...and in the end only China and Russia will emerge from this dungheap smelling of roses.
Can't we simply say that the Western Ideals have been abandoned so we can safely watch "$COUNTRY Got Talent", wave our flags and pretend we are still worthy to be proud of? Surely?
There is always the chance that he really didn't know about this and the secret three-letter acronyms are running amuck. I'd gladly take a lying bastard over that particular prospect. Who watches the watchmen? Not us, obviously.
Whatever.
The story isn't that the GCHQ/NSA spied on everybody and shared data to circumvent checks and balances. At least it isn't anymore.
Now the story has become what the Western World truly is. And I find the sight horrifying.
It is a safe assumption that ALL secret service type of organisations have directly or indirectly profited from this jolly old mess. The mass snooping on private citizens barely got a reaction from head politicos of all parties involved. But once the story broke that official buildings may have been bugged everybody scrambled to voice their indignation.
Meanwhile the guy who unearthed what we all suspected but never had proof for is handled like a hot potato. Hong Kong let him go because extradition papers were not only late but also weren't filled out properly. The US officials couldn't be arsed to put passport number or his full and korrekt name in the form. If you were that sloppy with your tax forms you would be potentially facing a prison sentence.
Russia offers political asylum and smugly adds that it is conditional on him not further embarassing "our US partners".
France, Spain and Portugal refused the president of Bolivia to pass their air space because he might have Snowden on board. Yet everybody complains about what he had published. Meanwhile every western country declines to offer asylum based on technicalities. Yet when they buy stolen bank records for hefty sums they also grant the whistleblowers immunity and possibly a new identity. The sheer two-facedness is ghastly.
Reading today's news reads like a declaration of bankruptcy of the western ideals and we will all have to do our homework in the aftermath of this mess. When this is all over the only ones without egg on their face will be Russia and China of all places!
And we, the people, discuss Snowden's girlfriend's tits and now about who lied when about what instead of taking responsibility of our elected dear leaders.
It was years ago. And it was in response to proposed legislation for mandatory telco data retention. The legislation didn't go anywhere due to massive protests.
Now it turns out that that data still gets stored and will be used after clearance by secret courts. Which actually makes you wonder if western democracy is even skin-deep.
So yes, Malte's data porn still is relevant. And he also quite recently published an op-ed on the NYT which does a good job explaining why state snooping doesn't fly in Germany. Even if he forgets to mention the massive protests against temporary random searching installed in the 70ies to catch red terrorists. "Temprary" turned out to partly include "the next 40 years and potentially indefinitely".
Now that I've finally seen his name next to his mug I recall that guy from E3 footage.
He was the infuriating git who was constantly smiling smugly while we tried to figure out what he actually was smug about.
Of course he had to defend the party line even tho behind the scenes MS was already preparing a 180 degree marketing turn. But the way he did it damaged him personally in such a way that he couldn't show his face to the gaming press ever again. Which kind of disqualifies him from filling a position as talking head.
When you look at it that way it makes perfect sense that he leaves the gaming industry and joins Zynga as CEO.
Well, take for instance the massive GCHQ snooping effort. What they did was perfectly legal based on laws from the mid 90ies. Now 20 years on those laws prove not to be sufficient because technical limitations that had held the storage of data gained by massive trawling in check are simply gone. The only effect the recent revelations had in the UK is that Theresa May may give up on her Snooper's Charter for the time being. Apart from The Guardian everybody else seems to be hunky-dory.
Meanwhile in the US the biggest discussion seems to be the size of Snowden's girlfriends tits and why he did betray his country. And who had lied to the Congress. I see very few headlines regarding the NSA using GCHQ data to circumvent the "not spy on our own people without cause" thing. It's all focussed on the messenger. Not on the message.
Meanwhile in Germany...
People took to the street a couple of years ago when some politico tried to push telco meta-data storage through legislation. Not by the dozens, by the thousands. Not for just a weekend, but for months. As a result there is very strong anti-snooping legislation in Germany and the minister of justice is one of the strongest pro-privacy advocates in the country.
tl;dr:
You reap what you sow.
As a little brouhahaha on top of the brouhaha German federal prosecutors(as they are required to do) are currently trying to figure out who to drag into court over this whole thing. Not based on privacy laws but over cold war anti spying legislation which was intentionally vague as to make it easy to lock up them damn red spies. Those laws are cold war carbon copies of US laws. As in aiding and abetting foreign powers to the detriment of the state.
Having listened to those two I do have to concur.
Those two are prime examples of a first class moron. Homicidal morons, which is the only thing that truly distinguished them. They didn't have one coherent original thought between them. And they spoke in macros like lolcats. They even botched that. For the first time you get to hear them speak themselves. If you ever wondered what kind of moron falls for hate rhetoric, look no further.
Consider this proposition: We'll give you this belt loaded with explosives. For free. All we ask of you is that you put it on and release this button when we tell you. If you would please just go over there. A bit further. Further still. Yes, yes, paradise will be awesome.
In many ways they remind me of those two middle-class schoolboys who blew up the Boston marathon out of a vague feeling of disappointment with the American Dream. The younger ran over his brother while making a dash for it with his car.
Terrorist is too big a word for them. They are homicidal idiots and that's what they are. There's a difference between spending years in preparation and practice like the 9/11 guys did. It only takes a sick mind and a special brand of idiocy to attack somebody with knives.
What's really sad is that those two morons triggered other morons to attack people who had nothing to do with them employing the same impeccable logic that triggered that attack on that Sikh temple because they obviously were hate-mongering muslims.
It's like a big circle-jerk that didn't quite happen because the participants couldn't find each others dicks.
You may choose to feel terrorized but I will stick with contempt and disgust.
Well, the application container has a separate thread per running request. So that's why you keep your resources thread local. While it is true that in most cases requests aren't served concurrently you still have to program like they were. Thankfully you only have to watch shared resources. But one fool with statically defined variables can seriously rain on your parade.
The submitter has no power. No influence. Which is good since he also might not have a clue. If he had one then he'd know that this is a management issue.
I also doubt most of what is written in the blurb. Multithreading is a non-issue in most business software since we spent the past 20 years to make sure we don't have to fuck that particular beehive ever again. The only place where you need this skill is either on a systems level where you wouldn't have survived into an old age if you didn't know anything about it in the first place. Also who has not ever fucked up a VCS commit?
I either call BS or beehive fucker on this one.
Sorry for being so drastic but I had to deal with that kind of attitude when on of my new hires thought he knew everything best and started to fuck with one of my most experienced guys. I offered him to go with the program or simply go. So he went. Last I heard he quit his new job after 6 months. I smell the same kind of BS right here. Same stench.
...and this is why a lot of working environments are what they are. What you describe is a reign of terror that is unable to hold on to good people, ensure they stay valuable and will have a high fluctuation. A fucked company. With no management competence whatsoever.
Thankfully I feel quite safe in my assumption that you are not currently holding a management position.
The most useful skill is an understanding how to achieve what. If you can do it in one language you can do it in all. Language is syntax and that's it. APIs have documentation(or you shouldn't use them). I've not seen anything truly new in the past 20 years. Only old concepts with a new name. Or combinations of old concepts.
I once got asked what this "cloud" thing actually was. I told them that it's some server somewhere that you bet the farm on that it is maintained and available without being able to check. Cloud = server + blind faith. If you explain it like that then nobody is really that interested. Bring on the next buzzword. And it better not be "Message-Oriented Middleware" or "Software As A Service" or anything like that.
Well, if you don't know how the VM works then you are pretty limited in what you can achieve. While I would generally agree with you that understanding computers is beneficial I don't believe you have to have done a lot of C. Uphill, Through the snow. Both ways. That's how we synchronized our shared memory in the olden days.
Anecdote time:
When i was a newbie I had a project lead on a project that involved communication between a Java client and a C server. My project lead insisted that simply opening a socket and go with the protocol we should talk to the server by RMI. So far so bad. The server guys wrote an RMI component that translated it to their protocol.
Then our project lead went ahead and said that we should only exchange Strings. And since that wasn't insane enough he insisted that we encapsulated our data within XML.
So what we had was XML in Strings over RMI. Because connecting to a port was too difficult. When he got demoted I didn't get his job because I had "rocked the boat". In retrospect I have to be thankful for that. By then the team was deeply dysfunctional and started baaing like sheep. The customer was somewhat impatient due to a 1 year project overrun. The vendor of the server wanted to sue. And our management was confused what the problem was. You are truly fucked when your management sends in the mediators. I still stuck with them for 3 further years and learned a lot about management. And hiring tech. A career building failure, so to speak.
That is a relatively recent addition. I think they went with Doug Lea's concurrency package. For the first 10 years of Java's existence there was very little to help encapsulate concurrency. IIRC worker threads didn't even exist in 1.2 when they introduced Swing.
Database connections and concurrency are things I do not trust APIs with unless they are very well documented. In case of threads I bloody well need to know where the locks are so I can think it through. Deadlocks are ugly. Also concurrency is a technology independant concept. While there is a way to handle it in Java, the techniques are the same everywhere. Although it does help that the support within the language(not only in the API) is quite good.
In 15 years I only had to write proper concurrent code once. At the core of an application. Spent a week mostly thinking about how to test it. I covered the whiteboard in my office with diagrams. All for about 200 lines of code which by now I would consider boilerplate code. Concurrent code is all about experience and defensive programming.
Most code we write is concurrent by default since we do a lot of web applications. I tell my team to keep that in mind when creating mutable shared resources.
I remember back in the day when client-side Java was considered a thing. You had to write concurrent code or you would lock up your render thread(the famous gray pane while the application did something). You could easily spot code written by a newbie. Who would then subsequently say that Java sucked for all the wrong reasons while missing the real bugbears.
Do stuff sequentially when in doubt and know when you absolutely have to go concurrent. If it is complex and complicated it is also wrong by design. Never go full retard.
Writing concurrent code is not a skill set you need that often. But there are exceptions where you need at least a modicum of understanding.
We once had used a contractor for a minor web application. nothing fancy. The guy used static variables for session values achieving something nobody had ever done before: the single-user web application. He was not on my team otherwise I would have caught him since I usually review each check-in of people I do not know. He agreed to forfeit half his pay and the other team leader cleaned up his mess.
Concurrency isn't tied to a particular technology. Nor is version control something super fancy. The guy in the blurb doesn't seem to have a technological problem. He simply is scared and needs serious calming down so he understands that admitting he needs to improve in some areas doesn't automatically mean his immediate termination. It all comes down to if he has a sane manager. Nearly everybody can be salvaged. And nearly everybody should. As we all know the hiring process wil be a PITA. And it takes a long time until you can actually use a new guy. That's why when in doubt I will stick with my people.
This guy has a serious case of what Micheal Lopp calls "The Fez". It is a management failing and should be dealt with at that level. His termination would be the ultimate management defeat. YOU DO NOT FIRE YOUR MOST EXPERIENCED PEOPLE!
The big truly succesful multinationals plan ahead quite a bit further. Also their IT decisions are predictable. If they are return customers and we know their IT folks then we can tell the purchasing department that their requirements will be obsolete in a year or so. Then it is up to them and their budget planning if they want to have multiplattform right off the bat or fit it into their next budget.
The purchasing department never is all powerful. If the ordering department has good demonstrable reasons to go with the higher bid then they will concur. Unfortunately this only works with return customers. Otherwise the future of their IT gets farmed out to the lowest bidder or whoever let their CEO win at golf.
Yep, thecost isn't only in the buying and the rollout. You need a lot of planning.
The larger organisations have a lot of custom software that won't even run on anything but XP. Even an Office upgrade is risky since a lot of applications are a series of linked Excel sheets that will break in the next version. Not to mention all those ActiveX controls that had been put into place since some long gone consultant used them to build "rich" web applications. Then there is of the problem that vendors always switch stuff around between versions so you will need to adjust your maintenance/admin processes and tools.
Over the years software landscape has become so entangled that if you pull a string you will get the whole hairball. The companies are of course to blame themselves. If somebody gives me money to build an IE6 web app in 2012 and doesn't add IE8/9 budget on top of that then IE6 it is. It depends on if you run a business or a charity. And even if I ran a charity I wouldn't help out a multinational megacorp.
The distinction between rebellion and civil war sometimes eludes me.
Must be the same thing as terrorist and freedom fighter.
It seems to be a case of who gets to write the history books.
In that case the pen is mightier than the sword. Or in our days propably TV. Isn't it amazing how the staunchest supportes of, say, the Irak war are also those who are in complete error of why it got started, what it initially tried to achieve and why in that respect it wasn't successful at all?
Same goes for the old myth that a ragtag band of patriots drove away the British. Or the widely held belief that the Founding Fathers were religious. They too wore funny hats but not as funny as the puritans who we sacrifice turkeys to.
Sure. Let everybody have a gun. But have them prove they also have the education as to when to use them and when not.
Slashdot Mirror
...and in the end only China and Russia will emerge from this dungheap smelling of roses.
Can't we simply say that the Western Ideals have been abandoned so we can safely watch "$COUNTRY Got Talent", wave our flags and pretend we are still worthy to be proud of? Surely?
There is always the chance that he really didn't know about this and the secret three-letter acronyms are running amuck. I'd gladly take a lying bastard over that particular prospect.
Who watches the watchmen? Not us, obviously.
Whatever.
The story isn't that the GCHQ/NSA spied on everybody and shared data to circumvent checks and balances. At least it isn't anymore.
Now the story has become what the Western World truly is. And I find the sight horrifying.
It is a safe assumption that ALL secret service type of organisations have directly or indirectly profited from this jolly old mess. The mass snooping on private citizens barely got a reaction from head politicos of all parties involved. But once the story broke that official buildings may have been bugged everybody scrambled to voice their indignation.
Meanwhile the guy who unearthed what we all suspected but never had proof for is handled like a hot potato. Hong Kong let him go because extradition papers were not only late but also weren't filled out properly. The US officials couldn't be arsed to put passport number or his full and korrekt name in the form. If you were that sloppy with your tax forms you would be potentially facing a prison sentence.
Russia offers political asylum and smugly adds that it is conditional on him not further embarassing "our US partners".
France, Spain and Portugal refused the president of Bolivia to pass their air space because he might have Snowden on board. Yet everybody complains about what he had published. Meanwhile every western country declines to offer asylum based on technicalities. Yet when they buy stolen bank records for hefty sums they also grant the whistleblowers immunity and possibly a new identity. The sheer two-facedness is ghastly.
Reading today's news reads like a declaration of bankruptcy of the western ideals and we will all have to do our homework in the aftermath of this mess. When this is all over the only ones without egg on their face will be Russia and China of all places!
And we, the people, discuss Snowden's girlfriend's tits and now about who lied when about what instead of taking responsibility of our elected dear leaders.
It was years ago. And it was in response to proposed legislation for mandatory telco data retention. The legislation didn't go anywhere due to massive protests.
Now it turns out that that data still gets stored and will be used after clearance by secret courts. Which actually makes you wonder if western democracy is even skin-deep.
So yes, Malte's data porn still is relevant. And he also quite recently published an op-ed on the NYT which does a good job explaining why state snooping doesn't fly in Germany. Even if he forgets to mention the massive protests against temporary random searching installed in the 70ies to catch red terrorists. "Temprary" turned out to partly include "the next 40 years and potentially indefinitely".
Now that I've finally seen his name next to his mug I recall that guy from E3 footage.
He was the infuriating git who was constantly smiling smugly while we tried to figure out what he actually was smug about.
Of course he had to defend the party line even tho behind the scenes MS was already preparing a 180 degree marketing turn. But the way he did it damaged him personally in such a way that he couldn't show his face to the gaming press ever again. Which kind of disqualifies him from filling a position as talking head.
When you look at it that way it makes perfect sense that he leaves the gaming industry and joins Zynga as CEO.
Well, take for instance the massive GCHQ snooping effort. What they did was perfectly legal based on laws from the mid 90ies. Now 20 years on those laws prove not to be sufficient because technical limitations that had held the storage of data gained by massive trawling in check are simply gone. The only effect the recent revelations had in the UK is that Theresa May may give up on her Snooper's Charter for the time being. Apart from The Guardian everybody else seems to be hunky-dory.
Meanwhile in the US the biggest discussion seems to be the size of Snowden's girlfriends tits and why he did betray his country. And who had lied to the Congress. I see very few headlines regarding the NSA using GCHQ data to circumvent the "not spy on our own people without cause" thing. It's all focussed on the messenger. Not on the message.
Meanwhile in Germany...
People took to the street a couple of years ago when some politico tried to push telco meta-data storage through legislation. Not by the dozens, by the thousands. Not for just a weekend, but for months. As a result there is very strong anti-snooping legislation in Germany and the minister of justice is one of the strongest pro-privacy advocates in the country.
tl;dr:
You reap what you sow.
As a little brouhahaha on top of the brouhaha German federal prosecutors(as they are required to do) are currently trying to figure out who to drag into court over this whole thing. Not based on privacy laws but over cold war anti spying legislation which was intentionally vague as to make it easy to lock up them damn red spies. Those laws are cold war carbon copies of US laws. As in aiding and abetting foreign powers to the detriment of the state.
Having listened to those two I do have to concur.
Those two are prime examples of a first class moron. Homicidal morons, which is the only thing that truly distinguished them. They didn't have one coherent original thought between them. And they spoke in macros like lolcats. They even botched that. For the first time you get to hear them speak themselves. If you ever wondered what kind of moron falls for hate rhetoric, look no further.
Consider this proposition: We'll give you this belt loaded with explosives. For free. All we ask of you is that you put it on and release this button when we tell you. If you would please just go over there. A bit further. Further still. Yes, yes, paradise will be awesome.
In many ways they remind me of those two middle-class schoolboys who blew up the Boston marathon out of a vague feeling of disappointment with the American Dream. The younger ran over his brother while making a dash for it with his car.
Terrorist is too big a word for them. They are homicidal idiots and that's what they are. There's a difference between spending years in preparation and practice like the 9/11 guys did. It only takes a sick mind and a special brand of idiocy to attack somebody with knives.
What's really sad is that those two morons triggered other morons to attack people who had nothing to do with them employing the same impeccable logic that triggered that attack on that Sikh temple because they obviously were hate-mongering muslims.
It's like a big circle-jerk that didn't quite happen because the participants couldn't find each others dicks.
You may choose to feel terrorized but I will stick with contempt and disgust.
...and Sega before that.
I wonder if they know that those generated sales if the game wasn't too bad. It might even be legally justified. But a smart move this isn't.
Well. I don't. I'm running a Chrome plugin that replaces the word "cloud" with "butt". Makes a lot more sense that way.
Well, the application container has a separate thread per running request. So that's why you keep your resources thread local. While it is true that in most cases requests aren't served concurrently you still have to program like they were. Thankfully you only have to watch shared resources. But one fool with statically defined variables can seriously rain on your parade.
The submitter has no power. No influence. Which is good since he also might not have a clue. If he had one then he'd know that this is a management issue.
I also doubt most of what is written in the blurb. Multithreading is a non-issue in most business software since we spent the past 20 years to make sure we don't have to fuck that particular beehive ever again. The only place where you need this skill is either on a systems level where you wouldn't have survived into an old age if you didn't know anything about it in the first place. Also who has not ever fucked up a VCS commit?
I either call BS or beehive fucker on this one.
Sorry for being so drastic but I had to deal with that kind of attitude when on of my new hires thought he knew everything best and started to fuck with one of my most experienced guys. I offered him to go with the program or simply go. So he went. Last I heard he quit his new job after 6 months. I smell the same kind of BS right here. Same stench.
...and this is why a lot of working environments are what they are. What you describe is a reign of terror that is unable to hold on to good people, ensure they stay valuable and will have a high fluctuation. A fucked company. With no management competence whatsoever.
Thankfully I feel quite safe in my assumption that you are not currently holding a management position.
Yup. It is. There have been books written about this but they only seem to be read by techs. Too little MBA mumbo-jumbo and too much common sense.
Michael Lopp has described this as The Fez. Rands in Repose is an awesome blog and his book is also quite nice.
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/01/24/avoiding_the_fez.html
Joel Spolsky also had a few run-ins with having to manage while being tech.
Technology is transient. Methodology isn't.
The most useful skill is an understanding how to achieve what. If you can do it in one language you can do it in all. Language is syntax and that's it. APIs have documentation(or you shouldn't use them). I've not seen anything truly new in the past 20 years. Only old concepts with a new name. Or combinations of old concepts.
I once got asked what this "cloud" thing actually was. I told them that it's some server somewhere that you bet the farm on that it is maintained and available without being able to check. Cloud = server + blind faith. If you explain it like that then nobody is really that interested. Bring on the next buzzword. And it better not be "Message-Oriented Middleware" or "Software As A Service" or anything like that.
Well, if you don't know how the VM works then you are pretty limited in what you can achieve. While I would generally agree with you that understanding computers is beneficial I don't believe you have to have done a lot of C. Uphill, Through the snow. Both ways. That's how we synchronized our shared memory in the olden days.
Anecdote time:
When i was a newbie I had a project lead on a project that involved communication between a Java client and a C server. My project lead insisted that simply opening a socket and go with the protocol we should talk to the server by RMI. So far so bad. The server guys wrote an RMI component that translated it to their protocol.
Then our project lead went ahead and said that we should only exchange Strings. And since that wasn't insane enough he insisted that we encapsulated our data within XML.
So what we had was XML in Strings over RMI. Because connecting to a port was too difficult. When he got demoted I didn't get his job because I had "rocked the boat". In retrospect I have to be thankful for that. By then the team was deeply dysfunctional and started baaing like sheep. The customer was somewhat impatient due to a 1 year project overrun. The vendor of the server wanted to sue. And our management was confused what the problem was. You are truly fucked when your management sends in the mediators. I still stuck with them for 3 further years and learned a lot about management. And hiring tech. A career building failure, so to speak.
Yeah, we use immutable objects a lot. Either you are threadsafe by design or you aren't threadsafe at all. There is no retrofitting.
That is a relatively recent addition. I think they went with Doug Lea's concurrency package. For the first 10 years of Java's existence there was very little to help encapsulate concurrency. IIRC worker threads didn't even exist in 1.2 when they introduced Swing.
Database connections and concurrency are things I do not trust APIs with unless they are very well documented. In case of threads I bloody well need to know where the locks are so I can think it through. Deadlocks are ugly. Also concurrency is a technology independant concept. While there is a way to handle it in Java, the techniques are the same everywhere. Although it does help that the support within the language(not only in the API) is quite good.
...also these are processes. You only need to synchronize on shared resources. Assuming the OS doesn't already do it for you.
Nothing to feel stupid about and you did exactly the right thing.
That's the learning process. And that's why experience is so valuable.
In 15 years I only had to write proper concurrent code once. At the core of an application. Spent a week mostly thinking about how to test it. I covered the whiteboard in my office with diagrams. All for about 200 lines of code which by now I would consider boilerplate code. Concurrent code is all about experience and defensive programming.
Most code we write is concurrent by default since we do a lot of web applications. I tell my team to keep that in mind when creating mutable shared resources.
I remember back in the day when client-side Java was considered a thing. You had to write concurrent code or you would lock up your render thread(the famous gray pane while the application did something). You could easily spot code written by a newbie. Who would then subsequently say that Java sucked for all the wrong reasons while missing the real bugbears.
Do stuff sequentially when in doubt and know when you absolutely have to go concurrent. If it is complex and complicated it is also wrong by design. Never go full retard.
Writing concurrent code is not a skill set you need that often. But there are exceptions where you need at least a modicum of understanding.
We once had used a contractor for a minor web application. nothing fancy. The guy used static variables for session values achieving something nobody had ever done before: the single-user web application. He was not on my team otherwise I would have caught him since I usually review each check-in of people I do not know. He agreed to forfeit half his pay and the other team leader cleaned up his mess.
Concurrency isn't tied to a particular technology. Nor is version control something super fancy. The guy in the blurb doesn't seem to have a technological problem. He simply is scared and needs serious calming down so he understands that admitting he needs to improve in some areas doesn't automatically mean his immediate termination. It all comes down to if he has a sane manager. Nearly everybody can be salvaged. And nearly everybody should. As we all know the hiring process wil be a PITA. And it takes a long time until you can actually use a new guy. That's why when in doubt I will stick with my people.
This guy has a serious case of what Micheal Lopp calls "The Fez". It is a management failing and should be dealt with at that level. His termination would be the ultimate management defeat. YOU DO NOT FIRE YOUR MOST EXPERIENCED PEOPLE!
The big truly succesful multinationals plan ahead quite a bit further. Also their IT decisions are predictable. If they are return customers and we know their IT folks then we can tell the purchasing department that their requirements will be obsolete in a year or so. Then it is up to them and their budget planning if they want to have multiplattform right off the bat or fit it into their next budget.
The purchasing department never is all powerful. If the ordering department has good demonstrable reasons to go with the higher bid then they will concur. Unfortunately this only works with return customers. Otherwise the future of their IT gets farmed out to the lowest bidder or whoever let their CEO win at golf.
Yep, thecost isn't only in the buying and the rollout. You need a lot of planning.
The larger organisations have a lot of custom software that won't even run on anything but XP. Even an Office upgrade is risky since a lot of applications are a series of linked Excel sheets that will break in the next version. Not to mention all those ActiveX controls that had been put into place since some long gone consultant used them to build "rich" web applications. Then there is of the problem that vendors always switch stuff around between versions so you will need to adjust your maintenance/admin processes and tools.
Over the years software landscape has become so entangled that if you pull a string you will get the whole hairball. The companies are of course to blame themselves. If somebody gives me money to build an IE6 web app in 2012 and doesn't add IE8/9 budget on top of that then IE6 it is. It depends on if you run a business or a charity. And even if I ran a charity I wouldn't help out a multinational megacorp.
I'd call it a civil war. Those are great fun.
200 years later everybody could be confused about what was going on then and if it actually was worth it.
The distinction between rebellion and civil war sometimes eludes me.
Must be the same thing as terrorist and freedom fighter.
It seems to be a case of who gets to write the history books.
In that case the pen is mightier than the sword. Or in our days propably TV. Isn't it amazing how the staunchest supportes of, say, the Irak war are also those who are in complete error of why it got started, what it initially tried to achieve and why in that respect it wasn't successful at all?
Same goes for the old myth that a ragtag band of patriots drove away the British. Or the widely held belief that the Founding Fathers were religious. They too wore funny hats but not as funny as the puritans who we sacrifice turkeys to.
Sure. Let everybody have a gun. But have them prove they also have the education as to when to use them and when not.