Anybody do the math here? $500m is their GROSS income from these domains when their NET annual profit is more than 1000 time bigger. They're not making any important profit here. That they allow this is probably just a volume-mitigated oversight. If I sell a Widget that breaks for a $1 profit and a company that makes a better, more durable version sells 1 billion of them for $2 more and pays $1.50 more, for them, and makes $100 Billion dollars, I'm pretty sure I'm still the evil one.

My observation has been that there are two problems here: 1) People, in particular business decision-makers, tend to make decisions without fully evaluating what they want. 2) IT folks tend not to negotiate a viable power structure, and allow non-technical people to make technical decisions The solution, is, first, to sell yourself as the administrator. By Selling yourself as an administrator, you can convince management that they're paying you to make these sorts of decisions, and that if they won't take your advice, they're spending money, that they're not benefiting from. This is a hard, risky sell, because, in a sense, you're arguing against the value of your job. An important part of this is dialog: evaluate your customer's (Boss's) need and find the best solution. Also, help him define his needs: "You need your computer to run reliably ALL the time, right? Using Firefox, help me do that for you. Using IE makes that, in some cases, virtually impossible." "They Software for the voicemail needs to be available. There are problems with the Java runtime that require maintenance, and maintenance cuts into your productive time. Is it worth it to you for me to fix a recurring problem on your time? or is it easier to use a more reliable access method?" The second part of the solution, is to use the tools that you have The key idea here is, you can force them into good procedure with a policy that prevents them running iexplore.exe, but that creates a political situation. that's why selling your ideas is important. With anyone lower than management, this is a great method, even with middle-management, as long as you have management support. The last Point I'd like to make is that sometimes, just continuing to maintain a bad solution is why they've hired an IT staff, and that even though the platform has lots of issues, If the management wants to use that platform, and it creates a job for you to do, do that job, It's why they hired you. If there's a problem with software running on that platform, do your best to discuss it with the vendor, and involve management in the discussion as neccesary, and allow them to share your frustration on an experiential level; they'll have a better point of reference for understanding your advice in the future. my $0.02us

Perhaps in a duel, this works great, but fater reaction vs action explains why management seems incapable of making good decisions based on current data, as compared to using an ounce of forsight

I'm not sure that twitter is something I think of when I consider early adoption. When everybody at CNN has an account, I'd say twitter is mainstream, and probably will be replaced with something more robust in short order. Facebook is a good contender. Android is another. Google Wave is a third.

And a glimpse into how we have the Microsoft of today. "Internal competition ..." what we see is a beast, operated internally through FUD, that has taught itself to compete the same way on the outside, as on the inside. "Stifled Innovation ... " the pursuit of the certain, in ignorance of the community, the beneficial, and the desirable. The power structure has lost the agility of youth because it doesn't allow itself to accept new ideas. It sounds as though Microsoft will have to truly re-invent it's corporate culture if it wishes to survive a changing market. and it will have to do it by really listeing to its employees, to it's customers, and to it's vendors; and I don't mean 'multiple choice surveys' but a free-form discussion about growth, supporting good ideas, nurturing bad ones, and competing in new markets, literally making new markets, instead of trying to slow or destroy old ones. I hope that the idea people who are fleeing Microsoft will join together and make their ideas a reality. It sounds like, at an atomic level inovation is alive at Microsoft afterall, if only we can keep Microsoft's power structure from killing it.

I think is right on target, and add that the closed-culture at Apple functions to so specifically target this, in part through the secrecy. People always put themeselves into groups. You would never know a true free-thinker if you met one, and you probably wouldn't like then very much, too much of a perspective gap.

you're old-fashioned!

someone else has already seconded this -- so I'll just add My $0.02us. I like that python has strict rules on coding style. Also -- while python has a lot of good features, I'd definitely suggest (to you student) that C be next, so that he'll appreciate python better, and know a classical language as well.