This is a tough question, and maybe that's why it's being posted on Slashdot. As someone struggling to find a job in the tech sector, who also has no degrees nor certifications, I've seen the whole "cert" thing as a double edged sword. First and foremost, it seems like every vendor in the known universe now offers a certification for their product. Now, who's getting a cut of the money that goes into testing and certifying people for product X? The vendor. That's who. I've gotten the impression that it's just a ploy on behalf of the vendors to make a quick buck. However, with that being said, you can look at the positives like this: Bob is certified in Product X. Company C uses Product X. To HR common folk, the fact that Bob is certified by the vendor in Product X makes him instantly more qualified than me, who lacks any kind of certification whatsoever. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. Maybe I know the product much better than Bob, but never hunkered down the $1100 to take the exam and get certified. Maybe I've never used the program before, and Bob really is the better man for the job. Maybe Bob spent a few all nighters cramming for an exam in which he regurgitated his text book back onto the bubble-in form during the test (think standardized testing). It's entirely situational though. To be fair, a lot of certification exams these days also include a hands-on portion which may require you to actually think. And to avoid making any more sweeping generalizations, some certifications are much harder to obtain than others. My biggest prohibiting factor in becoming certified in anything is the cost, followed by whether or not I'll actually net any kind of immediate benefit from becoming certified in anything. That, coupled with the fact that you need to re-certify every few years, and the constant changing landscape of the tech world (here today, gone tomorrow), makes me really question the relevance and long term benefits of a certification. Now a CS degree... that's a different story. Or is it?

It's a shame that this even happened.

I've been using Windows 8 exclusively on my primary computer since it became available on MSDN in August. It originally BSOD'd randomly and had a weird file copy bug, but MS has really stepped up their patching game since it was released to the general public in October. I haven't BSOD'd in almost a month, and the file copy bug I was experiencing seems resolved as well. The OS seems to have seen a host full of bugfixes since official release, and stability has certainly improved.