As a web-dev... I work day in day out with CS grads. As an engineering major, what my observation is, they are pretty bad at seeing the "big picture", and more often, very bad team players.

I attended a top-8 Australian university. In the engineering major, the mantra from day one is "be a team player, look at the big picture, plan ahead and well in advance". In my undergrad years, I have done many group assignment, presentations. These kind of activities will train undergrads to horn their communication and planning skills.

As far as my understanding, if you fail to communicate well, be a team player and plan projects well ahead i.e. see the big picture; you are pretty much doomed when you have to work in professional environments and have to handle big projects.

coffee drinkers are more white-collar, sedentary types who read lot of documents either physical ones or on a LCD screen for the most part of the day... and at occasions, under poor lighting. Isn't this the cause of losing eye-sight ??

Personally, I consume reasonable amount of coffee daily basis and I am close to 30 now. So far I can manage reading without glasses. Since 2 years ago or so, I get very tired reading... somewhat an early sign of losing eye sight. Before that, for 10 years or so, I used to study + code... seems all these heavy duty work is paying the price.. not the coffee...

...cynical about a career as a Scientist/Academic Researcher.

IMHO, there is absolutely no legitimate way of quantifying "success of a scientist". It is down to: 1) how a particular study stands the test of time; 2) extended studies that reassures the accuracy of original results, will make the original investigating scientist a true success. Best example I can provide is, Prof Higgs... even Prof Einstein.

All these 'publish-and-perish' claptrap will only do is: dilute the quality of academic research, discourage collaborations, proliferation of academic malpractices/dishonesty, and perhaps drive-away all the truly passionate scientists/researchers-alike from active research in to obscurity.

I finished my PhD last year in EE/CS. Personally, I did enjoy the pain/pleasure of doing research and the campus life in large. However, about half way through my graduate school, I increasingly felt hopeless being a researcher in academia. I went with the good intention of becoming a down-to-earth true-blue scientist/researcher. But the environment I worked was too toxic to keep to my humble wishes. I just couldn't stay there and keep doing research with a clear conscience knowing the academic dishonesty going around, and wrong-doers getting ahead in the "academic rat race" while I am getting scrutinised constantly for not being productive as them. So I did the bare minimum to defend my thesis, and got out on time with a sane mind to start a career in the industry as a software developer.

I regret about my decision in many ways. But I am happy that I do not have to sell-my-soul to cling on to my current position. Plus, I foresee a much better career path now compared to academia (promotions, ability to move to different institutions/career paths); and finally, got decent pay-cheques to enjoy life like I never did before.

I am a Electrical Engineer turned web-dev.

I worked with a fair number of CS grads in my current job. Certainly I am neither a rock-star developer, nor the yard-stick to measure their CS theory... I can tell you that half of them have bad habits like: writing spaghetti/un-maintainable code, not testing code for errors/exceptions, rarely documenting what they code, hardly or never clean up the code for optimal performance and pushing un-compilable code to the main branch. At times, it is undiluted agony to work with them.

I have absolutely no idea what they learn at school. But from the information I gathered from a recent intern who worked with me, he doesn't give a s#!@ about coding, and just killing time to join a bank/financial firm. Surprisingly, he didn't know how to debug codes using a given IDE or initiative to pick up that skill.

Increasingly, my team is getting filled with developers from other majors... mostly Engineering grads, instead of CS majors.

I am a regular social drinker, and I have some fair doubts about this study.

I have tried many different beers in their trademark glasses. But regardless the glass, I always stop at 4 (British) pints of regular beer (5% alcohol level) , as that's the absolute limit of liquids I can hold in my body cage.

My answer for "why some people drink too much?".. I think they are genetically able to process alcohol much faster. Also, the colder climate can make you drink slightly more. Or it could be just that, beer is so cheap*

* - I live in south east Asia, and a pint of good beer (say Guinness, Kilkenny, Hoegarden, Leffe... even Heineken) can be as steep as 12-13 US dollars!

I work as a web developer. During my working hours, I regularly open up 10-20 windows (anything from browsers, development tools, documents, etc) for development purpose. I generally like to pin all my app shortcuts icons on the 'start' menu; thus opening up things is a matter of two mouse clicks. But with the so-called-metro style interface, such conveniences have gone down the drain it seems.

As far as my work concerned, I think I will never move to a win 8 machine. IMHO, win 8 is terrible for developers and anybody alike. Sometimes I can't believe why M$ go down this route to marginalize out developers.

Having explained my displeasure, I must admit.. tile window has some advantages. I like the fact that I don't have to launch apps like mail, news, currency converters to see the latest updates. It really saves some fraction of time and system resources.

People,

1. Who already subscribed to Apple content services i.e. iTunes
2. Who found regular iPad is too big/clunky to carry around
3. Who never heard other available tablets options

Sorry, but I am not excited at all about this device. I completely ruled out the possibility of buying any size tablet for the foreseeable future.

As for my justification, I still think tablets are just a *toy*, and you can't use it for any hardcore productive activities i.e. coding, writing technical papers. Yes, it serves the purpose of content consumption. Having weighed all these pros & cons, I ordered a highly customized ThinkPad X230... and got it just today.

If I have a little hope in the tablet space... it has to be the M$ Surface; but I am not sure how far I can get used to Win8... so far, I have a love-hate relationship with it.

I RTFA the whole article... but IMO, it has forgot one or two things....

M$ vs DOJ: If you have read daily technology news back in 90s, you might remember how narrowly M$ escaped from a major anti-trust case. Since then, M$ had to play nice with DOJ to avoid getting the worm can re-opened. So it is somewhat obvious M$ didn't work aggressively in taking over other markets in last decade. All the new players, they do not have to answer DOJ for any anti-trust violations. So... new players are very lucky when it comes to approaching new markets.. be it search, consumer media, social networking etc.

At the very heart of the DOJ case...M$ was accused of "locking-in" customers for their products. And now, fast forward to 2012... Apple is literally locking in consumers behind their gardened walls with a plethora of their own hardware and software, Google & FB literally collecting private details from its consumers. Playing the devil's advocate here, I wonder how come they are not scrutinised intensely ?

M$ massive hiring spree: Though I can't exactly remember the figures and fact, I believe M$'s staff count has gone up by few folds since the turn of the century. Though I am not sure what's the reason behind this; but I am pretty sure this is the real reason why wheels started getting off. More staff means more HR to handle them. My best guess for this 'staff head count inflation' is, having lot of cash in bank.

But my overall conclusion is... markets are wide open only for a brief period of time. One can concur that market only during that brief moment. Late comers will always have to play "do or die" battle before totally convert the market to their camp, or die an early shameful death. M$'s biggest issue it seems, not discovering wide open markets to concur like the rest.

Having said all that, during last decade, M$ consumer products have become more stable and secure than in 90s. That's something worth noting.

Also, I would like to see Steven Sinofsky to head the Redmond camp after Ballmer... looking at his track record, I believe he can stop this plunging boat from drowning.

p.s
I have to agree that 'management style' in M$ is somewhat deleterious. My software house has this ghastly 6-month review cycle despite being a SMB. In the most recent review, I was accused of not having any initiatives during work by the reviewing HR boss. My sad situation is, my technical boss disagrees with my initiatives. To avoid annoying him too much, and get the team working on one direction; I have learnt to suspend my ideas and just to be a "yes-boss" guy. But would the HR boss understand my situation fully? Personally, I put lot of hours in writing well-polished reliable code. In return, both my bosses are nit-picking on me. IMO, these reviews are good for "failing" employees.. but the rest, why bother.. just throw them free candy or coffee.

I left my parent's basement 10 years ago. Throughout my extended college years and following professional years, I lived in a single room without a tele or cable.

I mainly survived by streaming things over the internet, which was the most economical option. I thought of subscribing cable many times in between; but the related monthly cost and the initial investment -- AKA giant-flat-screen-TV -- was too big for my student stipend.

I am not a soap-opera, series-drama kind of guy. I mostly watch documentaries (especially BBC ones). Since the invent of youtube, and especially in recent years; web is full of useful educational documentaries. Google's very own video search is a great way of finding them out.

On-and-off, I go down to the local pub to catch the Formula 1 and Footy action, which is a far better way of enjoying sport than sitting on a couch alone and watching with a bag of crisps & soda.

If the BBC opens up its great iPlayer service to the world, I will be subscribing that. This might require me to upgrade the broadband plan, but I think it is worth every penny!

I truly and greatly appreciate your correction !

I am residing in South-East Asia for the last decade or so. You must come here (even for a short holiday) to witness yourself how little natives over here care about English grammar and/or sentence structures. Apparently, there are local dialects such as Singlish (Singaporean English) and Manglish (Malaysian English). Give or take, both dialects are quite similar; and as far as the origins goes, it is direct word-to-word translation of Chinese phrases into English; though they have evolved over time with many more borrowed words and expressions.

Some interesting examples being:

English: "Would you like to join us for lunch now?"
Singlish/Manglish: "You wanna go lunch or not?"

[in a situation you disagree/reject something]
(E): "I do not agree with your suggestion"
(S/M): "Cannot one!"

[giving a lift to your friend]
(E): "I will come and pick you at the library, and drop you at the railway station"
(M): "I fetch you from library, then fetch you back to the station"

Search youtube.. there are plenty of Singlish videos.

Though I find these dialects are an energy efficient way of speaking English, and somewhat amusing to listen; I must confess that I find them nothing more than a nuisance, especially in a professional working environment. I often have communication issues with colleagues who are proficient in these dialects. Most of the time, they do not understand what I am talking about, and gives me strange looks. Then, I happen to run into the problem of misunderstanding instructions from my bosses, now that was pretty bad and costly.

I am finding it difficult to tell natives "Your English sucks!" to their face. Partly because it is rude and such remarks could go down quite horribly. On the other end, they them selves have this high esteem that they speak proper English, since most of them spoken or studied in English medium since a very young age.

Though I admit I am not perfect (after all, English is still my second tongue), I always thrive to write grammatically correct English, even when I am sending a text message. All in all, getting the right message delivered is much important than anything else in any form of communication. It puzzles me why internet age kids do not pay much attention, nor put effort in proper communication skills these days.

Phew.. that was close !!!

one liner is more than enough for any OS....

>> shutdown

Just my 2 cents....

1. Enter to a top college in either Electrical Engineering or Physics... or some other technical major
2. Do as many as possible CS courses while there
3. Do few internships in CS related field
4. Self-learn whenever you can, whatever you can find in CS field

I did Electrical Engineering in college. But half way through I realized that only thing I liked about that major was, digital logic and programming. So I enrolled into as many as possible CS related courses; did my senior year thesis something close to CS (communication protocol simulation using distributed network); and read/learned as many as possible CS related topics (mainly programming theory and parallel computing). Then I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering too. I managed to make my thesis much more CS related (machine learning + pattern recognition) and used much of my knowledge in algorithm, optimizations and distributed computing.

Just 2 weeks ago, I secured a web developer position at a software firm (somewhere in far east). Still I had to go through a written + oral technical examinations on programming, algorithm and puzzle solving. But the knowledge and experience came in handy. One added advantage I have, coming from Engineering background, is knowing everything from how the microprocessor, cache, memory works up to the level of how protocols at WWW level works. And when you start programming with "so-called ancient" multi-paradigm languages like C++ and some assembly in college (most microcontrollers still use C/C++ and/or ASM), it gives you a good foundation on whatever language you need to learn later on. Over the years, I've learned MATLAB, Python, JavaScript, SQL, C#... and now Ruby... but still, fundamentals concepts I understood while learning C/C++ was critical in most cases.