A Thanksgiving Rebuttal

Computerworld - Here we are on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and with the taste of burped-up cranberry sauce still fresh and every bathroom in the house still reeking of Glade Lavender Meadow, it's a time for requisite reflection. As it does every year, the long Thanksgiving weekend provided an opportunity for us all to articulate what it is we're thankful for without anyone sarcastically humming "Kumbaya" in the background. At least not loudly enough for us to hear. If the kids know what's good for them.
Following all that giving of thanks, journalistic balance compels me to report from the other side of the fence and articulate what it is I'm bummed about -- to list some of the things that make me about as thankful as a fiftysomething IT worker at Best Buy. (Go to QuickLink 50984 if you said, "Huh?" when you read that.)
I'm bummed that Chris Stone, the former No. 2 executive at Novell, left the company earlier this month, just as it was beginning to jell on the strength of its Linux strategy. CEO Jack Messman is a really nice guy, but I know I'm not the only one who questions his wherewithal to run the company without somebody like Stone serving as puppeteer. Big-time loss for Novell's users.
I'm bummed that Computer Associates can't get its act together to hold the CA World user conference in April as planned. CA users will have to wait until the spring of 2006 for the event, and it's a shame that those users will miss an opportunity to network at a gathering of this scale. But at least the company finally found a CEO after seven months of acting-CEO limbo . CA had issued a statement on Oct. 1 proclaiming that it would name a new CEO "in the next 30 to 45 days," and it missed that deadline by only about a week. I'm not sure, but I think the way CA counts days, it just made it.
I'm bummed that Congress popped open the H-1B visa cap the weekend before last by including a provision for 20,000 exemptions to the cap in an omnibus budget bill . I'm not bummed that 20,000 more people will get H-1Bs this year -- hey, I say let the most qualified individual get the job, regardless of his citizenship or the ranting of xenophobes. I'm bummed that the system allows provisions like this to be tucked into appropriations bills rather than passing or failing on their own merits and forcing individual