The issue is primarily one of convenience and plant cost. To get you 10Mb/s is mostly capital costs, so you pay a fixed rate. Overselling is done because average users don't saturate their channels. Businesses, otoh, do and they pay for the luxury. Pay per bit service would be difficult to structure without a fixed cost. Once you cover billing, tech support, and plant, you're up to nearly what everyone is already paying. Adding per-bit charges will only make it more expensive. Sure, you can pay more for a guarantee but the value of that guarantee is far less to the consumer than to the operator. And if you put your guaranteeds on the same line as your basic oversold, you're going to have to actively sort them out.
BTW - how much data does $35 buy you? Maybe you're getting $100 worth of data for the $70 you pay Comcast, and you just don't realize it. I would venture to guess that if you divided the entire data stream by the revenue, most slashdotters are getting more bits per dollar than the overall system average. Even if you just camp on the throttled ports, you may still be getting more bits than a dollar of Comcast plant depreciation.
C'mon folks, if you're getting your "hard facts" from blogs, you're already toast. Everybody has an agenda, it's just that some folks get paid for it. Don't think of them as military propaganda arms, think of them as paid public lobbiests (aka astroturfers) . Whole different form of slime, but slime nonetheless.
Most people with decent IT can access their servers from anywhere. Even those with so-so IT can have a modicum of access in several ways (offline files, web access services) without needing Google. The thing is, anyone with nazis for IT who won't let in any outside access to their servers would have a stroke if they found you were storing data on an external machine.
It seems useful for companies too small to have "real" IT and who don't care much about data security (corp secrets and such). For much of the market, though, it's a toy. For now, at least.
Maybe the fake spit will be developed at Florida's in-state rival Florida State. Then the new product can be called Seminole Fluid.
Thanks, folks. I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip you waiters.
FTFS: "allowing you to slide your finger across the screen to immediately shut off the display and keep what you're working on confidential"
Will it automatically hide the box of kleenex and bottle of hand lotion, too?
Most of the complaints seem to be about the drudgery of work and the unfairness of grading. I thought that, too, for a while. Then I realized that there were 4.0 GPA aerospace engineers in my class, and most of them really liked what they were doing. I did too, mostly, but barely made top 1/4 of my class. It wasn't that the grading was harder than high school - the people were smarter. As a result, I was lower on the population bell curve than I'd been, and I had to do a lot more work just to keep up.
If engineering is too hard, go play in one of the other majors. You'll probably find a couple where you're higher on the IQ chart than most. Big fish in a little pond - then you can slack a bit and get marks like you did in High School. Just hope you've got an "in" in the business world, because after you get you first job, nobody will care what your GPA was in college. Then you'll be back to fighting with the smart ones who took the hard classes in college - or worst yet, the so-so students who have family in your chosen business. Then you're truly screwed. Unless, of course, you're a genius and you start your own company and make a fortune...but if you were, you'd probably be doing better in your engineering classes. Bummer.
If you want a top tier, non-in-state school. Of course, if you're really smart, you should go to your in-state school and do a lot of extra-curricular stuff in-major. Then, presuming you don't start your own company right out of school, you can get your deep-pocketed employer to spring for an expensive second degree. Then go start that company.
If you (should reasonably) know that an infringing item is on the market, you must defend you patent immediately or lose rights to it. If Seagate suspects that the SSDs are infringing, they should be required to move now and not be allowed wait until the competitive item is successful.
Why would you bother to write to BD-R, unless you're selling or loaning (and don't trust friends to keep your discs in good condition)?
The most legitimate reasons for ripping is for using a media server, which more and more of us own. I've got about 270DVDs on mine - I built it when I found out that my Sony DVD jukebox was scratching the hell out of some of my discs, leaving them unplayable. Now all the discs are safe from both faulty mechanisms and greasy fingers in a closet. I've been avoiding getting a BR/HD player since I can't get the discs onto my server, and I'm not willing to jump through the hoops necessary to run a pc-based player. A recent update of PowerDVD prevented playback of bluray/hd-dvd images from the hard drive. Screw that.
Until now, if I wanted to see something in HD, I've just downloaded it - often pre-transcoded to 720p, since that's the resolution of my "best" playback device. I try to feel bad about the dozen or so I've done this with, but just can't seem to bring myself to feel guilty. Actually, I think I own about 6-8 of them on DVD, and just wanted to see what they looked like in HD; or I watched them before they were released, and subsequently bought the DVD when it was available, but didn't feel like ripping the dvd.
As for your question, I would presume it would take less than 3 hours, since that would be a 1x transfer.
Slysoft: BD+ will buy you time, but months only. From this moment on, no matter what we do, BluRay will be cracked.
Sony: But this DRM can't be cracked!
Slysoft: She is made of data, sir. I assure you, she can. And she *will*. It is a mathematical certainty.
You'll get a letter stating that your share has been applied to the more than half-trillion dollar shortfall between revenue and expenses this year.
Actually, now that I come to think of it, you may just get that check. $600 x 143M = $85B, so you can just figure that 1/4 of your "rebate" check from Dubya came from this auction. See how efficient government is? (excuse my while I go throw up)
Had a rough couple of weeks in the market, eh?
I believe current is constant in this case, so that the power decreases with the square of V. By reducing the voltage to 1/3.3 the typcial usage, a theoretical power decrease to (1/3.3)^2 or 1/10 is achieved. Again , in theory, and provided that they can get the transistors to work at that voltage. Then again, IANAEE, so I wouldn't take that as genuine truth.
The satellite is covered with retroreflectors, aka corner cubes. It is a property of three perpendicular planes that any light is returned along its incident path. Reflectors are used on bikes and cars, and highway signs (and high-gain front projection screens).
http://www.af.ca/halifax/sciences/gim/LAGEOS-NASA.jpg
The sphere, LAGEOS, is covered with corner cubes. For scale, I think it's about 60cm in diameter. To send a single photon up and receive it is amazingly accurate, and lucky. Divergence of a laser results in many orders of magnitude loss of signal over those distances. I believe we know the orbits of these inert satellites to better than 5cm, at least we did two decades ago when I worked on TLRS and MOBLAS station stuff at Goddard. We would send 200 ps pulses (Nd:YAG laser) and then gather the returns in a telescope - sometimes of only several photons out of the entire pulse - which were then used to calculate time-if-flight and determine the exact location on earth. This was done to track motion of the tectonic plates.
If there are multiple companies putting up $100M a pop for future production, I'd say there ought to be a solid business model in there somewhere.
The FCC doesn't know how to bluff, or more to the point, can't tell when somebody else is bluffing. You see, anytime the FCC has the opportunity to make a tough decision (say, ATSC) they call in industry groups to figure out the way that will work the best for them and go with that. If the industry says it will send them out of business, or make their costs so high that people will see triple digit increases, then the FCC believes them.
What the FCC is missing is that it is irrelevant what the cable companies say. They may very well go out of business, but that is also irrelevant because the American public places a high value on entertainment, and new companies will be fighting to fill any gap that opens up, given the opportunity.
Personally, I think the government (or governmental corporation, like the USPS, Fannie Mae, etc) should take over the infrastructure - or require divestiture of all physical plant operations - and allow for real competition in the content market. Imagine the rates for information becoming like the telephone long distance market.
You missed the point. Not everyone has computers as a "hobby," and can invest their limited time in learning all about them. It's not about building, it's about the thousands of fields with which we interact every day. How much do you know about farming? About amino acids? About detailed nutritional analysis? You eat every day, it's critical to your health, and it's a small fraction of your expenses. What about exercise techniques? Are you following a traditional regimen of walking, lifting, and stretching, or are you up on the latest trends in low-impact cardio and tailoring to your physical attributes?
As I get older, I find more and more things of interest, and yet my day seems cruelly fixed at 24 hours, 7 of which I must spend sleeping in order to get the most out of the other 17. I have to make conscious decisions what I give up and what I pursue. I'm || this close to giving up golf altogether, though I find it enjoyable. I just don't have time for it.
I bill $130 an hour. How many hours would it take to be as proficient in Open Office as I am in Word, or better yet Excel, I wonder? I would suggest that to be as proficient in either would likely take between 60 and 100 hours. Just a couple of weeks of training, which is far less than a single college course, but even if the training were free, it has an opportunity cost of around $10,000. For a "free" upgrade.
Besides, not all construction is replacement. If you add a deck or a sunroom, or remodel the basement, you're looking at new things. Of course, like all analogies - mine is nowhere near 1:1. The point is that new things take time and effort (and often money), and we all can't be abreast of the latest (or even recent) developments in all fields. There aren't enough hours in the day. To think everyone will find interest in _your_ field or hobby is a bit vain.
Interesting. So, what is your take on the recent developments in moment and portal frames in engineered wood construction? I find many people woefully ignorant of even the most simple principles of home construction, and yet practically everyone owns a home. Flashing? EIFS? That's not even getting into energy recovery ventilators and the latest developments in composite lumber products. Nearly every computer tech I know still lives in a house with a common furnace or heat pump, and *gasp* an unreinforced concrete masonry foundation, even though there are far more modern and superior systems which do so much more.
What was that? You just use your house to live in and it works just fine? Oh...
Wow, that touched a nerve. IT is, generally, an expense. It is primarily a support role. A valuable one, but still a support role, just like HR, accounting, finance, marketing, and plant maintenance. Everything would go to hell in a handbasket if any one of those functions was omitted, too. Saying each is critical to the company is true, but is also sensationalistic.
Now, there are times when IT can generate revenue - such as driving outside sales. They can assist in increasing productivity, too. But it is no more strategic than any other support role, on average.
but I didn't realize how much.
How long before they start building man-made islands in cute shapes?