there haven't been major advances in OS X or Windows for over a decade.

That's because the field has become mature, and there's little improvement to be made. For kernel-level and system-level stuff, all these concepts were mostly invented ages ago. Even the UI stuff was pretty stable by the early 2000s. So now some groups are trying to reinvent the wheel with all-new UI paradigms, as seen with Gnome3 and Windows' Metro UI, usually by trying to tie mobile and desktop UIs together, and the results have been horrifically bad.

Maturity is something we see in most technological fields: there's a whole lot of innovation early on, then people settle on one or two standard ways of doing things, then they stick with that for a long time, only making very small incremental improvements. Just look at aviation: they invented all kinds of weird-looking aircraft in the first few decades there, but what changes have there been to aircraft in the last 40 years or so? It's all been in the electronics, navigation, etc., not in the aerodynamics. Airplanes look almost exactly like they did 50 years ago, but with some relatively minor optimizations. Same goes for, say, laundry machines. A modern washing machine isn't much different from one 40 years ago, but now it has electronics which allow it to be more efficient with water and power and do a better job washing, but the overall design is pretty much the same, with two basic designs: a vertical-axis tub with an agitator, or a horizontal-axis tub (originally much more popular in Europe, but has gained popularity in the US in the past 15 years).

The problem with this is that smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry hardware these days has an entirely different architecture, called "ARM". (I think MIPS is also alive and kicking, being used in many embedded applications as well as ARM.) This shows why writing stuff in assembly is generally a bad idea: you can't port it to another architecture.

Wrong. Obama was indeed pretty short on merit, as was Reagan (a former B-list actor of all things). Just being a governor doesn't mean you'll be a good president; there's lots of shitty governors, and Bush II was one of those. Chris Christy is another great modern-day example of a shitty governor.

Unfortunately, the voters (in both parties) are lousy at picking candidates in the Primaries.

1. Just because meritocracy is real doesn't mean changes happen instantly.

Yeah, that's called inertia. In a real meritocracy, there'd be no inertia: people would dump the underperformer as soon as something better is available. But that's not what happened with the American car companies: they hung on for a very long time because of inertia, and as a result they're still here now. In a true meritocracy, they would have mostly disappeared in the early 80s, when Japanese cars had eclipsed them in every way, except probably for the full-size truck market (where Japanese makers didn't actually compete until later). In a mostly-meritocratic-system, with some inertia, the American carmakers would have died out by the early 90s. It wasn't until the late 2000s when the Americans really finally caught up.

2. Maybe their meritocratic skill is in navigating politics and unions, not car making.

Well the Japanese had far better cars on the market for decades, and didn't seem to have problems with unions or politics. Again, inertia, not meritocracy. If (as you might contend) unions were dragging down the American automakers, then in a true meritocracy they should have gone out of business in the 80s because of this. Instead, inertia kept them afloat, despite their problems with unions. Remember, this is a business: they make cars, and sell them to the general public. In a meritocratic market, the business with the superior product and customer service is the one which is the most profitable, and others go out of business. That's obviously not what happened with the American automakers; their cars in the 70s-90s were utter shit. And not only were they shit, but there were far superior alternatives on the market, at competitive prices. In a meritocracy, they should have gone under. It's that simple. Ergo, there's no meritocracy, just a huge amount of inertia (plus a big bailout in the late 2000s).

Yep, inertia is a powerful thing.

Here's another example for you: If meritocracy were a real thing, GM and Chrysler would have gone out of business in the 1980s (probably Ford too).

If meritocracy were a real thing, Bush would never have been President.

If meritocracy were a real thing, Justin Bieber would never have amounted to anything more than one of countless Youtube uploaders that no one cares about.

It also explains why the current generation embraces the music of their parents, a.k.a "Classic Rock", rather than rejecting it - as did every prior generation. (Remember when your parents' music used to sound "old fashioned" or "corny?")

I think this is an extremely important point, and something these theorists have ignored. I've been to a bunch of classic rock concerts in the last 6 years or so, and it's really struck me how wide an age range I see in the audience. I see middle-aged parents with their teenaged kids there frequently, watching bands like Styx and Foreigner. This is simply something you would never have seen in the 70s or 80s: teenagers then had zero interest in music from the 50s. I sure as hell never saw anything like this when I was younger and going to concerts in the 90s. But these days we've had Guitar Hero and lots of kids getting into this music; things are really different, and I think a lot of it is changes in the music industry since the rise of the internet. The subject I believe is far more complex than some theories about peoples' tastes changing as they age.

That said, I've come to appreciate music from the 1920s - 1950s, which predates me by a generation or two. Oh, and of course, there's also Classic Classical. That goes back several generations further.

Actually, Classical music, while nice and relaxing to listen to at times, also frequently bores me. For pre-20th-century music, Classical is just too new for me, and I prefer Baroque. The songs are more interesting and complex, and I like the harpsichord a lot.

Glad I'm in my 40's and I'm not weighed down by a mortgage, several kids, a shitty job and an impending divorce. I mean, seriously, what a fuck up way to look at life.

Like it or not, that's reality for lots of middle-aged people. How many people really, really love coming to the office day in, day out, and putting up with the same corporate BS? And at least 50% of marriages end in divorce, so it's not like that's unusual either.

Maybe for some people that stuff is true, but I never liked most of the music that my peers did. I went to college in the early/mid 90s, and I hated the music of that time. I quickly developed an appreciation for metal (mostly from the 80s), and later got into 70s rock. In fact, I've been learning to appreciate older stuff as I've gotten older, and I've never liked anything from the 90s on (unless it was 80s bands continuing to make music). I seemed to mostly come by this stuff on my own, though for a brief time in college I had a couple of friends who shared my musical tastes.

I also think it's wrong to ignore environmental factors: the music being made now really is different from that from decades past. They didn't have Autotune back then, and things were really different in the pre-Napster and pre-internet days.

Thanks! That sounds great. I have such a situation like that, and there's a break afterwards, but I got a job after that so it wasn't long-term unemployment, so the "period off" and "personal projects" thing sounds great, and in fact, is exactly what I did in that time as I was working on a side business.

I used to have a bunch of mercury fillings. None of them lasted 30 years; they all had to be replaced. The resin fillings I have now are well over 5 years old, more like 10-15 years. The best part is they look exactly like teeth; I can't even distinguish most of them. One of them is actually not really a "filling", but fills in a chipped tooth. It's strong enough to stay on the end of my front incisor, and is completely indistinguishable from real tooth. Try that with amalgam.

You sound like someone pining for cars with points.

Surely you can attach in some way a printer to a digital X-ray machine?

There's no such thing as a "digital x-ray machine". Do you also go to one of these horrible old-school dentists? They have a computer next to the chair, and instead of bite-wing film they use a small sensor that goes in your mouth, and has a cord with a USB connector on the end which plugs into the computer. Their software (one big name is "Dentrix") then does the capture and saves the images. There's two big advantages: the digital sensor requires about 1/10 of the x-ray energy as the old film, so you don't get such a big radiation dose, and the images are all digitally archived, so it's trivial for the dentist to bring them up and refer to them, and also to send them to other dentists in case you move and have to change dentists.

Reason for leaving should NEVER be stated on a CV.

Yeah, I already knew that. The problem is that many jobs require you to fill out an employment application and for each job, they demand a reason for leaving that position.

If it was the case that your boss was a wanker and you had to get out, spin it into something like "I had spent a decent length of time there and I believe I accomplished all that I was going to. I felt that it was the right time for me to look for new opportunities and hence here I am. In particular I am keen to work on (whatever they just told you about)."

Nothing there is a lie. If your boss was a jerk you probably weren't going to go any further in that role.

Sounds good. What if it's a job in the past, and you now have a gap after that job? What would be a good excuse there? TIA

Reason for leaving: My boss was an absolute cock and one day I had enough and I quit with no notice.

For some reason people don't seem to think this will raise questions about them.

That's really weird that that many applicants don't realize that. I would think that's common sense.

However, since you seem like a good one to ask, what should an applicant do in that situation, when a reason for leaving is demanded and that's their actual reason? Obviously they can't write the text above, but what's a better way to word it?

My experience is that often in technical spaces people can be very unaware of how certain things may portray them. People put photos on their CV, they put their marital status, how many kids they have, where the attend church, whole paragraphs about their hobbies, all sorts of weird things. Quite often the more techie they are the weirder the stuff they put on their CV.

Huh? Are you serious? I thought it was common knowledge that you don't put all that crap on your resume, and in fact that it's illegal for employers to ask. At least, that's how it is here in the US; you may not be US-based since you keep using the term "CV"; usually we only use that for academic positions. And, if you're not American, I wonder if that's a big culture difference; maybe techies here have much more disdain for AOL than people elsewhere.