37mph is more than you need for most Sunday afternoons on the M25!

There's actually a registry key you can change which flips back into the old non-Metro way of doing things - which is the default UI in all the leaked versions of 8 so far. http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-8-how-to-re-enable-the-classic-start-menu I'd say it's safe to assume that there will be an option to revert to that in the final product. This is a developer preview and as such it's no wonder that MS wants everyone to get used to the Metro interface.

Your problem is in your base assumption

No, my problem isn't that at all - I know full well that programming is a different path to helpdesk/sysadmin roles. When I say "high level" I mean management type roles, the sort of thing where you don't actually do the hands-on stuff. I was flexible enough to consider several different career paths and had relevant experience for two of them - helpdesk and programming. Those formed the bulk of my job applications.

The problem is simply that across the IT segment as a whole, be it programming to web design to sysadmin roles to helpdesk support, degrees are seen as pointless and "experience" is required but as others have said - the "experience" required is all but impossible to acquire at Uni.

And you're wrong when you say "Your CS degree makes you qualified to be a programmer, but unqualified for IT roles". My degree covered a broad array of disciplines, from formal logic and yes, programming, to hardware details (including a series of lectures about the IBM PS/2, bizarrely!) to troubleshooting, databse theory (inner and outer joins, 3rd normal form etc) and systems design (the old "systems analyst" type stuff). Most CS courses are the same in the UK, they include a bit of everything.

The whole point of getting a CS degree isn't to say "yeah, I'm an uber programmer - hire me!". It's to say "I have a sound knowledge of the basics and I know how to learn". That, added to whatever personal things you've done (be it building PCs, managing a website or writing games/apps) ought to be enough to get you in the door. Sadly, as others have said on here it isn't, simple as that.

A computer scientist should not be maintaining AD or playing with VMs for a day job. Building PCs does not qualify you for IT work any more than replacing the water pump on a car qualifies you as a fleet manager

Well, I wanted to get into IT and the traditional way to do that is to start at the bottom and work your way up. Building PCs is absolutely relevant experience for the helpdesk role, where you get called to a PC and have to replace the hard drive as it's sprouted bad sectors (etc). Similarly, knowing how to design, implement and test code is entirely relevant towards a low-end programming job.

You seem to be assuming I was planning to go straight in at a high level, which simply wouldn't have happened due to the lack of experience issue. My complaint is that even at the low levels there's an overwhelming attitude of "you need experience" (but that which you have doesn't count) and "degrees are worthless".

I graduated in 2001 (with a CS degree). Couldn't get an IT-related job in my area as the employers kept saying they wanted experience. For some reason, the fact I'd built PCs for myself and family for the past 7 years didn't count. Nor did the fact I'd written several Symbian games and had them published, which was how I paid my way through Uni. It wasn't as though I was after high-powered jobs, just typical helpdesk type roles or an entry-level programming position.

The problem as I saw it back then was that there were loads of not-really-interested-in-IT people floating around as a result of the Y2K problem - people went on training courses just to make some cash from it, then once Y2K was over they had the much-coveted experience that employers were calling for. New graduates didn't get a look in.

There's a general perception in the IT industry in the UK that degrees are worthless and only vocational qualifications count. Being a member of the BCS doesn't count for anything. It's quite maddening (yes, MCSEs and the like are handy but hardly the be all and end all - a degree shows the ability to learn, an MCSE shows the ability to learn a more specific set of skills) but there's nothing much that can be done.

After working as a temp in a variety of offices for seven years, I finally landed a job in a school on the IT helpdesk there. I'm now involved in the maintainence of their Active Directory domain, as well as keeping our various VMs ticking over and dealing with software rollouts and so on. All for less than half a teacher's salary!

My advice would be not to bother going to Uni in the UK, employers really don't value it in the IT sector. It's a sad state of affairs IMO.

Every 3 minutes here - my weather station FTP's data to my ISP's personal homepages server.

The (weather) models show Irene - or more accurately the remnants of Irene - throwing a trough over the UK next Friday. Looks like being wet, windy and quite chilly, rather Autumnal really. Going off the raw data, I'd expect gusts to 50mph or so and highs of around 17C (63F); as a result my preparations will be absolutely zero.

Quite right - there were dire warnings at the time of what would happen if your Thunderbird's fan died. It was always nagging at the back of mine when I built my 1.3GHz Thunderbird machine back in 2001 - although thankfully the fan worked for the best part of 8 years in daily use and although it's now in retirement in a local school (the machine is used for "take a PC to pieces" lessons) it still works fine.

The more annoying thing was the rubbish VIA chipset that motherboard (KT133A-RAID) contained, which caused distortion every time I played an MP3 in WinAmp on my SB Live.

The PC will not die out, it will merge with the laptop.

As they say around here, nah. Tried pricing a laptop with the equivalent of a GTX 580 in it? (Trick question, as the mobile 580m performs similarly to a desktop 560 GTX despite costing 3 times as much!)

It may be that most people are prepared to put up with slower performance (the fact that people buy Celerons is a good indicator of that) but there will always be those who want or need performance above that which you can get in a mobile platform, or who simply prefer paying half the price for an equivalent desktop.

Case in point: i7-2600K desktop with 8GB RAM, bluray, 24 inch monitor, 1TB HDD, 560 GTX graphics - around £1000. i7-2820QM laptop with 8GB RAM, 17 inch display, 750 GB HDD, 580m GTX graphics (similar performance to the desktop) - around £1800 if you're happy with Clevo, or if you prefer bling, £2300 for the same specs with Alienware.

And in a couple of years, no prizes for guessing which option wins hands down when it comes to upgrade costs!

Since 1981 and the launch of the IBM PC, which was followed in 1982 by the IBM PC XT and the IBM PC AT in 1984. I guess you don't remember the days when software boxes would have labels saying "Requires IBM PC AT or 100% compatible" on them?

I'll start believing in the end of the home PC when home servers with seamless tablet management and syncing become a reality.

I'll believe it when I see it. Anyone else remember all the hype 15 years ago about how we'd all be running Java thin client machines by the year 2000? Pundits have been calling for the PC to die for the past 15 years, half the platform's life! And yet we're as far away as ever from having PCs die out. About the only real change in that time is that laptops have increased in popularity, phones have absorbed the features previously found in standalone PDAs and yes, tablets have reappeared for the umpteemth time in the last 20 years.

Mind you, twenty years ago something fun happened - Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing, designed for tablets. It flopped.

The ability to watch blu-rays. The ability to play proper games (in lucious HD) and also MMOs. The ability to encode video and not have to wait ages. The ability to create programs and test them. The ability to run Office natively. The ability to run several VMs and thus simulate a network (for testing or just sheer fun). The ability to switch between MacOS, Windows 7 and Linux as and when needed.

The good side of all this tablet mania is that traditional PCs are stupidly cheap now. Memory is laughably inexpensive ($12 equivalent gets you 2GB RAM here in the UK). An i7-2600K CPU, for example, is the equivalent of $370 in the UK at the moment. 12 years ago a Pentium 3 450, which was the consumer equivalent back then, was the equivalent of $750. Half the price for something an order of magnitude more powerful - bargain!

Of course, that PC isn't exactly portable. But I, for one, do most of my serious computing tasks in a fixed location and thus a phone suffices for Internet on the move.

Bah - having looked at the data it's only a tiny, miniscule portion of what's available - a far cry from "virtually all" as the article stated!

In the 100-mile radius of where I live, there's only Gatwick. Gravesend, Brogdale, Sheerness, Manston, Southend, Shoeburyness, Heathrow, Lydd and more are nowhere to be seen and I know they all provide data to the Met Office as they appear elsewhere online.

So, either the climate research is only being done with a small number of stations or there's a hell of a lot of data still to be released. The Met Office's money-spinning climate data service is safe for now, it seems.

Part of that reasons is because the Met Office in the UK has a nice little sideline selling climate data - if it's all available for free they'll lose that income. It was a bit daft though, as there were cases of people who'd submitted data to the Met Office for years having to pay for their own data when they lost their local copy! Other European meteorological agencies have similar policies.

It's a different culture in the US where all this data is freely available and interestingly the same applies to the raw weather model output too - the American GFS is free for all (and is widely used commercially in the UK) while the equivalent from the ECMWF costs a small fortune to access, especially ensemble output.