don't know which companies you have worked with but in every environment I have every worked in, technical staff (developers etc and to a less extent sysadmins) who have domain/business knowledge are treated like gold.

Hi Canada, I would like to introduce you to the rest of the world where right or wrong this is standard practice. Calling the rest of the world retards makes you come across as a fool.

It isn't just that the apple is completed on the consumer/retail sector its that they have no enterprise/business strategy.

We do a lot of mobile development iphones/ipads etc and we have had a lot customers saying can you source a 100 ipads for us and unfortunately we can't. We tell them sorry please go to the retail store down the road.

Don't write off WM7 - its actually pretty decent and makes a lot of sense for business users part of the MS ecosystem. Nokia/WM7 could easily become the defacto standard for mobile business solutions

With Apple's strategy for dealing with large corporates being at best non-existent and at worst retarded this wouldn't be that hard.

Was thinking they needed to start with Greece, nobody really likes them anyways

You are an example of what is wrong with the western/European world - stop complaining and do something about it! Your leaders were elected by you and your fellow country men, they screwed up your country not Merkel or Sarkozy. When some people are receiving 5 different state pensions and retiring at 45, of course the country is going to collapse

Why is it that Germany is still in such a strong position with half of Europe failing into a hole? Because the country was run properly.

Best course of action now would be for Germany and France to just invade and annex the rest of Europe. At least their governments know how to run a country.

Thats all rubbish, its all about good genes vs bad genes - eat what you like you are either going to die young or you aren't Reminds me of the joke: http://www.jumbojoke.com/i_rest_my_case.html

You won't be able to retire at 65 so you will probably be working till at least 120 and if your spouse is financially dependent on you I suspect you would like them to be able to continue living comfortably rather than having to beg on the side of road because you died and they lost most of their household income.

Just because the home is paid off doesn't mean there aren't costs on running the property for the next 50 years

Well said! Best advice you can give to any potential programmer/software developer is start contributing to an open source project as soon as you start college. 3+ years later you walk out of college with 3+ years of real world development experience that can be verified by any potential employer.

Hell if a recent grad come for an interview with me and gave me bugzilla list of a bugs that they had worked on and fixed for a major open source project I would probably hire them on the spot.

Thats the problem, because the guy lacks programming experience he would then have to accept a lower salary in an entry-level position. Agreed I would hire over a recent grad any day but nobody wants to accept a lower salary so they get stuck in a field that they never wanted to get involved in the first place.

A solution architect earning decent cash has nothing to do with a CS degree - its all about being able to understand all domains of the problem CS, IT and business.

Having a decent CS/IT "techie" that can read and understand a business case is worth his/her weight in gold

Spot on, only advice I could ever give to a fresh out of college kids is hold out for the right job. If you can make ends meet working as tutor at college then do that.

Seen loads of pontentially promising careers destoryed by people accepting positions in call centers to make ends meet.

That first job you take will define your career unless you are prepared to resign and start again from scratch.

Haha, no! HTML5 is there as a presentation layer and is not going to replace any backend processing. Webservices/Database processes etc will still be a written in .net/C# etc frontends change.

HTML5/Javascript is effectively replacing silverlight.

Not funny, rather sad - shows you how screwed peoples priorities are when they believe that compare to the US China is the less of the two evils.

Hibernate has provided this type of functionality to Java for ages and with a decent framework you should have at most a couple of XML for your entire solution. With a decent framework everything is annotated - added an @Entity to your class and you done.

EntityManager em;

Persisting an object to a database:

Location loc = new Location();
em.persist(loc);

Getting an object from:
Location loc = em.find(Location.class, id);