I used to work for a company that sold technology oriented services. I think the staff were all required to take some kind of computer proficiciency test (even me working in IT). At any rate, the users were actually, for the most part, not horrible. I didn't think anything of it until I switched jobs and started working in a university office setting... Oh the humanity!!!
Looking back, I don't think the technology company had to compromise on necessary attributes in order to get computer literate people. In fact, I'm guessing the computer literacy tests helped detect a lot of idiots that might have otherwise been hired. People don't necessarily have to be fully computer literate to contribute in a modern workforce, but chances are, if the person ain't computer literate, they're not a particularly strong contributor.
The right question is, for those people who are using ebook technology, why are you doing it? If someone wants to get a book, they can find it anywhere in real book format. It's well understood, easy to use, it's something most have us have been comfortable with since the age of 6-7.
I'm guessing the people who use ebooks do so because
They want to try out the new format
They need highly portable references which happen to be published in ebook formats and perhaps other portable devices like a laptop are too clunky or unavailable.
They want to save shelf space? This doesn't seem very valid as one would imagine a small percentage of books are published as ebooks and most non reference books are read once materials anyway so you either don't need to keep them or do because you like have a shelf full of books.
Improved searchability of references? This is a neat aspect, BUT an electronic version of a "BOOK" format is not an optimal electronic reference. For example, most knowledge webs link between related information while a book is far more linear/narrative.
Any other reasons? Usability perks? If you're sitting at an airport with wireless, can you just buy and download a book instantly right from your reader?
Reporting total downloads may not give the reader the best possible representation of the actual popularity of Firefox with respect to its competition, but it still makes sense. When I look for freeware or open source software, and I'm comparing two products, one of the first things I look at is how popular the product is, and usually the best available metric is the number of times the product has been downloaded.
Is this number an accurate representation of the number of users of that product? No. Who even cares? It is a figure that tells you a little about how popular a piece of software is. It's a popular metric used for this purpose. And really, that's all that matters.
The English language is well equipped with nuanced words and structures that can accurately convey meaning, intent, tone, and information both simple and complex.
English and all other spoken languages are geared towards speach where the communication is augmented with tone, expression, hand waving, and obscene gestures. It has the capability of accurately conveying meaning, intent, etc... in text only form, but it is much much much much harder to do than in a face to face conversation.
The advent of smiley's and things like [sarcasm] tags are an effort to address some of the shortcomings of english as a written communication tool. Expressions such as "I was like" are also useful because in written text they imply a certain level of familiarity which helps set the tone of a message. In the absence of such familiarity cues, a message will look a lot more serious even if the content is supposed to be two old friends joking around. This means there's a higher probability of misinterpretation.
Personally, I'm guessing languages tend to evolve to more and more efficient forms, that this is what we are seeing now, and that we should let it evolve. It's not like we could stop it anyway.
ah that makes sense then. The publicity they get from this might even help them raise additional funds which can be applied to their primary goals. I wasn't really bothered so much as confused.
Better question... why is the EFF offering prize money for finding primes? It seems only very loosely related to their purpose. That's not the kind of thing I gave them money to do.
The interfaces link above has a place for you to download text file exports of most of the actual movie data (attrociously normalized). I have occassionally wanted to use this data on my own site for various purposes, but there are all kinds of nasty warnings about copyright and how all one's base belongs to them. It had been my understanding that one could not copyright a collection of facts, though one could copyright a collection of facts organized and presented in a particular manner. Legally, is there any reason a person couldn't just take their data, import it into a format of their own design, and then do whatever they wanted with it?
In other words, do IMDB's though-shalt-not-use-our-data-without-licensing claims hold water? Do their legal threats only apply to imdb specific content like user comments or reviews (which I don't think are in the text dumps anyway) or do they also apply to things like public domain information about a movie?
I understand that IMDB does allow some use of the data, otherwise they wouldn't provide the dumps, but the question is, how can they restrict the use as much as they claim to?
70% of your mark in any Comp Sci class here is usually 20% mid term and 50% final exam. Will rent-a-coder help there?
I've taken classes where the coding project is largely independent of the tests, meaning that having someone code your project would not necessarily hurt you on the test. If it doesn't hurt you, it will free up lots of time that can be spent preparing for the test.
As for a work environment, the programming I did in school was never anything more than fuel priming a pump with some often repetitive theory tossed in. Once you're primed, the work you find or do on your own tends to be far more expansive and applicable than the programming work in school, especially if you are self motivated.
I don't think it's generally in people's best interests to cheat, but penalties aside, there are probably times when one can cheat without hurting themselves. If the person does something productive with their time instead of the assignment, they may even come out ahead. That said, I would guess cheating was more often harmful.
Rushing a product out the door when you have knowingly failed to follow sound practices during development and testing is negligent...
Define sound practices. Personally I think it's a hard thing to do. In addition, I know I use a lot of software that was most likely not written using "sound practices". Would that software be unavailable if the creators were required to meet a certain (arbirtrary?) development standard?
At any rate, when you see a headline like $150 million down the drain, it makes you wonder how much more it costs to create two of these things versus one of them. I mean, I imagine a lot more is spent on design than physical parts and assembly. What percentage of the cost is in the launch?
I think they do this too, but their pricing whackiness goes well beyond this. On their premier site, they've got all kinds of weird problems going on. Sometimes adding a 1905 (19") flat panel to a computer configuration costs as more than $600. Sometimes it only costs $300. However, you can ALWAYS buy them a la carte from the same site for anywhere between $330-420 (depending on the pricing of the day).
Then there's the upgrade game. There is no consistency whatsoever in the costs of upgrades. You can have two identically spec-ed base pcs with 256MB of memory and on one an upgrade to 512MB costs $50 while on the other it is $150. It's true that part of this could be done to optimize their manufacturing and supply chains, but more often than not, I think it's just stupid mistakes and/or non-intentional inconsistencies.
I remember my manager once asked me to price a powervault for about a TB of network attached storage. I went with the cheapest thing I could find and started adding additional SATA drives. They were charging about $500 for EACH additional drive. They were 250GB or 300GB drives and at the time, one could buy those for around $160 from newegg. We ended up buying a terastation for about 1/3 the cost and getting more storage than the powervault.
It's possible dell's pricing antics will optimize cash flow in the short term, but it's having a profound negative affect on customer relations in the longterm.
My favorite is when it sometimes costs $600+ to add a 19" flat panel to some computer configurations when you can get the same one a la carte for $300 + $100 * (austin temp / austin heat index) * percent dell employees who had coffee that morning.
Seriously though, I suspect that there are fundamental problems (features?) in their in house pricing system. From a customer perspective, there's no reason they should have three different prices for the same piece of equipment in the same channel, and I've pretty regularly seen that happen. The premier channel seems to be the worst of them. Maybe they think they only have to have the sales site be better than IBM's premier, which means next to nothing.
After 40 years of 'pro' development, computing is still a human-driven craft instead of the extremely precise arm of engineering that it could so easily have become through its well-defined subject matter.
IMO, good, appropriate development practices are emerging and will continue to do so. One might say they are emergent behaviors of a complex system. The people I see touting formal software specifications or XP for almost everything are engaged in an attempt to force a premature optimization on the software development industry. They have a particular implementation of the still relatively poorly understood extremely diverse process of software development and they want everyone to use their implementation. Random aside: accreditation committees structuring CS curriculums are another form of premature optimization.
Most good software developers I know are learning self optimizing systems. They spend all day figuring out how to improve quality and automate processes and tend to apply those same thought processes to their own work. When something is good for someone, it will be recognized as good given time.
If the world continued along Linus's desired path of "reality" vs theory, the current mess will know no end, and the metaphorical bridges of computer science will still be falling down in the year 3,000.
To reitterate my earlier point, keep your shirt on.
We're just trying out Perspective, a.net wiki. It is supposed to have features for searching over office documents. As a lot of our documentation exists in odds and ends word files, this is why we're trying it out. Of course, there's only two people in our IT department so we can get away with more adhoc solutions.
I think the search is built on top of some windows indexing service, so presumably it has whatever limitations that has in terms of document types.
I've always thought the "teach you how to think" argument was arrogant bullshit. That said, a curriculum should assist you in developing critical thinking and problem solving skills. The kind of analytical skills developed in a mathematics program are not necessarily the most appropriate set of thinking skills for everyone.
Math deals with logical statements, things that are true or false, consequences of sets of statements, proofs, etc. Mathematics tends to zero in on activities relating to this type of thinking.
Meanwhile, there are other types of thinking and analysis which are important to people. For example, when designing software it helps to be able to think in a highly empathic manner on demand, fast context switching can be much more important than depth in some jobs, most will frequently have to come up with solutions to which there are no absolute answers.
My point is simple, a math or physics degree does not make the best default degree for thinking skills because it pursues a very narrow range of thinking skills at the exclusion of some more commonly needed items. In essence, they promote a more specialized, less general purpose mode of thinking.
IT is too broad a field for people to always be able to know the answer. For example, I do development, support, and administration in Linux and Windows using hordes of different kinds of technologies. If it were possible for me to know everything about how everything interacts, it wouldn't be hard.
Often, an IT guy won't have any better idea of what the answer is to a problem than you do, he's just better at troubleshooting the situation and finding answers. For example, I went to move a eudora user from pop (mail stored on pc) to imap (mail stored on server). Well, there were all sorts of Eudora specific problems getting the mail moved over. As my BS degree wasn't in Eudora idiosyncracies, and as we only had 5 Eudora users in the whole office, I had to spend time researching the answers to a lot of the problems and then experimenting until I foudn solutions to the problems where no solution seemed to exist.
I think one big problem in the IT industry is that some people expect IT to always know the answers and that's just not possible. This results in an IT staff that is pressured into promoting wild guesses into factual solutions. This results in IT failing to deliver on more promissed solutions, which results in angrier more demanding customers, which results in more pressure on IT. IT should always be honest when they don't know the answer, and you should give them a break when they are honestly trying to work with you to find the answer.
but I'll never forget what one professor said on the very first day of class - "We aren't here to teach you things - we are here to teach you how to think".
I've heard this dozens of times. Usually this is the line that gets said whenever someone challenges something about the curriculum or the teaching method or anything else the people with power don't want challenged. It's an arrogant and sadistic way of belittling people who challenge that status quo. Why are we learning axiomatic semantics when a study of usability and interface design would be so much more useful? Because we're here to teach you how to think.
All of those "test[s] of endurance" are the best way that you can learn how to think like an engineer
Why? As a critical thinker, you must acknowledge that the system presently in place is most likely not the best one. Do you have evidence for it being the best system? Or is it the best system because it's the one you payed 10's of thousands of dollars and several years of your life to undergo (Cognitive Dissonance). Or is it the best system because your teachers said it was and they're the ones who taught you how to think.
Seriously, that's [marketting] a pretty a strange criterium to judge software by
Technically, marketting is a much broader topic than most people give it credit for. The textbook description of marketting typically includes promotion (advertising), price, product, and placement. The most important is probably product, eg working with designers and developers to create a product customers want. In my opinion, Ubuntu seems to do this fairly well and that is a large part of why I eventually settled on them after trying debian stable/unstable, red hat, and fedora.
Just look at netscape. All it had to do was buy another browser and integrate it into the os... and boom! nescape is gone.
The fact that IE sucks compared to the current competition is a pretty good example of the effect I was describing. Web browsers bring inroads to platform independent computing. Platform independent computing is bad for Microsoft's windows monopoly (in theory). Therefore enhancements to browsers are bad for Microsoft's monopoly. Therefore IE sucks.
I didn't even know MS bought IE off another company, but that fits perfectly within the model of acquiring a company and then failing to realize its potential in favor of the existing business model.
I'd go a step further and say that a good IT professional also operates in a manner designed to increase the knowledge and abilities of coworkers regardless of whether or not they want to learn. In this I don't mean being annoying, forcing people to learn, or being confrontational... but rather using subtle strategies to demonstrate or convey knowledge.
For example, a number of my users occassionally use loaner laptops for presentations, but they really do not "get" dual displays. Why does projector screen show something different than this screen? But I want to see presentation notes on the laptop screen but not the projector! More than once, these folks have been stuck in front of mostly technical audiences, unable to get their presentations going.
These same kind of people are the ones who want things to "just work" and who don't want to spend any time understanding how to operate the equipment. To combat this in a non confrontational manner, I'm pushing dual displays for a few users in the office. The hope is that we can increase a few people's productivity while simultaneously spreading understanding of the operation of dual displays throughout the office.
I'm also looking into methods to allow users who normally have a helpless mentality to figure out how to do certain tasks without extensive IT intervention. For example, we have a few people that we've had to walk through burning cds in xp multiple times. We've provided written instructions with variable success. I'm looking into getting screen capture/video software that would let us produce extremely easy to follow tutorials. The next time, a user asks for help burning a cd, we'll send them the tutorial first before visiting them for the nth time.
A lot of people get angry or embarassed when they have to ask for IT support. This is one of the main reasons people become adverse to learning about computers. If we can give people the ability or at least the illusion that they can help themselves, then they will be more open to learning in the future. A downloadable tutorial that they can follow by themselves and refer back to later gives people that sense of independent achievement.
Sometimes you have to do a salesman job. We've got a few users who refuse to abandon Eudora Pop mail clients. They refuse to switch to Outlook because they don't want to learn anything. So, without confronting them on this issue (yet) we've been doing things like introducing them to Webmail (OWA) and selling them on storing mail on the server (imap) all the while making it more and more desirable to switch to Outlook (or hell - anything other than Eudora). Of course, jumping through all these gradual transition hoops is a LOT of work for us. It would probably be more efficient for the business unit if we just kicked them into Outlook.
Anyways, the moral is there are a lot of subtle things you can do to improve the competency and confidence of your coworkers regardless of whether or not they want to learn.
good news for Microsoft is that it doesn't have to...it just has to acquire a company that can
If you assume this innovation will disrupt MS's core business, then it is a little more complicated. It not only has to acquire a company that can, but it has to let that company cannibalize MS's existing business. Historically, most market leaders have a hard time doing this.
One example Wessel cites: software that tells patent litigants which courts have the most favorable historical record for their side. 'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services.
This can have positive side effects as well. If enough people exploit abnormal judicial variation, that variation may be reduced, the laws which allow plaintifs to shop for a jurisdiction may be changed. In general, the system can be adapted to compensate for the problem once the problem is clearly identified. If people didn't collect and analyze data, the problem would still exist. While it might not be as damaging, it would have little chance of ever being fixed. This sounds not unlike a vulnerability scanner for the judicial system.
The main reason this can't work, is that Google already owns the mindshare of the internet.
AOL was once king. They had a huge portion of the marketshare. The management no doubt thought they were doing everything right and they rested in their dominant market position. The problem then and now is that the internet is a rapid growth industry. New customers are pouring in all the time. Less than 1/6 of the world is on the internet today, which means there are about 5 billion more potential new customers than there are existing customers. In some places, like Africa, the ratio is even worse with only 2% of the population having net access. stats
Google's mindshare is important, but it is not by any means a magical protective shield. ICQ and AIM went from being the only chat networks to a fairly competitive market in only a few years because new users poured in and other companies got to them before AOL.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work for a company that sold technology oriented services. I think the staff were all required to take some kind of computer proficiciency test (even me working in IT). At any rate, the users were actually, for the most part, not horrible. I didn't think anything of it until I switched jobs and started working in a university office setting... Oh the humanity!!!
Looking back, I don't think the technology company had to compromise on necessary attributes in order to get computer literate people. In fact, I'm guessing the computer literacy tests helped detect a lot of idiots that might have otherwise been hired. People don't necessarily have to be fully computer literate to contribute in a modern workforce, but chances are, if the person ain't computer literate, they're not a particularly strong contributor.
The right question is, for those people who are using ebook technology, why are you doing it? If someone wants to get a book, they can find it anywhere in real book format. It's well understood, easy to use, it's something most have us have been comfortable with since the age of 6-7.
I'm guessing the people who use ebooks do so because
- They want to try out the new format
- They need highly portable references which happen to be published in ebook formats and perhaps other portable devices like a laptop are too clunky or unavailable.
- They want to save shelf space? This doesn't seem very valid as one would imagine a small percentage of books are published as ebooks and most non reference books are read once materials anyway so you either don't need to keep them or do because you like have a shelf full of books.
- Improved searchability of references? This is a neat aspect, BUT an electronic version of a "BOOK" format is not an optimal electronic reference. For example, most knowledge webs link between related information while a book is far more linear/narrative.
Any other reasons? Usability perks? If you're sitting at an airport with wireless, can you just buy and download a book instantly right from your reader?Reporting total downloads may not give the reader the best possible representation of the actual popularity of Firefox with respect to its competition, but it still makes sense. When I look for freeware or open source software, and I'm comparing two products, one of the first things I look at is how popular the product is, and usually the best available metric is the number of times the product has been downloaded.
Is this number an accurate representation of the number of users of that product? No. Who even cares? It is a figure that tells you a little about how popular a piece of software is. It's a popular metric used for this purpose. And really, that's all that matters.
The English language is well equipped with nuanced words and structures that can accurately convey meaning, intent, tone, and information both simple and complex.
English and all other spoken languages are geared towards speach where the communication is augmented with tone, expression, hand waving, and obscene gestures. It has the capability of accurately conveying meaning, intent, etc... in text only form, but it is much much much much harder to do than in a face to face conversation.
The advent of smiley's and things like [sarcasm] tags are an effort to address some of the shortcomings of english as a written communication tool. Expressions such as "I was like" are also useful because in written text they imply a certain level of familiarity which helps set the tone of a message. In the absence of such familiarity cues, a message will look a lot more serious even if the content is supposed to be two old friends joking around. This means there's a higher probability of misinterpretation.
Personally, I'm guessing languages tend to evolve to more and more efficient forms, that this is what we are seeing now, and that we should let it evolve. It's not like we could stop it anyway.
Clothes that change appearance with your mood? I feel so naked. Oops!
ah that makes sense then. The publicity they get from this might even help them raise additional funds which can be applied to their primary goals. I wasn't really bothered so much as confused.
Better question... why is the EFF offering prize money for finding primes? It seems only very loosely related to their purpose. That's not the kind of thing I gave them money to do.
The interfaces link above has a place for you to download text file exports of most of the actual movie data (attrociously normalized). I have occassionally wanted to use this data on my own site for various purposes, but there are all kinds of nasty warnings about copyright and how all one's base belongs to them. It had been my understanding that one could not copyright a collection of facts, though one could copyright a collection of facts organized and presented in a particular manner. Legally, is there any reason a person couldn't just take their data, import it into a format of their own design, and then do whatever they wanted with it?
In other words, do IMDB's though-shalt-not-use-our-data-without-licensing claims hold water? Do their legal threats only apply to imdb specific content like user comments or reviews (which I don't think are in the text dumps anyway) or do they also apply to things like public domain information about a movie?
I understand that IMDB does allow some use of the data, otherwise they wouldn't provide the dumps, but the question is, how can they restrict the use as much as they claim to?
70% of your mark in any Comp Sci class here is usually 20% mid term and 50% final exam. Will rent-a-coder help there?
I've taken classes where the coding project is largely independent of the tests, meaning that having someone code your project would not necessarily hurt you on the test. If it doesn't hurt you, it will free up lots of time that can be spent preparing for the test.
As for a work environment, the programming I did in school was never anything more than fuel priming a pump with some often repetitive theory tossed in. Once you're primed, the work you find or do on your own tends to be far more expansive and applicable than the programming work in school, especially if you are self motivated.
I don't think it's generally in people's best interests to cheat, but penalties aside, there are probably times when one can cheat without hurting themselves. If the person does something productive with their time instead of the assignment, they may even come out ahead. That said, I would guess cheating was more often harmful.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit taking other people's old ram.
Rushing a product out the door when you have knowingly failed to follow sound practices during development and testing is negligent...
Define sound practices. Personally I think it's a hard thing to do. In addition, I know I use a lot of software that was most likely not written using "sound practices". Would that software be unavailable if the creators were required to meet a certain (arbirtrary?) development standard?
At any rate, when you see a headline like $150 million down the drain, it makes you wonder how much more it costs to create two of these things versus one of them. I mean, I imagine a lot more is spent on design than physical parts and assembly. What percentage of the cost is in the launch?
I think they do this too, but their pricing whackiness goes well beyond this. On their premier site, they've got all kinds of weird problems going on. Sometimes adding a 1905 (19") flat panel to a computer configuration costs as more than $600. Sometimes it only costs $300. However, you can ALWAYS buy them a la carte from the same site for anywhere between $330-420 (depending on the pricing of the day).
Then there's the upgrade game. There is no consistency whatsoever in the costs of upgrades. You can have two identically spec-ed base pcs with 256MB of memory and on one an upgrade to 512MB costs $50 while on the other it is $150. It's true that part of this could be done to optimize their manufacturing and supply chains, but more often than not, I think it's just stupid mistakes and/or non-intentional inconsistencies.
I remember my manager once asked me to price a powervault for about a TB of network attached storage. I went with the cheapest thing I could find and started adding additional SATA drives. They were charging about $500 for EACH additional drive. They were 250GB or 300GB drives and at the time, one could buy those for around $160 from newegg. We ended up buying a terastation for about 1/3 the cost and getting more storage than the powervault.
It's possible dell's pricing antics will optimize cash flow in the short term, but it's having a profound negative affect on customer relations in the longterm.
My favorite is when it sometimes costs $600+ to add a 19" flat panel to some computer configurations when you can get the same one a la carte for $300 + $100 * (austin temp / austin heat index) * percent dell employees who had coffee that morning.
Seriously though, I suspect that there are fundamental problems (features?) in their in house pricing system. From a customer perspective, there's no reason they should have three different prices for the same piece of equipment in the same channel, and I've pretty regularly seen that happen. The premier channel seems to be the worst of them. Maybe they think they only have to have the sales site be better than IBM's premier, which means next to nothing.
After 40 years of 'pro' development, computing is still a human-driven craft instead of the extremely precise arm of engineering that it could so easily have become through its well-defined subject matter.
IMO, good, appropriate development practices are emerging and will continue to do so. One might say they are emergent behaviors of a complex system. The people I see touting formal software specifications or XP for almost everything are engaged in an attempt to force a premature optimization on the software development industry. They have a particular implementation of the still relatively poorly understood extremely diverse process of software development and they want everyone to use their implementation. Random aside: accreditation committees structuring CS curriculums are another form of premature optimization.
Most good software developers I know are learning self optimizing systems. They spend all day figuring out how to improve quality and automate processes and tend to apply those same thought processes to their own work. When something is good for someone, it will be recognized as good given time.
If the world continued along Linus's desired path of "reality" vs theory, the current mess will know no end, and the metaphorical bridges of computer science will still be falling down in the year 3,000.
To reitterate my earlier point, keep your shirt on.
We're just trying out Perspective, a .net wiki. It is supposed to have features for searching over office documents. As a lot of our documentation exists in odds and ends word files, this is why we're trying it out. Of course, there's only two people in our IT department so we can get away with more adhoc solutions.
I think the search is built on top of some windows indexing service, so presumably it has whatever limitations that has in terms of document types.
I've always thought the "teach you how to think" argument was arrogant bullshit. That said, a curriculum should assist you in developing critical thinking and problem solving skills. The kind of analytical skills developed in a mathematics program are not necessarily the most appropriate set of thinking skills for everyone.
Math deals with logical statements, things that are true or false, consequences of sets of statements, proofs, etc. Mathematics tends to zero in on activities relating to this type of thinking.
Meanwhile, there are other types of thinking and analysis which are important to people. For example, when designing software it helps to be able to think in a highly empathic manner on demand, fast context switching can be much more important than depth in some jobs, most will frequently have to come up with solutions to which there are no absolute answers.
My point is simple, a math or physics degree does not make the best default degree for thinking skills because it pursues a very narrow range of thinking skills at the exclusion of some more commonly needed items. In essence, they promote a more specialized, less general purpose mode of thinking.
IT is too broad a field for people to always be able to know the answer. For example, I do development, support, and administration in Linux and Windows using hordes of different kinds of technologies. If it were possible for me to know everything about how everything interacts, it wouldn't be hard.
Often, an IT guy won't have any better idea of what the answer is to a problem than you do, he's just better at troubleshooting the situation and finding answers. For example, I went to move a eudora user from pop (mail stored on pc) to imap (mail stored on server). Well, there were all sorts of Eudora specific problems getting the mail moved over. As my BS degree wasn't in Eudora idiosyncracies, and as we only had 5 Eudora users in the whole office, I had to spend time researching the answers to a lot of the problems and then experimenting until I foudn solutions to the problems where no solution seemed to exist.
I think one big problem in the IT industry is that some people expect IT to always know the answers and that's just not possible. This results in an IT staff that is pressured into promoting wild guesses into factual solutions. This results in IT failing to deliver on more promissed solutions, which results in angrier more demanding customers, which results in more pressure on IT. IT should always be honest when they don't know the answer, and you should give them a break when they are honestly trying to work with you to find the answer.
but I'll never forget what one professor said on the very first day of class - "We aren't here to teach you things - we are here to teach you how to think".
I've heard this dozens of times. Usually this is the line that gets said whenever someone challenges something about the curriculum or the teaching method or anything else the people with power don't want challenged. It's an arrogant and sadistic way of belittling people who challenge that status quo. Why are we learning axiomatic semantics when a study of usability and interface design would be so much more useful? Because we're here to teach you how to think.
All of those "test[s] of endurance" are the best way that you can learn how to think like an engineer
Why? As a critical thinker, you must acknowledge that the system presently in place is most likely not the best one. Do you have evidence for it being the best system? Or is it the best system because it's the one you payed 10's of thousands of dollars and several years of your life to undergo (Cognitive Dissonance). Or is it the best system because your teachers said it was and they're the ones who taught you how to think.
Seriously, that's [marketting] a pretty a strange criterium to judge software by
Technically, marketting is a much broader topic than most people give it credit for. The textbook description of marketting typically includes promotion (advertising), price, product, and placement. The most important is probably product, eg working with designers and developers to create a product customers want. In my opinion, Ubuntu seems to do this fairly well and that is a large part of why I eventually settled on them after trying debian stable/unstable, red hat, and fedora.
Just look at netscape. All it had to do was buy another browser and integrate it into the os... and boom! nescape is gone.
The fact that IE sucks compared to the current competition is a pretty good example of the effect I was describing. Web browsers bring inroads to platform independent computing. Platform independent computing is bad for Microsoft's windows monopoly (in theory). Therefore enhancements to browsers are bad for Microsoft's monopoly. Therefore IE sucks.
I didn't even know MS bought IE off another company, but that fits perfectly within the model of acquiring a company and then failing to realize its potential in favor of the existing business model.
I'd go a step further and say that a good IT professional also operates in a manner designed to increase the knowledge and abilities of coworkers regardless of whether or not they want to learn. In this I don't mean being annoying, forcing people to learn, or being confrontational... but rather using subtle strategies to demonstrate or convey knowledge.
For example, a number of my users occassionally use loaner laptops for presentations, but they really do not "get" dual displays. Why does projector screen show something different than this screen? But I want to see presentation notes on the laptop screen but not the projector! More than once, these folks have been stuck in front of mostly technical audiences, unable to get their presentations going.
These same kind of people are the ones who want things to "just work" and who don't want to spend any time understanding how to operate the equipment. To combat this in a non confrontational manner, I'm pushing dual displays for a few users in the office. The hope is that we can increase a few people's productivity while simultaneously spreading understanding of the operation of dual displays throughout the office.
I'm also looking into methods to allow users who normally have a helpless mentality to figure out how to do certain tasks without extensive IT intervention. For example, we have a few people that we've had to walk through burning cds in xp multiple times. We've provided written instructions with variable success. I'm looking into getting screen capture/video software that would let us produce extremely easy to follow tutorials. The next time, a user asks for help burning a cd, we'll send them the tutorial first before visiting them for the nth time.
A lot of people get angry or embarassed when they have to ask for IT support. This is one of the main reasons people become adverse to learning about computers. If we can give people the ability or at least the illusion that they can help themselves, then they will be more open to learning in the future. A downloadable tutorial that they can follow by themselves and refer back to later gives people that sense of independent achievement.
Sometimes you have to do a salesman job. We've got a few users who refuse to abandon Eudora Pop mail clients. They refuse to switch to Outlook because they don't want to learn anything. So, without confronting them on this issue (yet) we've been doing things like introducing them to Webmail (OWA) and selling them on storing mail on the server (imap) all the while making it more and more desirable to switch to Outlook (or hell - anything other than Eudora). Of course, jumping through all these gradual transition hoops is a LOT of work for us. It would probably be more efficient for the business unit if we just kicked them into Outlook.
Anyways, the moral is there are a lot of subtle things you can do to improve the competency and confidence of your coworkers regardless of whether or not they want to learn.
good news for Microsoft is that it doesn't have to...it just has to acquire a company that can
If you assume this innovation will disrupt MS's core business, then it is a little more complicated. It not only has to acquire a company that can, but it has to let that company cannibalize MS's existing business. Historically, most market leaders have a hard time doing this.
One example Wessel cites: software that tells patent litigants which courts have the most favorable historical record for their side. 'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services.
This can have positive side effects as well. If enough people exploit abnormal judicial variation, that variation may be reduced, the laws which allow plaintifs to shop for a jurisdiction may be changed. In general, the system can be adapted to compensate for the problem once the problem is clearly identified. If people didn't collect and analyze data, the problem would still exist. While it might not be as damaging, it would have little chance of ever being fixed. This sounds not unlike a vulnerability scanner for the judicial system.
The main reason this can't work, is that Google already owns the mindshare of the internet.
AOL was once king. They had a huge portion of the marketshare. The management no doubt thought they were doing everything right and they rested in their dominant market position. The problem then and now is that the internet is a rapid growth industry. New customers are pouring in all the time. Less than 1/6 of the world is on the internet today, which means there are about 5 billion more potential new customers than there are existing customers. In some places, like Africa, the ratio is even worse with only 2% of the population having net access. stats
Google's mindshare is important, but it is not by any means a magical protective shield. ICQ and AIM went from being the only chat networks to a fairly competitive market in only a few years because new users poured in and other companies got to them before AOL.