You don't really need a formal CS degree. Most companies don't seem to care WHAT subject is studied as long as you got a degree. Many of the most competent programmers I've met had no formal CS degree. They had other degrees and sometimes just took a couple of formal classes in programming or other CS-related subjects that interested them and sometimes not. A motivated person can easily learn what they need online these days if the goal is just to crank out code.

The fact that your current gig will pay for your education is good. Take advantage of that, even if the courses aren't directly applicable to your day to day job.

Best,

I work for a large enterprise. We "should" be buying more expensive gear. However...

We had a series of small conference rooms that often hosted meetings requiring WIFI access to one of our "play" networks that's isolated from most everything else. We bought a couple of the SMB Linksys/Cisco wireless access points. I believe they were about $500 each. We immediately had problems with them dropping connections, even with small numbers of users. A call to Cisco resulted in "um...you're at megacorp? Buy our enterprise gear. With your discount, surely you can "upgrade" for only a few thousand". And that was that. There was little effort put into solving the problem other than trying to shoo us into buying more expensive equipment. We ultimately punted them all, returned them for a full refund, and are now using access points from Asus that cost us less than 1/2 of the price and work flawlessly.

Lesson learned.

Nothing is free. Those guys provide a service and need to pay folks and keep the lights on.

Do I like this "feature"? No, not at all.

Would I like it more if Ubuntu dried up and went away? No.

There are ways to easily disable this "feature" that are posted all over the place. If you like Ubuntu and value your privacy, disable this "functionality" and lodge your complaint with Canonical. Maybe they'll find a better way to earn a living without irritating their userbase.

Best,

"Tax avoidance" doesn't appear to phase General Electric. They're definitely not an "internet company," have physical plants around the globe, and they pay a vanishingly small amount of corporate tax by using the same sort of schemes.

Imagine that....large corporations with armies of lawyers using lobbying to help them skirt tax payments to ultimately benefit their shareholders. And I guess it helps to have friends in high places. Guess who is Barack Obama's "jobs czar?" That's right, Jeff Immelt...CEO of GE. In 2010 GE made a global profit of US$14.2 billion. US$5.1 billion of that was attributable to operations in the US. How much did GE pay in taxes to the US government you ask? Well, zero. They actually had the balls to claim a tax benefit (billed against future earnings) of US$3.2 billion.

I'm all for companies being able to make a profit, but c'mon.

Personally, I'd be tickled if GM/Ford/Chrysler/Tesla/whoever could open their own dealer network. That would rid us of the thousands of smarmy dealerships (many with horrid BBB records) that prey on folks who just want to buy and maintain a car. Then consumer complaints could be handled more centrally and dealt with at the source. In theory, this would be financially better for the consumer since you'd be removing an extra profit center between the manufacturer and the consumer.

Bingo. I work at a large fortune 10 company with a few hundred thousand employees and it seems like a monthly occurrence where Sophos actively gets in the way. If it's not flagging benign content, it's causing resource problems on end-user systems. To call their support sluggish would be doing it a kindness. I believe we're actively looking for a replacement.

I recently bought one of their non-server Trinity APU processors specifically to be used for my HTPC. The power footprint is low enough that it fits in a shoebox sized enclosure and the integrated Radeon graphics mops the floor with anything from Sandy/IvyBridge and all at a lower cost. I use it to crank out 1080p video, send audio to my AVR and the kids use it to play games with a fair amount of eye candy turned on and at a playable resolution and frame rate.

Would I buy any current AMD processors for a server farm? Probably not.

Best,

I bought an X-box 360 5 or 6 years ago when my kids were 7 or 8 years old. It crapped out on me a couple of times and both times Microsoft "fixed" it and sent me another. Perhaps about 2 years ago, the kids got bored with it and began using the computer for gaming. The Xbox, along with the $1000 or so worth of games, controllers, and other swag sits gathering dust and the kids seem more interested in a fancy phone or tablet these days while they play minecraft online. I'll probably throw the Xbox up on ebay along with all the games and accessories before it becomes completely worthless. No plans here to buy a replacement.

I'm just using Libreoffice now since that is what our distros support out of the box (CentOS and Ubuntu). Since they are functionally the same, I haven't found any reason to cling to OO once all the noise started and resulted in the fork to LO. I haven't had any complaints.

Best,

Re: Intel 520's

I've been buying them and sticking them into the SAS slots on HP DL360/DL380 servers. They snap right in. I bought about 25% more than I need in case there are any failures and will proactively rotate them out for newer/larger ones in a year.

Very fast.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 without incident on the the A8-3870 (previous Llano architecture) without incident. Ubuntu + XBMC in a small shoebox mini-ITX enclosure is working great for an inexpensive HTPC for my home.

Best,

Who said anything about being an administrator? These are development machines for developers. Once things disappear off into production land, I let those people sort out what they want to run out in public and I know that our code will continue to work.

Best,

My company tries to enforce the use of Oracle Linux in our datacenter so I mostly wind up with it by default. I generally let the build guys do that and then I run a script to convert it to CentOS when I actually need to use it in production. That way, it mirrors what most of our developers have on their desk. The only real benefit I see for OEL is the faster turnaround for RH updates. In real-world usage, they've been pretty much the same for our typical use cases (busy LAMP boxes). If I were to avoid OEL, it would be only because I don't like encouraging a bully.

Best,

Egads, there hasn't been a new Powerpc in ages except for a few game consoles and people stuck with legacy IBM big iron. Any reason to continue bloating the kernel with that stuff? Time marches on. Why inconvenience everyone so that a few dozen PS3 users can run Linux? :)

I'm shocked....shocked, I say! Billion dollar companies hiring lawyers to create, and then exploit tax loopholes for their own (and their shareholders') benefit? There ought to be a law...oh wait!