That's who certifications were SUPPOSED to be for. For people who've coded long enough that most languages more or less feel the same, certs. are a nice, structured way to brush up on skills and pick up new ones. Most industry outside of IT do this, and it's called continuing education.

I can't direct you to a particular book, but a good deal of analog circuit literature revolves around power systems so you may want to start your search there.

Mainly because there is a shortage of quality developers. I know where you're coming from but it's a fact of life. Development is at an artisan level, much like the craftworkers & masons prior to the industrial revolution.

Agreed. It's easy to just "blame management" alone but what's often left unsaid is that XP/Agile works best with experienced, quality developers. Test-driven development requires a high level of discipline and it's extremely easy to stray and start throwing in a tiny, tiny features & optimizations above-and-beyond satisfying the test scenario(s). Really, this is no different from a special-forces squad. Not everyone's cut out for it and the team's not NOT usable in all situations.

The demand for low-skilled workers is declining to critical levels in the western world (because of automation and because outsourcing is cheaper for the rest) and high-skill work can never nearly cover the whole population.

In virtually every state you see migrant workers working HARD for 5+ an hour for menial tasks like food delivery, cleaning, field labor, etc. And high-skill work? The number of resident students in the sciences & engineering are ridiculously low and there are still shortages in the medical field. There is demand, but there's little financial advantage to hiring and retaining a citizen/legal resident workforce unless the playing field is leveled. This may mean tariffs for imports, tax hikes for outsourcing, etc. None of which will happen.

"...totally retarded"? Right. Don't take your "decent education" for granted. Only about half the Colombians go to high school and it may not even be free down there.

And anyhow, by the time these kids will enter the workforce, windows will be on version 15 (we're talking primary school kids!) and anything specific they learn about the system would be totally useless.

Someone who learned how to use Office 95 13 years ago can probably work their way around the latest version of office. And it's smart to target at the education level accessible to all children, which is different for each country.

There's merit to criticizing Sun's prices, but this box is aimed towards smaller shops that with high throughput and large volumes of critical data. There are (for now, anyway) many small shops that offer specialized services to financial companies. And even with all of 10-30 employees, they easily wade through several gigs of data per day. Not only that, but in order to get contracts they need to demonstrate that they have top-to-bottom support on hand; something Sun does well (albeit at an exhorbitant price). Otherwise, they will face stiff lawsuits if their downtime costs their customers, for less-than-due diligence. This is why comparing to Google doesn't quite cut it and why monolithic companies like IBM still offer consulting services (at obnoxious prices). No doubt, Sun really needs some serious introspection if they want to remain a player but there's still a need.

OR, sucker a bunch of graduate students into doing it for credit/thesis. You just need a professor to go along with it, which involves promise of money.

Who? Basically, anyone who's too cheap to upgrade their wireless router. WPA/TKIP was a temporary hack which works over the hardware portions of WEP, using nothing more than a firmware upgrade.

Too bad that study doesn't include anything about the battery. Though having no electricity at night would help me to sleep at night rather than playing WoW to the crack of dawn.

First of all, it depends on the country. Oil is subsidized in many developing nations--China's a big one--but in the U.S., it's mainly lower taxes as opposed to, say, the U.K. If you want to call that a subsidy, fine. BUT, the amount of fuel spent to create and deliver solar energy to the home (batteries, solar cells, etc.) is about the same as the fuel you'd have spent leeching off of the power grid, IF you get at least 20+ years of life out of your rig. That fact is masked BECAUSE of the heavy subsidies that solar gets ON TOP OF whatever your utilities and oil may be getting.

It's not a myth. Solar-based tech is heavily subsidized, so the model breaks down. Sure, you can recoup YOUR cost in 10 years but the cost of fuel used to create and deliver all of the components would be more like 20 to 25 years IF solar weren't subsidized.