I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to in your post, as you're obviously working from some degree of localized knowledge, but I thought I'd comment on this:
No, it's because Bill Gates slowed innovation in the industry to a crawl.
What you (and I) call innovation, the majority of the populace calls "irritating upgrades and disruptions". I agree that MS most certainly did destroy much of the industry - like a beautiful, yet deadly lichen which kills trees, with the ultimate result being a pile of rotting wood.
No, what MS did was make "IT" accessible to a broader audience at a substantially lower cost than anyone else, and gave the appearance of functionality. A lot of the practices were deceptive, and in the process actual innovation was destroyed, with the end result being a more standardized (albeit, a completely closed standard). But that's what companies and home users wanted (at the time).
I can't speak for the others, but in sysadmin work, the broad theoretical base can be very useful, and -does- set someone who paid attention in school apart from the person who didn't, even if they are otherwise on similar footing.
At the very least, the theoretical knowledge gives a person a critical edge up when it comes time to hunting down a problem or spec'ing out new system hardware. While you could just throw $20k of hardware at a problem in some instances, you might only need $4k (and you can prove this through a breakdown of the variables). Or you might be able to figure out which driver is causing a problem, and why - when it's been a plague of a problem for everyone who has tried it before you. And so on and so forth...
Yet, show me a non-entry-level-dev job in IT which a student can reasonably expect to get with helpdesk experience and a degree. Hint: there aren't any.
And getting into entry-level-dev positions won't help you get into IT, either.
I'd say it's a bit higher than that, still. There are a LOT of people who are only "partially employed". A LOT. Consider not only the people who have been out of work for a long time, but also those taking worse jobs for less pay. Or people who can only find short-term contract work. And so on and so forth...
I'd say the figure (if you include things like people who were previously "professionals" of one stripe or another who are now doing things like phone support and credit card telemarketing) would be more like 20-25%.
Eyup. The most respect you get from someone is their hopes that you might actually be able to fix the fuck-up performed on their computer by the guy down the street.
Imagine their utter shock when they hear that you want to charge them to fix it, and that it'll cost more than $50!
The problem I see is that most IT jobs do not have a clear advancement scale, and experience in your job seems to not be all that important - experience in your next job is.
For instance, a person can work for years as a developer, or as a tier-1 technician without advancement, despite competence in their job. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons, and i don't think it usually has to do with actual lack-of competence.
* First, there seems to be a tendency to hire-out jobs instead of look to your existing employees for the skills you need. If your internal developer has been with you for 2 years and has improved while there, but still lacks a bullet item or two on his resume "needed" to qualify for the job, he's not considered despite all other qualifications. * Aside from the Jr $role -> $role -> Sr $role progression, there does not seem to be much room for advancement. Managers and supervisors are hired externally, seemingly almost always with a management background instead of anything relating to the actual work done. This leads to the people lower-down having to pick up more work to make up for the fact that the manager isn't managing. * Employees are infrequently given the time to actually improve their skill-sets due to omnipresent deadlines and driving managers, requiring them to do this on their time off. (Ironically, they might be more willing to improve their skills at home if they weren't driven so hard at work...) Not only does this relate to the above item of promotions, but it's contrary to almost many other fields out there, where actually doing your job well is/can be largely influential on promotion into another (unrelated) field. * IT workers are not treated as professionals by employers - management or HR. They are treated as "workers" - more akin to helpdesk than to development, though development also gets treated this way, often. Basically, IT workers get treated like someone without an education, drive for knowledge, or experience in diverse environments - like a construction worker who has qualifications to operate certain machinery, and only that machinery. * Compare IT to (say) civil or mechanical engineering for a second. Even an engineer who is not in a supervisory position will get regular pay increases (ie, cost of living + experience + performance), and more often than not they're not working nearly as "hard" as an IT person (who is less likely to be salaried and have to do just as much or more self-improvement just to keep his job). The IT person is likely going to need to change jobs to get a pay increase, which itself costs money and time, making the proposition all the less appealing.
I'm just curious (and hopefully someone out there can give a clue to this): what is the career advancement path to become a system administrator? A network administrator? As near as I can tell, the requirements are being a network/server/systems administrator already for 4-8 years and having taken all the requisite certification courses. There don't seem to be too many "junior sysadmin", "sysadmin documentation expert", or similar positions out there, which would seem reasonable to me if you want to have competent sysadmins (and be able to pay fewer sysadmins, as you're able to hire 2-3 "junior sysadmins" for the cost of a single sysadmin - and so on and so forth).
I suspect that board members spend more afternoons out playing golf and drinking beer than they do sitting in a cubicle listening to MP3s, just waiting for 5pm to roll around...
Something I've noticed is that there seems to be a push here domestically a couple months before the requests for more H1B workers. This push - in the media and in corporate environments - seems to be to discourage people in IT, and to discourage people looking to get into IT.
33.5" for men? That is absurdly skinny. I am 6'2" and 155lb (+/- 5lb depending on the day - water/food intake and exhaust differential). I wear size 34" pants, and I find it difficult to actually gain weight.
And, I know for certain there are some Japanese people who are over that and not even approaching fat. That's just crazy.
Well, it's more complex than even that, as the division of the company into autonomous components would be very difficult.
What, exactly, composes an operating system? In my mind, any functional division would require the development tools - C# and VB.NET at least - to be kept with the OS company. However, this does not apply to ASP.
Now, something like IIS is not part of the operating system; would the "Networking" company get the ASP.NET Visual Studio? And, how would the Windows product line be devided up, as "Windows Server" is now a distinctly different product from Microsoft Vista (in terms of both marketing and functionality)? (And, would there be anything put in place to prevent the different Windows product lines from competing against each other? That could be interesting!)
And would IE belong alongside the Networking company, or the OS company (as that was one of the original reasons for MS being declared a monopoly in the first place)?
Any such move would obviously be disruptive, and undoubtedly change the way that the software industry works. Exactly how to carve up MS's existing products into different companies would greatly impact the success of said companies, to be certain.
Apparently you're not a hunter, or much of an outdoorsman.
Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on.
But those are not competing, or different, tasks. They are one and the same.
They both require high concentration on one's environment through sensory input - primarily visual and auditory. These tasks are not taken separately, but as a whole. The hunter is being observant of things which impact the whole picture of his hunt or gathering: which predators might be around, and where food might be best acquired. Is he screwing things up by making too much noise? And so on and so forth - just like a programmer intent on his code, considering the various items within the formulas which impact the larger picture.
A better analogy would be taking one's woman on a hunt or gathering activity. That would be the "two things at once" analogy, as her body would be a distraction, as would any talking she performs.
I imagine that, within a short few years, the only companies remaining there would be the operating system and office companies - and those with diminished market share.
The entertainment company might survive, if it's able to start turning a profit. But right now, my understanding is that most of MS's endeavors are feeding off the financial success of Windows and Office corporate/OEM sales, still.
The development tools provider would, likely fail, I think. They reason their tools have been as successful as they have been (vs., say, competing tools) is that support is integral to the OS, providing a large market share. With a split, I think such inter-working approaches would be unprofitable.
I don't fundamentally disagree with you, but with regard to Katrina specifically, the local and state level bureaucrats had completely fucked the pooch long before the Feds decided things had gotten out of hand.
MS is being subjected to this because they were declared an illegal monopoly. MS brought this upon themselves through repeated abuse of their market dominance.
They already "tried" to break MS up. MS just reorganized internally to nary a hickup. And, historically, breaking up a large corporation does not work: the children of Ma Bell are now a group of even larger corporations owned by the same parent companies which "compete" against each other only in guise.
Using that reasoning, what's it matter, re: Office documents? As near as I can tell, DOC files have been thoroughly reverse engineered (to the point where the majority of useful data, sans formattig on occasion, is recoverable).
The issue isn't that "we can do it" it's that the format is closed and therefore stifling competition.
So basically, what you're saying is this: that solar power is just about image.
Whether you say that solar power costs more per watt or that solar power wattage is more expensive due to increased energy requirements at the production side, the net result is the same.
Er, it's actually really, really easy to install to or create a RAID device in Linux. It's easier than simple single-disk configuration was about 5-6 years ago now. And even easier if you've got a supported raid controller and don't want to do software - IE, essentially automatic.
Eyup. I bought some CDRs right after they started getting really cheap (ie, drop in price from $1 each to about $.25 to $.10 each) -maybe 1998 or so. They lasted about 6 months before the surface layer started to peel and bubble, and they were kept in jewel cases in my basement, with infrequent use.
While that's an extreme situation, the materials CDRs and DVDRs are made from degrades relatively quickly. They have to degrade, actually, due to the nature of how writable media works: they are burned, literally, with a high-intensity light, so they must be (to some degree) photo-sensitive. The degree to which they are sensitive to sunlight and electrical lighting is going to vary with quality, but I suspect the polymers and chemicals used to allow the burning are going to degrade on their own, to some degree, even without light.
Pressed CDs and DVDs should be substantially less vulnerable to this. Anyone know if such technologies are still readily available? I know buying a CD presser and blanks was pretty pricey about 10 years ago.
Interesting you should mention PS/2, because I actually think that the PS/2 was a pretty damn good product compared to its competitors of the time - a revolutionary change which moved the PC industry forward quite a bit, adding a number of advancements.
I know of places using PS/2 systems extensively, a good 10+ years later, simply due to there versatility and quality. They were, I think, a rough correllary to the first iMacs: they threw out a lot of the older technology and produced something better overall. That isn't something that Vista did overtly, though it was done: too much extra, unappealing stuff was added, overshadowing the (minimal) positive stuff. That, combined with the long feature list which didn't make the cut, and prolonged anticipation...
The problem for IBM, I think, is that they were more in the dog house than Apple was when the iMac came out, and somewhat less in the dog house than MS currently is. Though, maybe i don't fully understand why the PS/2 was such a slap for IBM - I was a wee tot at the time, and everything I know about that era is just from reading stuff like Wikipedia and seeing the relics - occasionally running, mostly in closets and storage rooms.
I'm kid of curious why Via is't pushing their pico-ITX form factor much, instead putting more steam behind nano-ITX. It is substantially smaller - about the size of a deck of playing cards and (as I understand it) doesn't need nearly as much heat dissipation or power as the nano-ITX.
I'd like to, but I can't buy this line of reasoning.
Microsoft is a large corporation which has had a very static culture now for almost 30 years. In that time, most large corporations have changed their tune at least a couple times. Additionally, the culture of MS runs exactly perpendicular to the grain of this kind of decision, and there's absolutely no precedent for MS, within MS, to do this, while plenty of precedent to believe that they'll follow the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish route.
Large companies do not stop and do a 180 this quickly, particularly on an issue they've been obstinate about. It makes absolutely no sense, and it breeds concern amongst shareholders who view it as unpredictability and indecision - not to mention wasted money. I would not be surprised if top shareholders are having this explained to them as a tactic to continue dominating the market.
In short, there's really little reason - regardless of the other circumstances - for MS to take this route, short of wishful thinking.
It would indeed be a very good idea to build into Koffice/OOorg and the like the default functionality to report non-compliant ODF for each non-compliant document. It would, at least, make MS look bad.
This, then, could be potentially leveraged by companies and organizations which implement and/or use ODF in the event of MS abuse to raise either a civil suit or the issue of monopoly abuse again.
While it can't be said that 80% of our knowledge is in DOC format, it can be said that somewhere around that much of our digital knowledge that we use on a day-to-day basis to make money, as a society and culture, is stored in NTFS.
To me, that's a bit more problematic of a proposition than the document format.
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The inability to see more than two choices - some other option than what is and what was - is a very large indicator of unintelligence.
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to in your post, as you're obviously working from some degree of localized knowledge, but I thought I'd comment on this:
No, it's because Bill Gates slowed innovation in the industry to a crawl.
What you (and I) call innovation, the majority of the populace calls "irritating upgrades and disruptions". I agree that MS most certainly did destroy much of the industry - like a beautiful, yet deadly lichen which kills trees, with the ultimate result being a pile of rotting wood.
No, what MS did was make "IT" accessible to a broader audience at a substantially lower cost than anyone else, and gave the appearance of functionality. A lot of the practices were deceptive, and in the process actual innovation was destroyed, with the end result being a more standardized (albeit, a completely closed standard). But that's what companies and home users wanted (at the time).
I can't speak for the others, but in sysadmin work, the broad theoretical base can be very useful, and -does- set someone who paid attention in school apart from the person who didn't, even if they are otherwise on similar footing.
At the very least, the theoretical knowledge gives a person a critical edge up when it comes time to hunting down a problem or spec'ing out new system hardware. While you could just throw $20k of hardware at a problem in some instances, you might only need $4k (and you can prove this through a breakdown of the variables). Or you might be able to figure out which driver is causing a problem, and why - when it's been a plague of a problem for everyone who has tried it before you. And so on and so forth...
Yet, show me a non-entry-level-dev job in IT which a student can reasonably expect to get with helpdesk experience and a degree. Hint: there aren't any.
And getting into entry-level-dev positions won't help you get into IT, either.
10%?
I'd say it's a bit higher than that, still. There are a LOT of people who are only "partially employed". A LOT. Consider not only the people who have been out of work for a long time, but also those taking worse jobs for less pay. Or people who can only find short-term contract work. And so on and so forth...
I'd say the figure (if you include things like people who were previously "professionals" of one stripe or another who are now doing things like phone support and credit card telemarketing) would be more like 20-25%.
Eyup. The most respect you get from someone is their hopes that you might actually be able to fix the fuck-up performed on their computer by the guy down the street.
Imagine their utter shock when they hear that you want to charge them to fix it, and that it'll cost more than $50!
The problem I see is that most IT jobs do not have a clear advancement scale, and experience in your job seems to not be all that important - experience in your next job is.
For instance, a person can work for years as a developer, or as a tier-1 technician without advancement, despite competence in their job. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons, and i don't think it usually has to do with actual lack-of competence.
* First, there seems to be a tendency to hire-out jobs instead of look to your existing employees for the skills you need. If your internal developer has been with you for 2 years and has improved while there, but still lacks a bullet item or two on his resume "needed" to qualify for the job, he's not considered despite all other qualifications.
* Aside from the Jr $role -> $role -> Sr $role progression, there does not seem to be much room for advancement. Managers and supervisors are hired externally, seemingly almost always with a management background instead of anything relating to the actual work done. This leads to the people lower-down having to pick up more work to make up for the fact that the manager isn't managing.
* Employees are infrequently given the time to actually improve their skill-sets due to omnipresent deadlines and driving managers, requiring them to do this on their time off. (Ironically, they might be more willing to improve their skills at home if they weren't driven so hard at work...) Not only does this relate to the above item of promotions, but it's contrary to almost many other fields out there, where actually doing your job well is/can be largely influential on promotion into another (unrelated) field.
* IT workers are not treated as professionals by employers - management or HR. They are treated as "workers" - more akin to helpdesk than to development, though development also gets treated this way, often. Basically, IT workers get treated like someone without an education, drive for knowledge, or experience in diverse environments - like a construction worker who has qualifications to operate certain machinery, and only that machinery.
* Compare IT to (say) civil or mechanical engineering for a second. Even an engineer who is not in a supervisory position will get regular pay increases (ie, cost of living + experience + performance), and more often than not they're not working nearly as "hard" as an IT person (who is less likely to be salaried and have to do just as much or more self-improvement just to keep his job). The IT person is likely going to need to change jobs to get a pay increase, which itself costs money and time, making the proposition all the less appealing.
I'm just curious (and hopefully someone out there can give a clue to this): what is the career advancement path to become a system administrator? A network administrator? As near as I can tell, the requirements are being a network/server/systems administrator already for 4-8 years and having taken all the requisite certification courses. There don't seem to be too many "junior sysadmin", "sysadmin documentation expert", or similar positions out there, which would seem reasonable to me if you want to have competent sysadmins (and be able to pay fewer sysadmins, as you're able to hire 2-3 "junior sysadmins" for the cost of a single sysadmin - and so on and so forth).
I suspect that board members spend more afternoons out playing golf and drinking beer than they do sitting in a cubicle listening to MP3s, just waiting for 5pm to roll around...
Something I've noticed is that there seems to be a push here domestically a couple months before the requests for more H1B workers. This push - in the media and in corporate environments - seems to be to discourage people in IT, and to discourage people looking to get into IT.
33.5" for men? That is absurdly skinny. I am 6'2" and 155lb (+/- 5lb depending on the day - water/food intake and exhaust differential). I wear size 34" pants, and I find it difficult to actually gain weight.
And, I know for certain there are some Japanese people who are over that and not even approaching fat. That's just crazy.
Well, it's more complex than even that, as the division of the company into autonomous components would be very difficult.
What, exactly, composes an operating system? In my mind, any functional division would require the development tools - C# and VB.NET at least - to be kept with the OS company. However, this does not apply to ASP.
Now, something like IIS is not part of the operating system; would the "Networking" company get the ASP.NET Visual Studio? And, how would the Windows product line be devided up, as "Windows Server" is now a distinctly different product from Microsoft Vista (in terms of both marketing and functionality)? (And, would there be anything put in place to prevent the different Windows product lines from competing against each other? That could be interesting!)
And would IE belong alongside the Networking company, or the OS company (as that was one of the original reasons for MS being declared a monopoly in the first place)?
Any such move would obviously be disruptive, and undoubtedly change the way that the software industry works. Exactly how to carve up MS's existing products into different companies would greatly impact the success of said companies, to be certain.
Apparently you're not a hunter, or much of an outdoorsman.
Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on.
But those are not competing, or different, tasks. They are one and the same.
They both require high concentration on one's environment through sensory input - primarily visual and auditory. These tasks are not taken separately, but as a whole. The hunter is being observant of things which impact the whole picture of his hunt or gathering: which predators might be around, and where food might be best acquired. Is he screwing things up by making too much noise? And so on and so forth - just like a programmer intent on his code, considering the various items within the formulas which impact the larger picture.
A better analogy would be taking one's woman on a hunt or gathering activity. That would be the "two things at once" analogy, as her body would be a distraction, as would any talking she performs.
No, I doubt MS could survive in today's market w/o the monopolistic prop.
I imagine that, within a short few years, the only companies remaining there would be the operating system and office companies - and those with diminished market share.
The entertainment company might survive, if it's able to start turning a profit. But right now, my understanding is that most of MS's endeavors are feeding off the financial success of Windows and Office corporate/OEM sales, still.
The development tools provider would, likely fail, I think. They reason their tools have been as successful as they have been (vs., say, competing tools) is that support is integral to the OS, providing a large market share. With a split, I think such inter-working approaches would be unprofitable.
MS is not only a convicted monopolist, which carries the weight of such decisions, but they got off pretty lightly given their offenses.
Also, MS is a governmental sub-contractor, and a military one at that. This is a pretty marginal oversight for such a company.
Oh, I don't know about that.
I don't fundamentally disagree with you, but with regard to Katrina specifically, the local and state level bureaucrats had completely fucked the pooch long before the Feds decided things had gotten out of hand.
Uh, no.
MS is being subjected to this because they were declared an illegal monopoly. MS brought this upon themselves through repeated abuse of their market dominance.
They already "tried" to break MS up. MS just reorganized internally to nary a hickup. And, historically, breaking up a large corporation does not work: the children of Ma Bell are now a group of even larger corporations owned by the same parent companies which "compete" against each other only in guise.
Using that reasoning, what's it matter, re: Office documents? As near as I can tell, DOC files have been thoroughly reverse engineered (to the point where the majority of useful data, sans formattig on occasion, is recoverable).
The issue isn't that "we can do it" it's that the format is closed and therefore stifling competition.
So basically, what you're saying is this: that solar power is just about image.
Whether you say that solar power costs more per watt or that solar power wattage is more expensive due to increased energy requirements at the production side, the net result is the same.
Er, it's actually really, really easy to install to or create a RAID device in Linux. It's easier than simple single-disk configuration was about 5-6 years ago now. And even easier if you've got a supported raid controller and don't want to do software - IE, essentially automatic.
Eyup. I bought some CDRs right after they started getting really cheap (ie, drop in price from $1 each to about $.25 to $.10 each) -maybe 1998 or so. They lasted about 6 months before the surface layer started to peel and bubble, and they were kept in jewel cases in my basement, with infrequent use.
While that's an extreme situation, the materials CDRs and DVDRs are made from degrades relatively quickly. They have to degrade, actually, due to the nature of how writable media works: they are burned, literally, with a high-intensity light, so they must be (to some degree) photo-sensitive. The degree to which they are sensitive to sunlight and electrical lighting is going to vary with quality, but I suspect the polymers and chemicals used to allow the burning are going to degrade on their own, to some degree, even without light.
Pressed CDs and DVDs should be substantially less vulnerable to this. Anyone know if such technologies are still readily available? I know buying a CD presser and blanks was pretty pricey about 10 years ago.
Interesting you should mention PS/2, because I actually think that the PS/2 was a pretty damn good product compared to its competitors of the time - a revolutionary change which moved the PC industry forward quite a bit, adding a number of advancements.
I know of places using PS/2 systems extensively, a good 10+ years later, simply due to there versatility and quality. They were, I think, a rough correllary to the first iMacs: they threw out a lot of the older technology and produced something better overall. That isn't something that Vista did overtly, though it was done: too much extra, unappealing stuff was added, overshadowing the (minimal) positive stuff. That, combined with the long feature list which didn't make the cut, and prolonged anticipation...
The problem for IBM, I think, is that they were more in the dog house than Apple was when the iMac came out, and somewhat less in the dog house than MS currently is. Though, maybe i don't fully understand why the PS/2 was such a slap for IBM - I was a wee tot at the time, and everything I know about that era is just from reading stuff like Wikipedia and seeing the relics - occasionally running, mostly in closets and storage rooms.
I'm kid of curious why Via is't pushing their pico-ITX form factor much, instead putting more steam behind nano-ITX. It is substantially smaller - about the size of a deck of playing cards and (as I understand it) doesn't need nearly as much heat dissipation or power as the nano-ITX.
I'd like to, but I can't buy this line of reasoning.
Microsoft is a large corporation which has had a very static culture now for almost 30 years. In that time, most large corporations have changed their tune at least a couple times. Additionally, the culture of MS runs exactly perpendicular to the grain of this kind of decision, and there's absolutely no precedent for MS, within MS, to do this, while plenty of precedent to believe that they'll follow the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish route.
Large companies do not stop and do a 180 this quickly, particularly on an issue they've been obstinate about. It makes absolutely no sense, and it breeds concern amongst shareholders who view it as unpredictability and indecision - not to mention wasted money. I would not be surprised if top shareholders are having this explained to them as a tactic to continue dominating the market.
In short, there's really little reason - regardless of the other circumstances - for MS to take this route, short of wishful thinking.
It would indeed be a very good idea to build into Koffice/OOorg and the like the default functionality to report non-compliant ODF for each non-compliant document. It would, at least, make MS look bad.
This, then, could be potentially leveraged by companies and organizations which implement and/or use ODF in the event of MS abuse to raise either a civil suit or the issue of monopoly abuse again.
While it can't be said that 80% of our knowledge is in DOC format, it can be said that somewhere around that much of our digital knowledge that we use on a day-to-day basis to make money, as a society and culture, is stored in NTFS.
To me, that's a bit more problematic of a proposition than the document format.