In the US we pay the most per capita for medical services and have the lowest percentage of population with medical coverage of any industrial nation.
In the US, you get to pay an insurance company for the privilege of being thrown down a hole hoping to increase the profits for said company by your eventual death instead of providing the care needed to save your life or stabilize your quality of life so you can get back to normal.
In the US, the bureaucrat sitting 2000 miles away claiming your taken care of when you're not is called an "insurance agent".
And no, private health insurance is not affordable to the vast majority of US residents who are not currently covered. These are not people blowing their money on new cars and big screen TVs, these are people who are already having a hard time paying for necessities even though they may be working full time or more. Furthermore, the need for employers to subsidize health care is a significant drag on US companies' ability to compete globally.
The PDF you linked says pretty directly that the problem in Canada is a shortage of doctors, beds, and private sector competition. It also says that countries offering universal care but also having a vibrant private sector don't suffer from the long wait problems Canada does.
And finally, there are plenty of Americans who go shopping internationally for medical services as well. In fact, many of them go to Canada.
Here in America you would have had to wait at least that long to be seen. I don't go to the hospital very often, but I have never had less than a 1.5 hour wait when doing so. In fact, the one time I actually came in on an ambulance strapped to one of those boards (car accident) I waited 8 hours before before being seen by a doctor.
That whole thing about longer waits in single payer systems is big load of crap.
There is a place for online classes, certainly, but to say that the classroom will be irrelevant shows a shocking ignorance of different learning styles, in my opinion.
I happen to be one of those people who learns well in a lecture environment. The few times I've tried online classes, I've found them abysmal. Limited realtime interaction with the instructor (at best) makes it much harder to iron out misunderstanding of the material. Classroom discussion and office hours (i.e. face time) is critical for this. Additionally, i've never seen an online course setup where there was any way to verify that the person getting credit was the one doing the work.
IMO, online courses are a passable option if you just need course credits, but very poor for actual learning.
....but more and more, the teenager is the minority at institutions of higher learning...The stereotypical college student, fresh out of high school, is the exception to college in the 21st century.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Teenagers are still a significant portion of the population at any of the colleges and universities I've been to in the last few years. If we expand the age range just slightly to include all students not legally able to drink alcohol, I strongly suspect we'll have a majority.
Sure, that won't be the case for University of Phoenix, but I'm willing to bet it's true for any institution that doesn't specifically cater to adult learners.
I think lawpoop is confused. He keeps calling it "project management", but if you RTFA (I know...) he's actually asking about software engineering.
I'm currently taking a software engineering class and our assigned text is Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach. However, we've never opened it. My instructor says it's a "good reference", but he doesn't agree with everything in there. He teaches his own method, which he's developed while working as a software engineer for a large defense contractor for a couple decades, which he calls the "Heretic's Model".
That said, UML is non-intuitive at first, but useful once you learn it. Using modeling software can make it much easier to learn. I've mainly used Umbrello, but there are many others around. They should be able to import your existing code base and generate some of the diagrams automatically, assuming you're using a language your chosen app understands.
Ultimately though, a diagram's purpose is the help you understand what's going on. You can use any diagram style you like as long as it shows the information that you need. A good test of your diagram is if it makes sense to someone else once you explain what your symbols mean. If so, then it's useful. If not, some portion of the time you spent on it was wasted.
My basic rule for time estimates is to think about how long I think it will take and double it. I've never been a project manager, that's just how I come up with the numbers I give my PM when asked, and the results have been surprisingly accurate.
One major thing to keep in mind: rework can become necessary at any stage of the product lifecycle, and can take you back to any previous stage of the lifecycle. Don't screw yourself over by trying to shortcut that. If you discover in testing that you need to make a change to the architecture, don't just change the code, go back and change the architecture docs first and make sure you don't have any cascade effects going on, and check whatever intermediate stages you have as well. You'll be sorry if you don't.
The screen technology, already one of the most expensive parts of a netbook, is significantly more expensive in an e-book reader.
And?
For the last year or two, whenever I've been in line at Borders seen the display with their ebook reader (the Sony one I think) and I'd say "that's pretty cool!" Then I'd look at the price tag of about $325 and say "but not that cool."
OTOH, I didn't have much hesitation in dropping $275 for my HP Mini, which, among all the other things it does, also has an ebook reader.
That is the important point in the GP that you missed. if the E-Ink suppliers are pricing themselves out of the market, that's too bad for them. It's a cool technology, and if the devices were more equal functionally I'd probably pick the E-Ink device over the LCD device. As it is though, I'm not willing to pay ~25% more for a device that does a lot less.
If it were under $200, I'd most likely end up buying at least one.
That is a problem with government not with businesses.
I absolutely disagree. "It's business" is not a valid excuse for unethical behavior, and if we as a society continue to excuse such behavior on that basis then we are in effect condoning the kind of behavior that, for example, has put us in the current financial mess.
We need to start holding businesses to higher standards.
Why bother with all the new 'tech' that is probably expensive, etc. And just use something known to work....a simple fucking gun?!?!?
Liability.
Shooting a Somali pirate may or may not be a crime, depending on circumstances. Shooting a Somali fisherman definitely is. How do you know which one that boat coming toward you is?
This seems pretty cut and dried to me... Taser on the other hand is an invented word and is therefore trademarkable and should be protected.
Not necessarily. As another response pointed out, the name has become synonymous with stun gun devices to the point that the vast majority of people don't know it's a brand name. See: Kleenex.
However, mathematics is one of those areas where it's hard to be taken seriously as a professional if you don't have a PhD. I'm not saying that's how it should be, or that there aren't specializations where where a Masters is more than enough. I am saying that a Bachelors is not enough if you actually want to work in math.
You've got some serious stones telling someone they don't know what they're talking about and then throwing out math like that. I'm not sure if I should applaud you, or slap you upside the head.
Why couldn't it be C^3? Complex numbers are used in analyzing LRC circuits for example, so just because they're called "imaginary" doesn't mean they have no physical meaning.
I never claimed it would stop illegal immigration. I do claim that it fixes the problem of citizen babies being left behind when their illegal parents are deported: if the babies aren't citizens, they get deported too.
The "separating families" issue is being used as an emotional lever to try and push through another amnesty bill, which has been proven to make illegal immigration problems worse. My response is to propose an alternate solution.
I think if Wine merely (Right!) implemented the correctly documented part of the Win32 API they would be able to run the vast majority of Windows applications.
Don't you think that might be where they started. I mean, that's the easy part, right? It's certainly where I would have started. Of course, once that was done they had to actually get apps to work on it, and the reverse engineering began.
Remember, most Windows apps aren't developed through reverse-engineering undocumented calls but through the well-known interface.
No, they're developed in Visual Studio and compiled against closed source libraries that target those undocumented APIs, which is why they have to be reverse engineered in order to get anything to run.
I seriously doubt that Wine will ever come close to implementing the publicly known portion of the API, however.
If a significant portion of the documentation is wrong, incomplete, or obsolete, what's the point of even trying to work from it?
No doubt, but the interface is horrible - even with the improvements made recently.
YMMV. I've never had any issue with Gimp's interface, and I had no problem picking it up despite my prior experience with Photoshop.
It doesn't feel intuitive and, more to the point, it is too different from Photoshop for people to use when they've already got some Photoshop experience.
Did you know that both infants and new mothers have to learn how to breast feed? My point is that there is no such thing as an intuitive interface. "Intuitive" is just a code word for "familiar".
Difficulty in learning a new interface depends largely on the mindset of the person doing it. If you're the kind of person who focuses on concepts more than processes, then the transition will be much easier. If you're the type who just doesn't like to learn new things, or doesn't like things to change, then it will be harder. The actually quality of the interface is secondary (though still important, I'm not crazy enough to make that argument).
There is no standard package management - there are dozens of tools, and dozens more repositories for them.
And yet, package management on any given distro is so much easier and more consistent than on Windows that comparison is ludicrous. Having a few different package management standards in the Linux ecosystem may make things a bit more complicated for developers, but let's be honest: even on Linux, the vast majority of users are not developers.
Your definition of proprietry is somewhat flawed (it doesn't mean 'commercial' or 'closed source').
Actually, that is exactly what "proprietary" means. Look it up.
Gimp isn't going to "win" by chasing Photoshop either, which is precisely why the developers don't waste time and energy doing that.
In an ideal world, Gimp would "win" by being the better product, which it already is for many people who have taken the time to learn its more advanced features. In the real world however, Gimp will mainly gain momentum due to a combination of word of mouth and Adobe being asshats with their DRM. Whether that's enough to "win" remains to be seen, and honestly depends more on the magnitude of Adobe's asshatishness than anything else.
My favorite "useless feature" is track changes in Word. Do you have any idea how surprised people get when they send me a Word document and I send them back all my edits with cute little bubble comments next them? Does OO support track changes? Cause if they dont, that is a shame... it is a damn useful feature once somebody drops change-tracked document on your lap and you go "wow, I never knew this existed!".
That is indeed a useful feature, and I have not found a way to do exactly that in OOWriter. However, I generally make do with a combination of strikethrough, font color, and footnotes. I only edit documents that way as an ESL tutor, but it works just fine for that purpose, with the additional benefit of never being asked "How do I make your mark-ups go away so I can print this revision and turn it in?"
However, what I actually find a lot more useful is a spreadsheet that's reliable for statistical analysis. Can Excel do that yet?
Speaking of development tools... there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
MSDN? Seriously? Maybe they've made some changes since the last time I wasted an hour trying to find an answer there to what should have been a simple question. In my experience, 'man' beats the crap out of MSDN, never mind all the resources available from a simple Google search, and if for some reason I can't find the answer there I can always just look at the actual code.
There are numerous IDEs as well, with Kdevelop probably being the closest. I usually use Eclipse, but that's mostly because I want something cross-platform and I don't need to do any GUI development.
There is no common way to install and remove software.
Every distro I've seen has been self-consistent in this regard, which is what really matters. The "Oh noes; deb, rpm, tarball; it's too much for my brain!" argument is pretty much a strawman.
There are independent package repositories for things that are not included in the distros themselves which can be easily be added to the nice GUI package management tools, so all I have to do is open my package manager, do a quick search for what I'm looking for, and click "Install".
And, in case a developer doesn't want to go that route, it's not that hard to whip out an install script, even with a basic GUI if that's what you want. The few proprietary apps I've installed have all had install scripts that were functionally indiscernible from the Windows install wizard.
Sorry, but I have to say this is one area where Linux completely trounces Windows.
There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
I'm not a driver developer, but I find it very hard to believe that the Linux base fluctuates as wildly as the Windows base. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen situations where a Windows upgrade forced someone to buy new hardware do to lack of drivers for the new OS, and yet I can't recall ever seeing that situation on Linux, even with proprietary drivers for hardware long unsupported by the manufacturer.
There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things. Too many proprietary repositories, too many proprietary package systems, to many proprietary filesystem layouts.
I think maybe you need to look up the word "proprietary". Then again, "proprietary filesystem layouts" strongly indicates to me that you are a troll.
Gimp is *not* Photoshop.
I'll agree with you on that. I probably wouldn't recommend Gimp to any of the professional graphic designers I know (though honestly, I would bet money that at least half of them could do their jobs just as effectively with Gimp if they took the time to get used to it). That said, Gimp is more than adequate for the vast majority of people who use Photoshop. As someone who hasn't spent a lot of time getting to know Photoshop, I actually find the Gimp interface more usable.
Ponies.
If by this you mean that there will always be people saying that Linux isn't ready for prime time despite all the ways in which the Linux desktop user experience already surpasses the Windows user experience, then I will agree. However, a bunch of people saying something doesn't make it true.
I don't know if they're actually crooked, but they do seem to take a purely reactive stance to crime. They don't really patrol, but when a call goes out you will see 5 cars all rushing in out at the same time.
I really hope that there's sarcasm in that statement and that it's going over my head - what criteria would you like to place on individuals to call them US citizens if being born within the geographical borders of the country no longer applies?
You're either born to parents who are citizens or you apply for it like an immigrant. That's how it's done in pretty much every other country in the world.
Maybe they've changed it, but last time I used it you couldn't even install it unless you had Excel installed already. That's what it used for all the parts lists and such.
That may well be, but here I am with an Ubuntu machine and I'm willing to pay for another full Solidworks license if they will release for this platform.
Agreed, Solidworks is really a joy to work with. Sadly, it's so tightly coupled with Excel (or it was last time I used it, anyway) that I think you'll have to wait for MS to port Office first.
AutoCAD is widely used in pretty much all fields where some sort of CAD might be useful. ArchiCAD isn't. I think that more than explains why AutoCAD gets cracked so much faster.
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In the US we pay the most per capita for medical services and have the lowest percentage of population with medical coverage of any industrial nation.
In the US, you get to pay an insurance company for the privilege of being thrown down a hole hoping to increase the profits for said company by your eventual death instead of providing the care needed to save your life or stabilize your quality of life so you can get back to normal.
In the US, the bureaucrat sitting 2000 miles away claiming your taken care of when you're not is called an "insurance agent".
And no, private health insurance is not affordable to the vast majority of US residents who are not currently covered. These are not people blowing their money on new cars and big screen TVs, these are people who are already having a hard time paying for necessities even though they may be working full time or more. Furthermore, the need for employers to subsidize health care is a significant drag on US companies' ability to compete globally.
The PDF you linked says pretty directly that the problem in Canada is a shortage of doctors, beds, and private sector competition. It also says that countries offering universal care but also having a vibrant private sector don't suffer from the long wait problems Canada does.
And finally, there are plenty of Americans who go shopping internationally for medical services as well. In fact, many of them go to Canada.
Here in America you would have had to wait at least that long to be seen. I don't go to the hospital very often, but I have never had less than a 1.5 hour wait when doing so. In fact, the one time I actually came in on an ambulance strapped to one of those boards (car accident) I waited 8 hours before before being seen by a doctor.
That whole thing about longer waits in single payer systems is big load of crap.
There is a place for online classes, certainly, but to say that the classroom will be irrelevant shows a shocking ignorance of different learning styles, in my opinion.
I happen to be one of those people who learns well in a lecture environment. The few times I've tried online classes, I've found them abysmal. Limited realtime interaction with the instructor (at best) makes it much harder to iron out misunderstanding of the material. Classroom discussion and office hours (i.e. face time) is critical for this. Additionally, i've never seen an online course setup where there was any way to verify that the person getting credit was the one doing the work.
IMO, online courses are a passable option if you just need course credits, but very poor for actual learning.
....but more and more, the teenager is the minority at institutions of higher learning...The stereotypical college student, fresh out of high school, is the exception to college in the 21st century.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Teenagers are still a significant portion of the population at any of the colleges and universities I've been to in the last few years. If we expand the age range just slightly to include all students not legally able to drink alcohol, I strongly suspect we'll have a majority.
Sure, that won't be the case for University of Phoenix, but I'm willing to bet it's true for any institution that doesn't specifically cater to adult learners.
I think lawpoop is confused. He keeps calling it "project management", but if you RTFA (I know...) he's actually asking about software engineering.
I'm currently taking a software engineering class and our assigned text is Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach. However, we've never opened it. My instructor says it's a "good reference", but he doesn't agree with everything in there. He teaches his own method, which he's developed while working as a software engineer for a large defense contractor for a couple decades, which he calls the "Heretic's Model".
That said, UML is non-intuitive at first, but useful once you learn it. Using modeling software can make it much easier to learn. I've mainly used Umbrello, but there are many others around. They should be able to import your existing code base and generate some of the diagrams automatically, assuming you're using a language your chosen app understands.
Ultimately though, a diagram's purpose is the help you understand what's going on. You can use any diagram style you like as long as it shows the information that you need. A good test of your diagram is if it makes sense to someone else once you explain what your symbols mean. If so, then it's useful. If not, some portion of the time you spent on it was wasted.
My basic rule for time estimates is to think about how long I think it will take and double it. I've never been a project manager, that's just how I come up with the numbers I give my PM when asked, and the results have been surprisingly accurate.
One major thing to keep in mind: rework can become necessary at any stage of the product lifecycle, and can take you back to any previous stage of the lifecycle. Don't screw yourself over by trying to shortcut that. If you discover in testing that you need to make a change to the architecture, don't just change the code, go back and change the architecture docs first and make sure you don't have any cascade effects going on, and check whatever intermediate stages you have as well. You'll be sorry if you don't.
The screen technology, already one of the most expensive parts of a netbook, is significantly more expensive in an e-book reader.
And?
For the last year or two, whenever I've been in line at Borders seen the display with their ebook reader (the Sony one I think) and I'd say "that's pretty cool!" Then I'd look at the price tag of about $325 and say "but not that cool."
OTOH, I didn't have much hesitation in dropping $275 for my HP Mini, which, among all the other things it does, also has an ebook reader.
That is the important point in the GP that you missed. if the E-Ink suppliers are pricing themselves out of the market, that's too bad for them. It's a cool technology, and if the devices were more equal functionally I'd probably pick the E-Ink device over the LCD device. As it is though, I'm not willing to pay ~25% more for a device that does a lot less.
If it were under $200, I'd most likely end up buying at least one.
That is a problem with government not with businesses.
I absolutely disagree. "It's business" is not a valid excuse for unethical behavior, and if we as a society continue to excuse such behavior on that basis then we are in effect condoning the kind of behavior that, for example, has put us in the current financial mess.
We need to start holding businesses to higher standards.
I'm thinking along the same lines...
Why bother with all the new 'tech' that is probably expensive, etc. And just use something known to work....a simple fucking gun?!?!?
Liability.
Shooting a Somali pirate may or may not be a crime, depending on circumstances. Shooting a Somali fisherman definitely is. How do you know which one that boat coming toward you is?
This seems pretty cut and dried to me... Taser on the other hand is an invented word and is therefore trademarkable and should be protected.
Not necessarily. As another response pointed out, the name has become synonymous with stun gun devices to the point that the vast majority of people don't know it's a brand name. See: Kleenex.
I agree with pretty much all of your points.
However, mathematics is one of those areas where it's hard to be taken seriously as a professional if you don't have a PhD. I'm not saying that's how it should be, or that there aren't specializations where where a Masters is more than enough. I am saying that a Bachelors is not enough if you actually want to work in math.
You've got some serious stones telling someone they don't know what they're talking about and then throwing out math like that. I'm not sure if I should applaud you, or slap you upside the head.
Why couldn't it be C^3? Complex numbers are used in analyzing LRC circuits for example, so just because they're called "imaginary" doesn't mean they have no physical meaning.
I never claimed it would stop illegal immigration. I do claim that it fixes the problem of citizen babies being left behind when their illegal parents are deported: if the babies aren't citizens, they get deported too.
The "separating families" issue is being used as an emotional lever to try and push through another amnesty bill, which has been proven to make illegal immigration problems worse. My response is to propose an alternate solution.
I think if Wine merely (Right!) implemented the correctly documented part of the Win32 API they would be able to run the vast majority of Windows applications.
Don't you think that might be where they started. I mean, that's the easy part, right? It's certainly where I would have started. Of course, once that was done they had to actually get apps to work on it, and the reverse engineering began.
Remember, most Windows apps aren't developed through reverse-engineering undocumented calls but through the well-known interface.
No, they're developed in Visual Studio and compiled against closed source libraries that target those undocumented APIs, which is why they have to be reverse engineered in order to get anything to run.
I seriously doubt that Wine will ever come close to implementing the publicly known portion of the API, however.
If a significant portion of the documentation is wrong, incomplete, or obsolete, what's the point of even trying to work from it?
You're right! The problem with windows is it has no Eclipse equivalent!
Oh wait...
No doubt, but the interface is horrible - even with the improvements made recently.
YMMV. I've never had any issue with Gimp's interface, and I had no problem picking it up despite my prior experience with Photoshop.
It doesn't feel intuitive and, more to the point, it is too different from Photoshop for people to use when they've already got some Photoshop experience.
Did you know that both infants and new mothers have to learn how to breast feed? My point is that there is no such thing as an intuitive interface. "Intuitive" is just a code word for "familiar".
Difficulty in learning a new interface depends largely on the mindset of the person doing it. If you're the kind of person who focuses on concepts more than processes, then the transition will be much easier. If you're the type who just doesn't like to learn new things, or doesn't like things to change, then it will be harder. The actually quality of the interface is secondary (though still important, I'm not crazy enough to make that argument).
There is no standard package management - there are dozens of tools, and dozens more repositories for them.
And yet, package management on any given distro is so much easier and more consistent than on Windows that comparison is ludicrous. Having a few different package management standards in the Linux ecosystem may make things a bit more complicated for developers, but let's be honest: even on Linux, the vast majority of users are not developers.
Your definition of proprietry is somewhat flawed (it doesn't mean 'commercial' or 'closed source').
Actually, that is exactly what "proprietary" means. Look it up.
Gimp isn't going to "win" by chasing Photoshop either, which is precisely why the developers don't waste time and energy doing that.
In an ideal world, Gimp would "win" by being the better product, which it already is for many people who have taken the time to learn its more advanced features. In the real world however, Gimp will mainly gain momentum due to a combination of word of mouth and Adobe being asshats with their DRM. Whether that's enough to "win" remains to be seen, and honestly depends more on the magnitude of Adobe's asshatishness than anything else.
My favorite "useless feature" is track changes in Word. Do you have any idea how surprised people get when they send me a Word document and I send them back all my edits with cute little bubble comments next them? Does OO support track changes? Cause if they dont, that is a shame... it is a damn useful feature once somebody drops change-tracked document on your lap and you go "wow, I never knew this existed!".
That is indeed a useful feature, and I have not found a way to do exactly that in OOWriter. However, I generally make do with a combination of strikethrough, font color, and footnotes. I only edit documents that way as an ESL tutor, but it works just fine for that purpose, with the additional benefit of never being asked "How do I make your mark-ups go away so I can print this revision and turn it in?"
However, what I actually find a lot more useful is a spreadsheet that's reliable for statistical analysis. Can Excel do that yet?
Speaking of development tools... there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
MSDN? Seriously? Maybe they've made some changes since the last time I wasted an hour trying to find an answer there to what should have been a simple question. In my experience, 'man' beats the crap out of MSDN, never mind all the resources available from a simple Google search, and if for some reason I can't find the answer there I can always just look at the actual code.
There are numerous IDEs as well, with Kdevelop probably being the closest. I usually use Eclipse, but that's mostly because I want something cross-platform and I don't need to do any GUI development.
There is no common way to install and remove software.
Every distro I've seen has been self-consistent in this regard, which is what really matters. The "Oh noes; deb, rpm, tarball; it's too much for my brain!" argument is pretty much a strawman.
There are independent package repositories for things that are not included in the distros themselves which can be easily be added to the nice GUI package management tools, so all I have to do is open my package manager, do a quick search for what I'm looking for, and click "Install".
And, in case a developer doesn't want to go that route, it's not that hard to whip out an install script, even with a basic GUI if that's what you want. The few proprietary apps I've installed have all had install scripts that were functionally indiscernible from the Windows install wizard.
Sorry, but I have to say this is one area where Linux completely trounces Windows.
There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
I'm not a driver developer, but I find it very hard to believe that the Linux base fluctuates as wildly as the Windows base. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen situations where a Windows upgrade forced someone to buy new hardware do to lack of drivers for the new OS, and yet I can't recall ever seeing that situation on Linux, even with proprietary drivers for hardware long unsupported by the manufacturer.
There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things. Too many proprietary repositories, too many proprietary package systems, to many proprietary filesystem layouts.
I think maybe you need to look up the word "proprietary". Then again, "proprietary filesystem layouts" strongly indicates to me that you are a troll.
Gimp is *not* Photoshop.
I'll agree with you on that. I probably wouldn't recommend Gimp to any of the professional graphic designers I know (though honestly, I would bet money that at least half of them could do their jobs just as effectively with Gimp if they took the time to get used to it). That said, Gimp is more than adequate for the vast majority of people who use Photoshop. As someone who hasn't spent a lot of time getting to know Photoshop, I actually find the Gimp interface more usable.
Ponies.
If by this you mean that there will always be people saying that Linux isn't ready for prime time despite all the ways in which the Linux desktop user experience already surpasses the Windows user experience, then I will agree. However, a bunch of people saying something doesn't make it true.
I don't know if they're actually crooked, but they do seem to take a purely reactive stance to crime. They don't really patrol, but when a call goes out you will see 5 cars all rushing in out at the same time.
I really hope that there's sarcasm in that statement and that it's going over my head - what criteria would you like to place on individuals to call them US citizens if being born within the geographical borders of the country no longer applies?
You're either born to parents who are citizens or you apply for it like an immigrant. That's how it's done in pretty much every other country in the world.
Maybe they've changed it, but last time I used it you couldn't even install it unless you had Excel installed already. That's what it used for all the parts lists and such.
CACM has been revamped in the last year or so, you might give it another look.
That may well be, but here I am with an Ubuntu machine and I'm willing to pay for another full Solidworks license if they will release for this platform.
Agreed, Solidworks is really a joy to work with. Sadly, it's so tightly coupled with Excel (or it was last time I used it, anyway) that I think you'll have to wait for MS to port Office first.
AutoCAD is widely used in pretty much all fields where some sort of CAD might be useful. ArchiCAD isn't. I think that more than explains why AutoCAD gets cracked so much faster.