Many (all?) states have streamlined ways for people with Math / Science degrees to become math / science teachers without having to get an education degree. There is training and a certificate, but not another 4 year degree.
But when should you invest extra in infrastructure? During a recession.
Because:
- The price is lower than normal (even factoring interest on borrowing, labor and equipment are idle and should therefore be cheaper than normal)
- It's better to pay salaries of construction workers than pay them unemployment for not working
- Whatever stimulative benefits you may or may not get
When the government is rich tends to be when the economy is booming and infrastructure projects are extra expensive. If you're looking at a decades long ROI, you might as well start with a lower "I" and at a time it could be particularly helpful to the economy.
Hey we're busy. We really don't necessarily all want to struggle with games. We want something fun, that's a little challenging that we can get through. 12 hours of content for 60 bucks? That's about even with a movie.
Personally, I gravitate to the games I can play over and over again, rather than big story games, but I get it.
And the games we do play a lot are usually more social these days. The author complains about a short story in Halo or Modern Warfare. Well duh. Most people are paying for the multiplayer experience which infinitely re playable. The single player parts are a sideline. Is a 5 hour single player worth the money there? No. But that's not what people are buying anyway. It's like complaining about hugely expensive veg and potatoes while ignoring the steak that came alongside.
In Corporate IT budget terms, Confluence is free. A manager can purchase a couple hundred users worth of licenses on the corporate credit card. And it's supported. Hell, that's pretty much the Atlassian model. Stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap, and make 'em pretty.
I think the parent is dead on. If you have your heart set on plone (I've used it, it's acceptable - won't bring many tears of sorrow or joy) the parent is right. Just do it. If asked to compare to confluence, you want to find some practical reason Confluence is worse - some security thing would be ideal - but end up with a "look, this is easy, it's done, and it's free" kind of play. "We could do Confluence, but it does cost some money and it's pretty much the same thing. I don't see a compelling reason to pay for it."
However, if your boss really values support (a "throat to choke") you'll want to know what it'll cost to pay someone to provide you a Plone support contract. Plone.net has some providers listed. In the US, I'd start with http://www.enfoldsystems.com/ .
Yes, a sideways monitor is clever everyone. But if you look at the submission rather than the edited entry, he's clearly complaining about laptops. Which, if you turn sideways, are kinda tricky to type on. I guess "get an additional monitor" is legitimate, but it seems like there must be some vendors who are not shrinking their vertical pixel counts.
Paragraph 3 - "Plus after Econ 101, you learn the price curve is somewhat BS".
The real problem is that he seems to be thinking that if $3 covers the costs, $6 is greedy. He's ignoring anything fixed costs. And the real problem with price curve isn't it's degree of complexity but that for most of us not selling to huge numbers in various markets with massive research arms, we're blind to where demand comes in at various prices.
Worse yet, we know that humans aren't rational. People who would never buy your product at X will buy it for 3X either for vanity or "because you get what you pay for." You may even increase demand by raising the price.
Oh come on. No shit $2.99 covers the cost. It's digital. The incremental cost to the developer to ship another unit for a piece of software is tiny, tiny, tiny. Most of the $2.99 goes to profit, R&D and fixed costs.
Now, he still needs to pay those developers who made the software, buy computers, rent office space, etc. I'm sure he's done the math and knows he can achieve that by selling X at $6 or 2X at $3. Of course, he could go open source, set the price at 0 and make it up on volume [/stupid slashdot joke]. In Econ 101 he would have read about the price curve that suggests that fewer people will buy at $6 but maybe not so much fewer that it isn't the better price for his business. For a businessman, the ideal scenerio is to charge everyone the most their willing to pay - price stratification. This is why you have coupons at the grocery store. People with little money and lots of time can clip coupons and pay less. People who have more money will not and will pay a higher price.
The play here is not that he's trying to sell the 2X number with some paying $3 and some paying $6. He wants to first make sure he is able to break even by selling something like.5 X @ $6 and X @ $3. The $6 price helps him break even the same way the $3 price does. Plus, after Econ 101, you learn the price curve is somewhat BS in the first place. Part of what he's doing is stating "We think the product is worth $6, but are offering a 50% discount to poor people and assholes (distinct groups)." Now, regardless of why I look at the $3 price, I am much less likely to think, "Is $3 too much for this expansion?" because it's already a half off discount and be more likely to purchase. He may actually sell more units at $3 than he would have without the $6 option.
These guys are just remarkably (for better or worse) upfront about the price stratification. He's also a freak'n brilliant marketer. Free publicity on Slashdot is a win.
All software pricing is arbitrary. Always. It's up to a vendor to ask for what they think the product is worth, offer discounts / sales / etc to those who think it's worth less, and for the consumer to either purchase or not. The vendor needs to deliver a product that delivers a fair enough value that consumers will purchase their products again / not leave angry messages on forums or app stores.
It's a matter of trust. If someone I trust sends me a shortened link, or posts via a blog or twitter, then I'll follow that link if what they're talking about seems interesting. Never been burned. Helps not to trust 13 year olds that would send you to goatse.cx. And to answer the obvious retort: Part of that trust is the likelyhood that this person does things that result in their account being hacked.
But we can probably agree that copyright for some period is reasonable. Right?
So, in order to protect our computing devices, do we simply never load copyrighted material on them, or do we compromise and say, "If it's on loan, I'll let it delete itself after some time period to enforce the loan?" That's a compromise I think is pretty reasonable. If my library books would return themselves automatically and I didn't have to remember to take them back or face penalties, I'd be in favor of that as well. Personally, I'm often willing to sacrifice some control for some convenience.
No infrastructure? Really? Network building costs billions. Pricing is about percieved value not the cost. For printers or razors, the disposable bit is cheap to make and expensive to buy to cover the prices of the more expensive to make but cheap to buy part. Ditto your cell carrier giving you a phone for free and charging for SMS.
This is no fat and happy oligarchy. Sprint has been struggling to stay in business, Verizon and ATT&T are at each other's throats and smaller / regional players pop up regularly.
This whole complaint is like saying software should be free. It doesn't cost anything to let me download it, why shouldn't I get it for free? Oh crap, right. I'm on slashdot. You actually do think software should be free.
It's possible that if the poster is finding the cost outrageous, it's because his teams needs don't align super "super fast, super reliable, super awesome" storage. Perhaps he needs to beg IT to also offer a slower, cheaper option. Or perhaps they do and he's whiner .
Before I bought my first iPhone? Surf the web happily from my phone. There was mobile web browsing pre-iPhone but I found it unpleasant. On the iPhone, it worked.
Actually, basically all the things that a blackberry did three years ago, but did in an unpleasant enough way that they were not compelling, the iPhone made compelling.
Ease of use (and pleasantness of use) is a feature. I know that's an unpopular sentiment on/. where ease of use is to be ridiculed (see MS vs Linux), but similar to how Apple made a unix based operating system accessible to the masses, they also made the smart-phone accessible enough to me, that I would buy one. Their competitors have (largely) caught up, but give them their due. Apple democratized the smart phone with the iPhone.
The alternative is that people who have the most computers in their house - computer experts - are more likely to have at least one Mac. There's probably some truth to both perspectives.
Anyway, at my house right now I have:
1 sub-$1000 PC Laptap (wife's work machine) 1 $1500 PC gameing machine 1 15 inch Macbook Pro
The MacBook is work machine and I love it. My slightly newer gaming rig is barely used (whoops). Now, for work I need to run Windows and a Unix type system and travel. The Macbook Pro is perfect for travel - thin, light, and powerful enough to be an everyday PC replacement. Also, if you're going to run VMs, do you want to simulate Unix while using Windows memory management or the reverse? Right, you're running linux or a Mac. And let's face it, the Mac UI experience blows away anything out there.
My Mac has had it's share of problems, but the new sub $1k laptop has shown signs of crappy hard-drive its first three months, and the gaming machine is currently out of service. Every machine I bring into my house has a purpose, but trust me, when it's my money on the line, I'm going to give the Macs serious consideration. Particularly for machines that are used most every day for a couple years? Any extra couple hundred bucks is worth a slightly less frustrating, more pleasant experience. It's like spending money on a chair for a home office, yes you can get an OK one for $125 at Staples, but your ass is going to be in that thing 8 hours a day - it's worth getting one that's very comfy even for a bit more dough.
I see a lot of Macs in the hands of nerds these days - at software conferences, work environments, etc. Programmers who have their choice of machines seem to be getting Macs and displaying them like a status symbol. If I was buying a replacement single machine for my parents? Probably a PC because that's what they know. My mom has just become comfortable with right-clicking. The Mac would be better for her, but she'd never expend the effort to learn it. My Dad doesn't have a ton of time either, and knows Windows well enough that I'm not sure where he'd benifit. So yeah, for them their single machine should be a PC but more because their existing machine is a PC than anything particularly good about them.
Time Traveler's was very much an emotion driven movie (ie chick flick). It was a study on inter-personal relationships, free will, and destiny given a scenario where someone occasionally blinks out of existence and materializes at some significant place in the past or future. In that it used an element of fantasy to explore the human condition, I think it deserves sci-fi / fantasy respect. But it will do less than nothing to satisfy the teen-age boy in us that wants to see mechs blow shit up.
They're used to it, because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them
Yep. I'm a sales engineer these days after about four years in development.
It's helping people out and putting your tech skills to work. Take a big, complicated piece of software and get it up, running, and customized for potentional customer over the course of a few days (or weeks).
Most of the time, they're smart people with tough problems and you get to help them fix them. If you do a good job, your employer can win the deal.
There's a bit of sales in the job (more or less depending on who you do it for) but at the end of the day it's more technical than anything else.
I now have two business cards, one says "consultant" on it and the other says, "sales" on it. If I'd have known that would be my future when I was in college reading slashdot everyday, I probably would have cried. But I'm having way more fun doing this than slinging code, and frankly, it's harder.
If you are wanted for a crime in some country, you should avoid: 1) Going to that country 2) Going to countries with extradition agreements with that country
If you are dumb enough to go to the country, you deserve to be arrested.
How would I feel if someone tricked dumb American criminals into getting arrested? Pretty good. We could use less criminals on the streets. Feel free.
Having written some code, you could find a passion near development that works better for you. An understanding of what's going on at a low level will help, even if you don't write much code - I certainly don't write much anymore.
A couple things to consider:
Tools management - Everyone needs people to administer things like the source control or build systems used by development. There can be some fascinating problems there. At the low end, this tends to be below development but later be a more senior position than a senior developer.
QA - If you are detail oriented, but good at picking the most important five things from a list of 2000, QA might be a better fit for you than development. People would kill for smart skilled QA people who can write a little code to put together automated scripts.
Sales Engineering - You may need experience elsewhere first, but if you are social you might become a sales engineer. In this role you are usually working with the technical evaluators of some tool and helping them see the value in it with hopes that the recommend purchase to the dude with the checkbook. Most sales guys aren't technical enough to answer the most detailed questions and you can help there as well.
System Administration - You might love computers and working on them, but prefer a bit of scripting and debugging of systems to writing small subsystems of code. A good sys-admin is worth his weight in gold. Might be worth considering.
The real question is: What do you love about computers or software? If there's nothing, you probably got the wrong degree. If there's something there that's fun, you'll have to dig in to what jobs are present around it.
I have mixed feelings on software patents. I think they are appropriate, but probably run too long.
Often interesting software (as opposed to one-click stuff) takes months or years to develop the proper concepts and approaches for. Once you have the concepts and approaches down, the coding is relatively straight forward. Copyright protects our coding, but that may represent a small fraction of the effort that went into the development of the code.
So if my company spends 12 months talking to customers about a problem space, then 12 months prototyping and experimenting, and then another six months to take what we learned to a marketable product, we spent 2.5 years working on a product.
Without the software patent, a lazy competitor can spend one month understanding what the heck we did, and six months doing his own development and then compete with us on more or less equal footing.
So for 2.5 years of work, you only get a half year of market advantage. Does that pay for the extra R&D time? The extra risk in case it didn't pan out?
Now, that's an over simplificiation but I think it suggests that there is a role for software patents to play.
You need a balance. An engineering program should still be rich in Math, Literature, Science and other things that require the brain to think in different ways.
But at the end of the program, it would be nice if you weren't completely useless to potential employeers. Part of that is going to be something approaching vocational training - learning a commonly used programming language in a computer science program. But to have both good thinkers produced and be vocationally useful, you need those programming classes to address hard problems.
Now, at the time I was getting my degree I thought the study of state machines and other theory was useless and wanted more vocational stuff. In retrospec, that kind of class taught me more ways to think about problems and was quite valuable.
And new ones have been added. In both the OS and Proprietary worlds, people make efforts to fix bugs and as new features are added (and bugs are squashed) new ones are added.
Picking a random day and testing two pieces of software for bugs on that day is reasonably fair. The following week both products will be better, but unless you're going to test constantly, picking the latest release as of some day is the best you're going to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Many (all?) states have streamlined ways for people with Math / Science degrees to become math / science teachers without having to get an education degree. There is training and a certificate, but not another 4 year degree.
Grad students are trained to work extremely hard for little or no pay and even less credit. Perfect hire for this kind of work.
Generally, I agree.
But when should you invest extra in infrastructure? During a recession.
Because:
- The price is lower than normal (even factoring interest on borrowing, labor and equipment are idle and should therefore be cheaper than normal)
- It's better to pay salaries of construction workers than pay them unemployment for not working
- Whatever stimulative benefits you may or may not get
When the government is rich tends to be when the economy is booming and infrastructure projects are extra expensive. If you're looking at a decades long ROI, you might as well start with a lower "I" and at a time it could be particularly helpful to the economy.
Hey we're busy. We really don't necessarily all want to struggle with games. We want something fun, that's a little challenging that we can get through. 12 hours of content for 60 bucks? That's about even with a movie.
Personally, I gravitate to the games I can play over and over again, rather than big story games, but I get it.
And the games we do play a lot are usually more social these days. The author complains about a short story in Halo or Modern Warfare. Well duh. Most people are paying for the multiplayer experience which infinitely re playable. The single player parts are a sideline. Is a 5 hour single player worth the money there? No. But that's not what people are buying anyway. It's like complaining about hugely expensive veg and potatoes while ignoring the steak that came alongside.
It's definitely not cost.
In Corporate IT budget terms, Confluence is free. A manager can purchase a couple hundred users worth of licenses on the corporate credit card. And it's supported. Hell, that's pretty much the Atlassian model. Stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap, and make 'em pretty.
I think the parent is dead on. If you have your heart set on plone (I've used it, it's acceptable - won't bring many tears of sorrow or joy) the parent is right. Just do it. If asked to compare to confluence, you want to find some practical reason Confluence is worse - some security thing would be ideal - but end up with a "look, this is easy, it's done, and it's free" kind of play. "We could do Confluence, but it does cost some money and it's pretty much the same thing. I don't see a compelling reason to pay for it."
However, if your boss really values support (a "throat to choke") you'll want to know what it'll cost to pay someone to provide you a Plone support contract. Plone.net has some providers listed. In the US, I'd start with http://www.enfoldsystems.com/ .
Yes, a sideways monitor is clever everyone. But if you look at the submission rather than the edited entry, he's clearly complaining about laptops. Which, if you turn sideways, are kinda tricky to type on. I guess "get an additional monitor" is legitimate, but it seems like there must be some vendors who are not shrinking their vertical pixel counts.
Good progress on fusion right? It's what, about 50 years off for you?
Paragraph 3 - "Plus after Econ 101, you learn the price curve is somewhat BS".
The real problem is that he seems to be thinking that if $3 covers the costs, $6 is greedy. He's ignoring anything fixed costs. And the real problem with price curve isn't it's degree of complexity but that for most of us not selling to huge numbers in various markets with massive research arms, we're blind to where demand comes in at various prices.
Worse yet, we know that humans aren't rational. People who would never buy your product at X will buy it for 3X either for vanity or "because you get what you pay for." You may even increase demand by raising the price.
Oh come on. No shit $2.99 covers the cost. It's digital. The incremental cost to the developer to ship another unit for a piece of software is tiny, tiny, tiny. Most of the $2.99 goes to profit, R&D and fixed costs.
Now, he still needs to pay those developers who made the software, buy computers, rent office space, etc. I'm sure he's done the math and knows he can achieve that by selling X at $6 or 2X at $3. Of course, he could go open source, set the price at 0 and make it up on volume [/stupid slashdot joke]. In Econ 101 he would have read about the price curve that suggests that fewer people will buy at $6 but maybe not so much fewer that it isn't the better price for his business. For a businessman, the ideal scenerio is to charge everyone the most their willing to pay - price stratification. This is why you have coupons at the grocery store. People with little money and lots of time can clip coupons and pay less. People who have more money will not and will pay a higher price.
The play here is not that he's trying to sell the 2X number with some paying $3 and some paying $6. He wants to first make sure he is able to break even by selling something like .5 X @ $6 and X @ $3. The $6 price helps him break even the same way the $3 price does. Plus, after Econ 101, you learn the price curve is somewhat BS in the first place. Part of what he's doing is stating "We think the product is worth $6, but are offering a 50% discount to poor people and assholes (distinct groups)." Now, regardless of why I look at the $3 price, I am much less likely to think, "Is $3 too much for this expansion?" because it's already a half off discount and be more likely to purchase. He may actually sell more units at $3 than he would have without the $6 option.
These guys are just remarkably (for better or worse) upfront about the price stratification. He's also a freak'n brilliant marketer. Free publicity on Slashdot is a win.
All software pricing is arbitrary. Always. It's up to a vendor to ask for what they think the product is worth, offer discounts / sales / etc to those who think it's worth less, and for the consumer to either purchase or not. The vendor needs to deliver a product that delivers a fair enough value that consumers will purchase their products again / not leave angry messages on forums or app stores.
It's a matter of trust. If someone I trust sends me a shortened link, or posts via a blog or twitter, then I'll follow that link if what they're talking about seems interesting. Never been burned. Helps not to trust 13 year olds that would send you to goatse.cx. And to answer the obvious retort: Part of that trust is the likelyhood that this person does things that result in their account being hacked.
I'm with you that endless copyright is bad.
But we can probably agree that copyright for some period is reasonable. Right?
So, in order to protect our computing devices, do we simply never load copyrighted material on them, or do we compromise and say, "If it's on loan, I'll let it delete itself after some time period to enforce the loan?" That's a compromise I think is pretty reasonable. If my library books would return themselves automatically and I didn't have to remember to take them back or face penalties, I'd be in favor of that as well. Personally, I'm often willing to sacrifice some control for some convenience.
No infrastructure? Really? Network building costs billions. Pricing is about percieved value not the cost. For printers or razors, the disposable bit is cheap to make and expensive to buy to cover the prices of the more expensive to make but cheap to buy part. Ditto your cell carrier giving you a phone for free and charging for SMS.
This is no fat and happy oligarchy. Sprint has been struggling to stay in business, Verizon and ATT&T are at each other's throats and smaller / regional players pop up regularly.
This whole complaint is like saying software should be free. It doesn't cost anything to let me download it, why shouldn't I get it for free? Oh crap, right. I'm on slashdot. You actually do think software should be free.
It's possible that if the poster is finding the cost outrageous, it's because his teams needs don't align super "super fast, super reliable, super awesome" storage. Perhaps he needs to beg IT to also offer a slower, cheaper option. Or perhaps they do and he's whiner .
Before I bought my first iPhone? Surf the web happily from my phone. There was mobile web browsing pre-iPhone but I found it unpleasant. On the iPhone, it worked.
Actually, basically all the things that a blackberry did three years ago, but did in an unpleasant enough way that they were not compelling, the iPhone made compelling.
Ease of use (and pleasantness of use) is a feature. I know that's an unpopular sentiment on /. where ease of use is to be ridiculed (see MS vs Linux), but similar to how Apple made a unix based operating system accessible to the masses, they also made the smart-phone accessible enough to me, that I would buy one. Their competitors have (largely) caught up, but give them their due. Apple democratized the smart phone with the iPhone.
The alternative is that people who have the most computers in their house - computer experts - are more likely to have at least one Mac. There's probably some truth to both perspectives.
Anyway, at my house right now I have:
1 sub-$1000 PC Laptap (wife's work machine)
1 $1500 PC gameing machine
1 15 inch Macbook Pro
The MacBook is work machine and I love it. My slightly newer gaming rig is barely used (whoops). Now, for work I need to run Windows and a Unix type system and travel. The Macbook Pro is perfect for travel - thin, light, and powerful enough to be an everyday PC replacement. Also, if you're going to run VMs, do you want to simulate Unix while using Windows memory management or the reverse? Right, you're running linux or a Mac. And let's face it, the Mac UI experience blows away anything out there.
My Mac has had it's share of problems, but the new sub $1k laptop has shown signs of crappy hard-drive its first three months, and the gaming machine is currently out of service. Every machine I bring into my house has a purpose, but trust me, when it's my money on the line, I'm going to give the Macs serious consideration. Particularly for machines that are used most every day for a couple years? Any extra couple hundred bucks is worth a slightly less frustrating, more pleasant experience. It's like spending money on a chair for a home office, yes you can get an OK one for $125 at Staples, but your ass is going to be in that thing 8 hours a day - it's worth getting one that's very comfy even for a bit more dough.
I see a lot of Macs in the hands of nerds these days - at software conferences, work environments, etc. Programmers who have their choice of machines seem to be getting Macs and displaying them like a status symbol. If I was buying a replacement single machine for my parents? Probably a PC because that's what they know. My mom has just become comfortable with right-clicking. The Mac would be better for her, but she'd never expend the effort to learn it. My Dad doesn't have a ton of time either, and knows Windows well enough that I'm not sure where he'd benifit. So yeah, for them their single machine should be a PC but more because their existing machine is a PC than anything particularly good about them.
Time Traveler's was very much an emotion driven movie (ie chick flick). It was a study on inter-personal relationships, free will, and destiny given a scenario where someone occasionally blinks out of existence and materializes at some significant place in the past or future. In that it used an element of fantasy to explore the human condition, I think it deserves sci-fi / fantasy respect. But it will do less than nothing to satisfy the teen-age boy in us that wants to see mechs blow shit up.
They're used to it, because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them
Yep. I'm a sales engineer these days after about four years in development.
It's helping people out and putting your tech skills to work. Take a big, complicated piece of software and get it up, running, and customized for potentional customer over the course of a few days (or weeks).
Most of the time, they're smart people with tough problems and you get to help them fix them. If you do a good job, your employer can win the deal.
There's a bit of sales in the job (more or less depending on who you do it for) but at the end of the day it's more technical than anything else.
I now have two business cards, one says "consultant" on it and the other says, "sales" on it. If I'd have known that would be my future when I was in college reading slashdot everyday, I probably would have cried. But I'm having way more fun doing this than slinging code, and frankly, it's harder.
If you are wanted for a crime in some country, you should avoid:
1) Going to that country
2) Going to countries with extradition agreements with that country
If you are dumb enough to go to the country, you deserve to be arrested.
How would I feel if someone tricked dumb American criminals into getting arrested? Pretty good. We could use less criminals on the streets. Feel free.
This isn't exactly a civil rights issue.
Do you want to work with developers?
Having written some code, you could find a passion near development that works better for you. An understanding of what's going on at a low level will help, even if you don't write much code - I certainly don't write much anymore.
A couple things to consider:
Tools management - Everyone needs people to administer things like the source control or build systems used by development. There can be some fascinating problems there. At the low end, this tends to be below development but later be a more senior position than a senior developer.
QA - If you are detail oriented, but good at picking the most important five things from a list of 2000, QA might be a better fit for you than development. People would kill for smart skilled QA people who can write a little code to put together automated scripts.
Sales Engineering - You may need experience elsewhere first, but if you are social you might become a sales engineer. In this role you are usually working with the technical evaluators of some tool and helping them see the value in it with hopes that the recommend purchase to the dude with the checkbook. Most sales guys aren't technical enough to answer the most detailed questions and you can help there as well.
System Administration - You might love computers and working on them, but prefer a bit of scripting and debugging of systems to writing small subsystems of code. A good sys-admin is worth his weight in gold. Might be worth considering.
The real question is: What do you love about computers or software? If there's nothing, you probably got the wrong degree. If there's something there that's fun, you'll have to dig in to what jobs are present around it.
Maybe it was circut city passover.
There are breath mints that have much less that you might consider if you want to start dropping down into sane quantities of the stuff.
You still have the same easy dosing, low to no callories, etc. Just able to operate in 15mg increments.
I have mixed feelings on software patents. I think they are appropriate, but probably run too long.
Often interesting software (as opposed to one-click stuff) takes months or years to develop the proper concepts and approaches for. Once you have the concepts and approaches down, the coding is relatively straight forward. Copyright protects our coding, but that may represent a small fraction of the effort that went into the development of the code.
So if my company spends 12 months talking to customers about a problem space, then 12 months prototyping and experimenting, and then another six months to take what we learned to a marketable product, we spent 2.5 years working on a product.
Without the software patent, a lazy competitor can spend one month understanding what the heck we did, and six months doing his own development and then compete with us on more or less equal footing.
So for 2.5 years of work, you only get a half year of market advantage. Does that pay for the extra R&D time? The extra risk in case it didn't pan out?
Now, that's an over simplificiation but I think it suggests that there is a role for software patents to play.
You need a balance. An engineering program should still be rich in Math, Literature, Science and other things that require the brain to think in different ways.
But at the end of the program, it would be nice if you weren't completely useless to potential employeers. Part of that is going to be something approaching vocational training - learning a commonly used programming language in a computer science program. But to have both good thinkers produced and be vocationally useful, you need those programming classes to address hard problems.
Now, at the time I was getting my degree I thought the study of state machines and other theory was useless and wanted more vocational stuff. In retrospec, that kind of class taught me more ways to think about problems and was quite valuable.
And new ones have been added. In both the OS and Proprietary worlds, people make efforts to fix bugs and as new features are added (and bugs are squashed) new ones are added.
Picking a random day and testing two pieces of software for bugs on that day is reasonably fair. The following week both products will be better, but unless you're going to test constantly, picking the latest release as of some day is the best you're going to do.