let's turn this guy, already bleeding from from an apache canon fire, into mince meat for the camera!
I am sure when the military bans cameras there will be a major drop in reports because the soldiers will be free of their evil influence . ..
I am impressed you were are able to so easily trivialize the inhumane treatment of others. Something you must have learned from the current great leaders of the U.S.
How is that any different from donating code? The point is you can't just tell volunteers what to do and expect them to do it without any additional consideration, as if they are already on the payroll or in bondage.
I'm sorry, but under what authority does this guy have over Mozilla? At MS he might have programmers licking his toes, trying to make him happy, but out in the real world he is just another jerk that is having trouble coming to grips that the world does not revolve around him or view of things.
The Mozilla programmers got where they are on the project because they have talent in programming and want to surrond themselves with such talent. What talent does this guy have? In this community, talk is cheap. He wants the Mozilla programmers to listen, show us the CODE. Otherwise, why the hell should these guys give him the time day!? People write open source code to GET AWAY from jerks like this, who have authority but don't have a clue how things work.
Title means nothing here. I really wish we would just ignore the guy and spend more time appreciating the talented developers that are increasing the quality of all our lives.
Open source developers are not your employee/slave, they will do whatever the hell they want and, as a user, you should just feel fortunate that your needs were similar to the coder's. Every newbie who wants to have a longterm relationship with open source must come to terms with this. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of clueless newbies out there and a high concentration of them at MS.
If MS wants Mozilla to support Longhorn, why the hell does not MS submit some code! It is open source for godsakes! That is far more cooperation than MS EVER gives outside developers wanting to support MS software!!! It is amazing how clueless these people are . . . "why want you code for free for us, we are just a poor, multi-billion dollar, monopoly that has been convicted of criminal behavior on both sides of the Atlantic."
If MS has an itch with Mozilla, why not stop BITCHING, shut the hell up, and code! If MS were to code half as much as it bitched, I am sure worms written by 18 year olds wouldn't be ripping new ones out of corporations stupid enough to trust MS.
(This rant has been brought to you by my intolerance of stupidity masquerading as arrogance)
it seems pretty quick (especially when comparing it to OO 1.1, I suppose that is because it is just a spreadsheet program). And it seems to open xls files as quick as Excel.
Seems to be in a niche between OO which allows you to save to xls and gnumeric, which I didn't think allowed you to save to xls format but is very light and quick.
Oh, and it seems to support OO's calc format.
No, maybe it will not save the world, but it just may help a handful more people move to Linux and reward a commericial developer for supporting Linux. Though, I am sure it is not for EVERYONE.
Put the burden of protecting the data on the employee, let THEM pay to keep the data safe and carry the burden if it is lost or compromised (and let people like me immediately benefit from their Linux knowledge). Eventually, companies will figure out that there really is no other way to ensure their data is safe (in a non-dumb terminal environment).
Anyway, it gets to the point that the difference between employee and consultant really gets blurred. You get someone with more freedom in how they complete their tasks than a regular employee but with more job security than a consultant. Not bad. . .
the poster is against outsourcing?
Slashdot is a diverse group of individuals voicing their diverse opinions, which all conflict. I am tired of individuals saying "gotcha" when two completely SEPARATE individuals voice CONFLICTING opinions.
Btw, if ALL prices (not just wages) were to drop at the same rate, then, yes, nobody would be complaining about outsourcing. The problem is that there are market inefficiencies that are keeping some prices the same while others go down.
by having to compete with omnipotent corporations with armies of lawyers and patent specialists.
I mean, if genius is innate, should we not have like 10 Da Vincis just due to probability and the increase in population?
Maybe an environment that recognizes and protects novel ideas is also required besides just having access to the technology. Unfortunately, it is harder these days to protect one's own ideas and the environments that have the resources to protect ideas (corporations) usually cultivate environments that fear change (the status quo is what made them big in the first place).
I don't know about you, but I believe that today's Da Vincis are hacking away on some Open Source project somewhere, since that appears to be the last free haven of free thinking . . .
$
If they have access to the monetary resources, then they are simply trading past contributions to society for this particular benefit. Or do you believe that we should be regulating our economy and forget about capitalism?
Some would call extreme medical that antibiotic or vaccine that saved your life. Obviously you do not consider THAT extreme . . . bubble boy.
Saving someone's life is not playing God, but a very basic value that societies are based on. If an individual that we save thinks we made the wrong decision, they are more than welcome to end their own lives. Otherwise, good luck debating with everyone on when to let people die and when to save people. I am sure it will be resolved unanimously in society just as quickly as that little abortion thingy.
I thought that species with a DIVERSE genetic base had the best probability of survival.If, through technology, we are able to maintain an even MORE diverse code base, then is that not better?
Good genes, bad genes . . . in the current environment it is easy for you to pass judgement, However, when the environment changes, so must your definitions of good and bad. Since change is uncertain, there is no way you can really know which genes are good or bad. Would it not be better to hold on to as many different genes as possible, just in case we need them later?
Besides, if your genes are really detrimental to your daily function, you will already have a disadvantage that will limit the spread of your genes compared to other "good" gened people. There's additional medical costs, social prejudice, and simply a higher risk of death for people with inferior genetic material. You may live a quite normal and happy life, but individuals with similar genetic material as you will automatically be limitted, relative to other "healthier" genes. Plus, you have to take in account how large and diverse our population is now. Evolution will continue whether you decide to help it or not. It is simply the way the world works, not a policy one should live their life by.
Finally, it really can be argued that evolution is no longer relevant to human survival. Evolution takes thousands and thousands of years to mold species. Technology, on the other hand . ..well, keeping in mind the progress of the last 100 years, can you call me crazy if I were to say that technology could cure all illness within the next thousand years? With that in mind, maybe your genetics gives you a disadvantage physically, but the mental advantages to your genetics is a far greater advantage to the human race. Or maybe just having your gene set to study will allow the human race to understand our code that much quicker. Technology is just so much faster than evolution that even if your contribution is very, very small (like teaching your kid to program OSS), it is enough to make up for any genetic deficiencies.
And maybe the environment will change and your son will be the only one left to impregnate an entire generation of women . . . nomatter how slight the possibilty, how could you rob such a possibility like THAT from ANYONE!
or incilin or any human advancements that have allowed people to live who would have otherwise died.
Everyone who draws the line of what is too far, like you just did, conveniently places that line to exclude any kind of technological help their survival has depended on.
There are plenty of people living in dirt, eating trash to survive for what will probably be a pretty short life. Maybe until such people decide that THEIR quality of life is so low that they start drowning themselves and their children in muddy puddles, we can implement a "quality of life" policy and put those poor souls out of their misery if they fall below the definition of "liveable". Until then . . . I say you are playing God with out any of the usual minimal requisites to play the part.
If you are going to argue against this, please, oh please, say that the same money could have been better spent to save many more lives in some developing country.
But making judgement on someone's quality of life is all fun and games until someone looks at YOUR marginal existence and says, "man, we should really put YOU out of your misery."
Is this why the U.S. can bomb people and say it is saving those same people at the same time? Under a dictatorship their quality of life is so low that it is well worth risking their death in an attempt to raise their quality of life to a level worth living? How noble . ..
I sympathize that you were merely trying to discuss the issue, but your assumptions reveal a value that has been the root of all types of exploitations of other people. The quality of life argument has been used to inslave, to kill, and to exterminate entire civilizations. And now, I fear it has been used to turn the U.S. into a tool to allows poorly educated politicians play God.
Linux Apache Mysql/Postgresql Perl/PHP/Python Simply make it okay for your employees to install this technology on their computers, because it is great technology, it won't lock you in, and it is becoming a global standard.
It will be much easier approving a couple good Open Source technologies than creating a general policy for Open Source technologies.
Once management sees how great the above work, they will be much more open to additional addons to your list of approved Open Source programs.
that a multiple charset is being used in the address. The user could click the button and a window could open diagramming the nature of each character in the address. It could be a feature similar to the one used in mozilla-firebird for blocking pop-ups.
Anyway, a "homograph attack" seems fairly easy to prevent. I am sure Mozilla will soon incorporate such a feature.
However, IE has a different problem. It appears the fundamental system used to development IE is not dynamic and reactive enough to protect users from Internet based attacks. This will simply never change as long as the same development system is used. I am not saying that Open Source is the ONLY solution. However, it appears that it is a far better system than the one IE uses.
As a physician, you have a perspective that no other IT specialist has. Most of the phsysicians I know are NOT tech savvy. Consequently, there probably is a niche that is being neglected and can only be filled by someone who is both a physician and tech savvy.
For instance, I have noticed that the medical profession appears to be pretty stuck on proprietary technologies. Why don't you study all the current open source tools that exist for this industry. Pick a couple that seem the best. Play with them, master them. You like doing this stuff, right? In 5 to 10 years you could learn enough to be one of the primary developers for these projects. Then you can start approaching fellow physicians about this cool setup that you have that is free. Offer to set them up if they pay a consulting fee. ..
IT is not like becoming a doctor or accountant. Usually, if you become certified it is either for something high paying but risky (company could change vendors) or something low paying but stable (MSCE). Consultants utilizing open source software appear to get the best of both worlds.
Anyway, I am an accountant who is interested in computers and this is my strategy. I haven't started my own busines yet, but I have increased my productivity by learning some programming (Perl). Playing around with Open Source software is the cheapest hobby I have ever had, makes me forget that I am a worthless pion, and increases the quality of my life.
Perhaps I will never get my own consulting business, but I will more likely keep my job from being outsourced to some fresh Indian CPA when I can also maintain the company's accounting database and create customized auditing programs. I believe that one day every "professional" will know how to code, but I don't intend to wait around for others to catch up.
Which this guy thinks means "they made something I like." However, I thought "getting it" meant you understood the net gains from freeing software.
Oh, well . . . I guess some people just like using the lingo even though they don't have a clue what they are talking about. Imagine that . . . "Geek wannabes."
One, you probably have never worked for a company that has annual sales in the billions but does not use a rdbs. Instead, they use some kind of flat file system that requires manual entry of excel files sent from other branches. The financials are done in an Excel Spreadsheet and forecasts are sent out as spread sheaets.
You probably also never have had to create a Forecast database based on 60 different excel files that were sent every month from the main office that have different column order, names (many times mispelled), worksheet names (yes, that is important data too), and is more or less completely inconsistent. For this I have used the Perl Spreadsheet::Parse module which has been very, very helpful and allowed me to create a simple system to update things by simply having someone move a new excel file to a folder and run the script.
Excel is many things, but it is not a database, but since the business culture has for some reason decided that it is the only tool anyone should be required to learn, it ends up being misused. If you don't know how to program, how will you ever be able to know whether this is a task that should be done in Excel or a task that should be down in a programming language? Obviously my company doesn't know the difference and so Excel has been a very destructive influence on our data.
Yes, tools are tools, but some tools are designed to lock-in data and give the impression that they can do anything.
I mean, have you ever watched a guy create a segmented P and L by filtering an excel sheet, copying the filtered data to another sheet, changing the filter, copying the data for another sheet, etc . . . for over 2 hours? How can that be compared to learning some SQL and getting a dump from a database every month? How would you feel about our species if you knew that that was possible yet people still did it the inefficient way because "programming" is considered too difficult to be required from a "knowledge worker."
Programmer lock-in is far less costly than "knowledge worker" lock-in because the programmer can do the work of an entire department of mouse clicking number dragging "knowledge workers." Plus, regardless of how difficult and obscure the code is, it is still better documentation than nothing.
However, maybe you must first work a company like mine before you start seeing things this way. . . (i.e. Excel is great for one time analysis or routine tasks that NEVER change, but I think many people waste too much time with it simply because they associate GUI with "easier").
Or, at least I never ended up with a specific "economics degree required" job, though my current job as an operations analyst does allow me to use some of the theories. My company paid for me to become a CPA so that I could help them move towards GAAP (they are a foreign company). GAAP protects American accountants from the kind of outsourcing that programmers face because it is specific to the U.S., and it is far more expensive and inconvenient to become an American CPA than it is to learn some programming language.
The irony is that there are a lot of tasks that accountants use raw copy and pasting to perform every month (at least it appears the ones at my company do) that could be much better handled with some form of programming. The accounting and IS departments usually do not get along too well at my company (they just see things very differently . ..), and I bet that is the same at other companies. I have tried to learn as much programming on my own in order to save time on trying to analyze data that has been pissed away in inconsistent excel files.
Anyway, you are either going to have outsourcing or you will see investors invest in companies located where labor is cheaper. Either way, you will find it just as difficult to get a job with simply "programmer" on your resume. There are many, many companies out there that need programmers, but they are too behind times to understand that what they need is customization of software. If you have some other skill that can get you into the door, that opens the way to create some very useful applications that will make you more valuable than those chasing numbers around on an excel sheet or those cheap foreign programmers that will need detailed design documentation to be able to contribute anything useful.
Slashdot Mirror
let's piss on this guys face for the camera!
.
let's rape for the camera!
let's turn this guy, already bleeding from from an apache canon fire, into mince meat for the camera!
I am sure when the military bans cameras there will be a major drop in reports because the soldiers will be free of their evil influence . .
I am impressed you were are able to so easily trivialize the inhumane treatment of others. Something you must have learned from the current great leaders of the U.S.
How is that any different from donating code? The point is you can't just tell volunteers what to do and expect them to do it without any additional consideration, as if they are already on the payroll or in bondage.
What features am I demanding from developers?
Oh well, at least you might of felt witty when you posted . . . not all is lost.
I'm sorry, but under what authority does this guy have over Mozilla? At MS he might have programmers licking his toes, trying to make him happy, but out in the real world he is just another jerk that is having trouble coming to grips that the world does not revolve around him or view of things.
The Mozilla programmers got where they are on the project because they have talent in programming and want to surrond themselves with such talent. What talent does this guy have? In this community, talk is cheap. He wants the Mozilla programmers to listen, show us the CODE. Otherwise, why the hell should these guys give him the time day!? People write open source code to GET AWAY from jerks like this, who have authority but don't have a clue how things work.
Title means nothing here. I really wish we would just ignore the guy and spend more time appreciating the talented developers that are increasing the quality of all our lives.
Open source developers are not your employee/slave, they will do whatever the hell they want and, as a user, you should just feel fortunate that your needs were similar to the coder's. Every newbie who wants to have a longterm relationship with open source must come to terms with this. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of clueless newbies out there and a high concentration of them at MS.
If MS wants Mozilla to support Longhorn, why the hell does not MS submit some code! It is open source for godsakes! That is far more cooperation than MS EVER gives outside developers wanting to support MS software!!! It is amazing how clueless these people are . . . "why want you code for free for us, we are just a poor, multi-billion dollar, monopoly that has been convicted of criminal behavior on both sides of the Atlantic."
If MS has an itch with Mozilla, why not stop BITCHING, shut the hell up, and code! If MS were to code half as much as it bitched, I am sure worms written by 18 year olds wouldn't be ripping new ones out of corporations stupid enough to trust MS.
(This rant has been brought to you by my intolerance of stupidity masquerading as arrogance)
Sorry, I stand corrected. I just installed Gnumeric and it definitely is fastest (even in KDE). Keep up the great work!
it seems pretty quick (especially when comparing it to OO 1.1, I suppose that is because it is just a spreadsheet program). And it seems to open xls files as quick as Excel.
Seems to be in a niche between OO which allows you to save to xls and gnumeric, which I didn't think allowed you to save to xls format but is very light and quick.
Oh, and it seems to support OO's calc format.
No, maybe it will not save the world, but it just may help a handful more people move to Linux and reward a commericial developer for supporting Linux. Though, I am sure it is not for EVERYONE.
Put the burden of protecting the data on the employee, let THEM pay to keep the data safe and carry the burden if it is lost or compromised (and let people like me immediately benefit from their Linux knowledge). Eventually, companies will figure out that there really is no other way to ensure their data is safe (in a non-dumb terminal environment).
Anyway, it gets to the point that the difference between employee and consultant really gets blurred. You get someone with more freedom in how they complete their tasks than a regular employee but with more job security than a consultant. Not bad. . .
the poster is against outsourcing? Slashdot is a diverse group of individuals voicing their diverse opinions, which all conflict. I am tired of individuals saying "gotcha" when two completely SEPARATE individuals voice CONFLICTING opinions. Btw, if ALL prices (not just wages) were to drop at the same rate, then, yes, nobody would be complaining about outsourcing. The problem is that there are market inefficiencies that are keeping some prices the same while others go down.
by having to compete with omnipotent corporations with armies of lawyers and patent specialists.
I mean, if genius is innate, should we not have like 10 Da Vincis just due to probability and the increase in population?
Maybe an environment that recognizes and protects novel ideas is also required besides just having access to the technology. Unfortunately, it is harder these days to protect one's own ideas and the environments that have the resources to protect ideas (corporations) usually cultivate environments that fear change (the status quo is what made them big in the first place).
I don't know about you, but I believe that today's Da Vincis are hacking away on some Open Source project somewhere, since that appears to be the last free haven of free thinking . . .
$ If they have access to the monetary resources, then they are simply trading past contributions to society for this particular benefit. Or do you believe that we should be regulating our economy and forget about capitalism? Some would call extreme medical that antibiotic or vaccine that saved your life. Obviously you do not consider THAT extreme . . . bubble boy. Saving someone's life is not playing God, but a very basic value that societies are based on. If an individual that we save thinks we made the wrong decision, they are more than welcome to end their own lives. Otherwise, good luck debating with everyone on when to let people die and when to save people. I am sure it will be resolved unanimously in society just as quickly as that little abortion thingy.
I thought that species with a DIVERSE genetic base had the best probability of survival.If, through technology, we are able to maintain an even MORE diverse code base, then is that not better?
.well, keeping in mind the progress of the last 100 years, can you call me crazy if I were to say that technology could cure all illness within the next thousand years? With that in mind, maybe your genetics gives you a disadvantage physically, but the mental advantages to your genetics is a far greater advantage to the human race. Or maybe just having your gene set to study will allow the human race to understand our code that much quicker. Technology is just so much faster than evolution that even if your contribution is very, very small (like teaching your kid to program OSS), it is enough to make up for any genetic deficiencies.
Good genes, bad genes . . . in the current environment it is easy for you to pass judgement, However, when the environment changes, so must your definitions of good and bad. Since change is uncertain, there is no way you can really know which genes are good or bad. Would it not be better to hold on to as many different genes as possible, just in case we need them later?
Besides, if your genes are really detrimental to your daily function, you will already have a disadvantage that will limit the spread of your genes compared to other "good" gened people. There's additional medical costs, social prejudice, and simply a higher risk of death for people with inferior genetic material. You may live a quite normal and happy life, but individuals with similar genetic material as you will automatically be limitted, relative to other "healthier" genes. Plus, you have to take in account how large and diverse our population is now. Evolution will continue whether you decide to help it or not. It is simply the way the world works, not a policy one should live their life by.
Finally, it really can be argued that evolution is no longer relevant to human survival. Evolution takes thousands and thousands of years to mold species. Technology, on the other hand . .
And maybe the environment will change and your son will be the only one left to impregnate an entire generation of women . . . nomatter how slight the possibilty, how could you rob such a possibility like THAT from ANYONE!
or incilin or any human advancements that have allowed people to live who would have otherwise died.
.
.
Everyone who draws the line of what is too far, like you just did, conveniently places that line to exclude any kind of technological help their survival has depended on.
There are plenty of people living in dirt, eating trash to survive for what will probably be a pretty short life. Maybe until such people decide that THEIR quality of life is so low that they start drowning themselves and their children in muddy puddles, we can implement a "quality of life" policy and put those poor souls out of their misery if they fall below the definition of "liveable". Until then . . . I say you are playing God with out any of the usual minimal requisites to play the part.
If you are going to argue against this, please, oh please, say that the same money could have been better spent to save many more lives in some developing country.
But making judgement on someone's quality of life is all fun and games until someone looks at YOUR marginal existence and says, "man, we should really put YOU out of your misery."
Is this why the U.S. can bomb people and say it is saving those same people at the same time? Under a dictatorship their quality of life is so low that it is well worth risking their death in an attempt to raise their quality of life to a level worth living? How noble . .
I sympathize that you were merely trying to discuss the issue, but your assumptions reveal a value that has been the root of all types of exploitations of other people. The quality of life argument has been used to inslave, to kill, and to exterminate entire civilizations. And now, I fear it has been used to turn the U.S. into a tool to allows poorly educated politicians play God.
I fear God's retribution for such blasphemy . .
Linux
Apache
Mysql/Postgresql
Perl/PHP/Python
Simply make it okay for your employees to install this technology on their computers, because it is great technology, it won't lock you in, and it is becoming a global standard.
It will be much easier approving a couple good Open Source technologies than creating a general policy for Open Source technologies.
Once management sees how great the above work, they will be much more open to additional addons to your list of approved Open Source programs.
The future is Open.
that a multiple charset is being used in the address. The user could click the button and a window could open diagramming the nature of each character in the address. It could be a feature similar to the one used in mozilla-firebird for blocking pop-ups.
Anyway, a "homograph attack" seems fairly easy to prevent. I am sure Mozilla will soon incorporate such a feature.
However, IE has a different problem. It appears the fundamental system used to development IE is not dynamic and reactive enough to protect users from Internet based attacks. This will simply never change as long as the same development system is used. I am not saying that Open Source is the ONLY solution. However, it appears that it is a far better system than the one IE uses.
As a physician, you have a perspective that no other IT specialist has. Most of the phsysicians I know are NOT tech savvy. Consequently, there probably is a niche that is being neglected and can only be filled by someone who is both a physician and tech savvy.
.
For instance, I have noticed that the medical profession appears to be pretty stuck on proprietary technologies. Why don't you study all the current open source tools that exist for this industry. Pick a couple that seem the best. Play with them, master them. You like doing this stuff, right? In 5 to 10 years you could learn enough to be one of the primary developers for these projects. Then you can start approaching fellow physicians about this cool setup that you have that is free. Offer to set them up if they pay a consulting fee. .
IT is not like becoming a doctor or accountant. Usually, if you become certified it is either for something high paying but risky (company could change vendors) or something low paying but stable (MSCE). Consultants utilizing open source software appear to get the best of both worlds.
Anyway, I am an accountant who is interested in computers and this is my strategy. I haven't started my own busines yet, but I have increased my productivity by learning some programming (Perl). Playing around with Open Source software is the cheapest hobby I have ever had, makes me forget that I am a worthless pion, and increases the quality of my life.
Perhaps I will never get my own consulting business, but I will more likely keep my job from being outsourced to some fresh Indian CPA when I can also maintain the company's accounting database and create customized auditing programs. I believe that one day every "professional" will know how to code, but I don't intend to wait around for others to catch up.
Study often, study hard.
Maybe if you learned to laugh at Windows' mistakes, you could be happy all the time?
if he had anticipated how many times I push that sequence in a day.
However, it is a cooler sign to flash to the MSCE gangsters that hang out at my company for some reason . . .
I would be staring at blue screen all day at work.
Thanks . . . I think . . .
"Second, it can perform a denial-of-service against www.sco.com."
How do I get it?
Yes, Darl, there IS NO free lunch . . . get over it and shut the hell up.
How many levels of irony must this guy go through before his head explodes?
Which this guy thinks means "they made something I like." However, I thought "getting it" meant you understood the net gains from freeing software.
Oh, well . . . I guess some people just like using the lingo even though they don't have a clue what they are talking about. Imagine that . . . "Geek wannabes."
As a CPA, I would personally be thrilled if my company were to support me on a Unix based OS.
I believe it is the lawyers that are holding things up because they find Clippy to be witty . . .
One, you probably have never worked for a company that has annual sales in the billions but does not use a rdbs. Instead, they use some kind of flat file system that requires manual entry of excel files sent from other branches. The financials are done in an Excel Spreadsheet and forecasts are sent out as spread sheaets.
You probably also never have had to create a Forecast database based on 60 different excel files that were sent every month from the main office that have different column order, names (many times mispelled), worksheet names (yes, that is important data too), and is more or less completely inconsistent. For this I have used the Perl Spreadsheet::Parse module which has been very, very helpful and allowed me to create a simple system to update things by simply having someone move a new excel file to a folder and run the script.
Excel is many things, but it is not a database, but since the business culture has for some reason decided that it is the only tool anyone should be required to learn, it ends up being misused. If you don't know how to program, how will you ever be able to know whether this is a task that should be done in Excel or a task that should be down in a programming language? Obviously my company doesn't know the difference and so Excel has been a very destructive influence on our data.
Yes, tools are tools, but some tools are designed to lock-in data and give the impression that they can do anything.
I mean, have you ever watched a guy create a segmented P and L by filtering an excel sheet, copying the filtered data to another sheet, changing the filter, copying the data for another sheet, etc . . . for over 2 hours? How can that be compared to learning some SQL and getting a dump from a database every month? How would you feel about our species if you knew that that was possible yet people still did it the inefficient way because "programming" is considered too difficult to be required from a "knowledge worker."
Programmer lock-in is far less costly than "knowledge worker" lock-in because the programmer can do the work of an entire department of mouse clicking number dragging "knowledge workers." Plus, regardless of how difficult and obscure the code is, it is still better documentation than nothing.
However, maybe you must first work a company like mine before you start seeing things this way. . . (i.e. Excel is great for one time analysis or routine tasks that NEVER change, but I think many people waste too much time with it simply because they associate GUI with "easier").
Or, at least I never ended up with a specific "economics degree required" job, though my current job as an operations analyst does allow me to use some of the theories. My company paid for me to become a CPA so that I could help them move towards GAAP (they are a foreign company). GAAP protects American accountants from the kind of outsourcing that programmers face because it is specific to the U.S., and it is far more expensive and inconvenient to become an American CPA than it is to learn some programming language.
.), and I bet that is the same at other companies. I have tried to learn as much programming on my own in order to save time on trying to analyze data that has been pissed away in inconsistent excel files.
The irony is that there are a lot of tasks that accountants use raw copy and pasting to perform every month (at least it appears the ones at my company do) that could be much better handled with some form of programming. The accounting and IS departments usually do not get along too well at my company (they just see things very differently . .
Anyway, you are either going to have outsourcing or you will see investors invest in companies located where labor is cheaper. Either way, you will find it just as difficult to get a job with simply "programmer" on your resume. There are many, many companies out there that need programmers, but they are too behind times to understand that what they need is customization of software. If you have some other skill that can get you into the door, that opens the way to create some very useful applications that will make you more valuable than those chasing numbers around on an excel sheet or those cheap foreign programmers that will need detailed design documentation to be able to contribute anything useful.