Government priorities

WSJ article on the Linux uptick within IT organizations.

The allure of desktop Linux is the low entry cost: A typical license for Linux from Novell is $50 a year per PC versus the $299 Microsoft charges for Windows to businesses that don’t have a long-term contract with the software maker.

There’s this money quote from someone representing the State of Illinois:

The State of Illinois in recently consolidated its IT systems onto Microsoft software — and has no interest in using Linux, says Paul Campbell, director of the state’s Central Management Services department. “We don’t have time for science projects in state government,” he says.

Indeed. Why bother trying to save the people’s money. With the built in cost and resource inefficiencies, Windows is perfect for government IT needs.

Death of Computer Science

The British Computer Society has posted an essay on the death of computing (Via Slashdot):

Computer science has lost its mystique. There is no longer a need for a vast army of computer scientists. The applications, games and databases that students once built laboriously in final year projects are bought at bookshops and newsagents.

If the gap between public knowledge and academic curriculum isn’t large enough, the gap between academia and industry practice is a gaping hole. While academic departments concentrate on developing new computer systems in an ideal organisational environment, a lot of industry has moved away from in-house development to a focus on delivering a service.

This is somewhat misguided. Who will build the next OS – trust me the OS war isn’t over, and it won’t resemble today’s OS X and Vista. Google’s “cloud” isn’t going to appear from one. There is a long way to go and without computer scientists, it isn’t going to happen.

The gap between industry and academia should be wide. There is as great need for fundamental computing research today as there was in the early 80’s. Accounting packages, enterprise resource packages, and customer relationship management systems do not require computer scientists, they can make do with programmers – programmers are not necessarily computer scientists. I hope that distinction is clear.