Well, there we go then. He-sk is pretty sure. So that's settled.

Whoa there, Hoss. I think we are in violent agreement. I am just pointing out that the term engineer, which is what the poster was rabid about, can't be misused in the way he was objecting to. Which makes your point and I am agreeing with. It is just like chef. Anyone can call themselves a chef, anyone can call themselves a computer engineer. So yeah, getting a good degree from a good school is important. That was actually the point I was making. "Engineer" doesn't mean dick in the US. A good degree to start and a good track record later, those mean everything.

Should we have government certification for what makes a computer engineer? Personally I think that is a retarded idea and didn't say I thought we needed one.

Switch to decaf.

The general gist of this thread is a good one and getting a degree is a great idea. But CS engineering has no licensing requirements in the US, so no, it doesn't actually mean something. I have met more than my share of people with engineering degrees from third rate state schools who are absolutely abysmal. And equally I have met a very few absolutely brilliant engineers who have no degree at all and are completely self taught.

Again, I don't disagree on the whole with your general sentiment. Nor am I trying to attack state school education, I have met some solid folks who came out of state schools (Berkeley comes to mind immediately). Just that the generic statement that engineer means something in the US is demonstrably wrong. Personally, I don't have much respect for CS as an *undergraduate* degree in general. Folks coming out of Berkeley, Princeton, MIT, Caltech and a few other schools, a BS in CS is a pretty serious piece of paper. But if I had to make a generic call, MS and up is where I would put the engineer tag if you wanted to be really serious about it.

And this slightly less than brilliant original poster, if I were him I would go for one of those life experience degrees from a lower ranked state school, assuming he actually has the life experience, which can require only a couple of semesters of additional coursework if he has enough documentable experience, and then use that to get into an MS program at a not-to-competitive institution (since a top ranked institution won't look kindly on the GED of college degrees). Of course, the odds of him failing horribly due to not having the fundamentals solid is high. But it would meet his personal goals of avoiding as much non-CS coursework as possible.

You sir, are completely correct and I stand corrected. While I do feel there is a little more we could do in terms of education and ease of use for end users, you hit the key points on the head here.

Sorry, sport, I don't have a netbook. I have a laptop. Oh, they are the same thing? But the marketing on netbooks and notebooks doesn't say that. Netbook = limited little OS things. So that doesn't apply to me. Oh, wait, it does? I _am_ supposed to use that on my notebook?

You see where I am going here? And the netbook distro is fairly recent so that is why I hadn't seen it. But it doesn't matter. It still reinforces the point of consumer confusion. Which the thing we are talking about here. I personally don't care about this because I can and do compile my own kernels when the mood strikes. We are talking about general consumers here. And the point still stands that this issue causes unncessary confusion and is a clear barrier to adoption.

For the love of mod points, mod this AC up. Linux is my true love of OS'es, but we do think funny when it comes to ease of use for normal people.

Would you? Really? Cause I have been using Linux exclusively for my servers, desktops and notebooks for years and I didn't know there was a "laptop" ubuntu. Or suse. Or redhat.

Actually, I still don't know that. But I will take your word for it that something like that exists in some niche under a rock. Everything does. Linux distros are like porn on the net, if you can think of it, someone has done it. And heck, there are probably even supported ones from the three distros above maybe. Just I never heard of them because I haven't cared enough to look.

Which brings us to the odds of "the average computer user" having heard of them: Zero. Zip. None, Nil.

Plus, they have absolutely no conditioning for it, coming from either Mac or Win, where you don't need a magic special install to make your laptop work with your OS. You just do it.

So basically this isn't negating the OP's point, but instead reinforcing it. It is just another reason for people who aren't geeks to say: linux, I tried that but my battery life cut in half, so I put Win back on my machine.

One stops are mid level distributors that carry product from multiple labels. Somewhere the person writing this article got very confused by what is going on here.

If you look at the article comments there is a guy there who is also pointing this out.

Not saying EMI isn't annoying as are most of the labels, but this article is seriously confused.

Exactly! The UK is bristling with cctv cameras running into police stations and campaigns to have citizens turn in other citizens over simply taking pictures on the street. This isn't a society that, as a whole, has shown a whole lot of wanna when it comes to protecting their privacy or really giving a crap.