The approach proposed is that it teaches you a trade. The problem is that you will likely quickly cap out on salary and opportunity. Much like a plumber can get a license in a year or so and start making 30-50K... that's pretty much the max (unless you start your own business).

In the tech field, there is always another kid coming along with more current skills and willing to work at a starter salary.

Ideally, a college education teaches you how to learn... not merely a trade.

If you're looking to learn a trade, the 10-week "truck driver training school" approach might work.

Of course, there are the few rare exceptions where a non-college graduate has gone on to great things. But for the vast major of people a good solid education is more likely to equip them for a lifetime career than gambling on starting a hit business.

Although the original posted pointed out a handful of successful non-college graduates, I'm guessing that there are millions of non-college graduate failures that you've never heard of.

Actually the buggy whip business isn't dead, but has turned into a niche market. A quick google search revealed http://www.jedediahsbuggywhip.org/sales.nxg which goes after the accurate period reproduction whips and repairs and has been in business since 1851. A different company has gone after the modern market with LED buggy whips (for visibility at night). The advantage is that these stores can reach a national market from a centralized location (much like Netflix).

The real solution is to redefine the business using the existing customers as a base...video game rentals, snack food/beer with a side of video. But it's a pretty tough challenge in a saturated retail market with not a lot of IP other than a customer list, knowledge of movies and location.

I believe hardware is done by an electrical engineer.

Unlike many other databases, errors can be tolerated in facebook. If a post gets lost or a connection or two dropped it really doesn't cost Facebook anything--and it's unlikely to be noticed. And downtime and retries are tolerated by the users.

  Try running a real-time, financial system like credit card authorization & processing (which probably has more than 1 billion users), needs to balance at the end of the day and has response requirements measuring under 250 ms.

  Facebook is just better at promotions. There are other databases that are bigger, have tighter response requirements and are more complex. It's all about buzz.

Starting a new business is reallly hard. Why make it more complicated by trying to piece together a bunch of software that sort-of works. You didn't say what kind of business you're starting, but for a 5 employee or fewer business quickbook is really pretty good. And there is no reason to do payroll your self. It's really just too hard to get right, and you can get it almost for free from Quicken or your bank.

If you think you might be looking for a credit facility (aka a loan) your bank will be looking for specific items in your financial statements. They will not be impressed that you're supporting the FOSS community.

I'd look for the software that meets your needs--if it helps your business prosper and if costs a few hundred bucks it's a good investment. A license for Office is about $200, quickbook pro (with payroll) is about $40 per month.

In starting a business, your time is probably the most valuable thing you have. Get out there and sell!

When I was fairly young, I remember being allowed to spend the night at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia by myself to watch the first moon landing live. The moon landings certainly inspired a generation of engineers and scientists. I'm not sure what the equivalent is today? (Watching Wall Street and becoming a hedge fund manager?)

If you want to read a great book about JPL, check out "Moon Hunters: NASA's Remarkable Expeditions to the Ends of the Solar Systems". Out of print, but probably available in your library.

I looked into Google for SMB mail, but if you need permanent archiving and search there isn't a good solution. Deleted emails are really gone and there isn't an easy was to search across all of the users emails if the need ever arises.

For many businesses this isn't a big deal, but if you're in financial services, health or other regulated industries it is important.

Although you correctly point out that the MacBook Air is 5% thinner, you left off that it is 20% more expensive. The cost per inch to save those 0.03 inches is more than $6,500.

If you are really serious about security on traveling laptops, one solution is a really dumb, cheap laptop and require everyone to securely VPN into a secure machine back at the office. When the laptop returns from overseas, it gets wiped, zeroed and re-imaged. If the value of the target is high enough, the laptop can be securely destroyed on return. (The cost of the laptop is probably less than the airfare involved in the trip, and then there isn't any question about a laptop that was out of company control being plugged into the network.)

If you're really paranoid you could rig a self destruct on the laptop if the proper code isn't entered every 24 hours.

You might first check with the company policy on use of company-owned equipment. It may be acceptable for you to watch a netfilix movie, read an ebook, do some shopping or check personal email via a website like gmail. The company policies may actually be reasonable. On the other hand, if the work you are doing requires the highest level of security , then no you shouldn't use the computer for anything else. Check first. If the answer is no, then respect it or get another job.

If you are not allowed to use the computer for any non-work related stuff, buy a lightweight laptop or tablet for travel. It's not that hard.

If discovered, any attempts to circumvent the company security (successfully or not) are grounds for termination. I'd say you should not even usie a USB key with a distro unless explicitly approved. It's your employer's (or the client's) call. Copying and restoring the disk is just completely out -- what happens if someone else notices it while you're on your trip, or something bad happens to the laptop and the admins can't remotely control it?

Ask, and if the answer is no, buy your own device to travel with.

In those days, a page didn't need a 100K graphic, a couple of javascript frameworks, 20 ads and a huge flash file. Total time to transmit the information was probably the same (but there was less information available on the early closed networks).

I remember starting up PDP-8's where you had to use the processor switches to toggle in the boot loader. After the boot loader was in, you could load OS/8 from punched paper tape. The whole process was probably 5 to 10 minutes or so. Later versions of the PDP-8 (and 11) had dedicated boot roms and could load the OS from DEC-TAPE (or if you had lots of bucks even from the 5 MB hard drive).

I miss the good ol' days when you needed to know assembly language and binary.

The e-Macs are really long in the tooth...modern software will not run these machines (even Firefox 4... and FF is now up to something like 10). The OS is no longer supported (Macs have a very short OS support lifetime). I don't think CS5 runs on PowerPC. The CRT monitors are power, space and A/C hogs. The harddrives are about to go. No the request for new machines isn't unreasonable....Whether to replace with Macs or PCs is another discussion.