Well Sigh. I have more anecdotes. I thought that one most meaningful because it wasn't Vista (making my point) and it wasn't a desktop system, making the point that it wasn't a case of an underpowered machine. This was a high end maxed out machine in every respect.
That is what made its inability to accomplish a simple (though large) copy operation so surprising.
I don't think there has ever been a version of Windows that could deal with large numbers of files. Particularly if you are using the GUI interface. The whole thing is a toy operating system, really.
A few years ago, while investigating a similar problem with a production server (a SERVER not a client machine) the machine would gradually grind to a halt doing the copy, while still responding (but slowly) to other operations.
I found that the "copy" command did much better than a drag and drop operation, but still would have a problem eventually. Finally, I found that this was a known problem, and that to solve it, a dedicated MS employee had written a utility called "robocopy" the "robo" not being for "robot", but for "robust" (really, it said that!).
Using that usually got the job done, much more slowly than it should have, but at least I didn't have to re-boot the machine daily to clear things up.
Now that Gates is too busy with other things to take tours of the data center, really, Microsoft should do itself a favor and ditch the VMS underpinnings of Windows (some of which they have probably forgotten how to maintain) and build your nice GUI on top of BSD or something similar. That way you won't break your budget (in manpower and electricity) trying to match the Google server farms.
Once that's done you will have the experience needed to do the same on the desktop. You will be doing the world, and yourselves a favor. Thanks in advance!
I've had a Sprint based Razr phone for almost a year and at the other end of the spectrum a Nokia 1100 via Tracfon for a couple, and I've played with an iPhone long enough to know that I can live without one.
I too like the Nokia flashlight feature. I also like that it has a standby life of a month or more (in my experience) and can quickly be turned off and on, unlike the newer phones that must "boot" into a mode that can drive the display even to do something as simple as plug in to recharge.
I love the fact that I can check e-mail browse the web and so forth with the Razr, but the screen is too small to get much out of it (and the iPhone, to me isn't that much of an improvement, I have a Nokia N800 that serves about the same function as the iPhone in that regard).
My main use for a phone is, uh, talking on the phone, and unless I'm in a run down diner on the Interstate in the middle of nowhere, I'm not all that far from being able to check my mail and read the news on a real computer. Like most cell phone users I also own a laptop that does just fine in most Wifi locations.
All that to say, there may be a gPhone that competes with the iPhone, but iPhone users have shown that money isn't the issue with them. They'll stand in line to pay exorbitant prices for an untested product just for the status alone, and I'm sure many of them would do the same even if an equivalent service were available for free.
If the eventual gPhone has none of the features of the iPhone it will serve as a business-model-ending device for pay as you go services as Tracfone T-mobile, etc. Millions of people will buy them for emergency phones in the car, for their kids to take to school, for a spare when the battery on the iPhone dies, and so on. A dirt-cheap (production wise) phone will be almost as big a hit as an "iPhone killer".
Devil in these details: How will ads be presented? In the iPhone format, on the screen of course, possibly annoying the hell out of you while you are trying to do something else. On an N1100 type device, maybe you would hear a 5 second ad at the start of a call you make, and your callers could be subjected to such a thing too. Tying up a real 10-digit phone number costs money. I don't know how much, but it isn't zero. A totally free phone will have an issue with rapidly using up these number for (as mentioned above) phones that get stored in a car and rarely used. Maybe such a device will have a two step process to call. (1) call an 800 number (provided by Google) followed by (2) an internal ID to get to the phone. This could tie in with the GrandCentral acquisition (which I'm already using and impressed with). Finally, an "iPhone Killer" phone that is free, has a large display and other state of the art features is going to be treated like any other free thing, carelessly. It will be subject to all sorts of physical abuse and people will be ordering replacements like they are dim-sum. What could have marginally been an ad-supported device could quickly become a sink-hole for any company who tries it.
So, as usual, I think many of they "analysts" have their heads up their asses and are either dreaming, or engaging in typical stir up rumors to pump up the stock price tactics. Oh they wouldn't do that would they?
Regardless, when the gPhone does arrive, if it arrives, I hope it has a flashlight too.
What is surprising about these people is not that they are clueless about the technology, in fact they probably understand it pretty well, no what is surprising is that they are clueless, or pretend to be clueless about their own area of expertise, the law. This woman would appear to be either falsifying her own understanding of the law or indeed ignorant.
I just received from Amazon yesterday three CDs that cost $70 (rounded) yes, SEVENTY DOLLARS! The music is all from one group that hasn't existed since the mid 80s. I had previously purchased all of this material on records, and I had produced perfectly usable copies of the records as mp3s. I now have the same mp3s made from the newly purchased CDs. I can't tell the difference. Moreover there isn't a one to one correspondence between the CDs and the records, so even though a single CD would hold all the songs I like from this group, I had to buy three very expensive CDs to get those cuts. How in the world can people like me, and I'm sure I'm not alone, be responsible for the fact that Sony has turned into a POS company?
Really, Sony needs to just fire every single employee and start over, as a company they seem to have gone insane.
Not only am I not stealing from the record companies, I'm treating them as a charitable organization...
me: sure send me another five bottles of jams and jellies for $50 that will go to your charity. Don't you have anything besides jams and jellies?
caller: We have barbecue sauce. Would you like that instead?
me: no I already have a dozen bottles of that. You know this stuff really isn't very good. I'm having trouble even giving it away.
caller: Well its all for a good cause. A percentage goes to help fight [insert disease or social problem here].
me: How big a percentage is that by the way?
caller: Ummm, nobody's ever asked that before, I'll have to look it up. So how many bottles of barbecue sauce can put you down for?
Please note that Resolver is currently a Windows-only application . While we have no immediate plans to produce versions for other platforms, if there is enough interest then that will change.
There may be some exceptions, but I haven't found any... Once a bloger, journalist, programmer, and I'm sure lawyer, goes to work for "the Borg" they lose all sense of objectivity.
Why in this day and age would someone want to lock themselves into yet another Windows-only application?
I would avoid this thing like the plague. Even if Linux hasn't taken over the desktop, there are certainly enough Apple users these days that OS portability should be BUILT-IN to the design process from day one.
The whole point of an OS is to isolate the application from the hardware. But what good does that do us when so many new applications are designed to work with only a single OS, and that single OS is designed to work with only one type of hardware? Has our industry gone mad?
This video combined with this new functionality I think should serve as a wake-up to the vast number of people doing dumb things with computers... using an electronic system that mimicked a paper system, keeping all the disadvantages and missing all the advantages of new technology. It was of course in Microsoft's (and others) best interest to keep us going down this wrong path for as long as possible. Hopefully those days are finally ending.
Let's be serious, would you show up to a Linux user party?
Well, as a (relatively speaking) "computer expert" at a Linux user party I'd spend a lot less time making excuses as to why I couldn't come over to people's house to "look at my machine".
If everyone who routinely performed free support for Windows users stopped doing so the user base would fall off rapidly, since most of them don't want to pay anything for it.
Will there be no more humans working at microsoft anymore?
One can only hope that those who work there now (especially the ones who actually understand software) will re-examine the ethics of what they are doing and make another choice.
Has anyone every read the disclaimers on Windows or Linux? They make NO guarantees that the OS will even run.
I think that was the GP's point. His use of games as an example was a poor choice. But in general non-entertainment software should have some level of accountability for failure to perform.
I've noticed that Democrats who are not comfortable with the welfare state aspect of their party, but like the social freedoms aspect often call themselves libertarians. In a similar way, Republicans who are not interested in other peoples personal lives (and I happen to think this number is vastly underestimated) will also claim to be Libertarians to distance themselves from the unpalatable aspects of their party.
What is bad about this is that it means a lot of people who call themselves libertarians actually are not. Worse, it means that two of these "libertarians" may have views that are diametrically opposed on many issues.
Ask your "libertarian" friends if they believe in Social Security, welfare of various kinds, or even government run medical care. If they do, then they are not libertarians but Democrats who for some reason are ashamed to admit it. Likewise if they believe in a draft, large military spending, drug and sex laws, then they are not libertarians but Republicans.
Please, let's keep the word "libertarian" reserved for people who share a quite distinct point of view. Don't use it as a refugee camp for those not happy with their parent's political party.
I am a libertarian, in fact, but that doesn't mean that I completely disagree with government interference in a monopoly.
Same here.
But this has never been a case of oversight. It's a case of misdirection, the magicians trick of getting you to pay attention to his left hand, while he does something sneaky with his right hand.
I can't say with certainty that Microsoft's biggest customer is the federal government, but it has to be way up there. Add to that the fact that many many private businesses exist only to service government contracts. Add to that the fact that some federal agencies act as role models for others, especially when it comes to technologies issues.
Which federal agencies are the leaders and which are the followers? I know a couple, but I'd be guessing at the rest. Some people at Microsoft know the exact pecking order though.
In the early and mid nineties there was a big push to eliminate the inefficiencies of rooms and rooms of file cabinets filled with paper. The intentions were good, even though the technology hadn't quite got up to speed in making electronic alternatives better in every sense.
It was during this time when the feds mandated that proposals for work and other official documents submitted to it be in Word format rather than WordPerfect. It should have never been WordPerfect in the first place, it should have been a selection of popular formats, and to reduce the impact of conversions, flat file (txt) format with separate (jpg or gif) graphics should have been acceptable too. But the feds wanted to make things easy on themselves and not have to bother with multiple formats, so they picked one (WP) and then a few years later picked another (Word).
That sealed the fate of any word processing program or archival program, or *operating system* that wasn't compatible with Word. This linkage between Word (and subsequently Excel) and OSs, hardware, and other applications has of course been the centerpiece of this anti-trust debate, but it would have been mostly moot were it not for the feds dependency on one or two Microsoft applications.
Ask any federal worker you know why they are not only supporting, but guaranteeing a monopoly by transferring and storing information in a single vendor's formats. When that changes, the monopoly will end, and I agree that no further action will be required.
... can I get a keyboard without so many boogers on it?
But seriously. If they now start putting some sort of PC in every hotel room there would be far fewer reasons to even be carrying around a laptop. A pocket sized device like the N800 would be good enough for quick web access.
So what you are saying is that in addition to the deficiencies I've already cataloged among *MANY, not ALL* government employees, the particular branch you work for are unable to select qualified contractors. It doesn't surprise me.
My experiences were far from unique. And I'm quite sure there are many incompetent contractors out there too. The system we currently have actually encourages their existence. One more thing that should be fixed. Of course nothing can be fixed when some people choose to turn their eyes away from the issues they are uncomfortable with. You won't read this though.
"I think we need to FIX government, not eliminate it."
How?
I guess I classify myself as one of those libertarians (although I think the accepted system of classification leaves much to be desired).
When I argue with my left-leaning friends (of which I have many), we rarely get much past the point of my asking where they differ from what has come to be called socialism, and in what way we should do things differently from other socialist systems that have failed generally (while they might have succeeded in one area or another).
On those few occasions when I can get past the school-yard taunts regarding the current President or the previous one, we always come to this one point of agreement: I have no problem with government doing something, if it can be made to do it well, and cost-effectively.
I've had long talks with a former DOL administrator who doesn't mind being called a socialist, he even quotes from Marx. He agrees government needs to work better. But when I suggest that we need a system whereby dead-wood government workers can be more easily fired, he launches into stories of how he (as a Democrat) thwarted the wishes of Republican appointees. He can't see a conflict between government working better and a career made of political backstabbing. He admitted to having many employees over the years who were not politically connected but who sat around doing nothing most of the time. I asked him had he ever been able to fire one. No, he said, but he was pretty good at getting them transfered to other departments.
I worked in government too, as a consultant, on and off for 15 years. During that time it was rare for me to see government people actually doing anything (I'm talking civilian, not military here). It was contractors like myself that did most of the work. We *reported* to government people at various levels, but for the most part they didn't have a clue what we were doing at any level of detail. Existing systems have no specifications (although they might have had a document or two that they *claimed* were the specifications). Our government "supervisors" would typically have inherited a "system" that they knew little about and would charge us with "Make it keep working as it always has." They were particularly unhelpful when it came to something that was demonstrably working wrong, or poorly. Nothing is so true in this environment than the phrase "good enough for government work".
I often hear government workers complain about how they are underpaid by comparison with the private sector, but most of them that I talked to had never worked in the private sector, and were petrified of the possibility of such a thing ever occurring. They would show up at work at 8 or after, claim they got in at 7, totally disappear at 10AM and not be seen again until 2PM in time to pack up and leave at 3 (or sooner if they could get away with it). They'll all retire sooner than most of the contractors who's salaries they claim are higher, they will have better health care, if they are military, lifetime PX benefits, and so on.
The left's argument seems to be that if we could grow the government significantly more, to 100% of the economy instead of just 40% we could *all* live this good life.
My only question remains, who is actually going to do the work?
Slashdot Mirror
hehe
Well Sigh. I have more anecdotes. I thought that one most meaningful because it wasn't Vista (making my point) and it wasn't a desktop system, making the point that it wasn't a case of an underpowered machine. This was a high end maxed out machine in every respect.
That is what made its inability to accomplish a simple (though large) copy operation so surprising.
If you can't be bothered to vote, you are out. Paid or not.
I don't think there has ever been a version of Windows that could deal with large numbers of files. Particularly if you are using the GUI interface. The whole thing is a toy operating system, really.
A few years ago, while investigating a similar problem with a production server (a SERVER not a client machine) the machine would gradually grind to a halt doing the copy, while still responding (but slowly) to other operations.
I found that the "copy" command did much better than a drag and drop operation, but still would have a problem eventually. Finally, I found that this was a known problem, and that to solve it, a dedicated MS employee had written a utility called "robocopy" the "robo" not being for "robot", but for "robust" (really, it said that!).
Using that usually got the job done, much more slowly than it should have, but at least I didn't have to re-boot the machine daily to clear things up.
Now that Gates is too busy with other things to take tours of the data center, really, Microsoft should do itself a favor and ditch the VMS underpinnings of Windows (some of which they have probably forgotten how to maintain) and build your nice GUI on top of BSD or something similar. That way you won't break your budget (in manpower and electricity) trying to match the Google server farms.
Once that's done you will have the experience needed to do the same on the desktop. You will be doing the world, and yourselves a favor. Thanks in advance!
I've had a Sprint based Razr phone for almost a year and at the other end of the spectrum a Nokia 1100 via Tracfon for a couple, and I've played with an iPhone long enough to know that I can live without one.
I too like the Nokia flashlight feature. I also like that it has a standby life of a month or more (in my experience) and can quickly be turned off and on, unlike the newer phones that must "boot" into a mode that can drive the display even to do something as simple as plug in to recharge.
I love the fact that I can check e-mail browse the web and so forth with the Razr, but the screen is too small to get much out of it (and the iPhone, to me isn't that much of an improvement, I have a Nokia N800 that serves about the same function as the iPhone in that regard).
My main use for a phone is, uh, talking on the phone, and unless I'm in a run down diner on the Interstate in the middle of nowhere, I'm not all that far from being able to check my mail and read the news on a real computer. Like most cell phone users I also own a laptop that does just fine in most Wifi locations.
All that to say, there may be a gPhone that competes with the iPhone, but iPhone users have shown that money isn't the issue with them. They'll stand in line to pay exorbitant prices for an untested product just for the status alone, and I'm sure many of them would do the same even if an equivalent service were available for free.
If the eventual gPhone has none of the features of the iPhone it will serve as a business-model-ending device for pay as you go services as Tracfone T-mobile, etc. Millions of people will buy them for emergency phones in the car, for their kids to take to school, for a spare when the battery on the iPhone dies, and so on. A dirt-cheap (production wise) phone will be almost as big a hit as an "iPhone killer".
Devil in these details: How will ads be presented? In the iPhone format, on the screen of course, possibly annoying the hell out of you while you are trying to do something else. On an N1100 type device, maybe you would hear a 5 second ad at the start of a call you make, and your callers could be subjected to such a thing too. Tying up a real 10-digit phone number costs money. I don't know how much, but it isn't zero. A totally free phone will have an issue with rapidly using up these number for (as mentioned above) phones that get stored in a car and rarely used. Maybe such a device will have a two step process to call. (1) call an 800 number (provided by Google) followed by (2) an internal ID to get to the phone. This could tie in with the GrandCentral acquisition (which I'm already using and impressed with). Finally, an "iPhone Killer" phone that is free, has a large display and other state of the art features is going to be treated like any other free thing, carelessly. It will be subject to all sorts of physical abuse and people will be ordering replacements like they are dim-sum. What could have marginally been an ad-supported device could quickly become a sink-hole for any company who tries it.
So, as usual, I think many of they "analysts" have their heads up their asses and are either dreaming, or engaging in typical stir up rumors to pump up the stock price tactics. Oh they wouldn't do that would they?
Regardless, when the gPhone does arrive, if it arrives, I hope it has a flashlight too.
Because if it doesn't start with a "K" us KDE folk won't recognize it as oK to use.
that I'm sure Verizon will be all over it.
Would someone notify company officials that I have commenced holding my breath?
Right.
The most important features of Vista were dropped before it ever hit the street.
Too bad the mainstream media won't clue the public into this.
But then they are working their own games...
Like getting the election cycle to start a year early to pick up all the ad revenue.
What is surprising about these people is not that they are clueless about the technology, in fact they probably understand it pretty well, no what is surprising is that they are clueless, or pretend to be clueless about their own area of expertise, the law. This woman would appear to be either falsifying her own understanding of the law or indeed ignorant.
I just received from Amazon yesterday three CDs that cost $70 (rounded) yes, SEVENTY DOLLARS! The music is all from one group that hasn't existed since the mid 80s. I had previously purchased all of this material on records, and I had produced perfectly usable copies of the records as mp3s. I now have the same mp3s made from the newly purchased CDs. I can't tell the difference. Moreover there isn't a one to one correspondence between the CDs and the records, so even though a single CD would hold all the songs I like from this group, I had to buy three very expensive CDs to get those cuts. How in the world can people like me, and I'm sure I'm not alone, be responsible for the fact that Sony has turned into a POS company?
Really, Sony needs to just fire every single employee and start over, as a company they seem to have gone insane.
Not only am I not stealing from the record companies, I'm treating them as a charitable organization...
me: sure send me another five bottles of jams and jellies for $50 that will go to your charity. Don't you have anything besides jams and jellies?
caller: We have barbecue sauce. Would you like that instead?
me: no I already have a dozen bottles of that. You know this stuff really isn't very good. I'm having trouble even giving it away.
caller: Well its all for a good cause. A percentage goes to help fight [insert disease or social problem here].
me: How big a percentage is that by the way?
caller: Ummm, nobody's ever asked that before, I'll have to look it up. So how many bottles of barbecue sauce can put you down for?
me: Just the usual order I guess.
There may be some exceptions, but I haven't found any... Once a bloger, journalist, programmer, and I'm sure lawyer, goes to work for "the Borg" they lose all sense of objectivity.
Why in this day and age would someone want to lock themselves into yet another Windows-only application?
I would avoid this thing like the plague. Even if Linux hasn't taken over the desktop, there are certainly enough Apple users these days that OS portability should be BUILT-IN to the design process from day one.
The whole point of an OS is to isolate the application from the hardware. But what good does that do us when so many new applications are designed to work with only a single OS, and that single OS is designed to work with only one type of hardware? Has our industry gone mad?
If Microsoft were a racehorse it would have been put down by now.
It is a drag on our society, on our culture, on our economy, not to mention the rest of the world's.
I wish something could be done about them, but we just have to wait for them to blow all their own limbs off and bleed to death I guess.
errr...
or something.
This video combined with this new functionality I think should serve as a wake-up to the vast number of people doing dumb things with computers... using an electronic system that mimicked a paper system, keeping all the disadvantages and missing all the advantages of new technology. It was of course in Microsoft's (and others) best interest to keep us going down this wrong path for as long as possible. Hopefully those days are finally ending.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA
Well, as a (relatively speaking) "computer expert" at a Linux user party I'd spend a lot less time making excuses as to why I couldn't come over to people's house to "look at my machine".
If everyone who routinely performed free support for Windows users stopped doing so the user base would fall off rapidly, since most of them don't want to pay anything for it.
reduced functionality was a standard feature in Windows.
That's why I stopped using it.
38.482137,-119.40502
Using GE, looks like a plane to me.
One can only hope that those who work there now (especially the ones who actually understand software) will re-examine the ethics of what they are doing and make another choice.
I think that was the GP's point. His use of games as an example was a poor choice. But in general non-entertainment software should have some level of accountability for failure to perform.
I've noticed that Democrats who are not comfortable with the welfare state aspect of their party, but like the social freedoms aspect often call themselves libertarians. In a similar way, Republicans who are not interested in other peoples personal lives (and I happen to think this number is vastly underestimated) will also claim to be Libertarians to distance themselves from the unpalatable aspects of their party.
What is bad about this is that it means a lot of people who call themselves libertarians actually are not. Worse, it means that two of these "libertarians" may have views that are diametrically opposed on many issues.
Ask your "libertarian" friends if they believe in Social Security, welfare of various kinds, or even government run medical care. If they do, then they are not libertarians but Democrats who for some reason are ashamed to admit it. Likewise if they believe in a draft, large military spending, drug and sex laws, then they are not libertarians but Republicans.
Please, let's keep the word "libertarian" reserved for people who share a quite distinct point of view. Don't use it as a refugee camp for those not happy with their parent's political party.
Would this "disk" be Blue-ray or HD DVD?
I'm wondering because the resistance to dust and water (mud) could be a deciding factor in the format wars.
Same here.
But this has never been a case of oversight. It's a case of misdirection, the magicians trick of getting you to pay attention to his left hand, while he does something sneaky with his right hand.
I can't say with certainty that Microsoft's biggest customer is the federal government, but it has to be way up there. Add to that the fact that many many private businesses exist only to service government contracts. Add to that the fact that some federal agencies act as role models for others, especially when it comes to technologies issues.
Which federal agencies are the leaders and which are the followers? I know a couple, but I'd be guessing at the rest. Some people at Microsoft know the exact pecking order though.
In the early and mid nineties there was a big push to eliminate the inefficiencies of rooms and rooms of file cabinets filled with paper. The intentions were good, even though the technology hadn't quite got up to speed in making electronic alternatives better in every sense.
It was during this time when the feds mandated that proposals for work and other official documents submitted to it be in Word format rather than WordPerfect. It should have never been WordPerfect in the first place, it should have been a selection of popular formats, and to reduce the impact of conversions, flat file (txt) format with separate (jpg or gif) graphics should have been acceptable too. But the feds wanted to make things easy on themselves and not have to bother with multiple formats, so they picked one (WP) and then a few years later picked another (Word).
That sealed the fate of any word processing program or archival program, or *operating system* that wasn't compatible with Word. This linkage between Word (and subsequently Excel) and OSs, hardware, and other applications has of course been the centerpiece of this anti-trust debate, but it would have been mostly moot were it not for the feds dependency on one or two Microsoft applications.
Ask any federal worker you know why they are not only supporting, but guaranteeing a monopoly by transferring and storing information in a single vendor's formats. When that changes, the monopoly will end, and I agree that no further action will be required.
You must be new around here.
... can I get a keyboard without so many boogers on it?
But seriously. If they now start putting some sort of PC in every hotel room there would be far fewer reasons to even be carrying around a laptop. A pocket sized device like the N800 would be good enough for quick web access.
So what you are saying is that in addition to the deficiencies I've already cataloged among *MANY, not ALL* government employees, the particular branch you work for are unable to select qualified contractors. It doesn't surprise me.
My experiences were far from unique. And I'm quite sure there are many incompetent contractors out there too. The system we currently have actually encourages their existence. One more thing that should be fixed. Of course nothing can be fixed when some people choose to turn their eyes away from the issues they are uncomfortable with. You won't read this though.
How?
I guess I classify myself as one of those libertarians (although I think the accepted system of classification leaves much to be desired).
When I argue with my left-leaning friends (of which I have many), we rarely get much past the point of my asking where they differ from what has come to be called socialism, and in what way we should do things differently from other socialist systems that have failed generally (while they might have succeeded in one area or another).
On those few occasions when I can get past the school-yard taunts regarding the current President or the previous one, we always come to this one point of agreement: I have no problem with government doing something, if it can be made to do it well, and cost-effectively.
I've had long talks with a former DOL administrator who doesn't mind being called a socialist, he even quotes from Marx. He agrees government needs to work better. But when I suggest that we need a system whereby dead-wood government workers can be more easily fired, he launches into stories of how he (as a Democrat) thwarted the wishes of Republican appointees. He can't see a conflict between government working better and a career made of political backstabbing. He admitted to having many employees over the years who were not politically connected but who sat around doing nothing most of the time. I asked him had he ever been able to fire one. No, he said, but he was pretty good at getting them transfered to other departments.
I worked in government too, as a consultant, on and off for 15 years. During that time it was rare for me to see government people actually doing anything (I'm talking civilian, not military here). It was contractors like myself that did most of the work. We *reported* to government people at various levels, but for the most part they didn't have a clue what we were doing at any level of detail. Existing systems have no specifications (although they might have had a document or two that they *claimed* were the specifications). Our government "supervisors" would typically have inherited a "system" that they knew little about and would charge us with "Make it keep working as it always has." They were particularly unhelpful when it came to something that was demonstrably working wrong, or poorly. Nothing is so true in this environment than the phrase "good enough for government work".
I often hear government workers complain about how they are underpaid by comparison with the private sector, but most of them that I talked to had never worked in the private sector, and were petrified of the possibility of such a thing ever occurring. They would show up at work at 8 or after, claim they got in at 7, totally disappear at 10AM and not be seen again until 2PM in time to pack up and leave at 3 (or sooner if they could get away with it). They'll all retire sooner than most of the contractors who's salaries they claim are higher, they will have better health care, if they are military, lifetime PX benefits, and so on.
The left's argument seems to be that if we could grow the government significantly more, to 100% of the economy instead of just 40% we could *all* live this good life.
My only question remains, who is actually going to do the work?