Any job interview I walk into with someone with such a self righteous attitude, I walk out.

Hiring is a two way street: management picks the employees they want, but employees would be smart to pick the team they want to be on.

How about cost? A suit costs more than jeans + t-shirt and you'll need a few of them. You still need to own jeans and t-shirts for your off days, so you're buying more clothes then before. Plus suits wear out easier. Torn jeans are trendy. Torn suit trousers are not.

On top of that you can't clean them yourself, you have to take them to a dry cleaner, which costs money. The shirts you can clean yourself but prepare to spend some time everyday ironing, and it won't look as nice as if you'd brought it in for a proper cleaning.

Not to mention the other bits you end up needing to buy (all expensive): nice dress shoes, cuff links, nice dress socks, ties, nice shirt.

Personally, I love the way I look in a suit. And I enjoy that people look at you differently since a suit screams status.

But for a low paying job, it's a huge percentage of your income and not worth it.

...it won't have a single thing I need.

I can give you a few...

SSDs under WinXP gradually degrade in performance, because XP doesn't support SSD TRIM. On Win7, this is not an issue, so you don't have to wipe / reset the SSD / restore the operating system once a year.

Graphics performance of video drivers - I gained 20-30% performance switching from XP 32bit to Win7 64bit on the same machine, maybe even doubled performance. This was back when I multi-boxed EVE Online - I went from struggling to run 3 windows (at least one would only get 15-20 FPS), to being able to have 5-6 open (all with 40+ FPS).

The 32bit limit of 3-something GB of RAM is a bit limiting when Firefox is chewing up 500-800MB, Thunderbird is chewing up another few hundred MB, and a handful of other background tasks chewing up 40-50MB each. Moving to Win7 meant I could put in 8GB of RAM on the box, and make use of it.

Multi-tasking performance is just better in Win7 when compared to XP. Less hiccups / pauses / other strange slowdowns.

The window preview as you hover over the tasks in the task bar is addictive. Being able to see thumbnails of each application window makes it easier to pick which window to bring forward (another bonus for multi-taskers).

A bit more resilient then XP to being infected - not perfect, but a definite step forward.

We run Linux on the servers, but I'm quite happy running either OS X or Win7 on the desktops. Both get the job done well enough and stay out of the way.

(Running Win7 on a 2007-era Thinkpad T series, 8GB RAM, pair of SSDs, and only a dual-core Intel CPU.)

I've long stated that the worst thing the US DoJ ever did to Microsoft - was failing to force them to break apart into separate companies.

Operating systems should have gone one way (at which point, I suspect that modern versions of Windows would be posix-based, probably on BSD). The application stack should have gone another way (MSOffice running on just about everything, instead of being limited in order to sell Microsoft Phones). The hardware stuff into a 3rd company.

Instead of being separate companies and competing - now they are all bound together, fighting for their little fiefdoms tooth and nail, and slowly sinking into obscurity.

You can, and I'd guesstimate that about 50% of legit SMTP connections to our server are encrypted with TLS. But that number could also be as low as 10-20% (the 90% of all connections being spam zombies makes it harder to estimate).

I have not tracked the value over time to see if it is going up/down. And our site is not particularly large, so we don't have a good sample to pull from.

I think the idea is that you pay the ISP for a "Netflix booster", and then your Netflix traffic gets un-humped into the fast lane.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see the foolishness in one of the highest volume uses of the Internet also being one of the highest priority? That people are thinking of the huge transfers of pre-produced video as being something other than the dead last, lowest priority cheapest-per-byte traffic there is, is totally ridiculous.

The only things that should be "fast laned" (low latency) are VoIP, videoconferencing, interactive terminals, etc: most of which is either low-bandwidth or else niche. If "high priority" is what many peoples' connections are doing several hours per day, then our very sense of "priorities" is fucked up.

I can't say I'm a fan of the ISPs that Netflix is fighting with, but at the same time: Fuck Netflix. Netflix is a case study in how to do video technologically wrong and it seems like they're just totally ignoring common sense. Why shouldn't doing things like a luddite, be relatively expensive? (Really, having storage in your box is still considered prohibitively expensive? It sure wasn't expensive in 2000 with Tivo series 1. Things got worse since then?!?) If the pampered princess insists that her cake be delivered from the kitchen a bite at a time and the commoner just puts a whole slice on his plate and takes a bite at the table whenever he wants it, we expect the princess' servants to be rolling their eyes when she's not looking, embezzeling, etc.

When we have broken up the monopolies and our streets have conduits under them containing a dozen competing fibers, we can re-evaluate the tech from our position of abundance. Maybe video streaming won't be on-the-face-of-it-stupid, then. But that's the future, not today.

For the real world, eh? Let's see. Optimism will not stop...

Well, not with that attitude it won't.