There is significantly less wrong with software patents than with software copyrights. For one thing, patents expire in the next 100 years. You seem to completely confuse copyright and patent. Patent says you publish your invention, and then you get to have a monopoly on its production for a limited time. Copyright says that you create a unique work, and nobody can copy it for a time. You would've patented the concept of a book, but you would copyright the story in the book.
The major difference is that you need to publish enough to reproduce your invention to get a patent. After it expires, public record has enough that someone else could build another of the previously patented thing.
Car = heavily regulated industry that has significant artificial government blocks to entry
Jumbo jet = same issue as car, but it also costs many millions of dollars to build one
Software = no regulation, no cost to enter market
So as far as getting it, well it's no surprise that people use amatuer/small business software, but not planes/jets/cars from the same market segment. That same producer segment could never afford to produce a car or jet, but software is essentially free to produce and distribute.
The patent shouldn't be able to prevent amateur/small business from competing. The reason that this is possible is because the patent system has been broken. You shouldn't be able to patent something obvious, something non-unique, or something that isn't a mechanism. A formula/algorithm is just not a mechanism.
Problems with copyright vs. patent are simple. Patents still expire in a period of time as to make the invention still useful to the public. Copyrights last for more than 100 years.
Copyrights are so far gone that we really just need to cancel all existing copyrights and start over. Neither of the two should last more than ten years under any circumstance. It works against the public good for them to do so. This is a problem, since that is why patent/copyright were allowed to begin with.
IOW, for software: a patent would be better than a copyright, but this is largely because copyrights are broken. Also, you can go to jail for violating copyright, but just be shut down for violating patent (in the US, and probably soon in the EU).
Doing this defeats the whole point of learning how to take good pictures. That digital will not teach you anything about necessary things like light metering and aperture selection. By going digital all you learn is that you can half-ass it and shoot anything without learning how to make the shot good in the first place. Doing film and learning the whole process teaches not only how to take the great shot, but all the things you can do to improve a bad shot, or be creative with what you have. Additionally, it gives incentive to make that snap a good one, since you have to process the film before you even get a clue how it will look.
First off, this depends heavily on your class focus and what you would like to do. Do you want to design software, write code, manage projects, etc? Look for jobs in those areas that interest you and that you have some experience in. Think of where that career will take you, and if you want to end up going that direction.
If you don't have industry experience, you will have to take a more entry level job and work up. If you have done projects that showcase your abilities, then try for more senior level. If you have little or no management experience, you will have a harder time getting senior level work. The same is likely if you have no design experience.
If you are motivated and can handle everything involved *and* have demonstratable skills and some charisma, then you will make more doing contract and consulting work. You will be in a good position to start your own business, as well. It will give you a chance to build contacts and network for a while. If this does not sound like you, then look for full-time work.
The Master's degree does not immediately make you qualified for anything. It tends to mean that you will command a higher salary, which is not exactly a good thing for someone with entry level experience. That's why a lot of people work for a while and go for their MS degree at the same time, or work and then take leave to do school full-time.
Your manager is wise to say to look for work that is above your skill. If you get bored in your work, you'll eventually stop caring about your job. This not only hurts your productivity, but will hurt your career.
No, you don't give that up liberty at all. First off, that isn't an essential/guaranteed liberty. Second off, nothing prevents you from doing exactly that. You make a decision to not punch people out and similar things. Sure, there are repurcussions if you go ahead and punch the guy, but the government doesn't prevent you in the first place.
The optimal for freedom *would* be anarchy, but it is easy to see why humans can't handle that level of complete freedom. In our system, you still do get the ability to choose your actions, so the freedom to commit crime exists, just not the guarantee that you'll be able to exercise the free will to do more such things in the future.
The point is that it is unacceptable to give up that liberty ever, under any circumstance. Essential liberties are in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The interpretation is that if you are willing to give those liberties up because you think you'll be safer, then you don't understand why we had to have the Constitution. You would be helping to recreate the situation that lead to people leaving Europe and the US declaring independence. Those liberties are so important that there is *no* reason to ever give them up.
As for your door scenario. Being able to freely enter/exit your house without keys is not an essential liberty. Being able to have a house and not worry about the government making you house soldiers or randomly searching your house for the hell of it *are* essential liberties. If you thought that it would be OK for the government to force everyone to carry ID, and submit to search because they heard that maybe there was going to be a terrorist attack... that would be curtailing of freedom and liberty.
I do agree that the quote is misused and misunderstood, though.
That works fine for him to keep the mail coming in. The problem is when you combine the annoying "dynamic ip range" lists with an idiotic admin that thinks using one to blindly deny is a good idea. I mentioned in another post, but Juno and Netzero do this. Neither will pay attention to you when you complain. Of course they also RBL deny their postmaster account, which is a no-no.
Yes, fun isn't it? Trying running your own email server from a Charter business link. Then try sending email to Juno or NetZero customers. Their mail server will give you a 550 denied. Proceed to have the ISP's ignore you, and the RBL jerks ignore you.
The reason for the block? All Charter IP addresses have been put into a "residential" blocklist by one RBL nut that decided such a list was a good idea. Everyone knows that you should have to buy a T1 to send email. This is because people who really need to send email have the budget to pay 800$/mo for it, apparently. Unfortunately, Juno and NetZero both seem to agree.
Corporate license keys do not require activation. Everyone that wants to infringe on MS and get free copies of Windows knows it. Long ago people had reverse engineered the algorithm to generate their own volume license keys. Anyone doing pirate copies of Windows just uses one of those.
As for corp licenses... well those are expensive. If you only have 30 laptops, all of which came with Windows, and two Windows servers, you wouldn't buy a VL agreement. What would probably happen is that you'd get really upset that your test machines keep requiring activation.
So for a lot more money, you can get rid of activation. For everyone else you can either crack the activation trash, or you spend a lot of time calling MS and being annoyed in general.
What this really makes trouble for is people who do images of machines using their existing licenses. Many of those people probably just find a VLK and do it that way.
If you want to stay in that level of programming for your career, then that's no problem. But those managers that say nothing about your dress are probably also remembering that you're the guy with the piercings. They're remembering that you won't meet the partners, and that you won't be meeting with the customers.
You get ten years down the road, and you'll probably be pretty pissed about how you can't advance in the company. You might have to try for work somewhere else that doesn't know of your body mods. You'll be starting over somewhere else, potentially with a spouse, kids, mortgage, etc.
Don't think that they don't notice just because they don't say anything.
Times are changing, but business is business. This whole comment section for the story consists largely of "whine whine whine, I want my way or I'll whine more". Take a step back and look at it! Take a slightly more exacting view of what people are throwing their adolescent bitching about. It should be no surprise that a LOT of people out there aren't too tolerant of shoving bit of metal in yourself, poking holes in your skin, and dying various parts of yours bodies, and then trusting that you'll be professional and reliable.
Presentable for business today is a button down shirt and clean slacks. Formal includes a tie and a jacket. This is the same as 1975, which was the same as 1955. Business has never been tolerant of numerous piercings or visible tattoos. Recently, ear piercings on either gender are no problem, and tattoos are accepted as long as you aren't doing your face.
As was said, you can hide your body art when it's appropriate to do so. Most things in a National Geographic are completely inappropriate in a business setting.
While on the topic, most of what's in those magazines are from cultures that, while they may be nifty, are also living tribally, and often quite savagely.
It would be better for people to interact with others based upon their actual personality and knowledge instead of just appearance. In reality, there are plenty of ways to alter how people perceive you. One of the easiest is to look different. Burning things into yourself, poking holes, and dying things is a very strong way to change your appearance and alter how people respond to you.
It's great that you haven't had any trouble finding good work. Truthfully, many people do have a bit of a hard time getting their foot in the door after they do things to themselves similar to what you've done.
I think it more comes down to many people taking an objection to what these modifications really are. Sure, they're adornment meant to attract attention. Ultimately, they boil down to things like:
Piercing: a bit of metal shoved through a hole you stuck in yourself.
Tattoo: a picture painted under your skin by sticking yourself repeatedly with a needle.
People have much less of an aversion to someone with different hair or a quirky way of dressing. They're both easily changed and temporary by their nature. Piercings and tats are permanent changes; some piercings heal, some leave permanent damage. Even then, most people really don't care if a guy has pierced ears, but there's a good chance that they'll react to someone with a pierced eyebrow, tongue, or chin.
As for clothing, the dress code enforcing a uniform appearance. It also implies a level professionalism that is recognised across the world. People aren't very likely to do banking at a place where everyone is pierced and dresses punk with crazy hair, for example. It implies a lot of instability in the place.
Male vs. female dress is something where there isn't really a reason to have different dress codes. This is why most places will say "business formal" or "business casual" instead of "slacks for men and dresses for women".
It also doesn't help that a *great* many people think that piercings and tattoos are disgusting. It isn't just being narrow-minded either. Your accusation is just as narrow-minded as those you accuse. Some people aren't very comfortable with the idea of sticking stuff in themselves. I find it the idea a bit distasteful, and I'm an early 20's long haired guy.
Roundtrip Earth to a geosynchronous satellite is about 500ms. Speed depends on your channel width, and so could be anything.
Consumer satellite Internet tends to push 512Kb-1Mb down and 128Kb-256Kb up, all with 500ms latencies. You can get faster than this with specialized services. For example, DirecTV is pushing hundreds of MPEG digital video streams at the same time, so that's going to be a considerable data rate.
2.2GHz w/ 512MB RAM and a 4200rpm drive? I haven't seen a laptop spec'ed with a 3600rpm drive in quite some time. It's almost certainly a 4200rpm drive since it's based on a fairly recent Celeron chip. It probably has 1MB or 2MB of cache on it to reduce amount the disc needs to spin up.
I agree that the only important spec was the hard drive. He's likely using WinXP, as well. This means that his computer should be starting up in 20s or so, and word would take slightly longer than the menu select effect to start up ( 2s).
Try this out some time for yourself. Even on an early production pre-Coppermine P3, the load times are only a few seconds. OO.o, on the other hand, routinely takes 10s-15s to load on a 2+GHz desktop. Just timing 1.9.100 Writer startup now was 12s on my Athlon 2600+ w/ a 7200rpm 8MB cache drive. Word was under 3s.
OO.o still wins because the load time is about the same on subsequent loads, and it costs 450$ less than Office for largely the same functionality, and a longer load time.
Everybody does system management now. All the big players did at the time, by which I mean non-x86 players. Now, everybody out there does the in depth system monitoring and management. Compaq has been of dubious intention for a long time. For twenty years now they've been breaking industry standard to screw customers into having to buy parts from them.
I'm not saying Proliant servers were bad; in reality, they were far from it. I love the old Proliants that I've worked with. Hell, I have an old dual P-Pro system that works wonderfully. Well, wonderful except for weighing 100 pounds.
When HP and Compaq merged, HP didn't dump their server line. They picked up all the Compaq line into their name, and continued their own non-x86 servers. Compaq branded all the desktop equipment. This was probably because the HP name was stronger in the server market, and Compaq was a business desktop company.
x86 became abundant because it was "good enough" and was cheap to produce. The z80 was "good enough" for an awful long time, and it was terribly slow and lacked funtionality. You say it's all software, and I say software is driven by the hardware capabilities. Those companies might have competed with Intel in x86, but for their architectures being superiour, and for Intel not second sourcing them. x86 was always a holdover, and it just has refused to die a deserved death.
As someone paid to do microprocessor work, you should know better. The ISA is a big deal as everything the system does is tied to it. If your ISA is trash it kills the performance of your software. Look at all the problems the P4 has because of the way it handles decode and execution! Quite an achievment for Intel to produce a "next generation" architecture that's slower per cycle than the previous. You end up having to do all sorts of stupid complex things to "fix" the problems the terrible ISA caused.
I know there's an internal ISA for all modern x86 chips. There's still a whole lot of complexity that's added to maintain compatibility with a trash ISA. It's a huge waste that Intel keeps losing at hard.
Seriously, Itanium wasn't a bad project. The idea of making a more flexible chip that required software to act better isn't bad. It's just a differing perspective: CS vs EE. You can't change the silicon once it hits market. NVIDIA is pretty good at this idea, for example. Their hardware is rather flexible, and you can see how much so by looking at how they manage to squeeze more performance out of it with each driver release.
Just remember, x86 might be 99% of the world's software, but 99% of the average users only run Office, a web browser, and an email client.
Worse yet, you don't even get 99% of the software. You get the software that Microsoft hasn't broken with OS updates. I think it would be amusing to get Win3.1 to work on modern systems, or Desqview, or anything similar. The underlying hardware has changed a lot, and has broken compatibility. This sort of thing happens when a platform has been implemented without a good design.
x86 was designed in under a week, and it shows badly...
What would have to happen is for some company to take a leap on developing around one of these architectures and letting the market run with it. I had hoped that Apple was going to do this when it switched to PPC for the logic. That didn't happen, and there's an absolute ton of reasons for it.
Truth of it is that all those other arch's did well in the server/scientific computing space. Now you have so many MCSE types, so many of which are incompetent, and managers demanding Windows on everything. They miss that the server doesn't need to run any particular OS or platform as long as what you need is available.
This is why in the important environments, you have servers on HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc. You would be hard pressed to find a financial institution or heavy scientific computation project running on a Windows or x86 platform. The real performance that you need isn't there, and Windows just isn't reliable. You get Wintel on areas where downtime is acceptable outside of scheduled maintanence, and on workstations.
Try swapping a CPU or RAM out of an operating system on Wintel. You can get hotswap drives and the underused capability for hotswap PCI, but that's the end of it.
This is why platforms like Alpha and PA-RISC disappearing is worrying. We're headed towards where the only vendors out there selling truly stable platforms are going to be IBM and Sun. IBM has enough money to not die for decades, even with losses, but Sun is hurting badly. They've started selling a lot of Intel kit just like HP.
Ultimately, Intel makes consumer grade parts, and it's the same thing with AMD kit. Consumer grade always means lower quality since you have to drive the price down for market penetration and to hold your market share against the inherent competition. We're losing the option to get kit that is above consumer grade without doing your own R&D.
To tie up two things you mentioned:
You have to build it first, otherwise nobody can buy it. Business is about managed risk leading to a successful product and revenue. In the case of CPUs, these weren't exotic chips; they were just expensive. An UltraSPARC isn't that much more than an Itanium and it was the same for Alpha. PA-RISC servers are rather pricey, but it's still cost to benefit a better deal.
HP did start going down hard after the Compaq merger, same as DEC. After they stop production of PA-RISC and related platform, there will be no reason to buy Compaq/HP instead of someone else. People will consolidate vendors and end up picking just for convenience. This has tended to be Dell since they're easier to deal with and a bit cheaper.
Some of those wonderful instruments still exist with Agilent Technologies, at least. Just goes to show what happens when you have anything to do with Compaq... DEC and HP both used to be companies with incredible products. Now we'll have lost two of the best designed chip architectures, and two of the best UNIX variants to ever be on the market.
The point here is that the worst of all the CPU designs out there is the Intel one. Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, PPC are all better designs. The reason they never really made the desktop is because they aren't Intel. This is the same rationale that lead to Windows, Word DOCs, etc being "the way".
It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.
Look at how well the PPC is doing in the console industry right now. It was obviously a better choice than the x86 based chips or it wouldn't have been done. It obviously could be manufactured for the same price or less.
Two interesting tidbits. First, look into the iAPX-432 processor. Intel intended to kill off their 8-bit CPU line because in favor of that chip. It was 32bit, could do SMP, supported hot-swappable chips, and a host of other features. The 8086 was thrown in as a quick product to hold the company until the 432 was ready. Needless to say that the 432 never became popular as a result of the x86 line.
The second tidbit is that the Itanium actually needed an instruction set translator to run existing x86 apps. This layer was developed in partnership with HP. Intel *doesn't* maintain compatibility in their chips. They were trying to kill off x86 again, because it was a dead end.
I have to agree... the idea of puzzles at an interview is insulting, and doesn't tell you anything about an applicant's ability to the the job.
There are many problems with doing a puzzle, anyway. What if you're not good at the type of puzzle, or hate puzzles, or your brain is a little fried after bad traffic getting to your interview? Now you're cast aside because while you can write great algorithms, you have trouble figuring out some stupid gimmicky puzzle on the spot.
This just makes it harder for people to get their foot in the door, and harder for an established person to get into a company. It might not kill a company, but it will keep out some of the best employees. This means that eventually, your competition will eat you alive.
The problem, as I see it, is that the calculator helps to remove the math from math class. The kids using them don't understand what they're doing or how it works any longer. They just know that they get the answer the teacher wants by hitting these particular buttons in the right order. Without understanding the theory it is very difficult to properly apply the material.
I've seen this type of thing all over the place. At work I'm dealing with what boils down to this same problem, right now. People knew that they had to hit this key, then this other key, and then type in some numbers. The keys changed and they didn't know what they were doing, so now they're having tons of problems.
It's amazing how much simple things make a difference. There was this shoddy concept called "whole language" that a few states decided to do. The idea was that instead of teaching phonetics and root/suffix combinations while learning language, they would teach a word at a time. This was a miserable failure in every place it was tried. Nearly a generation of educated kids that have difficulty reading for the first time in centuries.
The calculator would be fine so long as the student understands what the calculator is doing for them.
Confirmation of the existance of an ET would spur investment into either paranoid defense or into programs like SETI. We might see another scientific renaissance that produces things like a way to reach FTL travel. Like anything else, if you know something is possible then you know you aren't wasting your time.
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A book could be patented. Its contents may only be copyrighted.
There is significantly less wrong with software patents than with software copyrights. For one thing, patents expire in the next 100 years. You seem to completely confuse copyright and patent. Patent says you publish your invention, and then you get to have a monopoly on its production for a limited time. Copyright says that you create a unique work, and nobody can copy it for a time. You would've patented the concept of a book, but you would copyright the story in the book.
The major difference is that you need to publish enough to reproduce your invention to get a patent. After it expires, public record has enough that someone else could build another of the previously patented thing.
Car = heavily regulated industry that has significant artificial government blocks to entry
Jumbo jet = same issue as car, but it also costs many millions of dollars to build one
Software = no regulation, no cost to enter market
So as far as getting it, well it's no surprise that people use amatuer/small business software, but not planes/jets/cars from the same market segment. That same producer segment could never afford to produce a car or jet, but software is essentially free to produce and distribute.
The patent shouldn't be able to prevent amateur/small business from competing. The reason that this is possible is because the patent system has been broken. You shouldn't be able to patent something obvious, something non-unique, or something that isn't a mechanism. A formula/algorithm is just not a mechanism.
Problems with copyright vs. patent are simple. Patents still expire in a period of time as to make the invention still useful to the public. Copyrights last for more than 100 years.
Copyrights are so far gone that we really just need to cancel all existing copyrights and start over. Neither of the two should last more than ten years under any circumstance. It works against the public good for them to do so. This is a problem, since that is why patent/copyright were allowed to begin with.
IOW, for software: a patent would be better than a copyright, but this is largely because copyrights are broken. Also, you can go to jail for violating copyright, but just be shut down for violating patent (in the US, and probably soon in the EU).
Doing this defeats the whole point of learning how to take good pictures. That digital will not teach you anything about necessary things like light metering and aperture selection. By going digital all you learn is that you can half-ass it and shoot anything without learning how to make the shot good in the first place. Doing film and learning the whole process teaches not only how to take the great shot, but all the things you can do to improve a bad shot, or be creative with what you have. Additionally, it gives incentive to make that snap a good one, since you have to process the film before you even get a clue how it will look.
First off, this depends heavily on your class focus and what you would like to do. Do you want to design software, write code, manage projects, etc? Look for jobs in those areas that interest you and that you have some experience in. Think of where that career will take you, and if you want to end up going that direction.
If you don't have industry experience, you will have to take a more entry level job and work up. If you have done projects that showcase your abilities, then try for more senior level. If you have little or no management experience, you will have a harder time getting senior level work. The same is likely if you have no design experience.
If you are motivated and can handle everything involved *and* have demonstratable skills and some charisma, then you will make more doing contract and consulting work. You will be in a good position to start your own business, as well. It will give you a chance to build contacts and network for a while. If this does not sound like you, then look for full-time work.
The Master's degree does not immediately make you qualified for anything. It tends to mean that you will command a higher salary, which is not exactly a good thing for someone with entry level experience. That's why a lot of people work for a while and go for their MS degree at the same time, or work and then take leave to do school full-time.
Your manager is wise to say to look for work that is above your skill. If you get bored in your work, you'll eventually stop caring about your job. This not only hurts your productivity, but will hurt your career.
No, you don't give that up liberty at all. First off, that isn't an essential/guaranteed liberty. Second off, nothing prevents you from doing exactly that. You make a decision to not punch people out and similar things. Sure, there are repurcussions if you go ahead and punch the guy, but the government doesn't prevent you in the first place.
The optimal for freedom *would* be anarchy, but it is easy to see why humans can't handle that level of complete freedom. In our system, you still do get the ability to choose your actions, so the freedom to commit crime exists, just not the guarantee that you'll be able to exercise the free will to do more such things in the future.
The point is that it is unacceptable to give up that liberty ever, under any circumstance. Essential liberties are in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The interpretation is that if you are willing to give those liberties up because you think you'll be safer, then you don't understand why we had to have the Constitution. You would be helping to recreate the situation that lead to people leaving Europe and the US declaring independence. Those liberties are so important that there is *no* reason to ever give them up.
As for your door scenario. Being able to freely enter/exit your house without keys is not an essential liberty. Being able to have a house and not worry about the government making you house soldiers or randomly searching your house for the hell of it *are* essential liberties. If you thought that it would be OK for the government to force everyone to carry ID, and submit to search because they heard that maybe there was going to be a terrorist attack... that would be curtailing of freedom and liberty.
I do agree that the quote is misused and misunderstood, though.
That works fine for him to keep the mail coming in. The problem is when you combine the annoying "dynamic ip range" lists with an idiotic admin that thinks using one to blindly deny is a good idea. I mentioned in another post, but Juno and Netzero do this. Neither will pay attention to you when you complain. Of course they also RBL deny their postmaster account, which is a no-no.
Yes, fun isn't it? Trying running your own email server from a Charter business link. Then try sending email to Juno or NetZero customers. Their mail server will give you a 550 denied. Proceed to have the ISP's ignore you, and the RBL jerks ignore you.
The reason for the block? All Charter IP addresses have been put into a "residential" blocklist by one RBL nut that decided such a list was a good idea. Everyone knows that you should have to buy a T1 to send email. This is because people who really need to send email have the budget to pay 800$/mo for it, apparently. Unfortunately, Juno and NetZero both seem to agree.
Corporate license keys do not require activation. Everyone that wants to infringe on MS and get free copies of Windows knows it. Long ago people had reverse engineered the algorithm to generate their own volume license keys. Anyone doing pirate copies of Windows just uses one of those.
As for corp licenses... well those are expensive. If you only have 30 laptops, all of which came with Windows, and two Windows servers, you wouldn't buy a VL agreement. What would probably happen is that you'd get really upset that your test machines keep requiring activation.
So for a lot more money, you can get rid of activation. For everyone else you can either crack the activation trash, or you spend a lot of time calling MS and being annoyed in general.
What this really makes trouble for is people who do images of machines using their existing licenses. Many of those people probably just find a VLK and do it that way.
UPS doesn't allow all of that for anyone off the floor. Delivery drivers have the same rules.
If you want to stay in that level of programming for your career, then that's no problem. But those managers that say nothing about your dress are probably also remembering that you're the guy with the piercings. They're remembering that you won't meet the partners, and that you won't be meeting with the customers.
You get ten years down the road, and you'll probably be pretty pissed about how you can't advance in the company. You might have to try for work somewhere else that doesn't know of your body mods. You'll be starting over somewhere else, potentially with a spouse, kids, mortgage, etc.
Don't think that they don't notice just because they don't say anything.
Times are changing, but business is business. This whole comment section for the story consists largely of "whine whine whine, I want my way or I'll whine more". Take a step back and look at it! Take a slightly more exacting view of what people are throwing their adolescent bitching about. It should be no surprise that a LOT of people out there aren't too tolerant of shoving bit of metal in yourself, poking holes in your skin, and dying various parts of yours bodies, and then trusting that you'll be professional and reliable.
Presentable for business today is a button down shirt and clean slacks. Formal includes a tie and a jacket. This is the same as 1975, which was the same as 1955. Business has never been tolerant of numerous piercings or visible tattoos. Recently, ear piercings on either gender are no problem, and tattoos are accepted as long as you aren't doing your face.
As was said, you can hide your body art when it's appropriate to do so. Most things in a National Geographic are completely inappropriate in a business setting.
While on the topic, most of what's in those magazines are from cultures that, while they may be nifty, are also living tribally, and often quite savagely.
It would be better for people to interact with others based upon their actual personality and knowledge instead of just appearance. In reality, there are plenty of ways to alter how people perceive you. One of the easiest is to look different. Burning things into yourself, poking holes, and dying things is a very strong way to change your appearance and alter how people respond to you.
It's great that you haven't had any trouble finding good work. Truthfully, many people do have a bit of a hard time getting their foot in the door after they do things to themselves similar to what you've done.
I think it more comes down to many people taking an objection to what these modifications really are. Sure, they're adornment meant to attract attention. Ultimately, they boil down to things like:
Piercing: a bit of metal shoved through a hole you stuck in yourself.
Tattoo: a picture painted under your skin by sticking yourself repeatedly with a needle.
People have much less of an aversion to someone with different hair or a quirky way of dressing. They're both easily changed and temporary by their nature. Piercings and tats are permanent changes; some piercings heal, some leave permanent damage. Even then, most people really don't care if a guy has pierced ears, but there's a good chance that they'll react to someone with a pierced eyebrow, tongue, or chin.
As for clothing, the dress code enforcing a uniform appearance. It also implies a level professionalism that is recognised across the world. People aren't very likely to do banking at a place where everyone is pierced and dresses punk with crazy hair, for example. It implies a lot of instability in the place.
Male vs. female dress is something where there isn't really a reason to have different dress codes. This is why most places will say "business formal" or "business casual" instead of "slacks for men and dresses for women".
It also doesn't help that a *great* many people think that piercings and tattoos are disgusting. It isn't just being narrow-minded either. Your accusation is just as narrow-minded as those you accuse. Some people aren't very comfortable with the idea of sticking stuff in themselves. I find it the idea a bit distasteful, and I'm an early 20's long haired guy.
Roundtrip Earth to a geosynchronous satellite is about 500ms. Speed depends on your channel width, and so could be anything.
Consumer satellite Internet tends to push 512Kb-1Mb down and 128Kb-256Kb up, all with 500ms latencies. You can get faster than this with specialized services. For example, DirecTV is pushing hundreds of MPEG digital video streams at the same time, so that's going to be a considerable data rate.
2.2GHz w/ 512MB RAM and a 4200rpm drive? I haven't seen a laptop spec'ed with a 3600rpm drive in quite some time. It's almost certainly a 4200rpm drive since it's based on a fairly recent Celeron chip. It probably has 1MB or 2MB of cache on it to reduce amount the disc needs to spin up.
I agree that the only important spec was the hard drive. He's likely using WinXP, as well. This means that his computer should be starting up in 20s or so, and word would take slightly longer than the menu select effect to start up ( 2s).
Try this out some time for yourself. Even on an early production pre-Coppermine P3, the load times are only a few seconds. OO.o, on the other hand, routinely takes 10s-15s to load on a 2+GHz desktop. Just timing 1.9.100 Writer startup now was 12s on my Athlon 2600+ w/ a 7200rpm 8MB cache drive. Word was under 3s.
OO.o still wins because the load time is about the same on subsequent loads, and it costs 450$ less than Office for largely the same functionality, and a longer load time.
Everybody does system management now. All the big players did at the time, by which I mean non-x86 players. Now, everybody out there does the in depth system monitoring and management. Compaq has been of dubious intention for a long time. For twenty years now they've been breaking industry standard to screw customers into having to buy parts from them.
I'm not saying Proliant servers were bad; in reality, they were far from it. I love the old Proliants that I've worked with. Hell, I have an old dual P-Pro system that works wonderfully. Well, wonderful except for weighing 100 pounds.
When HP and Compaq merged, HP didn't dump their server line. They picked up all the Compaq line into their name, and continued their own non-x86 servers. Compaq branded all the desktop equipment. This was probably because the HP name was stronger in the server market, and Compaq was a business desktop company.
x86 became abundant because it was "good enough" and was cheap to produce. The z80 was "good enough" for an awful long time, and it was terribly slow and lacked funtionality. You say it's all software, and I say software is driven by the hardware capabilities. Those companies might have competed with Intel in x86, but for their architectures being superiour, and for Intel not second sourcing them. x86 was always a holdover, and it just has refused to die a deserved death.
As someone paid to do microprocessor work, you should know better. The ISA is a big deal as everything the system does is tied to it. If your ISA is trash it kills the performance of your software. Look at all the problems the P4 has because of the way it handles decode and execution! Quite an achievment for Intel to produce a "next generation" architecture that's slower per cycle than the previous. You end up having to do all sorts of stupid complex things to "fix" the problems the terrible ISA caused.
I know there's an internal ISA for all modern x86 chips. There's still a whole lot of complexity that's added to maintain compatibility with a trash ISA. It's a huge waste that Intel keeps losing at hard.
Seriously, Itanium wasn't a bad project. The idea of making a more flexible chip that required software to act better isn't bad. It's just a differing perspective: CS vs EE. You can't change the silicon once it hits market. NVIDIA is pretty good at this idea, for example. Their hardware is rather flexible, and you can see how much so by looking at how they manage to squeeze more performance out of it with each driver release.
Just remember, x86 might be 99% of the world's software, but 99% of the average users only run Office, a web browser, and an email client.
Worse yet, you don't even get 99% of the software. You get the software that Microsoft hasn't broken with OS updates. I think it would be amusing to get Win3.1 to work on modern systems, or Desqview, or anything similar. The underlying hardware has changed a lot, and has broken compatibility. This sort of thing happens when a platform has been implemented without a good design.
x86 was designed in under a week, and it shows badly...
What would have to happen is for some company to take a leap on developing around one of these architectures and letting the market run with it. I had hoped that Apple was going to do this when it switched to PPC for the logic. That didn't happen, and there's an absolute ton of reasons for it.
Truth of it is that all those other arch's did well in the server/scientific computing space. Now you have so many MCSE types, so many of which are incompetent, and managers demanding Windows on everything. They miss that the server doesn't need to run any particular OS or platform as long as what you need is available.
This is why in the important environments, you have servers on HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc. You would be hard pressed to find a financial institution or heavy scientific computation project running on a Windows or x86 platform. The real performance that you need isn't there, and Windows just isn't reliable. You get Wintel on areas where downtime is acceptable outside of scheduled maintanence, and on workstations.
Try swapping a CPU or RAM out of an operating system on Wintel. You can get hotswap drives and the underused capability for hotswap PCI, but that's the end of it.
This is why platforms like Alpha and PA-RISC disappearing is worrying. We're headed towards where the only vendors out there selling truly stable platforms are going to be IBM and Sun. IBM has enough money to not die for decades, even with losses, but Sun is hurting badly. They've started selling a lot of Intel kit just like HP.
Ultimately, Intel makes consumer grade parts, and it's the same thing with AMD kit. Consumer grade always means lower quality since you have to drive the price down for market penetration and to hold your market share against the inherent competition. We're losing the option to get kit that is above consumer grade without doing your own R&D.
To tie up two things you mentioned:
You have to build it first, otherwise nobody can buy it. Business is about managed risk leading to a successful product and revenue. In the case of CPUs, these weren't exotic chips; they were just expensive. An UltraSPARC isn't that much more than an Itanium and it was the same for Alpha. PA-RISC servers are rather pricey, but it's still cost to benefit a better deal.
HP did start going down hard after the Compaq merger, same as DEC. After they stop production of PA-RISC and related platform, there will be no reason to buy Compaq/HP instead of someone else. People will consolidate vendors and end up picking just for convenience. This has tended to be Dell since they're easier to deal with and a bit cheaper.
Some of those wonderful instruments still exist with Agilent Technologies, at least. Just goes to show what happens when you have anything to do with Compaq... DEC and HP both used to be companies with incredible products. Now we'll have lost two of the best designed chip architectures, and two of the best UNIX variants to ever be on the market.
The point here is that the worst of all the CPU designs out there is the Intel one. Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, PPC are all better designs. The reason they never really made the desktop is because they aren't Intel. This is the same rationale that lead to Windows, Word DOCs, etc being "the way".
It comes down to managers that don't know a damned thing about the tech, but making all the decisions on it. These other architectures had more growth potential, higher performance, and better overall design than any Intel chip released in the x86 line. The downside was mostly in channel cost. Since they weren't already abundant, they were expensive. If they were mass produced, they wouldn't be any different in cost than the x86 market is.
Look at how well the PPC is doing in the console industry right now. It was obviously a better choice than the x86 based chips or it wouldn't have been done. It obviously could be manufactured for the same price or less.
Two interesting tidbits. First, look into the iAPX-432 processor. Intel intended to kill off their 8-bit CPU line because in favor of that chip. It was 32bit, could do SMP, supported hot-swappable chips, and a host of other features. The 8086 was thrown in as a quick product to hold the company until the 432 was ready. Needless to say that the 432 never became popular as a result of the x86 line.
The second tidbit is that the Itanium actually needed an instruction set translator to run existing x86 apps. This layer was developed in partnership with HP. Intel *doesn't* maintain compatibility in their chips. They were trying to kill off x86 again, because it was a dead end.
More like they require the additional DRM that is in XPSP2, in addition to the strict dependancy that the version tag is set to 5.1.2600.
I have to agree... the idea of puzzles at an interview is insulting, and doesn't tell you anything about an applicant's ability to the the job.
There are many problems with doing a puzzle, anyway. What if you're not good at the type of puzzle, or hate puzzles, or your brain is a little fried after bad traffic getting to your interview? Now you're cast aside because while you can write great algorithms, you have trouble figuring out some stupid gimmicky puzzle on the spot.
This just makes it harder for people to get their foot in the door, and harder for an established person to get into a company. It might not kill a company, but it will keep out some of the best employees. This means that eventually, your competition will eat you alive.
The problem, as I see it, is that the calculator helps to remove the math from math class. The kids using them don't understand what they're doing or how it works any longer. They just know that they get the answer the teacher wants by hitting these particular buttons in the right order. Without understanding the theory it is very difficult to properly apply the material.
I've seen this type of thing all over the place. At work I'm dealing with what boils down to this same problem, right now. People knew that they had to hit this key, then this other key, and then type in some numbers. The keys changed and they didn't know what they were doing, so now they're having tons of problems.
It's amazing how much simple things make a difference. There was this shoddy concept called "whole language" that a few states decided to do. The idea was that instead of teaching phonetics and root/suffix combinations while learning language, they would teach a word at a time. This was a miserable failure in every place it was tried. Nearly a generation of educated kids that have difficulty reading for the first time in centuries.
The calculator would be fine so long as the student understands what the calculator is doing for them.
Confirmation of the existance of an ET would spur investment into either paranoid defense or into programs like SETI. We might see another scientific renaissance that produces things like a way to reach FTL travel. Like anything else, if you know something is possible then you know you aren't wasting your time.