Having dropped out of a five year EE program after 4 years to work for my brother over twenty years ago I can't say it made much of a difference in my career. I started working as a computer programmer while I was still in high school. I went to college for the same reason everyone does, to meet girls and have fun. I seriously can barely remember any programming classes, although I took enough to equal my universities' CS requirements. When I spoke to the administrators about changing to the CS major and letting me graduate, they said that I had to retake my CS101 course because I had taken it at a junior college when I was a sophomore in high school. Apparently they thought that it being six years before and from a community college that it shouldn't count. I suggested that they consider the four years of part time work I had programming, which they also couldn't accept. It seemed so ridiculous that I left in my senior year without a degree. After about five more years my university decided that although they didn't give me a degree that I might give them more money. I receive two letters a year from them asking me to donate. Why can't I remember the programming classes? Most of the programming classes had a lab and tests administered at a testing center. I would write the labs in the first two weeks of class, pass them off and take the tests, I usually lost interest in the lectures after about the third week and I would pick up more hours working. I do remember a silly humanities class where we looked at pictures of Grecian urns. So do I recommend college, of course, I still have the wife I met there and I still have fun.

I've checked the rate of growth of my church. Wars and the great depression had a lower growth rate than during this recession. Still the membership of my church is growing. Sitting home and surfing the web may make people less likely to seek out the society of a church. What's funny is the assumption that this is a good thing. I rarely post to these self congratulations postings of atheists. Atheists will continue to pat themselves on the back. You cannot give an atheist any evidence that they will accept, as they refuse to look just like those who claim the world is flat. Atheists will stand in line at a church's soup kitchen and deny that there is any reason for people to come together to help others. They will claim the religion is the cause of all the problems in the world, even though many horrible world leaders like Stalin were clearly atheist. Don't think that just because I stop arguing with you that your ideas are correct. It may be that I realize it is pointless to argue with those who cannot think. There will come a time in your life when you need help. You may continue to deny it. But realize that God will be there even if you do not believe.

Respond that your doctor will charge you even if you die on the operating table. If he wants a non-skilled job done, hire non-skilled employees and tell them each line to write. If you need a skilled job done the risks are born by both the client and the provider. The client pays for all cost overruns. The skilled employee risks a bad reputation if they do a bad job.

I looked at my desk yesterday, I have a Dell machine running Windows 7 with two monitors. In the second monitor I run Linux in a virtual machine. My Laptop is a Mac running OSX. I also have Parallels on my Mac with virtual machines with Red Had Linux and Windows 7 images. Lately I have been working on embedded software, but I also write Windows apps and do some web site development. Some tools only run on Windows, some only on Linux, some only on Mac. You can wine and cry or just learn to use all systems. If I were to spend my own money today to buy a computer it would be a Chromebook. My children have no trouble using Macs, Windows or Linux as I also have all three types of machines at home. We are also about evenly split on iPhone vs. Android. Tablets, we use the iPad most as my early Visio Android tablet quit due to poor soldering. I just haven't gotten around to resoldering its poorly made power connector. Most people don't have experience with all systems and can't afford to buy multiple systems. Here are a few things I do to keep sane. Don't ever upgrade the OS on a machine. Unless you got a lemon OS like Windows Vista, you are better off keeping with the OS that came with your box. Buy the hardware and OS based upon your application needs. My wife uses iTunes, a web browser and email, so we bought her a Macbook Pro. My kids do school work and play games, obviously a WiiU and a Chromebook is what they need. Don't worry about switching from one system to another. If you are considering a system that locks your data in, reconsider. Even the best system will be out of date in three years. I've been buying personal computers for over 30 years, I was online before the internet. If I had stuck with the CP/M system I took to college I would be way out of date now.

It is an ignorant point of view that believes thinking about something, or for that matter writing it down or drawing it is invention, that is called fiction. Did Jules Vern invent the rocket because he wrote about taking a trip to the moon or did Michelangelo invented the helicopter. If that was true invention, then we wouldn't need any engineers. We all could have travelled to the moon in 1865 when Jules Vern released his book. I was born 100 years later and no one had still stepped on the moon. People point at patent law as inventions, yet that is just how lawyers and judges play in technology. Real invention doesn't happen sitting on your couch. It doesn't happen in the attorney's office. Real invention takes many disciplines, team work, time, money and desire. More things are being invented today than at any other time. True invention actually produces a working version of an idea. The wright brothers were not credited with inventing the airplane because they were the first to think about it, they were credited with inventing the airplane because they were the first to take off and land in a craft they built without killing themselves. And Curtis invented the aileron that all modern use to fly even though he lost the patent battle with the Wright brothers. Real invention is doing the work, not wining in court. I've worked at companies where someone wanted to sell us ideas, what a load of bull, usually we would tell them to get lost as we have a ton of ideas that we employees have discussed already and many times we had already written down in detail. Part of the inventive process is trowing out ideas that are not yet cost effective.

I worked at one place that fired all the programmers nearly every two years. Bad programmers come and go. So what. I worked there nine years until I quit to go to another company when I wanted to leave. If you cannot take over a project, figure out what is wrong and correct it, then maybe you're not the great programmer you think you are. Here's how to become a better programmer. Realize first what is good code, it isn't the code style, you can use a code beautifier to change that. It isn't in the comments. Although good programmers recognize when a well placed comment will help. Good code works. Support calls decrease. You can demonstrate that to a non-technical boss. Why was I still employed when they fired all programmers every two years? Because often I was the sole programmer on a project and it didn't fail. If they had a project that failed, they gave it to me and after a few releases it was fixed. So secret number one, the reason you right unit tests isn't because your boss forces you to do it, it is because you recognize that your work is your reputation. So what if you aren't given time to write good code, you're not given time to write bad code, are you? Don't even commit your code to the repository until you have tested it. Study programming, and I don't mean like you did in school, realize that professors like to teach, programmers like to program. Find a good programmer and look at his code. If there are no good programmers in your company, look at open source. Lastly, recognize that becoming a good programmer takes years. Learn a little about metrics, it will help you to show your boss that your projects are improving while you are becoming a better programmer.

I wrote a little Javascript tutorial that I teach to scouts to satisfy the programming requirement of the computer scout merit badge. I haven't gotten much feed back from people who have just seen it on the web. http://nicholdraper.com/scouts/jtutorial1.html. I wrote it because anyone who has access to a computer has the tools to execute this little tutorial. The scout merit badge has a good introduction to computers. I wouldn't recommend how I learn languages to a non-techie, I've taught a couple dozen scouts and only the techie ones really finish. But everyone should understand the idea of a machine processing data. Techie people want to understand deeply, non-techie people want and overview. So much more than a very simple Javascript program just causes frustration.

You have a good point. There are some activities legal in parts of the world that are not legal in other parts of the world. All the more reason to not continue the myth that you can use the internet without being found out. By the way, I have a patent on detecting how many computers you have behind your residential gateway. No matter how smart you think you are you are not safe to believe that you can do things on the internet and remain anonymous. I guess I should add either stop it or flee to a safe country for your activity.

I worked for a hotel ISP provider. Every week we received subpoenas for people's activities on the internet. We identified the room they stayed in. The hotel would get a subpoena and would turn over the sign in information and even security camera pictures of the individuals. Usually they paid with credit cards and they were known, but even paying cash they had a picture of the individual. Home ISPs are the same, they know where you live. Piggy backing on your neighbor's ISP, it doesn't take too long to track down an unwanted signal. Most people follow the law. Why would we not want sick people who victimize children to be locked up. With under $1000 in off the shelf equipment I can watch what my neighbor downloads. I'm surprised that readers of Slashdot would believe that what they do online can't be monitored, traced, recorded and used against them is a court of law. Read your ISP agreement. Frankly if this bothers you -- what weird sick stuff are you into? Stop it.

You bring up a very good point. I used to work for an ISP, we found that porn sites were the most likely to play tricks with their pages to increase their apparent popularity. When we counted web pages by viewers and not by page hits, not a single porn site remained in the top 100. I very much doubt the percentages are accurate at all.

There are some web sites dedicated to just source code: http://www.codeproject.com/ is a great place to find useful small applications with an explanation. http://sourceforge.net/ has excellent code. http://apache.org/ has very good projects. These sites don't require you to retype anything. While the programs in codeproject are small, some of the projects in source forge and apache are huge -- but many have very good small tutorials to get you up and running. For little hardware projects look at http://www.instructables.com/. Even the commercial products now have incredible online resources that in many ways surpass what we got in Byte, if you're not familiar with http://msdn.microsft.com/ check it out. Another approach is to install Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, or any distribution comes with a package manager that allows you to browse applications by the thousands. I set one up in my house and my daughter had Tux Racer installed before I got home from work the next day. Computer magazines didn't go away, they were eclipsed. Oh did I mention http://eclipse.org/ its a full IDE, open source and a development environment as well.

I too learned to program in basic on a TI-994a. I wanted an Apple II but my dad wouldn't spend the money. But, I don't agree that Basic is the way to learn today. I've written a programming intro for the Scout computer merit badge programming requirement. Here's a link http://nicholdraper.com/scouts/jtutorial1.html I can usually get through this in about an hour and a half with five or six scouts 12-15 years old. I recommend that you get him an introduction into programming. After completing a small program, if it sparks his interest he will do more. One of the things that exists now that didn't when I was a kid is the web. So, in my introduction, I choose to teach using JavaScript. It exists for free in every browser on every computer. Also, learning a bit of HTML helps kids understand how the web pages they use every day are formed.

Please, have you seen the Walt Disney movie "Never Cry Wolf?" If your IT integration skills lead to a mountain of we'll say junk for the sake of politeness, then maybe its your own skills. I worked at a place where a group of programmers constantly complained that they weren't given the resources to do good work. I was working on firmware and their group was responsible for the Windows software part of the project. Finally our boss came to me and asked me to take over their project. So they were let go and I took over their responsibilities. Good grief, they were coding in C++ and I had given them some simple C code to integrate. I had expected them to take my small c file and create an object out of it. Instead they had cut and pasted the guts of my small code into methods in C++ objects that had grown to thousands of lines. It took me a couple of years, but I managed to refactor all their code and port the system to Java and I added automated testing. I was able to improve the reliability from about a six percent failure rate to less than a one percent failure rate. (Our customers told us that our competitors products ran at about an eight percent failure rate.) If you find yourself with kludge after kludge and go and see the movie "Never Cry Wolf" and then spend less money on Moose Head beer and more on software training.

The best thing about open source is that most projects don't make money. Most posts here have taken for granted that money equals value. Oracle as a for profit business MUST evaluate its role in its open source projects by the profitability of its involvement. But, open source projects can be run for other reasons. And the best thing is that if Oracle drops support for an open source project, unlike a closed source project it can continue. Now, the question is will it. It the open source project was just an appendage of a for fee project, then we haven't really lost anything. If it really solves the needs of a community then that community should pick it up. Free software should be allowed to exist for reasons beyond money, I'm not suggesting that a for profit company should keep unprofitable open source projects, in fact I think that they should not. But individuals, groups and even corporations should be allowed to sponsor open source project for any reason. I know many individuals that have written and continue to maintain open source projects for a resume item, as a tool they love and even just to learn something. I hired just such a guy and I encourage him to use his open source software to solve our companies problems and I encourage him to add features to the open source project. He specifically came to work for me because his previous employer didn't share my views. We have a better product with an employee with the open source experience. Would I say his open source projects are profitable? I don't care, we don't look at it that way. He is profitable for us and our core business is profitable, so, who cares if we sponsor a side open source project.