I agree with your post up to the point at which you begin trolling about formats. Yes, tech staff do have to wear two hats to support both Windows and Mac environments, but a few creative types using macs in a windows business rarely amounts to major headaches for IT staff. Yes, there are some format issues early on, but users adjust quickly and FAQ pages (and tech staff templates) get updated quickly. Has the mac penetrated business? I doubt it, although I have no data. Is it hard to run a mixed environment? More so than a single-platform environment, but not terribly so in limited situations. Does letting employees choose the platform that causes the fewest headaches for them (vis a vis familiarity, software availability, format compatibility, support, etc.) improve productivity and work satisfaction? I would strongly suggest so. But perhaps I'm wrong.

Interestingly, when I went to the doctor for a persistent fever, coughing, and sore throat, he advised me that I was likely to have an influenza variant but that this health division was no longer doing swabs for H1N1 unless you were admitted to a hospital. This means that, at least in my area, there are probably a great number of cases un-reported, despite having presented themselves to medical personnel with typical symptoms. Oh, and I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, home of ~200 cases.

Much of the disagreement in Canada comes from the well-meant desire to protect the good name of engineering from the obvious (and occasionally not so obvious) cereal-box-top code monkeys denigrated in previous posts. That much is laudable. Where the fight gets interesting, and perhaps more contentious, is the desire (not universal, but significantly present) to keep software engineering accreditation as something that only schools of engineering can achieve. Software engineering is studied and taught equally in engineering and in computer science. It's the conflict between these two fields that has historically (at least in Canada, but strangely not in the rest of the world) been the site of the most litigation and vitriol. I think this does little for either side, but as a graduate from a computer science program with a degree in software engineering (University of Saskatchewan) I may be biased.

I think that both engineering and whatever software engineering will become will benefit from a more rigid structure of professionalism in software production and maintenance and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a software engineering graduate (from either discipline) who would disagree. That said, this is less about protecting the public from people like me (I flatter myself) and more about those who call themselves software engineers with few or no qualifications. I often think of this as the fight that psychologists face when trying to deal with the large number of "psychotherapists" who purport to provide similar services -- just without the education and legal responsibilities.

I'm startled at the highly modded trolling found in this commentary -- not to the usual standards of Slashdot, but apparently this touched a nerve.