Went Saturday to pay my final respects. Picked up 3 old fluke DMM's last calibrated in the 1990's and 2 1ft USB cables for just under $23. My buddy picked up a HP 35 in perfect cosmetic condition, with the case. Waiting on a battery to test it.
I remember my first walk about in the late 80's. They seemed to concentrate on old office cubicle furniture back then. One of the owners, made his own wine. Got to taste it. It was really bad.
It was always the place to go to either buy some older hardware you needed, or to walk around with a buddy a reminisce as you saw hardware you used at some point in a previous life.
So, computer literacy gone for years. We lost the local HRO and Digital GURU in the last year. Both due do soaring rents. HRO, it was going to be a 60% hike. Just over a year later, the HRO sign is still there over the door to the empty store.
So you guys know, Bob is looking to retire. So unless someone makes an offer to buy it, HSC is next.
Part of the issue is the number of hardware manufacturing and R&D companies has dropped to nothing. So possible new inventory is disappearing. Some of the inventory at weird stuff and HSC has been on the shelf for over 10 years. Techshop, a short 10 year existence, great concept, wrong execution. Action electronics also gone.
Anchor Electronics on walsh is still around.
Much of today's electronics won't last long enough to be resold. Bang Good, either goes bang or might be good.
Talking about old electronics and junk, Electronic Flea Market will be at Fry's Sunnyvale Saturday April 14, not at De Anza.
I am using protonmail. When I login, user id, password, and pass phrase for my mailbox to decrypt it. If I wanted, I can use google authenticator to add 2FA. Also in Switzerland, so US subpoena is more meaningless. You also set your PGP keys so you can send and receive encrypted emails as part of the service.
I feel sorry for your students. If you left the engineering field instead of finding a Good company to work for, do not take it out on future engineers. I hope that star in the first robotics program is encouraged to become an engineer.
The POS managers that want idiots willing to work crazy hours and are too young to call bullshit in deadlines in the name of agile get reputations. If you aren't off playing ping pong and getting your work done, 40-50 hours of solid work, and a good manager will notice. The 50+ hours weeks should only be for special events the last less than a month once maybe twice a year. If you are working 50+ on a regular basis, you better be one of the first 20 hires and have ownership in whole percentage points.
Saiyeth the Old man who has followed this philosophy for 30+ years.
Absolutely right. A good engineer is a lifelong learner. With docker and cloud services, no reason not to be able to do deep dives on topics. Setting up a network of computers is cheap enough these days.
Remember during the bubble when a certain country created 300,000 "air quote" "engineers" seemingly overnight? When people here did not understand the difference between a college and University from that country. We have a short fucking memory. Because many of those one trick ponies went to the equivalent of coding boot camps. Now can it work, yes, if you are an engineer. Good engineers are born, not created. You will grow and become a good software engineer, something you would have been no matter what. For most people, no. I have a couple of friends who went to college, did not earn a computer science degree and you would count yourself lucky to have such brilliant people on your engineering team. But they are the exception.
It is sad, but all these people saying that Bill Gate and Zuckerberg did not finish college and are billionaires. First, they did make it into top notch colleges. Second, they proved they were engineers from the get go. The only good thing, is that people from bootcamps are cheaper to hire and they disappear after a while.
University computer science degree means 4 years of writing some level of code for a wide variety of computer science basic topics, a certain level of mathematics. Those general education requirements? How do you think we had enough time to write code for our classes. Taking general ed classes you easily pass going only once or twice a week. Plus, a good engineer thinks out of the box. The more you know about other subjects, the more you can think about solving problems with a different perspective.
Received a couple of notices. Not happy. I need to evaluate something for my dad and something for myself. One of the features I liked was knowing if something catastrophic occurs they would get a drive to me. Granted I use dual time machine drives, but still.
So now to find another service that does that. Or pay them their $120 and sync data to one system. Which is probably what I will do. But not for my dad, put him on carbonite or something that uses S3 as a backend.
I hope their business customers using the home service hands them a little hell.
I did not get AHS from a forgetting to check box, which is bullshit and Wells should be raked over the coals for that. I took the service when I purchased my place because of another friends positive experience with them.
But I have successfully used them for the 10 years I owned my home. A/C issue in the heat of summer, multiple years, someone shows up in a couple of days and gets it fixed. Washing machine rebuild. Dishwasher fixed.
AHS hold a lot of weight with their contracted vendors. They tend to be higher quality than those I have found on my own. They don't screw around. I have no issues paying the monthly fee.
But Wells, who is my banker, should be raked over the coals for what they are doing.
For the basics, you can earn your Amateur Radio Licenses. They require you learn some basic electronic principles that are beyond most of the kits.
I have played with the kits and they did not help. What I had to know to earn my amateur extra radio license required more knowledge. No morse code anymore, just 3 multiple choice licenses where all the questions are published.
What you learn is also specific to radios. Filters, amplifiers( sound and power), transmitter and receiver circuits. You learn what it means to apply Kirchhoff's laws. Also to put resistors, capacitors and inductors in serial or parallel configurations. The basics of analyzing power through circuits.
The basic books from amazon work well with the kits from radio shack. Make sure what you get has a breadboard. So I do not think that the snap electronics kits are good for adults. At the makers fair, there was the kit from sparkle labs, http://kits.sparklelabs.com/. The initial parts from sparkle labs are great, but the instructions are bad. But this kit, along with purchasing a reasonable digital multimeter and a book from amazon would be a great start. The kits sold by make magazine are excellent, http://www.makershed.com/. Make magazine is also a great resource,http://makezine.com/magazine/.
For the meter, spend the $50 for one that will test your components, resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors also.
If you dive in and buy a soldering iron, do not cheap out. Spend the $40 for the basic Weller red soldering station or $110 for the basic blue station. Buy a pointy tip, $5. The chisel tip that comes with it is not good for soldering boards.
There are plenty of books that cover the topic with sample circuits. Look at the books offered at http://arrl.org./
A book "Hand's On Radio Experiments" is an excellent book. It publishes the first 60 articles written for ARRL's QST magazine. You can also buy a kit with all the parts needed to do the experiments. The book (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255) and the parts kit (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255K) is $100 from the ARRL.
Most of the above covers analog electronics. For digital electronics, there is a lot of support for digital electronics. The basic stamp kits are great for that. They sell very proven kits, http://www.parallax.com/ with very well written manuals that will take more than a weekend to go through. Also through the make magazine site you'll find project sites for other micro processors used by hobbyists.
Also, to have guided lessons, a class with lab at the local community college is also a great way to go if you have the time. After all the long winded crap above, if you really want to learn and want more than to look at a board and know what the parts are, this is probably the best way to go. Either way, depending on the depths of the knowledge you are looking for, it is between months and a couple years of learning.
Hope I see you at a booth selling a kit at the maker faire in a couple of years.
Absolutely. Skill and the ability to complete projects is very important. I hate doing things twice. Unless it is lots of fun:D.
You are probably one of those rare kids that have been participating in open source projects or general coding since they were 9 or 10. So you've created a track record.
KDE was written by Matthias Ettrich in his early 20s. Linus Torvalds wrote Linux in his early 20s as well. So I am not saying there is anything wrong with young programmers. I did not write any code as earth moving as these guys. But most of my peers early in my career were much older than me because of the level of problem I have always been willing to take on.
Again the point was more to state there is life as a down in the trenches software engineer for as long as you can maintain your skills and get the job done.
As far as young software engineers go. My friend's son is 10 and is creating his own Linux distro.
Not really. I've also been thinning since my mid 20's. My beard also started turning a bit gray then.
The statement was meant to mean that there are more people staying in the field and being hired. After all, the point of the original posting is whether or not there is ageism. Whether or not you are expected to move from the trenches at some point.
I've been a software engineer for 25 years.
No issues. There is no expectation that you should move to management at some point.
The main expectation is that you are able to keep up with technology as it changes. I've moved from COBOL to C to Java to perl to php. I've used more scripting languages than I can remember. You have to keep moving forward. You never stop reading.
Provide mentoring to less experienced engineers. Never hide what you know. It is not good being the curmudgeon that keeps his knowledge to himself. You become a teacher.
Understand where projects you have participated in have succeeded or failed. Bring that experience to that table. Most of us have seen more product the never made it to market than have made it. Your experience in knowing why projects succeed is something import you bring to the table.
Plus you are the senior guy you get more opportunities to take lead on the cool projects.
So I would not worry. I am seeing more people with some gray and missing hair. So as long as you produce, people will continue to hire you.
At $95 the 80's do sound better. They don't need an amp.
I was using my music from an IPOD with MP3's VBR hi rate to compare the two models. The 125's required an AMP. But they sound great if you want to spend as much on a headphone amp as you did on a Ipod.
Again if there is a multi year retension requirement of this data, then as they finish each project, the raid 5 will wind up being some 6 figure Netapp or EMC to hold all the old projects.
You still want to do an offsite archive of the data.
I agree with the other guys. Disk drives that are unused have a shelf life of about 5 years. The medium does need to be read read once in a while. And yes the electronics can go bad.
For tapes, the secret is to make and test multiple copies of the tape. I suggest 3. And pay a company that specializes is tape archives to store the tape.
Make sure you understand how to maintain your tape drive. Mostly make sure you use the cleaning tape to clean the heads on a very regular basis. If you can afford it, get 2 drives. Write the data on one and verify the data on another.
The bigest ememy for tapes is climate. You do not want humidity or temerature to change.
What is the value of the data? What if there is a disaster and these tapes are required?
You should have one storage company locally, and another out of state. Depending on the number of tapes, you are not talking about a lot of money for storing the tapes.
Buy and label pairs of drives. HDs are cheap these days. One is the original store and the other is the backup.
Name the first drive as driveA and driveAbkup, second set driveB and driveBbkup.
Keep a notbook for eack to note the customers/jobs in each drive. This way he does not have to attach the drive to know which customers jobs are on it.
When ever something on a drive is modified, use your favorite backup program to copy from driveA to driveAbkup.
I currently use Integro Personalbackup.
This give you 2 copies. If needed because of leaving town or what ever reason, one set of drives can be kept offsite if needed.
This is something simple you can teach.
Also keep in mind most photographers only keep the "negatives" for a specific period of time. 5-10 years.
Using this method will guarentee tha the data on the drives are read and written which helps keep the data fresh. HD's can loose data of not read once in a while.
Youo will need to teach your friend to run health checks on the drives twice a year to make sure it is not failing. This is important even for drives that site for 2 or more years. You do not want a HD to sit for 5 years without spinning up.
I've been out there with a CS degree for over 20 years. Yes, the theoretical classes are very important. A good mathmatical CS backgroud will give you a leg up in the long run. As others have said, it is important to learn the theory and why different approaches, OS's and languages exist. It will help you dig into the practical topics as programming languages, platforms and operating systems change. It will let you keep up with different philosophies of how to design a system, and maybe you'll understand why the flavor of the month is popular. Hopefully you'll learn to not be dogmatic.
Being dogmatic and a lack of flexibility has you using the equivilent of a hammer for everything. Very soon that will cause a career change and not by choice. Employers want people with a full tool belt. People who know how their tools work and why they use them. They also like to see that you change your tools as things evolve.
Where it is offered, takes classes where design or working within a team is required. It will give you an idea of programming within a team. People skills are important in the real world.
Do not pass on internships, involvement in open source or school projects. Anywhere there is a team of people writting code that will be used in a production environment by more than a few people. This will give you the leg up when you graduate. To say that you worked on code that is in production somewhere. Even if you can show you fixed a bug a month in firefox or apache. It shows you wrote peer reviewed code. You have code in production.
Use the internships to find out what you want to do. Try to get an internship with different companies each summer. Different evironments. Different types of projects. Different industries. Do not choose based on the cool company. Some cool startup doing something new might be cooler than google or microsoft.
the one issues is that once I added my computer to the phone as a blue tooth device, it stopped automatically connectig to my motorola bluetooth headset.
Call me a troll if you need but....
after many years of working with people who have not gone to college and those who have, a software engineer or a system administrator that goes to college always has the advantage.
From the 80's of blowing away today's equivilent of heald graduates, to the boom and outsourcing of today where there is no way in Hell India can create 200,000 skilled computer people all from colleges that are as good as ours overnight.
I've been though it all. I've been kicking ass for 23 years. I'm still learning. I'm still reinventing myself. People still feel I have more than enough to contribute.
People who truly go to a 4 year school and learn logic, mathmatics, the algorithms, concepts of multiple computer languages, how to build a compiler, how to create a database. The difference between database and data base, so their, errr... there. This is important. You will use it all, if you are lucky.
A 2 year school teaches just how and what. A college teaches you all 5, what, when where, why and how. When you know why, you can keep learning. If you only know what, your always behind waiting for the next guy to tell you! In this market, you have to reinvent yourself every 3-4 years.
So if a 2 year school gets you working sooner, then go for it. Then do not be disappointed when some "college puke" takes your next job from you.
Now if you want to take the 8 years to earn a degree part time, more power to you. I had to finish school part time. It is truly hard.
If you feel you are 3 years out of date, then you've have fallen into a trap. Unlike many professions, this one requires you reinvent yourself every 3 years. Was JSP, now Struts or velocity. Was java collections, now Java 1.5 templates. If you aren't reading a few books a year. Or selling your boss on a technology you want to learn this is what happens.
You must read and have the spare machine to play with. You must at least browse Dr. Dobbs.
This is why my resume is upto date after 22 years.
Now that the y2k issues are dea and gone, Cobol programmers now most commonly say, "So that was a Non fat decaf latte....?"
Can't turn into the guy that in 1993 walked out of a presentation I gave on Visual Basic because he did not know what a mouse was. This is a true story.
Slashdot Mirror
3B in revenue. 35M fine. Like a pimple that needs to be popped.
Went Saturday to pay my final respects. Picked up 3 old fluke DMM's last calibrated in the 1990's and 2 1ft USB cables for just under $23. My buddy picked up a HP 35 in perfect cosmetic condition, with the case. Waiting on a battery to test it.
I remember my first walk about in the late 80's. They seemed to concentrate on old office cubicle furniture back then. One of the owners, made his own wine. Got to taste it. It was really bad.
It was always the place to go to either buy some older hardware you needed, or to walk around with a buddy a reminisce as you saw hardware you used at some point in a previous life.
So, computer literacy gone for years. We lost the local HRO and Digital GURU in the last year. Both due do soaring rents. HRO, it was going to be a 60% hike. Just over a year later, the HRO sign is still there over the door to the empty store.
So you guys know, Bob is looking to retire. So unless someone makes an offer to buy it, HSC is next.
Part of the issue is the number of hardware manufacturing and R&D companies has dropped to nothing. So possible new inventory is disappearing. Some of the inventory at weird stuff and HSC has been on the shelf for over 10 years. Techshop, a short 10 year existence, great concept, wrong execution. Action electronics also gone.
Anchor Electronics on walsh is still around.
Much of today's electronics won't last long enough to be resold. Bang Good, either goes bang or might be good.
Talking about old electronics and junk, Electronic Flea Market will be at Fry's Sunnyvale Saturday April 14, not at De Anza.
I am using protonmail.
When I login, user id, password, and pass phrase for my mailbox to decrypt it.
If I wanted, I can use google authenticator to add 2FA.
Also in Switzerland, so US subpoena is more meaningless.
You also set your PGP keys so you can send and receive encrypted emails as part of the service.
I would call this pretty secure.
They also have a service protonVPN that is nice.
I feel sorry for your students. If you left the engineering field instead of finding a Good company to work for, do not take it out on future engineers. I hope that star in the first robotics program is encouraged to become an engineer.
The POS managers that want idiots willing to work crazy hours and are too young to call bullshit in deadlines in the name of agile get reputations. If you aren't off playing ping pong and getting your work done, 40-50 hours of solid work, and a good manager will notice. The 50+ hours weeks should only be for special events the last less than a month once maybe twice a year. If you are working 50+ on a regular basis, you better be one of the first 20 hires and have ownership in whole percentage points.
Saiyeth the Old man who has followed this philosophy for 30+ years.
Absolutely right. A good engineer is a lifelong learner. With docker and cloud services, no reason not to be able to do deep dives on topics. Setting up a network of computers is cheap enough these days.
Remember during the bubble when a certain country created 300,000 "air quote" "engineers" seemingly overnight? When people here did not understand the difference between a college and University from that country. We have a short fucking memory. Because many of those one trick ponies went to the equivalent of coding boot camps. Now can it work, yes, if you are an engineer. Good engineers are born, not created. You will grow and become a good software engineer, something you would have been no matter what. For most people, no. I have a couple of friends who went to college, did not earn a computer science degree and you would count yourself lucky to have such brilliant people on your engineering team. But they are the exception.
It is sad, but all these people saying that Bill Gate and Zuckerberg did not finish college and are billionaires. First, they did make it into top notch colleges. Second, they proved they were engineers from the get go. The only good thing, is that people from bootcamps are cheaper to hire and they disappear after a while.
University computer science degree means 4 years of writing some level of code for a wide variety of computer science basic topics, a certain level of mathematics. Those general education requirements? How do you think we had enough time to write code for our classes. Taking general ed classes you easily pass going only once or twice a week. Plus, a good engineer thinks out of the box. The more you know about other subjects, the more you can think about solving problems with a different perspective.
This is what I am thinking as well. I use time machine for onsite/home backups.
My only issue is that if there is a fire or burglary, I would be down for days pulling the data back.
Received a couple of notices. Not happy. I need to evaluate something for my dad and something for myself.
One of the features I liked was knowing if something catastrophic occurs they would get a drive to me. Granted I use dual time machine drives, but still.
So now to find another service that does that. Or pay them their $120 and sync data to one system. Which is probably what I will do. But not for my dad, put him on carbonite or something that uses S3 as a backend.
I hope their business customers using the home service hands them a little hell.
I did not get AHS from a forgetting to check box, which is bullshit and Wells should be raked over the coals for that. I took the service when I purchased my place because of another friends positive experience with them.
But I have successfully used them for the 10 years I owned my home.
A/C issue in the heat of summer, multiple years, someone shows up in a couple of days and gets it fixed.
Washing machine rebuild.
Dishwasher fixed.
AHS hold a lot of weight with their contracted vendors. They tend to be higher quality than those I have found on my own. They don't screw around. I have no issues paying the monthly fee.
But Wells, who is my banker, should be raked over the coals for what they are doing.
For the basics, you can earn your Amateur Radio Licenses. They require you learn some basic electronic principles that are beyond most of the kits.
I have played with the kits and they did not help. What I had to know to earn my amateur extra radio license required more knowledge. No morse code anymore, just 3 multiple choice licenses where all the questions are published.
What you learn is also specific to radios. Filters, amplifiers( sound and power), transmitter and receiver circuits. You learn what it means to apply Kirchhoff's laws. Also to put resistors, capacitors and inductors in serial or parallel configurations. The basics of analyzing power through circuits.
The basic books from amazon work well with the kits from radio shack. Make sure what you get has a breadboard. So I do not think that the snap electronics kits are good for adults. At the makers fair, there was the kit from sparkle labs, http://kits.sparklelabs.com/. The initial parts from sparkle labs are great, but the instructions are bad. But this kit, along with purchasing a reasonable digital multimeter and a book from amazon would be a great start. The kits sold by make magazine are excellent, http://www.makershed.com/. Make magazine is also a great resource,http://makezine.com/magazine/.
For the meter, spend the $50 for one that will test your components, resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors also.
If you dive in and buy a soldering iron, do not cheap out. Spend the $40 for the basic Weller red soldering station or $110 for the basic blue station. Buy a pointy tip, $5. The chisel tip that comes with it is not good for soldering boards.
There are plenty of books that cover the topic with sample circuits. Look at the books offered at http://arrl.org./
A book "Hand's On Radio Experiments" is an excellent book. It publishes the first 60 articles written for ARRL's QST magazine. You can also buy a kit with all the parts needed to do the experiments. The book (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255) and the parts kit (http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=1255K) is $100 from the ARRL.
Most of the above covers analog electronics. For digital electronics, there is a lot of support for digital electronics. The basic stamp kits are great for that. They sell very proven kits, http://www.parallax.com/ with very well written manuals that will take more than a weekend to go through. Also through the make magazine site you'll find project sites for other micro processors used by hobbyists.
Also, to have guided lessons, a class with lab at the local community college is also a great way to go if you have the time. After all the long winded crap above, if you really want to learn and want more than to look at a board and know what the parts are, this is probably the best way to go. Either way, depending on the depths of the knowledge you are looking for, it is between months and a couple years of learning.
Hope I see you at a booth selling a kit at the maker faire in a couple of years.
Long ass winded sermon over.
Absolutely. Skill and the ability to complete projects is very important. I hate doing things twice. Unless it is lots of fun :D.
You are probably one of those rare kids that have been participating in open source projects or general coding since they were 9 or 10. So you've created a track record.
KDE was written by Matthias Ettrich in his early 20s. Linus Torvalds wrote Linux in his early 20s as well. So I am not saying there is anything wrong with young programmers. I did not write any code as earth moving as these guys. But most of my peers early in my career were much older than me because of the level of problem I have always been willing to take on.
Again the point was more to state there is life as a down in the trenches software engineer for as long as you can maintain your skills and get the job done.
As far as young software engineers go. My friend's son is 10 and is creating his own Linux distro.
Not really. I've also been thinning since my mid 20's.
My beard also started turning a bit gray then.
The statement was meant to mean that there are more people staying in the field and being hired. After all, the point of the original posting is whether or not there is ageism. Whether or not you are expected to move from the trenches at some point.
I've been a software engineer for 25 years. No issues. There is no expectation that you should move to management at some point. The main expectation is that you are able to keep up with technology as it changes. I've moved from COBOL to C to Java to perl to php. I've used more scripting languages than I can remember. You have to keep moving forward. You never stop reading. Provide mentoring to less experienced engineers. Never hide what you know. It is not good being the curmudgeon that keeps his knowledge to himself. You become a teacher. Understand where projects you have participated in have succeeded or failed. Bring that experience to that table. Most of us have seen more product the never made it to market than have made it. Your experience in knowing why projects succeed is something import you bring to the table. Plus you are the senior guy you get more opportunities to take lead on the cool projects. So I would not worry. I am seeing more people with some gray and missing hair. So as long as you produce, people will continue to hire you.
At $95 the 80's do sound better. They don't need an amp.
I was using my music from an IPOD with MP3's VBR hi rate to compare the two models. The 125's required an AMP. But they sound great if you want to spend as much on a headphone amp as you did on a Ipod.
The 80's are worth the money.
$119 for the empty carrier, $238 for one with a 60GB HD. And they still have the Chutzbah to charge extra for a power supply.
Go spend $30-50 for the carrier at any computer store. Make sure it has a Win and mac compatibility logo on it.
I have a couple of carriers that have worked great for me on XP systems and Linux systems. But I can't perform a format of the drive from my Mac.
You now have 3 disks sitting on a shelf.
Again if there is a multi year retension requirement of this data, then as they finish each project, the raid 5 will wind up being some 6 figure Netapp or EMC to hold all the old projects.
You still want to do an offsite archive of the data.
I agree with the other guys. Disk drives that are unused have a shelf life of about 5 years. The medium does need to be read read once in a while. And yes the electronics can go bad.
For tapes, the secret is to make and test multiple copies of the tape. I suggest 3. And pay a company that specializes is tape archives to store the tape.
Make sure you understand how to maintain your tape drive. Mostly make sure you use the cleaning tape to clean the heads on a very regular basis.
If you can afford it, get 2 drives. Write the data on one and verify the data on another.
The bigest ememy for tapes is climate. You do not want humidity or temerature to change.
What is the value of the data? What if there is a disaster and these tapes are required?
You should have one storage company locally, and another out of state.
Depending on the number of tapes, you are not talking about a lot of money for storing the tapes.
This guy is a photographer, not an administrator.
Buy and label pairs of drives. HDs are cheap these days. One is the original store and the other is the backup.
Name the first drive as driveA and driveAbkup, second set driveB and driveBbkup.
Keep a notbook for eack to note the customers/jobs in each drive. This way he does not have to attach the drive to know which customers jobs are on it.
When ever something on a drive is modified, use your favorite backup program to copy from driveA to driveAbkup.
I currently use Integro Personalbackup.
This give you 2 copies. If needed because of leaving town or what ever reason, one set of drives can be kept offsite if needed.
This is something simple you can teach.
Also keep in mind most photographers only keep the "negatives" for a specific period of time. 5-10 years.
Using this method will guarentee tha the data on the drives are read and written which helps keep the data fresh. HD's can loose data of not read once in a while.
Youo will need to teach your friend to run health checks on the drives twice a year to make sure it is not failing. This is important even for drives that site for 2 or more years. You do not want a HD to sit for 5 years without spinning up.
I've been out there with a CS degree for over 20 years. Yes, the theoretical classes are very important. A good mathmatical CS backgroud will give you a leg up in the long run. As others have said, it is important to learn the theory and why different approaches, OS's and languages exist. It will help you dig into the practical topics as programming languages, platforms and operating systems change. It will let you keep up with different philosophies of how to design a system, and maybe you'll understand why the flavor of the month is popular. Hopefully you'll learn to not be dogmatic.
Being dogmatic and a lack of flexibility has you using the equivilent of a hammer for everything. Very soon that will cause a career change and not by choice. Employers want people with a full tool belt. People who know how their tools work and why they use them. They also like to see that you change your tools as things evolve.
Where it is offered, takes classes where design or working within a team is required. It will give you an idea of programming within a team. People skills are important in the real world.
Do not pass on internships, involvement in open source or school projects. Anywhere there is a team of people writting code that will be used in a production environment by more than a few people. This will give you the leg up when you graduate. To say that you worked on code that is in production somewhere. Even if you can show you fixed a bug a month in firefox or apache. It shows you wrote peer reviewed code. You have code in production.
Use the internships to find out what you want to do. Try to get an internship with different companies each summer. Different evironments. Different types of projects. Different industries. Do not choose based on the cool company. Some cool startup doing something new might be cooler than google or microsoft.
I live in the SF bay area. It works well for me. I just moved over from verizon. I have not tried the modem facilities.
It syncs with iSync.
the one issues is that once I added my computer to the phone as a blue tooth device, it stopped automatically connectig to my motorola bluetooth headset.
Call me a troll if you need but....
after many years of working with people who have not gone to college and those who have, a software engineer or a system administrator that goes to college always has the advantage.
From the 80's of blowing away today's equivilent of heald graduates, to the boom and outsourcing of today where there is no way in Hell India can create 200,000 skilled computer people all from colleges that are as good as ours overnight.
I've been though it all. I've been kicking ass for 23 years. I'm still learning. I'm still reinventing myself. People still feel I have more than enough to contribute.
People who truly go to a 4 year school and learn logic, mathmatics, the algorithms, concepts of multiple computer languages, how to build a compiler, how to create a database. The difference between database and data base, so their, errr... there. This is important. You will use it all, if you are lucky.
A 2 year school teaches just how and what. A college teaches you all 5, what, when where, why and how. When you know why, you can keep learning. If you only know what, your always behind waiting for the next guy to tell you! In this market, you have to reinvent yourself every 3-4 years.
So if a 2 year school gets you working sooner, then go for it. Then do not be disappointed when some "college puke" takes your next job from you.
Now if you want to take the 8 years to earn a degree part time, more power to you. I had to finish school part time. It is truly hard.
But as we have seen, XML has been beaten to death and used where it is not needed.
Drives me nuts at times. Nothing like a closes app constantly yapping. Eating bandwidth with plain text and sucking CPU cycles unwrapping the XML.
Pet Peeves. Everyone has many. But never admits to it.
You must read and have the spare machine to play with. You must at least browse Dr. Dobbs.
This is why my resume is upto date after 22 years.
Now that the y2k issues are dea and gone, Cobol programmers now most commonly say, "So that was a Non fat decaf latte....?"
Can't turn into the guy that in 1993 walked out of a presentation I gave on Visual Basic because he did not know what a mouse was. This is a true story.