Uh... you do know that Standard Oil was broken up by the government. The reason they don't exist has nothing to do with superior alternatives or market forces. Standard Oil is actually an excellent argument against your thesis because left to its own devices it would almost certainly still be ridiculously dominant.
You say that no one wants to pay for incremental changes to Office or Windows, and yet people spend billions upon billions of dollars doing exactly that every year.
In short, you're arguing that the market will be rational or behave the way you think it should, rather than looking at how the market actually has and continues to behave.
Probably Office will be gone someday... but that day is not coming soon. Just like the day that we stop using so much oil is not coming soon. You don't even have to like Office or Microsoft to understand that -- you just need to deal with the world as it actually is.
PHP is about as close to Perl as you can get without actually being Perl.
No, and I've worked with both Perl and PHP. Try again.
I'll give you an easy example: what breaks (or could break) if you try to convert a PHP4 project to a PHP5 project? Someone who makes their living as a PHP developer will know that. A Perl developer probably won't.
I think phase 3 is "Taking all the customers you have successfully locked into using your software and giving them the butt-fucking they so richly deserve,"
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
It is inevitable that Windows and Office will fall by the way-side.
Based on what, exactly?
That's one of the major complaints about Microsoft. When those products go what else do they have? A patent war?
When people stop using databases, what does Oracle really have?
When people stop searching for things on the internet, what does Google have?
At this point there's still no credible threat to Windows on the desktop or Office on the horizon, and anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you something or has adopted Open Source as a religion rather than a merely very good idea.
Outlook is a piss poor imap client and Sharepoint is a lousy CMS
And democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others that have been tried.
(Alternately, Outlook is more than an imap client and Sharepoint is more than a CMS.)
The world is full of products that everyone seems to hate that nonetheless enjoy a ridiculous level of marketplace dominance because even if they are terrible, they still seem to be the best for what most of the market wants. Flash, for example.
I've been noticing more companies are dropping the Bundled Office for a discounted price and using OpenOffice instead.
It's very probable that my experience does not represent the whole, but I have literally never seen OpenOffice in use in any of the many businesses I have worked for. Even when I've worked with IBM employees they were still using Outlook instead of Lotus, much less OO.
Lots of servers and many phones, tablets and other devices where windows CE once played.
It's very possible that I just don't know enough about the mobile space, but was Windows CE ever, at any point, a commercial success? If so, I blinked and missed it, but I do freely admit I don't know a lot of the history there.
Your problem is that you seem to view each of Microsoft and open source as monolithic united entities with a single mind and vision.
Sure, I'd fully expect MS to try to slap the shit out of, say, OpenOffice if it's infringing on one of their Office patents. Note that I'm not arguing for whether that would be right or wrong, only that you should expect it.
But there's open source software that does a million other things that Microsoft isn't directly trying to sell a product for. And why wouldn't they, especially internally, be a fan of and use the hell out of any of that?
For Microsoft, their business is in selling software, and everybody else is a competitor. In the case of Open Source, a very annoying competitor they can't get rid of easily.
However, open source hasn't been a serious (as in market share) competitor in the areas where Microsoft traditionally makes most of its money. I mean, sure, they'd make a huge pile of money and love it if everyone with Linux servers dumped them for Windows servers, but that's never going to happen.
Also note that Microsoft isn't likely to GPL Office or anything like that. They're probably just coming to see its adoption as orthogonal to their core business more often than not.
This shouldn't surprise anyone too much. Ten years ago some people really thought that Linux was going to replace Windows on everyone's desktop, open source projects were going to kill Office, etc.
Which never happened.
The reality is that there's room for both open and closed source software in the world.
The other thing that kills me about this is new hires must be a perfect match, but anyone here longer than six months has already gone thru three complete reorgs to totally new platforms. So... the entire current staff has to do OJT but new hires cannot? Anyone who's actually held an IT job longer than six months can back me up on this.
To be fair, the current staff already has knowledge of the company's business domain, practices, personnel, legacy projects, etc. that gives them value over a new hire.
(Not to argue that all or even most requirements on new hires are reasonable.)
A friend of mine applied there, got an interview, and then was told no because he didn't know PHP, despite having a few years of Perl. Cause, you know, the sheet said PHP, and programming can't possibly just be programming, right?
That's not completely invalid, unless your friend was the only candidate.
Learning a new programming language is usually trivial. Learning all of the libraries, design ideas, best practices, hidden pitfalls, etc. around that language usually isn't. Hell, at an enterprise level I'm not an especially qualified Java developer today despite having a good 8 or so years of professional Java dev on my resume because so much of the constructs and practices around the language are constantly changing and I haven't done enough of it lately.
Sometimes someone who has the background to eventually learn how to do a job well is good enough -- but if you're competing with people who are ready to do it on day one because they do have the specific experience, don't be surprised if you don't get the offer.
That's not new. Most colleges/universities do theory-heavy courses designed to let you learn the next big technology.
True, but universities could choose to provide more of a practical or business-useful tilt. (I don't want to get into the argument of whether or not they should.)
The example I always use is that in four years of undergrad classes at a top-rated (at the time, I have no idea if it still is) American university for computer science, I never encountered a database. In industry, I'm not sure I've encountered a project that didn't use a database for something. And, sure, I was taught a lot more complicated things than basic SQL, but as far as the business world is concerned that's a hell of an omission.
For what it's worth, I picked "public transit commute through Oakland" because I learned a lot of slang that way a decade or so ago when I was rocking the BART. I sadly don't get out that way often enough anymore.
Demanding that a subculture learn SAE, is the same as demanding that every subculture of America be, or at least practice Christianity.
We do have freedom of religion enshrined in our Constitution; we don't have freedom of language included as far as I know. While I agree that demanding a subculture learn and always use SAE is unreasonable, here I think you've gone too far.
Is it possible for most English speakers to follow most of it, figuring out words they don't know from context cues, etc.? Sure, I think it is.
Is it also possible to lose possibly important nuances in the process? I think that's the case, too. For example, a hooptie is a car but there's also a fair amount of connotation to that choice of word.
First, how does the Justice Department, as part of their interviewing process, figure out if someone legitimately has this skill or is faking it? This can't be that far from being the linguistic equivalent of a non-technical company trying to hire a programmer or IT person with a particular kind of expertise. In the tech world those situations are dailywtf's waiting to happen -- it can't be much better in this one.
Second, if you had this expertise, how would you keep it current? Spend an hour a day riding public transportation in Oakland?
There are lots of democracies in the world not run by white people.
However, it's still the case that you can't knock over the government in a country that has never really had democracy and suddenly make democracy work by forcing it on people. It's too much of a cultural shift too fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... you do know that Standard Oil was broken up by the government. The reason they don't exist has nothing to do with superior alternatives or market forces. Standard Oil is actually an excellent argument against your thesis because left to its own devices it would almost certainly still be ridiculously dominant.
You say that no one wants to pay for incremental changes to Office or Windows, and yet people spend billions upon billions of dollars doing exactly that every year.
In short, you're arguing that the market will be rational or behave the way you think it should, rather than looking at how the market actually has and continues to behave.
Probably Office will be gone someday... but that day is not coming soon. Just like the day that we stop using so much oil is not coming soon. You don't even have to like Office or Microsoft to understand that -- you just need to deal with the world as it actually is.
That's some good partisan trolling is what that is.
I have and do. :)
I remember that the last version of Notes I had to use would crash constantly, and then refuse to start up again until the computer was rebooted.
I see. You work in HR, I take it.
PHP is about as close to Perl as you can get without actually being Perl.
No, and I've worked with both Perl and PHP. Try again.
I'll give you an easy example: what breaks (or could break) if you try to convert a PHP4 project to a PHP5 project? Someone who makes their living as a PHP developer will know that. A Perl developer probably won't.
I couldn't say if it's the norm, just the way it was for me.
Our required classes on relational algebra were all theory/math and zero practical application. That was most of my classes, to be fair.
I think phase 3 is "Taking all the customers you have successfully locked into using your software and giving them the butt-fucking they so richly deserve,"
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
It is inevitable that Windows and Office will fall by the way-side.
Based on what, exactly?
That's one of the major complaints about Microsoft. When those products go what else do they have? A patent war?
When people stop using databases, what does Oracle really have?
When people stop searching for things on the internet, what does Google have?
At this point there's still no credible threat to Windows on the desktop or Office on the horizon, and anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you something or has adopted Open Source as a religion rather than a merely very good idea.
Outlook is a piss poor imap client and Sharepoint is a lousy CMS
And democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others that have been tried.
(Alternately, Outlook is more than an imap client and Sharepoint is more than a CMS.)
The world is full of products that everyone seems to hate that nonetheless enjoy a ridiculous level of marketplace dominance because even if they are terrible, they still seem to be the best for what most of the market wants. Flash, for example.
I've been noticing more companies are dropping the Bundled Office for a discounted price and using OpenOffice instead.
It's very probable that my experience does not represent the whole, but I have literally never seen OpenOffice in use in any of the many businesses I have worked for. Even when I've worked with IBM employees they were still using Outlook instead of Lotus, much less OO.
Lots of servers and many phones, tablets and other devices where windows CE once played.
It's very possible that I just don't know enough about the mobile space, but was Windows CE ever, at any point, a commercial success? If so, I blinked and missed it, but I do freely admit I don't know a lot of the history there.
Your problem is that you seem to view each of Microsoft and open source as monolithic united entities with a single mind and vision.
Sure, I'd fully expect MS to try to slap the shit out of, say, OpenOffice if it's infringing on one of their Office patents. Note that I'm not arguing for whether that would be right or wrong, only that you should expect it.
But there's open source software that does a million other things that Microsoft isn't directly trying to sell a product for. And why wouldn't they, especially internally, be a fan of and use the hell out of any of that?
For Microsoft, their business is in selling software, and everybody else is a competitor. In the case of Open Source, a very annoying competitor they can't get rid of easily.
However, open source hasn't been a serious (as in market share) competitor in the areas where Microsoft traditionally makes most of its money. I mean, sure, they'd make a huge pile of money and love it if everyone with Linux servers dumped them for Windows servers, but that's never going to happen.
Also note that Microsoft isn't likely to GPL Office or anything like that. They're probably just coming to see its adoption as orthogonal to their core business more often than not.
This shouldn't surprise anyone too much. Ten years ago some people really thought that Linux was going to replace Windows on everyone's desktop, open source projects were going to kill Office, etc.
Which never happened.
The reality is that there's room for both open and closed source software in the world.
The other thing that kills me about this is new hires must be a perfect match, but anyone here longer than six months has already gone thru three complete reorgs to totally new platforms. So ... the entire current staff has to do OJT but new hires cannot? Anyone who's actually held an IT job longer than six months can back me up on this.
To be fair, the current staff already has knowledge of the company's business domain, practices, personnel, legacy projects, etc. that gives them value over a new hire.
(Not to argue that all or even most requirements on new hires are reasonable.)
A friend of mine applied there, got an interview, and then was told no because he didn't know PHP, despite having a few years of Perl. Cause, you know, the sheet said PHP, and programming can't possibly just be programming, right?
That's not completely invalid, unless your friend was the only candidate.
Learning a new programming language is usually trivial. Learning all of the libraries, design ideas, best practices, hidden pitfalls, etc. around that language usually isn't. Hell, at an enterprise level I'm not an especially qualified Java developer today despite having a good 8 or so years of professional Java dev on my resume because so much of the constructs and practices around the language are constantly changing and I haven't done enough of it lately.
Sometimes someone who has the background to eventually learn how to do a job well is good enough -- but if you're competing with people who are ready to do it on day one because they do have the specific experience, don't be surprised if you don't get the offer.
That's not new. Most colleges/universities do theory-heavy courses designed to let you learn the next big technology.
True, but universities could choose to provide more of a practical or business-useful tilt. (I don't want to get into the argument of whether or not they should.)
The example I always use is that in four years of undergrad classes at a top-rated (at the time, I have no idea if it still is) American university for computer science, I never encountered a database. In industry, I'm not sure I've encountered a project that didn't use a database for something. And, sure, I was taught a lot more complicated things than basic SQL, but as far as the business world is concerned that's a hell of an omission.
A number of specious things manage to get voted up.
Or haven't you ever seen someone organize a campaign for that?
Maybe it could be Ellison-as-Hitler instead. Just go ahead and pre-bust the Godwin cherry on all the Oracle stories.
Urban Dictionary should suffice
Okay, but now how are you going to tell the terms/definitions on UrbanDictionary that people legitimately use from the ones that people just make up?
It's a fun site but dictionary.com it's not.
For what it's worth, I picked "public transit commute through Oakland" because I learned a lot of slang that way a decade or so ago when I was rocking the BART. I sadly don't get out that way often enough anymore.
I was with you until this point:
Demanding that a subculture learn SAE, is the same as demanding that every subculture of America be, or at least practice Christianity.
We do have freedom of religion enshrined in our Constitution; we don't have freedom of language included as far as I know. While I agree that demanding a subculture learn and always use SAE is unreasonable, here I think you've gone too far.
Respectfully, I think you're choosing to read a lot more into this story than is really there.
Well, look at it this way:
Is it possible for most English speakers to follow most of it, figuring out words they don't know from context cues, etc.? Sure, I think it is.
Is it also possible to lose possibly important nuances in the process? I think that's the case, too. For example, a hooptie is a car but there's also a fair amount of connotation to that choice of word.
First, how does the Justice Department, as part of their interviewing process, figure out if someone legitimately has this skill or is faking it? This can't be that far from being the linguistic equivalent of a non-technical company trying to hire a programmer or IT person with a particular kind of expertise. In the tech world those situations are dailywtf's waiting to happen -- it can't be much better in this one.
Second, if you had this expertise, how would you keep it current? Spend an hour a day riding public transportation in Oakland?
There are lots of democracies in the world not run by white people.
However, it's still the case that you can't knock over the government in a country that has never really had democracy and suddenly make democracy work by forcing it on people. It's too much of a cultural shift too fast.