A part of the answer to your question can be found here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html . To get the full impact you need to watch the whole thing right to the very end, 3:15.

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Not according to this: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html. (You need to watch all 3 minutes of it to get the point. It's rather dramatic.)

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And we'll let everyone in the engineering company design parts for the next bridge we build. What could possibly go wrong? Well, they'd be in violation of the Professional Engineering legislation in their jurisdiction, for one thing. IT still has nothing like professional licensing: There is absolutely nothing preventing rank amateurs from producing code for production. That's why software crashes are a lot more common than bridges collapse. It's going to take decades, and probably some fatalities, but eventually the world will hold IT accountable for its mistakes, just like the history of engineering, medicine, pharmacy, etc.

+1. Every developer should be made to write 100 times on the whiteboard: "The data belongs to the enterprise, not to the application."

Data architecture is a discipline in itself, not something a developer does off the side of his/her desk.

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From the article:

I thought Washington crossed the Delaware. When was he in Italy? Now I'm all confused.

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People interested in this topic may wish to read Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In my opinion Pinker does a more convincing job of documenting that violence has declined rather than why, but it's a fun read.

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We used to name servers after planets in our solar system. Then in 2006 the name space shrank by one and we had to make some hard decisions about which services to shut off.

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He might have said it. A search on German Google finds a lot of hits attributed to him (and not Saxe) for variations on "The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep."

Why? Because he's self-satirizing! He's never had a real IT job, yet he condescends to lecture those with decades of hard-earned "lessons learned" who have seen this plan go belly-up before.

This is just another pendulum swing. Another 7 years and it'll be swinging the other way due to some highly publicized lawsuits and jail terms.We'll see ol' Galen eat crow then. In the mean time just grin and bear it; it' can't be stopped.

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Look at his biography over on Infoworld. He ran a desktop publishing company. He wrote some books about it. He's a journalist. But he has no real IT experience. He's clueless about what it really takes to manage thousands of users in a regulated industry. He's just an armchair quarterback.

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In the absence of someone doing proper analysis, it's safest to assume it does require all those things. Because if you assume the other way around and your guess is wrong, the whole company can go under. Or maybe you've only ever worked on trivial stuff?

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You might enjoy the book by Regina Barreca, "They Used To Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted... Women's Strategic Use of Humor."

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Fine for bits and pieces, but read Isaacson's biography of Jobs. Yes your parent quote was exaggerating, but Jobs's philosophy was very, very closed source, with the purpose that Apple could control the consumer experience from end to end. The bits and pieces you cite were things Jobs would have opposed.

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Blackberry Playbook - Same price and it doesn't do email

Mine does email just fine, tethered to my corporate BB Bold via BlackBerry Bridge. And at long last there's a Citrix client for it, too.

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Blackberry Playbook. Seriously. We evaluated one a month after its release. Fully updated system, but the built-in Adobe reader was unable to open and reliably render or scroll two basic, Acrobat-generated PDFs (less than 500kB, text with some images, no fancy stuff). No background apps were running to slow things down.

It's working OK now.

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