I think you'd find that within a very short period of time anarchy would be rather unpleasant and highly expensive.
If you think it's a good idea take a look at a lot of the third world where whoever has the most guns controls the government of the day and everyone who has no guns gets screwed.
There are some governments that are worse than no government, but, for all its faults, the US government is not one of them.
What they're saying is that it's got something that other mice don't have.
Pretty much everything brand new, at least in hardware, starts off proprietary because if it was already a standard it wouldn't be new.
In addition, while you may or may not like Windows, Microsoft peripherals have been excellent for a long number of years. I still personally prefer logitech for mice, but I've been using a Microsoft natural keyboard for quite a few years now and it's one of the best keyboards I've ever had. Worked out of the box on linux too(minus the silly little shortcut buttons I don't use anyway but which all of them come with these days).
Proprietary doesn't always mean bad, and open doesn't always mean good.
Brand new technologies are expensive, and they're not generally designed by committee. Even new innovations in the open source world could be termed as proprietary because only one person is doing it.
Blu-Ray won because Sony owned media rights, and were willing to hurt a little to make itwin.
Toshiba could have spent every penny they had to bribe every movie studio other than Sony to switch to HD-DVD, but there would still have been a large chunk of media that would never be HD-DVD.
The reverse wasn't true.
A few studios went HD-DVD only in the early days when there wasn't much to be lost from it, but none of them were going to stay that way for long. In the end it was always going to be Blu-Ray unless Sony themselves gave up on the technology, and it would have taken a much bigger difference to get HD-DVD to win.
Of course winning that format war is a rather relative term as it's still not clear that Blu-Ray has actually won, more that HD-DVD has lost.
From what I understand from what I've read, the mighty mouse cannot detect the difference between your left and right fingers if both fingers are on the mouse.
Hence to click the right button you have to take your left finger off.
I would presume that if it can't tell the difference it presumes a left click, so you could probably alt-zoom and still click to fire.
I didn't say you shouldn't learn a new language. I said that there's a reason your boss doesn't want you to use these languages, and there's a reason why for all their faults C/C++ and java are still around while dozens of other languages have disappeared or been relegated to very specific niches over the years.
As a programmer any new learning can only help you, but this idea that the new flavour of the month language is going to change the world is and always has been ludicrous.
Very few of them offer enough actual real term benefit to make up for the costs of implementing code in them.
As much as I'm not a "think of the children" type (nearly everything done in the name of children does nothing to actually protect them and often times makes things worse), viewing this sort of material(and I mean the real stuff not the fake stuff which I reckon is probably ok, though not my cup of tea) is not a thought crime any more than watching a snuff film would be.
It's not a thought crime because it has to come from somewhere, and that means that in order for it to exist a crime has to be committed and the more demand for it there is the more crimes get committed. There's no such thing as a harmless production of the real thing and the folks who view it(on purpose at least) are funding and enabling that sort of thing even if they're not participating.
You could possibly argue that finding a way to provide and artificial/healthy outlet for these folks is better for society than trying to pretend they don't exist, and there's certainly a lot of gray area in the late teens, but there is certainly a category of this sort of thing that is fundamentally wrong, and viewing it is no more innocent than participating in it's production.
Learning a new language involves lost productivity, and if you choose a language that isn't in mainstream use it will involve lost productivity for everyone you hire to use it.
Generally speaking new languages don't offer enough benefit over the old languages to justify that expenditure.
It's the thing everyone always forgets, even if learning something new is easy, the new thing has to be sufficiently better than the old thing to justify the learning.
Boutique languages are almost never a good investment because even if you hire a programmer who loves to learn the liklihood that they've learned any particular language is fairly low. Languages become popular not because they are superior in any technical sense, but because they provide a benefit for a project which outweighs the investment cost.
Just because a programmer can learn a language doesn't mean it makes financial sense for them to do so on company time.
I'm not actually in the US anymore either, I just get a little cranky with the people who think that because 15,000 in their country can provide a relatively luxurious lifestyle, that it's not fair that I make more than that where it can't.
My cost of living is actually higher than the US, though the currency value here is, at the moment, substantially lower.
I've got nothing against H1B visas, but the whole "buy labour at cheap prices and then sell it to Americans at high prices when you're taking away the jobs that allow the Americans to buy at those prices" game has always pissed me off because it's going to end up screwing everyone in the end.
The problem with this theory is that it doesn't work.
Outsourcing happens because companies can buy labour at overseas prices, and sell the resulting products/services to Americans at American prices.
If you earned as much as Americans, or if Americans earned as much as you, then there would be noincentive to outsource(the administrative costs generally make it a questionable practice as it is) and you'd be out of a job.
Outsourcing is an exploitation of globalization, not a result of it. I'm all for freer immigration, and I'm all for skilled candidates getting a fair shot at jobs.
That said, when things "fix themselves" it's going to hurt you more than it hurts me, because it's not going to be cheaper to hire you anymore, and your country will still have no local companies to hire you.
Let me tell you, as someone who does this sort of thing for a living, coding for IE as well as for standards is a pain in the ass.
This is especially true for AJAX. This isn't entirely Microsoft's fault, because the W3C always seems to have the attitude that "just because the browser 90% of people use already does it this way, doesn't mean that should be the standard".
XMLHttpRequest in IE 6 and earlier is an activex control. So is Microsoft's implementation of XML.
They're not controls which get installed, they're part of IE.
Some of this is changing(the W3C standard implementation of XMLHttpRequest works in IE 7), but in general doing both is a fair wack of work, and Microsoft reckons that supporting two isn't worth what it'd cost them to do. As it'd be mind bogglingly stupid of them to support Firefox and not IE, they're not going to support Firefox.
Well mostly because no large business(or for that matter small business) wants to be anywhere near the bleeding edge. The bleeding edge is a dangerous place to be, that's why it's the bleeding edge and not the chocolate edge or the fluffy pillow edge.
There are a lot of reasons why folks stick with IE 6 in the corporiate environment, but the primary one is third party core systems.
Pretty much every business has one, an application they couldn't develop themselves, and which either doesn't have an open source alternative or whose open source alternative sucks.
A lot of those applications have web interfaces, and, if the application is relatively old(not even necessarily your version of it) then realistically it's not going to be conforming to web standards because when it was built they didn't exist.
If it comes down to choosing between IE 7 and still pretty basic support for web standards, or having a system crucial to your business continue to work properly, folks are going to stick wtih IE 6.
This may change with IE 8 or 9 depending on how good the standards compliance ends up being, but IE 7 still requires a lot of the same fiddling to make it work, and the cost of getting there can be prohibitive for something as stupid as a web browser.
Economically, apple's products are not overpriced.
They are not overpriced because there are a lot of idiots out there who think that shiny is good, and that, despite the fact that apple uses the exact same parts as everyone else that they're better hardware.
Some people would by a turd for $2000 if Steve Jobs sold it to them.
That doesn't mean that apple's products aren't overvalued, which is distinct from being overpriced, but is what I believe was the orignal intent.
The only basic difference between an Apple laptop and a laptop from a competitor is the appearance/case, their support, and OSX.
Now some people might argue that those differences are worth the price point difference between a Macbook and an equivilent laptop from a competing manufacturer, and apparently enough people believe that this is the case that apple is able to make a rather healthy profit every year(though I'm not certain how much of that comes from laptops).
The GGP however appears to be arguing that, at least from his perspective, that valuation is incorrect.
Personally I tend to agree with this assessment, as from my experience Macbook cases aren't any more solid than anyone elses(and less so than laptops specifically designed to be rugged), the experiene of some of my friends with apple support, as well as extensive experience with Dell support have led me to believe that the whole lot of them are a bunch of wankers, and while OSX is quite nice, if they sold an unbundled version for the price difference between macs and their competitors there'd be slashdot vitriol up to the ceiling.
YMMV, and it certainly doesn't hurt Apple that most other laptop manufacturers can't put together a halfway decent product either, nor does it hurt that laptops are quite often more of a status symbol than a utility item and so prettiness counts.
That doesn't change the fact that while apple can quite obviously sell their laptops for the price they sell them at and so are probably not stupid for doing so(you'd have to see their projections for profits at lower per item profits and higher volume), the people who are willing to pay that might possibly be a tiny bit foolish.
Employers in general, and in the US in particular, are, for the most part, totally crap at writing job adverts.
They write up things they'd like as opposed to what they actually need, and guess what, they don't get them.
When I first graduated, I saw a job looking for someone with 5 years experience with.NET. At the time, even the educational version of.NET had only been out for about a year and the commercial version had been out for about 3 months.
Since this company was not paying well enough to steal developers away from Microsoft, and wasn't anywhere near Redmond, one must presume that their eventual candidate did not actually have these skills.
Most employers ask for way more than what they're going to get, and in most cases more than they actually need.
This is particularly the case for people in entry level jobs, they want a guru for intern pay, and it's not going to happen.
Try for everything position you think you can do, be willing to take a pay cut if you have to in order to get your foot in the door, and have some good clean code samples to provide if you're asked.
When I was fresh out of Uni I did the same things you did, but I've since learned, that if you don't try you'll never get anywhere, and, especially when you've still got a pay check coming in, the cost of throwing out resumes is pretty much nil, and the rejection isn't so bad.
You should of course, as others have said, also make sure that folks in your own company know you want to move up in the world, and take whatever opportunities you can get your hands on internally. Even if the job isn't exactly where you want to go, moving up will make you look a lot better on a resume than sitting on the bottom for years.
I don't think you understand how crypto, or for that matter computers, work.
Generating the key space is not hard, it's time consuming because there's a whole lot of entries. Testing that key space involves going through each and every entry and testing that entry. The test is actually computationally more intensive than generating the next key, so trying to "generate the key space" and then "testing against what you generated" would be just about the most mentally defective way to do this as you'd spend more time pulling the next bit of data from disk than you would generating it from scratch.
The key space is not hard to work out. For WPA it's the full set of characters that can be entered using a keyboard(unicode supports 95,156 plus control codes which probably don't work)to the power of the number of characters you've entred.
Realistically you're going to be looking at far less than that because people are unlikely to use anything that's not directly on their keyboard, but the point is the same.
Well ya see, the complexity increases exponentially, but the speed also increases exponentially, and they sort of cancel each other out.
Of course all of this is really rather immaterial as you're talking about breaking todays encryption with computers from 50 years hence, which isn't going to happen, as none of the devices using todays encryption will still boot in 50 years, let alone actually support whatever protocols we're using by then.
No, it really doesn't, it makes absolutely no difference as to when they're releasing them. In fact releasing them far away from one another only makes things worse because folks who aren't interested in whatever race they release first won't buy.
Blizzard can afford to wait 3 years as easily as it can afford to wait a year. If WoW ended tomorrow they should still have the cash reserves to last until they could release a finished Starcraft product.
Everything on that list still applies.
Which one is the real game, why should people pay full price for a second one.
If you can play full multi-player without buying the expensive one, then in a year why would anyone ever buy anything but one of the cheap ones.
If you can only play whatever new stuff you get from the expansions with the expansions and everyone has a different expansion so you can't use your new units then why would you pay for them?
If you can use your new units against people who haven't got the expansions then why should anyone play a game where you have to buy three games to be able to play multi-player?
Well, partially because most of the people who still play them are Korean and they take their gaming way way way too seriously.
Second, the RTS market has been fairly quiet in recent years, there's been a few Warhammer titles, and another Age of Empires, but nothing mind blowing.
Third while the whole thing has been done to death, SC is still probably the best RTS that's ever been released.
I personally dislike WC3 because the whole upkeep system shafts my play style, but it wasn't a bad game.
None of this affects the fact that the game play of SC (and even more so the game play for Diablo) has been done to death, even if most implementations sucked.
Blizzard is pulling a gamble here, because the pricing is going to be a mess.
If they make one of them expensive and the other two cheap the vast majority of people will buy one or both of the cheap ones for multi-player and give the expensive one a miss.
If they're all expensive then the same situation but more people will be angry and they're in an even worse situation.
If they're all cheap, then they may as well just have released them as one big game a year later, it's not like Blizz desperately needs new capital in the next 6 months.
They also risk, presuming that multi-player is impacted in any way by which purchase you make, fragmenting the multi-player market so much that there's no one to play with and no one wants to play.
If there's no impact people will be unlikely to pay for the single player campaigns at all.
Personally, while there is a chance they'll pull this off, even a chance it'll be a good thin, I'd predict that the whole fiasco will do more to damage their reputation than anything else, and as they have no excuse for greed as their balance sheets should be well into the black by now.
Generally speaking only wealthy people went to school to be segregated in the first place, and even then men and women weren't really separated they just didn't go to school with one another. Plenty of men worked at or around girls schools and vice versa not even counting the fact that if they got out of the school grounds there were plenty of men.
Excluding societies where unmarried women were not allowed to leave the house unescorted(like the ancient Greeks) and nobles of more recent times(both of whom historically married their daughters off at around 12 or 13 albeit often to much older men) this hasn't really been a terribly effective process.
This one is true, but it's not like modern kids don't have sex without any of those things, so it's not really a deal breaker.
There have been methods for terminating pregnancy for at least as long as recorded history. The old methods were far more dangerous, far less reliable, and even less generally socially accepted than they are today, but they still existed and were utitilzed.
A man could, and in some societies still can, but realistically marriages were very political in most places and if you were wealthy enough you could easily find someone to marry your daughter even if she was pregnant with another mans child.
This certainly happened, if they got caught, and there families didn't protect them, but a lot of virginal women ended up in the same sort of place. Again teenagers aren't particularly good at forseeing the future.
Depending on what part of society you were in being a bastard most certainly had some social consequences, but poor people didn't care, and quite a number of the illegitimate children of nobles were rather successful. English history is littered with famous Fitz-somethings, and Fitz meant essentially bastard son of. Terms like "natural child" were thrown around too. It was of course quite scandalous, but not the end of the world.
Most importantly, whether you truly believe that all ancient people waited till they were married to have sex, which plainly isn't true, historically people got married at a very early age. When the average lifespan for most people is 30 years, you don't wait till you're 25 to get hitched, peasants got married at very young ages to other young people, rich folks generally married young women to old men, but since rich folks only liked to marry other rich folks they were so inbred that any genetic advantage to this was pretty much nullified.
The idea that people won't have sex till they're in their 20's is a modern anomaly. No one has even pretended that it happens before the 20th century, if it ever happened even in the early 20th century it was more likely to have been caused by most young men being involved in various and sundry wars(and they were certainly having sex) leaving women at home with no one within 20 years of their own age to have any sex with.
Young people have always had sex, and no amount of people telling them that it's a sin, will destroy their lives, or has a lot of unintended consequences has ever prevented it from happening.
True in the modern era with less people believing in sin, and more of the consequences being avoidable it might happen more often, especially before marriage, but at the same time for those very reasons it is less societally harmful and so we're no worse than we ever were.
Our bodies are programmed at the most basic level to procreate, our most basic desires are chemically tuned towards this process, and the process itself is pleasurable for the very reason of encouraging the process.
As thinking beings we are capable of overcoming these instincts and making the decision not to follow them, but to believe that our success rate in doing so has ever been anywhere close to 100%, especially in the early years when the genetic drive is strongest and the mind least able to overcome it is pure folly.
Nah, I could understand that, I wouldn't approve of it of course, but at least rational self interest matches what republicans are supposed to believe in.
If you watch Bush with other leaders who have served fairly long terms he just looks totally lost all the time.
For a particular example try to find any photos of him with John Howard at last years APEC, it was something to behold.
That said, if all you're looking to do is get out of the US because it's sinking, a lot of everywhere else is sinking too, and from all indications it's going to get worse.
If you're talented and sufficiently adventurous you can get work in other countries, but you always could. Most of what I was saying is that you're not going to magically escape this thing by going somewhere else.
The basic and fundamental problem is that, the free market doesn't work.
It's terribly poor at measuring anything that doesn't affect the bottom line, and government intervention to fix that inevitably creates a sufficiently high barrier to entry that in most industries, monopoly like structures are fairly inevitable.
That's not to say that capitalism in and of itself is a failure, or that we should all be communist.
However, we have to stop relying on the market to fix everything because the evidence over the last three hundred years is that it won't.
The free market is supposed to reduce prices and increase competition. Some company is supposed to come along and try to undercut their competition who will in turn undercut them, leading to efficiency and an eventual price drop, but it doesn't happen. Why should a company cut prices when they know that though they might make some short term gains the end result will be exactly the same situation they're in at the present but with lower margins.
People are supposed to always act with rational self interest, but they don't, they act with emotion, with fear and anger and jealousy.
Pure free market capitalism requires exactly the same sort of naive changes to human nature that pure communism does. They both rely on people knowing what is best for them in the long run and acting on that knowledge, which they just don't do.
Our current economic system rewards sociopathic behaviour. The people who make it to the top are the people who are most willing to knife their opponents in the back. They aren't the best, or the brightest, they're simply more willing (and able) to do what it takes to climb to the top. Unsurprisingly the end result of putting sociopaths in power is sociopathic results. Everyone else gets screwed.
I don't know what the solution is, whether it's going to be more government control, or perhaps just more consequences for destructive behaviour(people who put money over the good of the community get their assets siezed or get sent to jail).
What's important is the fact that we can't answer every question with "leave it to the markets" because the market isn't free, can never be free, and probably wouldn't work the way we think it would even if it were.
The economies of Africa and most of Asia have always been fucked.
Realistically Japan and China may weather this, though that's a big if since they sell a lot of stuff the the US and Europe, and if they do a few countries like Australia may stay afloat.
All those countries have pretty stringent immigration requirements, and to be honest, I'd be surprised if any of them are going to get out of this unscathed and times of economic trouble are generally times of intense xenophobia in even the most enlightened countries. Guest workers are never particularly popular when jobs are scarce(think about how most of Slashdot thinks about H1B visa holders).
And most of Europe(and everyone else who lives somewhere were we don't have to deal with lunatics with guns for the most part) thanks you profusely for not visiting them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think it's a good idea take a look at a lot of the third world where whoever has the most guns controls the government of the day and everyone who has no guns gets screwed.
There are some governments that are worse than no government, but, for all its faults, the US government is not one of them.
Pretty much everything brand new, at least in hardware, starts off proprietary because if it was already a standard it wouldn't be new.
In addition, while you may or may not like Windows, Microsoft peripherals have been excellent for a long number of years. I still personally prefer logitech for mice, but I've been using a Microsoft natural keyboard for quite a few years now and it's one of the best keyboards I've ever had. Worked out of the box on linux too(minus the silly little shortcut buttons I don't use anyway but which all of them come with these days).
Proprietary doesn't always mean bad, and open doesn't always mean good.
Brand new technologies are expensive, and they're not generally designed by committee. Even new innovations in the open source world could be termed as proprietary because only one person is doing it.
Toshiba could have spent every penny they had to bribe every movie studio other than Sony to switch to HD-DVD, but there would still have been a large chunk of media that would never be HD-DVD.
The reverse wasn't true.
A few studios went HD-DVD only in the early days when there wasn't much to be lost from it, but none of them were going to stay that way for long. In the end it was always going to be Blu-Ray unless Sony themselves gave up on the technology, and it would have taken a much bigger difference to get HD-DVD to win.
Of course winning that format war is a rather relative term as it's still not clear that Blu-Ray has actually won, more that HD-DVD has lost.
Hence to click the right button you have to take your left finger off.
I would presume that if it can't tell the difference it presumes a left click, so you could probably alt-zoom and still click to fire.
That said it's still a fairly stupid technology.
As a programmer any new learning can only help you, but this idea that the new flavour of the month language is going to change the world is and always has been ludicrous.
Very few of them offer enough actual real term benefit to make up for the costs of implementing code in them.
It's not a thought crime because it has to come from somewhere, and that means that in order for it to exist a crime has to be committed and the more demand for it there is the more crimes get committed. There's no such thing as a harmless production of the real thing and the folks who view it(on purpose at least) are funding and enabling that sort of thing even if they're not participating.
You could possibly argue that finding a way to provide and artificial/healthy outlet for these folks is better for society than trying to pretend they don't exist, and there's certainly a lot of gray area in the late teens, but there is certainly a category of this sort of thing that is fundamentally wrong, and viewing it is no more innocent than participating in it's production.
Learning a new language involves lost productivity, and if you choose a language that isn't in mainstream use it will involve lost productivity for everyone you hire to use it.
Generally speaking new languages don't offer enough benefit over the old languages to justify that expenditure.
It's the thing everyone always forgets, even if learning something new is easy, the new thing has to be sufficiently better than the old thing to justify the learning.
Boutique languages are almost never a good investment because even if you hire a programmer who loves to learn the liklihood that they've learned any particular language is fairly low. Languages become popular not because they are superior in any technical sense, but because they provide a benefit for a project which outweighs the investment cost.
Just because a programmer can learn a language doesn't mean it makes financial sense for them to do so on company time.
My cost of living is actually higher than the US, though the currency value here is, at the moment, substantially lower.
I've got nothing against H1B visas, but the whole "buy labour at cheap prices and then sell it to Americans at high prices when you're taking away the jobs that allow the Americans to buy at those prices" game has always pissed me off because it's going to end up screwing everyone in the end.
Outsourcing happens because companies can buy labour at overseas prices, and sell the resulting products/services to Americans at American prices.
If you earned as much as Americans, or if Americans earned as much as you, then there would be noincentive to outsource(the administrative costs generally make it a questionable practice as it is) and you'd be out of a job.
Outsourcing is an exploitation of globalization, not a result of it. I'm all for freer immigration, and I'm all for skilled candidates getting a fair shot at jobs.
That said, when things "fix themselves" it's going to hurt you more than it hurts me, because it's not going to be cheaper to hire you anymore, and your country will still have no local companies to hire you.
Both XML and XMLHttpRequest as well as a number of other things Microsoft implemented first were initially implemented as ActiveX controls.
This is especially true for AJAX. This isn't entirely Microsoft's fault, because the W3C always seems to have the attitude that "just because the browser 90% of people use already does it this way, doesn't mean that should be the standard".
XMLHttpRequest in IE 6 and earlier is an activex control. So is Microsoft's implementation of XML.
They're not controls which get installed, they're part of IE.
Some of this is changing(the W3C standard implementation of XMLHttpRequest works in IE 7), but in general doing both is a fair wack of work, and Microsoft reckons that supporting two isn't worth what it'd cost them to do. As it'd be mind bogglingly stupid of them to support Firefox and not IE, they're not going to support Firefox.
There are a lot of reasons why folks stick with IE 6 in the corporiate environment, but the primary one is third party core systems.
Pretty much every business has one, an application they couldn't develop themselves, and which either doesn't have an open source alternative or whose open source alternative sucks.
A lot of those applications have web interfaces, and, if the application is relatively old(not even necessarily your version of it) then realistically it's not going to be conforming to web standards because when it was built they didn't exist.
If it comes down to choosing between IE 7 and still pretty basic support for web standards, or having a system crucial to your business continue to work properly, folks are going to stick wtih IE 6.
This may change with IE 8 or 9 depending on how good the standards compliance ends up being, but IE 7 still requires a lot of the same fiddling to make it work, and the cost of getting there can be prohibitive for something as stupid as a web browser.
They are not overpriced because there are a lot of idiots out there who think that shiny is good, and that, despite the fact that apple uses the exact same parts as everyone else that they're better hardware.
Some people would by a turd for $2000 if Steve Jobs sold it to them.
That doesn't mean that apple's products aren't overvalued, which is distinct from being overpriced, but is what I believe was the orignal intent.
The only basic difference between an Apple laptop and a laptop from a competitor is the appearance/case, their support, and OSX.
Now some people might argue that those differences are worth the price point difference between a Macbook and an equivilent laptop from a competing manufacturer, and apparently enough people believe that this is the case that apple is able to make a rather healthy profit every year(though I'm not certain how much of that comes from laptops).
The GGP however appears to be arguing that, at least from his perspective, that valuation is incorrect.
Personally I tend to agree with this assessment, as from my experience Macbook cases aren't any more solid than anyone elses(and less so than laptops specifically designed to be rugged), the experiene of some of my friends with apple support, as well as extensive experience with Dell support have led me to believe that the whole lot of them are a bunch of wankers, and while OSX is quite nice, if they sold an unbundled version for the price difference between macs and their competitors there'd be slashdot vitriol up to the ceiling.
YMMV, and it certainly doesn't hurt Apple that most other laptop manufacturers can't put together a halfway decent product either, nor does it hurt that laptops are quite often more of a status symbol than a utility item and so prettiness counts.
That doesn't change the fact that while apple can quite obviously sell their laptops for the price they sell them at and so are probably not stupid for doing so(you'd have to see their projections for profits at lower per item profits and higher volume), the people who are willing to pay that might possibly be a tiny bit foolish.
They write up things they'd like as opposed to what they actually need, and guess what, they don't get them.
When I first graduated, I saw a job looking for someone with 5 years experience with .NET. At the time, even the educational version of .NET had only been out for about a year and the commercial version had been out for about 3 months.
Since this company was not paying well enough to steal developers away from Microsoft, and wasn't anywhere near Redmond, one must presume that their eventual candidate did not actually have these skills.
Most employers ask for way more than what they're going to get, and in most cases more than they actually need.
This is particularly the case for people in entry level jobs, they want a guru for intern pay, and it's not going to happen.
Try for everything position you think you can do, be willing to take a pay cut if you have to in order to get your foot in the door, and have some good clean code samples to provide if you're asked.
When I was fresh out of Uni I did the same things you did, but I've since learned, that if you don't try you'll never get anywhere, and, especially when you've still got a pay check coming in, the cost of throwing out resumes is pretty much nil, and the rejection isn't so bad.
You should of course, as others have said, also make sure that folks in your own company know you want to move up in the world, and take whatever opportunities you can get your hands on internally. Even if the job isn't exactly where you want to go, moving up will make you look a lot better on a resume than sitting on the bottom for years.
Generating the key space is not hard, it's time consuming because there's a whole lot of entries. Testing that key space involves going through each and every entry and testing that entry. The test is actually computationally more intensive than generating the next key, so trying to "generate the key space" and then "testing against what you generated" would be just about the most mentally defective way to do this as you'd spend more time pulling the next bit of data from disk than you would generating it from scratch.
The key space is not hard to work out. For WPA it's the full set of characters that can be entered using a keyboard(unicode supports 95,156 plus control codes which probably don't work)to the power of the number of characters you've entred.
Realistically you're going to be looking at far less than that because people are unlikely to use anything that's not directly on their keyboard, but the point is the same.
Of course all of this is really rather immaterial as you're talking about breaking todays encryption with computers from 50 years hence, which isn't going to happen, as none of the devices using todays encryption will still boot in 50 years, let alone actually support whatever protocols we're using by then.
Blizzard can afford to wait 3 years as easily as it can afford to wait a year. If WoW ended tomorrow they should still have the cash reserves to last until they could release a finished Starcraft product.
Everything on that list still applies.
Which one is the real game, why should people pay full price for a second one.
If you can play full multi-player without buying the expensive one, then in a year why would anyone ever buy anything but one of the cheap ones.
If you can only play whatever new stuff you get from the expansions with the expansions and everyone has a different expansion so you can't use your new units then why would you pay for them?
If you can use your new units against people who haven't got the expansions then why should anyone play a game where you have to buy three games to be able to play multi-player?
Second, the RTS market has been fairly quiet in recent years, there's been a few Warhammer titles, and another Age of Empires, but nothing mind blowing.
Third while the whole thing has been done to death, SC is still probably the best RTS that's ever been released.
I personally dislike WC3 because the whole upkeep system shafts my play style, but it wasn't a bad game.
None of this affects the fact that the game play of SC (and even more so the game play for Diablo) has been done to death, even if most implementations sucked.
Blizzard is pulling a gamble here, because the pricing is going to be a mess.
If they make one of them expensive and the other two cheap the vast majority of people will buy one or both of the cheap ones for multi-player and give the expensive one a miss.
If they're all expensive then the same situation but more people will be angry and they're in an even worse situation.
If they're all cheap, then they may as well just have released them as one big game a year later, it's not like Blizz desperately needs new capital in the next 6 months.
They also risk, presuming that multi-player is impacted in any way by which purchase you make, fragmenting the multi-player market so much that there's no one to play with and no one wants to play.
If there's no impact people will be unlikely to pay for the single player campaigns at all.
Personally, while there is a chance they'll pull this off, even a chance it'll be a good thin, I'd predict that the whole fiasco will do more to damage their reputation than anything else, and as they have no excuse for greed as their balance sheets should be well into the black by now.
Most importantly, whether you truly believe that all ancient people waited till they were married to have sex, which plainly isn't true, historically people got married at a very early age. When the average lifespan for most people is 30 years, you don't wait till you're 25 to get hitched, peasants got married at very young ages to other young people, rich folks generally married young women to old men, but since rich folks only liked to marry other rich folks they were so inbred that any genetic advantage to this was pretty much nullified.
The idea that people won't have sex till they're in their 20's is a modern anomaly. No one has even pretended that it happens before the 20th century, if it ever happened even in the early 20th century it was more likely to have been caused by most young men being involved in various and sundry wars(and they were certainly having sex) leaving women at home with no one within 20 years of their own age to have any sex with.
Young people have always had sex, and no amount of people telling them that it's a sin, will destroy their lives, or has a lot of unintended consequences has ever prevented it from happening.
True in the modern era with less people believing in sin, and more of the consequences being avoidable it might happen more often, especially before marriage, but at the same time for those very reasons it is less societally harmful and so we're no worse than we ever were.
Our bodies are programmed at the most basic level to procreate, our most basic desires are chemically tuned towards this process, and the process itself is pleasurable for the very reason of encouraging the process.
As thinking beings we are capable of overcoming these instincts and making the decision not to follow them, but to believe that our success rate in doing so has ever been anywhere close to 100%, especially in the early years when the genetic drive is strongest and the mind least able to overcome it is pure folly.
If you watch Bush with other leaders who have served fairly long terms he just looks totally lost all the time.
For a particular example try to find any photos of him with John Howard at last years APEC, it was something to behold.
The thing that makes Bush the worst president ever is because he's done bad things but is to mind boggling stupid to understand what he's done.
I can live with evil, it's stupidity I have a hard time with.
That said, if all you're looking to do is get out of the US because it's sinking, a lot of everywhere else is sinking too, and from all indications it's going to get worse.
If you're talented and sufficiently adventurous you can get work in other countries, but you always could. Most of what I was saying is that you're not going to magically escape this thing by going somewhere else.
It's terribly poor at measuring anything that doesn't affect the bottom line, and government intervention to fix that inevitably creates a sufficiently high barrier to entry that in most industries, monopoly like structures are fairly inevitable.
That's not to say that capitalism in and of itself is a failure, or that we should all be communist.
However, we have to stop relying on the market to fix everything because the evidence over the last three hundred years is that it won't.
The free market is supposed to reduce prices and increase competition. Some company is supposed to come along and try to undercut their competition who will in turn undercut them, leading to efficiency and an eventual price drop, but it doesn't happen. Why should a company cut prices when they know that though they might make some short term gains the end result will be exactly the same situation they're in at the present but with lower margins.
People are supposed to always act with rational self interest, but they don't, they act with emotion, with fear and anger and jealousy.
Pure free market capitalism requires exactly the same sort of naive changes to human nature that pure communism does. They both rely on people knowing what is best for them in the long run and acting on that knowledge, which they just don't do.
Our current economic system rewards sociopathic behaviour. The people who make it to the top are the people who are most willing to knife their opponents in the back. They aren't the best, or the brightest, they're simply more willing (and able) to do what it takes to climb to the top. Unsurprisingly the end result of putting sociopaths in power is sociopathic results. Everyone else gets screwed.
I don't know what the solution is, whether it's going to be more government control, or perhaps just more consequences for destructive behaviour(people who put money over the good of the community get their assets siezed or get sent to jail).
What's important is the fact that we can't answer every question with "leave it to the markets" because the market isn't free, can never be free, and probably wouldn't work the way we think it would even if it were.
The economies of most of Europe are fucked.
The economies of Africa and most of Asia have always been fucked.
Realistically Japan and China may weather this, though that's a big if since they sell a lot of stuff the the US and Europe, and if they do a few countries like Australia may stay afloat.
All those countries have pretty stringent immigration requirements, and to be honest, I'd be surprised if any of them are going to get out of this unscathed and times of economic trouble are generally times of intense xenophobia in even the most enlightened countries. Guest workers are never particularly popular when jobs are scarce(think about how most of Slashdot thinks about H1B visa holders).
And most of Europe(and everyone else who lives somewhere were we don't have to deal with lunatics with guns for the most part) thanks you profusely for not visiting them.