Reminds me of "Brazil" (the Terry Gilliam one, not the courntry.)

Every manager I've questioned about the shortcomings of cubicles has said that it's good for intra-office communication and creative collaboration . . . before walking into their private office and shutting the door behind them. Even in an organization where they made a point that managers didn't have private offices (though, senior managers and executives, of course, still did) most of the managers camped out in the few small conference rooms where employees were supposed to be able to go for "spontaneous collaborative sessions."

I guess this meant that they realized that they have nothing to offer intellectually or creatively to the work of the office.

My grandfather was a talented amateur artist and cartoonist. He had a cartoon hanging on his wall for as long as I remember that he had drawn when he was 65 that had a middle-aged man standing by a street sign that said "Easy St.", with a caption that read, "Old age is always ten years older than I am."

He lived on his own into his mid-90's, passing away at 97, so I like to think that that attitude may have some merit.

I remember the eagles bringing the bear into the fray, but, not having read the books, I didn't realize that it was Beorn.

That would have been a nice bit to make clear.

If their positions weren't protected by the FCC, they would be worried about competition. If they were worried about competition, they would be doing everything in their power to differentiate their service from any potential competitors by using their economies of scale to provide the fastest, cheapest service available. Competition inherently lowers the percentage of profits to very low levels. We can look to the first world countries that we used to be able to count ourselves amon and see the levels of service and pricing that would develop in a competitive market.

I can't believe the hubris of claiming this is a market driven policy. AT&T is bascially saying, "Capitalism, Capitalism, Capitalism . . . unless I lose my monopoly, in which case, Central planning, Central Planning, CENTRAL PLANNING!"

AT&T and Comcast are doing everything the can to prevent market pricing, and claiming that there's a market-based reason for it.

Most companies keep their pirates in the finance department.

I'm suddenly remembering that it's been a while since I saw "Month Python's TheMeaning of Life".

The HP12C was still being recommended in 2008 to MBA students. I've got a "Platinum Edition" from earller this century. So, if they are defunct, it hasn't been long.

Develop an eidetic memory.

Dip pens or fountain?
    I won't even discuss the expressionless abominations that are ball-point and roller-ball.

I remember getting pages of largely unformatted text as letters when I was in college because my father used vi as his word processor of choice and then just piped the output to a dot matrix printer. He used vi for correspondence for the rest of his life into the current century. He was a Unix/Xenix guy from the word go, and thought C was for people who were too lazy to organize their thoughts well enough to code in Fortran and Cobol.

I miss him. He was a great guy.

Who cares? The people paying for the retraining, not only directly, but also indirectly through lost productivity. The people who's business is slowed because it takes longer to fix issues while the IT staff is getting up to speed on the new system.

If the new system won't be so much more efficient that it more than makes up for all of those lost hours of productivity, then the switch doesn't make sense. Lots of people outside of IT are affected by changes to systems like this. All of those wasted cycles represent workers not able to use their computers to get the work of the firm done. How much does it cost a company if a system change like this mean that the Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Mobile offices are down for a couple of hours because IT has never experienced a problem like this before and is having to fly by the seat of their pants to come up with a solution?

People who rely on their computer systems and need them to be up and running as much of every day as is possible. That's who cares if IT is learning a new system "on the job."

I did. And let me tell you, putting your faith in a Master Control Program is a very, very bad idea.

I had to read that sentence twice in the article. I think what he meant was that a fundamental change that's met with such controversy shouldn't be implemented, not that the controversy shouldn't exist. If you can't get buy-in, you shouldn't be mucking up the works by invalidating people's knowledge of how the system operates.

Unfortunately, as my former boss used to say, "Some people are never going to like the taste of the soup until they get a chance to p*ss in it."

That being said, please, if you insist on undoing millions of hours of system training for workers around the globe, go work at Microsoft. It's their business model (see: ribbon interface, Start button, loss of Start button, Bob, etc., ad nauseum.)