I bet all of those people have a degree right? That's the problem with college/university, it produces people that come out of it thinking they know everything they need to but don't.

Experience and learning on the job beats a paid for piece of paper. How do you get the experience people ask; you've just gotta work at it, start young, enjoy what you're doing, and start at the absolute bottom rung of the ladder. i.e. A developer might not be able to land a junior developer role straight away without a degree, but you sure can do any old monkey work... telephone support, QA etc. Then just get some industry certifications in your spare time (book + exam for Oracle Java cert is what $150?), keep hinting to people about your development skills, speak to people you know etc. etc. and you'll easily be where you want to be (and with years of valuable real world experience) before your friends even get out of college.

And that's exactly how it should work. Why should someone who is not bright be more successful than somebody that is? A piece of paper from a college doesn't make someone bright.

I disagree, most of the people I know coming out of computer science degrees in the UK have little to no knowledge useful in the real world. Whereas those that taught themselves and are genuinely interested in computing are far more valuable in my experience. Sure they may not know the cookie cutter coding standards of all the college graduates, but all that can be picked up in a matter of weeks(/days).

I guess maybe computing is a little different from other subjects, you can't really do chemistry at home.

Surely this isn't newsworthy, haven't people taken some pixels of the flag area before in the last few years? Do we have additional pixels now in this picture?

Either way the pixels look like pixels and not a flag. :(

In IT in the UK degrees are pretty much worthless bits of paper. Companies that want degrees only care that you have a degree, they don't care what the subject is, and frankly if you've had that much working experience in your field then the content of a degree isn't likely to teach you anything you don't already know.

Therefore do something for yourself, a subject you want to learn about that may not even be related at all to your working life, archaeology, history, politics, philosophy, physics, music, literature... the list is endless, have fun, life isn't all about work.

My TV screen doesn't need higher resolution than 1366x768!

*posting via wireless keyboard/mouse while laying on sofa 10 foot away*

May as well just use cement then!

There does seem to be a complete dearth of similar free software for the home wine brewer... to the point where I ended up deciding to learn how to program, and wrote something for myself in the space of a few weeks:

https://code.google.com/p/winebrewdb/

Frankly it's pretty inflexible, I only wrote exactly what I needed, no more, no less, and god knows how my "coding standards" compare to anything in the real world. But hey I'm no java developer, and it is free (as in speech and beer (or should that be wine?)) & multi-platform (probably)!

...you mean like a PC running linux? Ok, sorted, now we'll just wait for the games to roll in...................

I exist, that's all I know for sure, *everything* else is a belief.

I think I'll go with solipsism personally.

I guess if it's a legal right and then you're subsequently sacked for taking too much time off (does this really actually happen in the real world??), then you could take your employer to court for unfair dismissal (unless of course has no such laws regarding unfair dismissal).

Is this just a US thing?

Here in the UK I can't imagine this ever occurring, any company doing such a thing would quite rapidly lose staff. In fact all of my employers have generally actively encouraged holiday taking (on the basis that accrued holiday in one year often doesn't get carried over to the next year).

How much holiday do you guys get over the pond anyway? I think the average for office workers here (not counting contractors of course) has gotta be about 25 days + public holidays.

Not to mention "No wonder they went from distant 2nd place last gen to last place this gen." is incorrect too!

The PS3 is in fact in last place in terms of sales figures: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Console_wars#Worldwide_sales_figures_6

gp obviously pulled some numbers from magical fairy land. :D

*agreed* I would ditch FF for Chrome too if it weren't for the extensions. Thus far all mine have been updated relatively quickly, but I can't help feeling that at some point in the future plugin developers are just gonna give up bothering.

The Firefox UI is fine, surely one of them could spend the time they would be spending on this to fix up the vomit they called a UI in Thunderbird 5?

(not that it matters as I now use gmail instead of Thunderbird since that)