Can only agee here. I saw Joe Bonamassa last night (in Glasgow), and I have to say that, despite Joe's undoubtedly good playing (with 4 Marshalls, RIP Jim), the entire experience was somewhat underwhelming. Sound mix was total shite to the point that we could hear the guitar, a bit of singing, but there were also keys & bass, who may have well as been miming. Could hear the cymbals acoustically, plus apparently soundless tom-toms & snare. To ice the cake, the front-of-house sound was about 1/10th second out of synch with what was actually being played. I played pub gigs for years, and have watched many others, and as the OP says, completely different (and better) quality of sound.

A drummer is generally very loud, so you will get along just fine with (variously) 40 watt Fender, 100 watt Marshall or anything in between, although perhaps two 4 x 12's will move maybe a wee bit too much air for the smaller venue. 300 watts for bass is not too much at all, but you have to be careful because larger speaker enclosures (eg. 15 inch speakers & up) don't sound loud until you are about 25 feet away from them.

The people in the '60s used backline amplification for instruments and PA for vocals only, and they were right.

It might be some modern thing; I don't seem to remember Blackmore, Hagar, Nugent, Gallaher, Moore et al sounding quite so bad 30-odd years ago, but that might just be old age, or perhaps the insidious creep of digital processing.

As an aside, I could kick myself for letting various point-to-point wired Marshalls go over the years, especially a little 20 watt head and 1 x 12 cabinet, and a Park 100 watt master volume combo. Lovely, lovely things...

Moral - avoid stadium rock if you care about sound quality.

I'm going to have to both agree with, and disagree with these points.
There are some things in education which are essential tools for anyone in the modern world - Arithmetic and basic English (or whatever native language you speak), aka. reading and writing, basic literacy. Then there are basic practical things, perhaps vocational if you will; a basic knowledge of carpentry, etc. plus the opportunity to practice it will in all possibility at least encourage a sense of self-reliance and competence in young people, and that can't be a bad thing.
As regards the case of Physics, Maths, Chemistry, Biology etc. (I'm old enough never to have studied a subject called "science" at school), well you'll need those if you go on to higher education, but you'll not really get enough depth at school to get any real use out of them otherwise; mostly, in the modern world, they are used as signifiers that an individual is on a certain place on the smartness scale.
I would be inclined to view the teaching of programming computers as straddling the vocational and essential areas here. Let's face it, the world now runs on software and anything which encourages more contributors, as opposed to consumers, is IMHO a good thing. If we are going to inflict computers on young people, better to show them that they (the computers!) are tools, and how these tools work. We would never have done otherwise with say, a chisel or a plane; to do with computers is at best a waste of time and at worst a totally squandered opportunity.
My $0.02 anyway

,,, I got my first break in the biz via the old IBM test (not with IBM). God only knows what it was intended to prove, but apparently it somehow was able to pick out potential programmers. Not so, in my experience, being good at programming was an endevour which required shitloads of learning how stuff actually worked, no matter how good you were at the test. So IMHO, just a case of jumping through a hoop to get elsewhere. That said, learn z/Arch assembly language. As far as I can tell, no-one can do that shit these days, and you can make real bucks at it. Especially because everyone else who tries is totally crap at it.

I did too, but 20 minutes later I wanted to cure it again.

Ok, I posted a sarky one earlier, mainly due to the earing (or earring, if you prefer, comment), but let's get serious.

Once upon a time, having not worn a wristwatch for years, I bought a digital watch. After about two years, the battery died. When I went to get it replaced, it transpired that the watch had also died. I repeated this scenario twice. Finally I thought that enough was enough, and that if I ever bought another watch, I'd get something worth keeping, and repairing if necessary. Because you wear your watch every day, and you get used to having it there when you need to tell the time.

Well, I've had a long career in the software business, and I think that I've been through its many annoyances throught the years; stuff that was written in a hurry, stuff that was just simply half-arsed and stuff that was the work of a true professional (I'm talking about other people's work here); that was both elegant and delightful to read back over.

And I kinda like that stuff - done by someone who was an artist as well as just getting the job done. Things like that are just a delight and a pleasure to work with.

There is such a thing as "just feels right" - probably not something you could measure in any rational way, but you can feel it if it is there. I would think that if one had unlimited cash, there are many "good" things one could afford to buy - a Saville Row suite, a Porsche 911, a LearJet, even a big, fuck-off yacht like Larry Ellison.

I bought a Rolex. I could have paid more, but I couldn't buy better. 21 years on, it still does fine - it is the most perfectly engineered little machine, I can wear it on my wrist, and it even tells the time! Yeah, somewhat indulgent, but so what. A small and pleasing luxury which puts the daily grind in a different perspective. Something to remind me that I will aways be something more than a cog in a machine. If something else floats your boat, then do that thing, and I hope it gives you the same small pleasure every day as my silly little watch gives me. One day, it will be my son's, and given care, his son's or daughter's also, and it will still be as cool as fuck. I'll settle for that.

And if you prefer ear-ring, spelling obviously doesn't matter either :)

Well, I wear an earing. I also have a Rolex GMT Master, an Omega Seamaster, and a Longines Hour Angle Navigator (for rare watch fans), all bought from the spoils of writing software.

Perhaps that earing doesn't matter a fuck if you actually are good at what you do.

But I agree with the battery stuff.

Close the paper anyway? It is (by far) the largest-selling rag in the UK. Murdoch's media has basically corrupted the police and Parilament here, using, frankly, illegal means for years. This is a gang of prize bastards desperately trying to avoid an inevitible shitstorm. All these shitty little laws, which penalise strictly personal things, who do you think benefited from that all these years, and gave those unelected bastards power over the body politic (and you guys in the USA, google William Randolph Hearst, if you don't believe it happens).

These bastard are suddenly on the back foot. And, believe me, this is a good thing.

Why precisely the fuck is this modded troll?

Seems like a perfectly fair comment to me.

... tyres slash you!

Ok, no real idea why I wanted to contribute that. Must be the sheer horror of seeing "ostracised" spelled with a "z".

After all there is more joy in heaven when one sinner repents... But seriously, as a manager you deal with people. They do what they want, and there is nothing you can do about that. Computers, on the other hand, are more amenable, and do what you want, but you have to ask nicely. But let's not kid ourselves, the only thing worth doing in this entire business is programming; anything else is a sideshow. So you want to make a contribution? Well, there has never been a better time to start. The world is full of open-source projects where the people who make things happen also let you know how they do it. Find something that you think is the mutt's nuts and whatever language it is written in, lean that, and take the time to understand how things really work. It will cost some time, for sure, but that's how it's done. It seems that you don't want to be limited in your understanding of what is required to get things working. This is a good attitude. The world is full of people who pull things out of their arses without having a clue. More power to your elbow, Sir.

Man, I live about 430 miles from the office, but you know what? We have this technology shit which means that you can (nature of job depending obviously) work from just about anywhere. And in my experience over the last 8 years, it works just fine. I have a 30-second commute to work, and you know, it beats the living crap out of the alternatives. Yes, there are exceptions, but I imagine that these can be dealt with be simply being sensible. I think that in 40 years time, in the IT game at least, that anyone who looks back at employers who insisted that you work in an office will realise that they were working for paranoid idiots who thought that they and their employees bleeding time, money and diminishing resources was a smart business plan.

Errr. You do realise that your arguement reads a little as if you're are saying that that the automotive industry is in the ascendant whilst the oil exploration and pertrochemical industries are in decline? I'm not expert in rhetoric, but I belive that this sort of thing is called a false dichotomy (real rhetoric experts, feel free to jump in). One might make a similar arguement that most modern fashion challenges don't benefit from working on the level of textile design, or for that matter, growing cotton. Well, perhaps on a very narrow level indeed, but it does seem rather silly to mistake a desirable outcome for the reality of how it is achieved. I appreciate that I am somewhat misrepresenting your core point to leap into the discussion, but it is really quite impossible to not get a little peeved about these holy language wars which seem to break out at the drop of a hat (there is a post somewhere else in this article where someone states that they "hate assembler snobs", which makes about as much sense as hating farmers if you value being able to eat). Look, as many others have pointed out, the whole point of computers, as viewed as a universal machine, is that you, as the programmer, get the damn things to churn out perfect copies of what you have told them to do, once, twice, one hundred, one million, tens of trillions of times. There has never, in human history, been anything close in terms of amplifying effort unless Archimedes himself has been elevated to some celestial plane where he does indeed have a long enough lever. That said, whilst people are thinking themselves smartarses for writing stuff in Java (the only language which is quicker to write than to run), then a) the point is being missed, a bit, and b) best that other smart people look for better, faster ways of making stuff work. Oh, and in the day job, 'C' is very much a high-level language. It is fine and, most importantly, portable for the purposes required, but our stuff simply would not work without breaking out the dreaded assembler here and there (there is tons of Java too, but we prefer not to speak about that). So what? The appropriate tool for the job and all that. The IT world truly amazes me. Do we really imagine that "news for plumbers, stuff that matters" would have long debates about the superiority of the spanner over the sink plunger? Some languages are perfectly fine for applications where the end user has all the processing power they need on their desk. Other stuff has to play nicely in a multi-user, multi-tasking, multiprocessing environment, and there it is best to use (and if it is important to you) learn the appropriate way to get the best out of that. Of course some commentators have a bit of an agenda here - I know and am familiar with language x, so it's the best thing since sliced bread and everyone should bow down to my incandescent genius - but that's bollocks. All it does is give the rest of the world the impression that this is a long way away from being even close to a profession; something which is very much encouraged by the common perception of the industry here in the UK (but you already knew that by the way I spelled "arguement") - stories of large systems developments going expensively tits up are ten a penny. Whilst it appears that the basic values in our business remain "x" is better than "y", then I don't expect that to change real soon now. Which is a pity; the world is at our fingertips guys (and gals). About time we take a leaf (only the one, mind) out of the book used by lawyers, doctors and other sundry self-serving trades and stop pissing on our own fireworks for a change. Just my $0.02

I guess that you people are talking about IT, not software. I suppose that that's a modern idea - when I started out in the business it was just computers - big things with IBM on the side, and they were pretty much of a piece. You really had to inhabit that world to understand it; users, such as they were, were pretty much at the mercy of the same things as the so called expert; some were keen and took pains to understand what they were doing, others blew in the wind. But like anything else with an intellectual twist to it, taking the time to understand how the environment one is working in works is a worthwhile exercise. I don't think that I am the smartest person in the world, but it took me about 2 weeks to figure out that the best way to approach things was to learn stuff that a) walks out the door with you when you leave and b) other people want. If you want a career in, or involving, computers, best be prepared to sit on your arse and spend lots of time getting to know what you are doing. If you can, and are good at getting things done, this whole discussion is moot. Make your own luck and ignore this horseshit.