State of the IT industry

_ mind was occupied with these thoughts for some time now.

When _ started learning about computer systems, _ had this feeling that _ am entering an industry that offers some kind of services to other people.

Today, _ just can’t help but feel that this is not the case. Looking at how people sell their services, the image _ have is not of someone oferring help. It’s not: here’s a cool service, would you like to use it? It’s rather: we have the service; you need it; pay us or fuck off.

_ do not know. Maybe it’s because now there are more services, more companies. The market became harder to maintain. Is it the falling economy? The sudden increase in perceived, virtual wealth? Young people being loud?

_ mean, let’s look at UEFI Specification. It tells you that the system table revision is coded as an 32-bit unsigned integer. It goes on and says the first 16 bits are the major version. Then it tells you the lower 16 bits code the minor and subminor numbers and the pseudocode for version 2.60 is

((2<<16) | (60))

And that these lower bytes contain binary coded decimals.

_ am yet to encounter this binary coded decimal. The spec does not have it. The implementation at Tianocore does not have it. _ hardware also doesn’t seem to return them.

Do the authors even know what a binary coded decimal is? Maybe _ just understand IT better than most people, _ dunno.