Grading is mostly bogus. You have a maximum of 30 numbers on a sheet of paper at the age of 19 that's supposed to determine wether you are suitable for this or that specialist job. Utter bullshit in specialist cases such as CS.

Think of specialist cases as the same with musicians. If you haven't plaved the piano since the age of 12 at least - good luck finding a conservatory that will take you. Same with ballett: You have to be good and dancing and have the right body measures and start in your single digit ages. Grades be damned, if you don't have that, you won't become a professional ballett dancer.

To go into CS simply based on a grade average, with no affinity to abstract thinking, a solid math foundation and solid teenage experience with computers and some fundamental programming skills is like joining a dance-company at the age of 19, overweight and never having moved your body around other than to get from a to b the easiest way possible, with no sports or anything similar. Silly, wouldn't that be? Excactly.

Same should apply for CS. People who have bad grades but are genius programmers - I'd bet there are quite a few of those - should have mentors asking them to join college, no matter what their report card says. Likewise, people who just won't cut it and bog the industry down with crappy experience should be asked to leave.

Here in Germany CS has no NC, because it's so hard. Which means whenever I join a CS track I have to waste 3 semesters of the college filtering out the idiots in mandatory "Programming for idiots who took CS because they like playing Wow all day 101" courses. It's a huge PITA and is the largest downside I see in taking a path to an academic degreee. I so whish I could take Math and leave programing for n00bs out and skip a semester or two.

Beer is supposed to have foam! Of course, the donkey pee-pee you guys and the dutch call beer doesn't have any foam, but in Germany a Beer is only well-tapped if it's "Foamcrown" (that's what it's called) can carry a 2-Euro coin.

Ok, so much for the education. Here comes a beer-joke, somewhat on the subject:
A guy from Collogne, a guy from Duesseldorf and a guy from Muenster walk into a bar. Mr. Collogne order a "Koelsch", Mr. Duesseldorf an "Alt" and the guy from Muenster a Coke. Both Mr. Collogne and Mr. Duesseldorf turn to him and ask: "Why do you order a coke?" - "Well, if you guys don't drink any beer, I won't either."

Aparently his last movie, Exodus, is crap. ... I hope he doesn't screw this up.

Captain Obvious submitted again.

Open Source matters for sensitive anything. In fact, I, and any professional I've talked to, would say if it's not FOSS or at least using a free open standard in data format, it's of no use for anything sensitive or mission critical. We've arrived at the point where critical systems that are not FOSS aren't even considered to be enterprise ready by a large portion if not even the majority of IT experts. Which is a good thing, IMHO.

For instance, anybody nowadays talking Unix and not thinking of a FOSS *nix but suggesting something other (exotic I guess you'd call it today) would be laughed out of the room. One of the reasons I find RMSes insistence on the GNU/Linux term a tad backwards - although he is right about most of the important things.

Looks good. Better compression and better looks.
How performance intensive is the decompression/decoding? If that's in the green area, I see no reason not to adopt it.
Let's adopt it. ...
Would need some marketing though. Flashy logo and a pronounceable name. How about "Bepog"?

I use Unity. There, I said it. Said it before, in fact.

Unity is buggy. Quite buggy, to be honest. Compiz sucks - it has since the beginning - and Keyboard behavior is sometimes erratic right up to unusable.

However, I get the overall concept of unity and I think it's a good one. My Mom can use it, which is a good sighn. And it's not nearly as intimidating as the crap we see on other desktops.

This summer I've gotten myself a 15" ThinkPad, installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it and bought a Logitech Performance MX mouse to operate all the extra expose functions and stuff as I'm used to on my Mac at work. It's cool. For a FOSS based OS it is really neat - can't complain about that.

That said, it's far from primetime, especially since the hardware integration is no where near the experience you get with the fruit company.

I do hope to see a full-blown convergence device based on linux one day - if it's unity based and they've fixed the glaring bugs until then, I'd have no problem with that either.

My 2 cents.

You gotta love the creativity the geek community comes up with time and time again. It is plainly obvious that you can't sue adblockers away, but it's fun to watch the battle unfold in front of us anyway. I'm grabbing my deck-chair and my popcorn just now. :-)

Cert, diplomas and degrees are topping.

If you can't - with a straight face - say: "Gigs were low at the time, I thought I might aswell take a cert, to see if I could make it." then certs won't add anything. If, however, you want to raise your marketability as a freelance or in a setting where politics count for a lot, a certification can be the little extra that gives you the edge. Just don't rest on them or boast to much about them, then you're fine.

Perhaps a certification trail on a certain topic - SAP or Oracle - might even be a prerequisite. But then it's the equivalent of a college degree anyway. And the same rules apply for those, if perhaps on a larger scale.

I always thought this to be quite obvious once I though about it for a little while.
You need space, matter and movement.
Those together create what we call time, when we observe it.
All four of those are interdependent. ... I came up with this at about the age of 9. Since then I've been doing fine with that answer. Couldn't say if science found anything new, but I really don't care. That philosophical answer (I suppose it is one) is sufficient enough for me. :-)

We know that problem in and out: People mixing up C, C++ and Objective-C. Especially non-experts. That's no surprise. Then saying, despite requireing "C/C++" in the confidential: "Oh, you only have 20 years of C - I thought you knew at least a little C++ - OK then, sorry, you're the wrong guy."
Me: *pictures Vincent and Jules pulling out their 9mm parabellums and pumping the HR guy full of bullets" ...

Non-trivial JavaScript only caught on on a large scale when the term Ajax was coined and with it we finally had a better word for JavaScript - until then most decision makers would mix up Java and JavaScript. Sometimes without anybody noticing that. ... In hindsight, I really can't blame them all that much.

I think of all the C stuff as the "C" family of languages.
As far as I can tell, coaxing C into some OOP thing is a little tricky, but doable. C++ is different, yea, but if you turn on your brain and are willing to ditch the habit of writing your own stacks, any C dev worth his money should be up to pro-level C++ development in a few weeks. Same for Objective-C. It's not that C people write everything from scratch these days. Where to you think those bazillion libs in Linux come from?

As for the C-Family of languages: Of course there still relevant. What kind of stupid question is that? What's Linux built with? C. What's Windows built with? C++. What's Mac OS X built with? Objective-C. What is any non-trivial system critical component built with? C, C++ or Objective-C (in the case of OS X / iOS).

And that's not changing any time soon, trust me on that one.

In other news in 9 months:
Closing of "Adblock Plus" forces millions of ABP users to waste 90 seconds to search for an alternative. Film at eleven.

Seriously, WTF?
This is probably just some publishers organisation trying to show publishers that "they are doing something!".

If these guys know how to play it right, Node.js is history. He had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.

I hope this new project knows how to manage things and do good marketing.
Thumbs up. Let's see where this goes.

So my post got marked troll? That's interesting.
Could there be some techno-religious blindness going on here?
How about an insightful rebuttal?

Like, "no you're wrong, there are new designs for fission reactors that are reasonably safe and leave no bad garbage and no nuclear wasteland if they blow up" or "study x,y and z show 70% of humanity is going to die of agonizing pain if we cut power usage by 40% so we're damned to use it" or something.

Nobody can take the responsibility of their garbage for 400 000 years or more. Nobody.

One gram of Plutonium can terminally poison 50 million people and has a half-life of 24 000 (twenty-four thousand) years.
The danger of nuclear may be exaggerated wrongly, but not to much. You can't exaggerate the risks of nuclear to much.

Nuclear fission power was a cute, albeit not very elegant, techno-romantic idea of the 70ies. Right now fauna is flourishing in chernobyl, because humans moved away. It's the last generation of mamal-scale life celebrating. If the microbiology in chernobyl is any indication, it will be a nuclear wasteland in a century, maybe with some fungi flourishing.

There is a plain and simple fact: Nuclear Fission is too dangerous, especially in the hands of short-sighted, rather unwise human beings. It's a naive toy that produces wast amounts of heat, small amounts of incredibly long-term dangerous waste and a little electricity on the side.

Anybody with two braincells to rub together can see that, TV sensationalism or not. Friggin' high-tech Germany isn't decommissioning fission for no reason.

Chernobyl, Fukushima and just these minutes some plant in the Ukraine again. A longer stretch of those in the next few decades, and we have yet another huge environmental problem on our planet. I hope we get the curve.

It's exactly the other way around.

Want experienced pros who can rescue your projects from total disaster?

Treat them like humans.

It's the companies that need to hone their social skills. End of Story.

Point in case: I am - once again - in a gig with an agency. They took some effort to convince me to give them a try. We did 2 months of contracting to try things out, then I came on.
"Change Management" "Corporate Publishing" ... any marketing buzzword you can think of - you're b-bingo cards would be filled many times over in one regular workday. We even have a whole department specialized in producing power-point presentations (No joke!). The naivety with which technical issues are approached here leaves me gasping for air every odd week. It takes effort to remain calm, explaining even the most basic concepts of web-development to people who do and sell web to our customers 24/7. Our headroom is a bunch of outlet multipliers from the hardware store and a bunch of off-the-shelf home-SAN-drives piled into one heap for company backup purposes, managed by a student on the side. A truly scary sight. The only host that come close to anything a pro would use I salvaged from a ancient Acer laptop lying around that I cleaned and installed Debian 7.6 on. Our production pipeline is a sight to make a grown man cry.

However, and here is where it gets interesting:

I've rarely worked with such kind, forthcoming and polite people. The respect that I'm treated with and the patience with which the team treats me when I can barely hold back my techie-frustration I've rarely seen. I've seen so many asshole agencies in my life that I'm still genuinely suprised how this shop completely breaks the mold in my book. It's a team that lacks the in-house experience and actually is aware of the fact. Aside from that, they are a refreshing experience after years of too much crap.

I've seen so many shops in which devs are treated like shit - that they themselves have lost their social skills or have no interest in using them, is of no surprise to me.

I've come to the conclusion, that I'd rather work with the sort of company I am in now that with some so-called dedicated web-development team that can't treat their members like normal people.

Bottom line:
That social skill thing works both ways. I've taken such amounts of crap from corps and companies in this industry that I find conclusions like those of the GP laughable at best. In most cases their just plain wrong.