It really depends but to give some background, I am a self taught programmer that never finished college and dropped out. I was a huge computer nerd growing up and learned 6502 assembly (Apple II), z80 assembly (TI-85), x86 assembly using MASM and TASM, basic, turbo pascal, turbo c and visual basic. That was just before I was out of High School. I was big in to hacking, cracking, boxing, phreaking and the allure of the darker side of technology long before the infamous Hacker movie of the 90's. Angelina used to be sooo hot, lol. Fast forward to college and I was supremely bored. I was going for a network technologies degree and wanted a CS degree. I only made it two years. I eventually just stopped showing up for class except to ace the exams. I was already Microsoft Certified for some of the classes the teacher was teaching and often the teacher was asking me questions or I had to correct them. I was also working entry level positions at the time building pcs, installing networks, excel automation with vba and access, database and web development etc. Basically anything to get some field experience and make money while I was going to school. There are generally two types of people. The ones who could care less and just want the degree and the ones that are actually interested in the material. More often than not the ones interested in the material already know a lot of the material but the classes still have to be designed to teach the people that just want the piece of paper. It really sucks for the motivated people who love technology but school is more about money and clout these days than actual academia. To answer your question, six of one and half a dozen of the other. In some ways I wish I had the degree because I am very weak on things like Big O, Design Patterns and Unit Testing which are very important to some larger companies. On the other hand I can mop the floor with people when it comes to algorithms, debugging and cranking out solid code. I was DevOps before it was even a thing, mainly because necessity was the mother of invention. Because I did not have a degree, I usually ended up working for smaller businesses which meant lower pay and benefits and lower budgets for tools and hardware making the job more difficult. You really need to get creative to get the job done well. Fast forward 20+ years and I feel like I am somewhat successful. It is definitely doable to make it without a degree if you have talent but it will be a more difficult path. It is a lot easier these days with how

You're not, MS will overwrite your setting during updates, usually major updates, because of changes they make on the back end. Similar to how Google will automatically log you in to chrome and track you if you log in to youtube or any other google affiliated / owned website. You just have to trust they are doing what's best for you. /s

z80 assembly back on the TI-85 back in 93-94'. Then on to x86 assembly, turbo pascal and turbo c.

I love the feature, I use it all the time. I have 5 monitors and typically have around 30 windows open with various browsers, eclipse, hulu, text editors, navicat etc. I use desktop fences to organize my shortcuts, folders, temp files etc into groups on my desktop but it's a pain to get to your desktop sometimes because you don't want to minimize all those windows by clicking show desktop which means you have to go through and maximize each one you want to restore. So I can shake, access my desktop then shake and bring everything back to exactly where it was. It's probably not that useful for people who don't multitask or have more than one monitor.

I've been using WinSCP for ftp and sftp for a long time. Great client. Flash FXP would be my favorite commercial client.

Hrm, I doubt microsoft is going to let anyone release anything they want. Remeber all executables on the X360 are encrypted and have to be signed in order to run and microsoft is the only one who can sign them. It will allow smaller development studios to be able to develop for the x360, but don't expect a plethora of "Free" software/games for your xbox since microsoft still has to approve what gets released. -djenkins