I paid full retail for my first photoshop (version 2.2) back in the day (1994). MS Office? 10$ for a fully licensed version thru my employer (That's professional version, including access and powerpoint).

OS - XP professional came with the machine, I would have to spend a lot of time to replace it, and it WOULD NOT RUN a piece of software on the machine that my company paid 1200$ for.

So, what would Linux cost to implement? No way to tell, because it can not do the job. So once again, the premise is faulty to start with. Linux is not a complete solution.

They go on and on about a series of awards - given out for various accomplishments. And the "low" turnover last year. Well sure, they cut our salary, but we stayed anyway to keep from becoming unemployed --- that's your low turnover.

But the company across the street came in 11 places ahead of us? Are the people that created this list insane? The place across the way doesn't pay well, but talks about big bonuses in their writeup. Then they go on about them paying for tuition for people - my question is where are the people going to college? The closest acredited school is 30 miles away and doesn't do much at night. All we have locally is community colleges and a couple of non-accredited "universities".

And you are so wrong. It is a simple problem.

I have already put the new lights into almost all of my home lighting now. Eventually, all but ONE light will be replaced. That one 5 bulb chandelier REQUIRES 1 incadescent bulb in order to turn on correctly. The other 4 bulbs are the lower power lighting. They are a smattering of other bulbs still as incadescents, but as they burn out they are getting replaced. (Or as the one required incadescent burns out, I use one of those others to replace it and swap it for one of the low power ones.)

And before you get on with the "oh they have special bulbs for that" - tried them - they don't work.

So, GE, please keep manufacturing incadescents.

Vector and such math is good if you want to go graphics and the like.

Algorithms and Automata theory is good if you want to go the Database administration route.

You pays your money and makes your choice.

As for Mathmaticians making the best programmers - sounds like a mathmatician talking to me. It ain't neccessarily so.

I chose the automata route myself, and I employed as a DBA for a fortune 10 company. However, with todays DBMSes, you might want to get some statistics under your belt.

I was one of a team of 3 that wrote a system in COBOL in 1983. Last I heard it is still running. It generated Maintenance schedules for a large plant automatically.

The next system I worked on after that (1985-88) was running until the company sold the division that used it. Don't know what happened after that.

Code from 1996-7 is still running for a tax system for an insurance company.

Code from 1999-2000 is still ordering merchandise for a major entertainment company (A certain Mouse you know).

And if you send packages by certain LARGE corporations then you use COBOL behind the scences. I wrote a new COBOL program for one of those a few weeks ago (and I'm a DBA, not a developer).

Do you ship anything? Say with Fedex, UPS, or any of the other big shipping companies? Congratualtions, you have just created COBOL transactions.

Define "multitasking" so that people are bound to fail, then measure the failure.

I define multitasking to include doing more then one task on my computer at a time. The trick is to start a long running BACKGROUND task and then do something requiring more attention in the foreground. It works very well.

So, I call this study INCOMPLETE. the peole doing it were probably playing video games while measuring their data - LOL!

Ok, I have somewhere at home, DOS 3.3 on a 720K floppy (And on the hard drive). AND --- AND ----- a working external 360K floppy on the same machine. This is an old Toshiba T1200, running an 8088 with 640K. I think I might have some old 360K garbage floppies around too, though I would have to look for them. I fire this beast up once a year or so, because it still does one thing the newer machines can't....RAW editting of a file on the disk hex bit by hex bit - the really old Norton Utilities....

Got this old machine new in 1988, then got a $100 class action suite return on it YEARS later.

And yes, I would like to see a 5.25" USB floppy somewhere too, just for grins and for a couple of old programs.

I also still have another machine that has a 1/2 height dual drive (5.25" 1.2 MB and 3.5" 1.4MB drive) and a tape drive and a CD drive..... And it is on my home LAN, so I can acces sit from the other machines.

First, some states have the emissions checks done by private enterprises (CT for one). And then you get states like Florida, that do not do an Emissions check at all. In fact, there is no check of any car in Florida that would involve looking at the odometer.

Oops....