University degrees about giving yourself options, and learning structured problem solving. Most, but not all, of the good to great programmers that I have seen have all had university degrees, but not necessarily Comp Sci, Comp Eng, or Comp informics. One of the best programmers has a philosophy degree. The university degrees are about giving you broad perspective, and not just about giving you the skillz.

Having an university degree is not essential, but it is way easier to get ahead faster. The vast majority of people I know who do not have degrees tend to be very naive about their view of the world and problem solving. Learning calculus may not give you direct programming skills, but it will give you another lens in which to view the problems that you need to solve, as just about any subject that has any rigor. The old adage of "you only get out of something what you put into it" definitely applies. If you are cruising through uni on all the fluff courses, your not doing yourself any favours.

It sounds like you want to get out into industry, but consider your financial implications if you do. Personal circumstances vary hugely, so if you are not giving up a free or heavily subsidized education by parents or scholarships, then my advice is get out to industry, and see what's what, as quick as possible. If you're currently on student loan it will not cost you anything to wait a few years, and you'll probably value the university education more. Who know, you might that you actually want to that Zoology degree.

I think it is pretty clear that you are not better off with Windows 8. MS only started punishing people with wanting to stay on Windows XP 2 years ago. 10 years after that version was release. Unfortunately MS is punishing people with this new version.

I have to take issue with this:

I had a room full of PCs 3+ years old which are running fine for the most part, but the laptop batteries don't hold a charge, not enough memory to run Windows XP + AV + Line of Business Apps. Our company wanted to donate to the systems to a worthwhile cause, as it seems wasteful to chuck them out because they are not suitable for our needs, but the systems are okay for internet, word processing, RDP, solitaire etc. Anyway, I loaded Xubuntu 12.04 on all them and every one of them works well, and each one had full driver support for wireless straight after the install--except one with a Broadcom chipset, a simple Google search gave me the answer to that. I did not have to chase down drivers from the manufacturers website, as I would have had to do if I loaded XP, and none of them would run Windows 7.

Each system was a painless install, and worked as you would expect after the install. Why would I waste time loading Windows? Xubuntu/Linux is the superior option in this case. Perhaps because this hardware is a few years old, it now has better linux support. My girlfriend has a scanner that does not have support beyond Windows XP; the Scanner is 7 years old. It does not work on Windows Vista or 7, but it works great with linux. Not in all cases, but certainly in many cases, I am now finding that Linux has better support than Windows does. Furthermore, I have an old Toshiba latop which is 64bit capable, but the Toshiba website has no listed support for 64 under Windows, however 64 bit works great under linux.

My expeience with new hardware and Linux has been that there have niggles from time to time, but I have experienced that with Windows as well. My view is that Linux's hardware support is just as good as Windows, and in the case of older hardware often better. The reputation that Linux being hard to configure, setup, and use is now largely undeserved.

While Windows has support from Microsoft and/or the hardware manufactures, this support is limited, and doubtful if any of the hardware venders would offer support for this hardware anyway. I do wholly question the actual value of MS Windows products outside of being locked into the platform because of line-of-business applications.

The reason for charging for subscriptions and at the news stand was to determine readership metrics. It was a very good model, as people would only pay money to buy something that they where interested in, so the more people you had buying something the more readers you had, and thus the more you could charge for your ad space. This was a simple model, which Murdoch understood.

Newspapers and most lay periodicals (technical/professional/trade journals and consumer reports not-so-much) for decades have made almost all their money from Advertising. Advertising boycotts have previously had a major editorial impact on the Media. Charging people for print subscriptions is basically a mechanism to track and understand readership dynamics, and to understand how much ad space is worth. Now, with the internet, we get much more detailed metrics directly on what people are reading on our websites, and what they are not, and what the space is worth, which is basically volume driven now, price-per-view, and price-per- click. So the metrics of what people are willing to pay for to read is basically redundant, because why would I pay for something, when I can get it (better) for free?

As before it matters how many people look at something, but now also on how many people directly act on that ad. Page 3 ad's have always been the most expensive, because the most people look at those ad's, but we would only have a rough idea on conversion. Now we can put an ad on a website, a person can click through and buy something--obviously the most case scenario from an advertisers point of view, and now very easy to measure the success or failure on for everyone involved, or they can ignore the ad, and we'll hope that they might come back someday.

From a print sense, Murdoch is basically imposing an Advert boycott on himself, which is insane from a business point of view.

The paywall is a complete failure, both in the sense of Murdoch's understanding of what IT is--how information is now created and consumed--and the real sense on how best run his business. Being an information reseller, as that what Murdoch is, is now much more nuanced, and finely grained. It's not this simple equation of how many readers I equals how much I can charge for ad-space, but how many people I can get to click through.

Perhaps the real reason is that Murdoch is trying to get a larger cut from Google/MS/Yahoo for adspace, as he thinks his ad-space is more valuable than Joe-blogger. Or perhaps Grandpa Murdoch doesn't get it. Either-way, my view is that paywalls will actually increase diversity, and increase traffic to independent media sources, so in some sense, I'm all for paywalls, as sites that put their content behind pay-walls won't get indexed by search engines, and then will be come irrelevant.

I can't wait for a paywall on Myspace!

If they (AP, NAA, Murdoch--I'll call them whiners) can't configure their robots.txt files to stop google etc from indexing them, then what makes you think that they could analyse their logs. Actually, they probably do not realize there are logs. It seems most people don't--when colleagues, friends and family ask me about various problems they are having with their (IT) systems, I ask them what their log system / event viewer says, and most of the time, the response I get is either "oh ya, I forgot to look at the logs" or "There are logs?"

Google should just decrease the whiners' page ranks, and promote independent media where possible.

Ultimately I think the whiners are trying to shift the blame of their failing business models and plans away from themselves to SbE (Somebody Else) just as the music and movie industries have done (and continue to do) to blame "filesharers" and get P2P technology banned, made illegal and throttled. I find it highly annoying, maybe even insulting, when I try to download an Ubuntu ISO through BT only get 40kbs, but get 320 kbs when I download off of their servers directly.