Those are valid knocks against MS, and I'm no big fan of Gates and Friends. However, it is a historical reality that without MS windows, desktop computing would still be a idiosyncratic little community typing out cryptic strings to a command line OS to do computing. Windows brought computing to the masses. Command line OSes were just too abstract for casual, low-tech users and MACs were (and are) prohibitively expensive.
Yes, MS has done some very evil things and some very incompetent things. But MS Windows gave rise to our industry's explosion, and they deserve a small amount of positive affirmation for that.
Just as it is impossible to quantify how much development hasn't occurred because of MS competition stifling, it is equally impossible to quantify how much of the last decade's content would not have been developed if MS hadn't developed an affordable GUI OS where any monkey could launch an app by clicking an icon. So maybe we are 5 development cycles behind where we would be if MS had published Windows in a perfect and altruistic world, but we are many development cycles ahead of where would be now if Windows hadn't been developed at all.
This whole argument can be read as "I want access to *any* information I want, but I only want to allow access to a certain amount of my information." Just a funadamentally flawed line of reasoning.
Perhaps if porn producers are able to track porn purchasing habits then they can produce a better quality of porn which would benefit the entire porn purveying community. This is a perfectly acceptable use of "private" information. It's a simple point - if you would care that someone is tracking you porn purchases, don't purchase porn - or viagra, or subscriptions to mail order bride sites,...
As for that whole "Amazon and the other data collectors are the same as Nazis" argument in the last paragraph - just a freaking load of crap. As if a lack of census data would have provented the holocaust. So riduculous it's laughable. Europeans were launching wholesale pogroms aimed at eradicating Jews centuries before census techniques were developed. In fact, centuries before double entry accounting was developed in the late middle ages, Jews were already suffering from periodic pogroms in Europe. Data doesn't kill people - bad people who are given power kill people. And how does the public identify people likely to abuse authority? Exactly by accessing the information on those potential Hitlers that Ckwop wants to keep the public from accessing.
So a single WiFi point atop a city's tallest building could provide the entire metro region with high speed wireless internet access (hswia)? If this feat can be reliably duplicated, even at a relatively high cost it will lead to a revolution. With just a hundred or so hardware modules 80%+ of the US's pop would have free hswia! It could be the highest impact innovation since the explosion of the internet itself. Certainly it would overshadow the rise of residential broadband access. All those cable and phone companies would have to get out of the data business (since it would be free) and get back to the cable and phone businesses.
I'm curious why Americans are so shocked that the world preeminence we have enjoyed for a century looks like it will come an end in the next few generations (if we're lucky).
History is in fact rife with empires that rose to politcal, military and cultural dominance and then (for whatever reason) saw it slip away. The English before US. The Spanish before them. The HRE, Romans, Egyptians...
Why on earth do Americans think, "Oh, but the American world dominance will be the one that lasts forever?" Didn't the English believe that in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries? The Spanish in the fourteenth - seventeenth centuries?...
It is a fact of history: Cultures rise to dominance and then fade from dominance. America is just fulfilling the eon old historical pattern. Maybe China will be the next in line; Maybe an unified Europe; Maybe India; Maybe a repeat of the middle ages where there was no global power. I don't know. But I do know, that eventually America will fall from its penacle. No doubt about it.
The fact is that if you are a good programmer, you can get an entry level programmer position without a CS degree. If you're good at math, and want to be a programmer you're much better off taking a job doing tech support at an IT company straight out of high school than going to college. In that tech support role, you'll learn from real programmers doing real programming and in a couple years get a job as an entry level programmer. By your 2nd - 3rd year of programming, you'll be a tech lead at about the same time your fellow high school alums graduate from college. If you spend the 4-5 years to get a CS degree, you'll end up 2-3 years behind the technophiles who go straight into IT from high school.
At some point, a degree may be desireable to move into mgmt at larger corps, but you can pick that up (without debt) part time with company paid benefits in you first 7-8 years of employment. Of course, you'll miss out on all the non-career benefitting activities of college...
Added to this is the "betrayal" of 2003-2004... In the late 1990s all the software advocates were scurrying around high school campuses expounding to the good math students what a great life they would have if they went of to college and got their CS degree. So four years later, those kids started saying, "Okay, I've got my CS degree, where's my kewl job?", but industry was saying,"Oh, well, we're in a recession and we've found some nice Indians and Chinese who'll do our software dev. Have a nice life." You could almost hear the stampede of upperclassmen rushing to their advisor to switch out of CS and into econ, and engineering in 2002 as word circulated about the software dev outsourcing trend in industry.
As for the gender bias, the fact is that programming is generally a male field. Not because men are inherently better programmers, but because men (generally) program more. For most successful male programmers, programming is not just their chosen profession, it is their primary hobby in one form or another as well. I appreciate that there *exists* women who program 9 hrs a day professionally, and then go home and tinker on their linux box, or personal webserver for another 4-5 hrs over their Chinese takeout, but such women are the *exception*, whereas *every* male programmer I've ever met leaves their daytime programming job and go home (or some wireless hotspot) to putter around on their own personal software projects. Frankly, I believe women have a healthier attitude toward software development, but my opinion doesn't change the facts. So when a hiring manager is looking at a male candidate who is two years out of college, and a female candidate for the same job, that male candidate almost certainly has 2500+ more hours of programming experience than the female. And that extra programming shows up in technical interviews. Right out of college they're probably closer to parity, but career path-wise men generally out program women because men program more than women. My experience has been that when a woman is programming as much as her male counterparts (and I've know a handful who did) their is no appreciable difference between their careers. If *anything* those women do better than their male counterparts because management finds it so refreshing to have a woman who has programming as her hobby as well as her profession.
Anyone can have his cake and eat it, too. Perhaps you mean "eat his cake and have it, too" (which can't be done; once you eat your cake, it is gone and you therefore can no longer have it).
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Those are valid knocks against MS, and I'm no big fan of Gates and Friends. However, it is a historical reality that without MS windows, desktop computing would still be a idiosyncratic little community typing out cryptic strings to a command line OS to do computing. Windows brought computing to the masses. Command line OSes were just too abstract for casual, low-tech users and MACs were (and are) prohibitively expensive.
Yes, MS has done some very evil things and some very incompetent things. But MS Windows gave rise to our industry's explosion, and they deserve a small amount of positive affirmation for that.
Just as it is impossible to quantify how much development hasn't occurred because of MS competition stifling, it is equally impossible to quantify how much of the last decade's content would not have been developed if MS hadn't developed an affordable GUI OS where any monkey could launch an app by clicking an icon. So maybe we are 5 development cycles behind where we would be if MS had published Windows in a perfect and altruistic world, but we are many development cycles ahead of where would be now if Windows hadn't been developed at all.
This whole argument can be read as "I want access to *any* information I want, but I only want to allow access to a certain amount of my information." Just a funadamentally flawed line of reasoning.
Perhaps if porn producers are able to track porn purchasing habits then they can produce a better quality of porn which would benefit the entire porn purveying community. This is a perfectly acceptable use of "private" information. It's a simple point - if you would care that someone is tracking you porn purchases, don't purchase porn - or viagra, or subscriptions to mail order bride sites, ...
As for that whole "Amazon and the other data collectors are the same as Nazis" argument in the last paragraph - just a freaking load of crap. As if a lack of census data would have provented the holocaust. So riduculous it's laughable. Europeans were launching wholesale pogroms aimed at eradicating Jews centuries before census techniques were developed. In fact, centuries before double entry accounting was developed in the late middle ages, Jews were already suffering from periodic pogroms in Europe. Data doesn't kill people - bad people who are given power kill people. And how does the public identify people likely to abuse authority? Exactly by accessing the information on those potential Hitlers that Ckwop wants to keep the public from accessing.
So a single WiFi point atop a city's tallest building could provide the entire metro region with high speed wireless internet access (hswia)? If this feat can be reliably duplicated, even at a relatively high cost it will lead to a revolution. With just a hundred or so hardware modules 80%+ of the US's pop would have free hswia! It could be the highest impact innovation since the explosion of the internet itself. Certainly it would overshadow the rise of residential broadband access. All those cable and phone companies would have to get out of the data business (since it would be free) and get back to the cable and phone businesses.
I'm curious why Americans are so shocked that the world preeminence we have enjoyed for a century looks like it will come an end in the next few generations (if we're lucky).
History is in fact rife with empires that rose to politcal, military and cultural dominance and then (for whatever reason) saw it slip away. The English before US. The Spanish before them. The HRE, Romans, Egyptians...
Why on earth do Americans think, "Oh, but the American world dominance will be the one that lasts forever?" Didn't the English believe that in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries? The Spanish in the fourteenth - seventeenth centuries? ...
It is a fact of history: Cultures rise to dominance and then fade from dominance. America is just fulfilling the eon old historical pattern. Maybe China will be the next in line; Maybe an unified Europe; Maybe India; Maybe a repeat of the middle ages where there was no global power. I don't know. But I do know, that eventually America will fall from its penacle. No doubt about it.
The fact is that if you are a good programmer, you can get an entry level programmer position without a CS degree. If you're good at math, and want to be a programmer you're much better off taking a job doing tech support at an IT company straight out of high school than going to college. In that tech support role, you'll learn from real programmers doing real programming and in a couple years get a job as an entry level programmer. By your 2nd - 3rd year of programming, you'll be a tech lead at about the same time your fellow high school alums graduate from college. If you spend the 4-5 years to get a CS degree, you'll end up 2-3 years behind the technophiles who go straight into IT from high school. At some point, a degree may be desireable to move into mgmt at larger corps, but you can pick that up (without debt) part time with company paid benefits in you first 7-8 years of employment. Of course, you'll miss out on all the non-career benefitting activities of college... Added to this is the "betrayal" of 2003-2004... In the late 1990s all the software advocates were scurrying around high school campuses expounding to the good math students what a great life they would have if they went of to college and got their CS degree. So four years later, those kids started saying, "Okay, I've got my CS degree, where's my kewl job?", but industry was saying,"Oh, well, we're in a recession and we've found some nice Indians and Chinese who'll do our software dev. Have a nice life." You could almost hear the stampede of upperclassmen rushing to their advisor to switch out of CS and into econ, and engineering in 2002 as word circulated about the software dev outsourcing trend in industry. As for the gender bias, the fact is that programming is generally a male field. Not because men are inherently better programmers, but because men (generally) program more. For most successful male programmers, programming is not just their chosen profession, it is their primary hobby in one form or another as well. I appreciate that there *exists* women who program 9 hrs a day professionally, and then go home and tinker on their linux box, or personal webserver for another 4-5 hrs over their Chinese takeout, but such women are the *exception*, whereas *every* male programmer I've ever met leaves their daytime programming job and go home (or some wireless hotspot) to putter around on their own personal software projects. Frankly, I believe women have a healthier attitude toward software development, but my opinion doesn't change the facts. So when a hiring manager is looking at a male candidate who is two years out of college, and a female candidate for the same job, that male candidate almost certainly has 2500+ more hours of programming experience than the female. And that extra programming shows up in technical interviews. Right out of college they're probably closer to parity, but career path-wise men generally out program women because men program more than women. My experience has been that when a woman is programming as much as her male counterparts (and I've know a handful who did) their is no appreciable difference between their careers. If *anything* those women do better than their male counterparts because management finds it so refreshing to have a woman who has programming as her hobby as well as her profession.
Anyone can have his cake and eat it, too. Perhaps you mean "eat his cake and have it, too" (which can't be done; once you eat your cake, it is gone and you therefore can no longer have it).