Getting a degree is worth it for 2 reasons. 1. You learn to learn, that alone is a huge boon. 2. Stuff like how a linked list or a B+-tree works internally never gets old. Those theoretical concepts are still very much relevant today. You should either refrain from learning too-particular things (that was my prof's aporach) or distill the essense out of particular knowledge to apply it to other things running on the same principles. Example: While we can agree that a modern CPU is orders of magnitude more complex, than the venerable 8080, the basic concepts are still the same. I personally am a fan of learning actually (at that time) useful things as learning theory without any grounding in reality isn't the way my brain works, but distill the essense to apply it to new fields. And let's be real, truly new fields are few far and between. The most progress computer science has been having for half a century is old wine in new (way fancier and bigger) bottles.

https://xkcd.com/927

I've never considered tests in TDD to be my boss, but let me try discussing a raise with my tests!

Dunno if someone mentioned that already, but Process Monitor is a fantastic tool and is well-suit for exactly this use case.

Hey, I weekly change stuff according to my client's wishes, every time believing that when I fulfil said wishes, I can finally draw a line under the particular work package, only to find my client to have more wishes.

I once had the litereally same and I brought this upon myself. When doing something similar as you did, I used dd to copy the whole disk block-wise. With the same result, the one partition was as large as it was before. The solution is incredibly simple: Resize the partition. Windows' own diskmgmt.msc is perfectly able to do so.

Free pizza and beer? Sign me up!

35€/month, 25 Mb/s, city. Yeah, I overpay a huge lot for what I'm getting.

AFAIK there's no point to going to university for thist stuff. I remember my informatics lections being so theoretical, they're pretty useless for getting stuff done and academia didn't prepare me for stuff going wrong in the field (such as a network connection being less reliable than a SATA cable). I've read on some blog linked in the Codeproject news about how programming should be taught in a master/apprentice-manner rather than in an academic manner and from my own experience in the field, I very much agree. I don't think that academia is entirely useless. When it comes to stuff such as designing embedded OS' or compilers yourself, deep theoretical knowledge surely is helpful. But when you're the guy who uses all those background services to get the actual task done, university is a waste of time. Well, not entirely. I got hired for having a degree sinmply because it indicated to my now-employer that I'm a bright head capable of learning. Apart of that, that's about it.

Silverlight was a plugin. Blazor compiles to native web. Huge difference.

C-compatibility. Loads of issues with C++ stem from C-compatibility.

I need something the technology I'm about to learn is great for. I remember learning OOP from having a task/scheduler project, I had several (related) types of tasks and have solved that via inheritance. Before that, OOP was for me "Namespaces separated by dots" because that was all OOP was doing for me that I needed. But that's maybe just me. I'm a practical guy and I strugge big time learning something for the very sake of learning it. I need a project, a goal with the new stuff being a better way to reach that goal, then my previous knowledge. Otherwise, I'll do things the most effecient way and if that means that I won't learn anyting new, then that new wasn't a good idea to learn in the first place.

I guess, it depends on the job. For a pure data clerk, I don't see the problem and viewing the world (the office) from a different perspective every day may be an interesting experience. For a pure software developer, that makes sense as well. The drawer isn't really needed for anything but a couple of pens and some paper, that's easily portable. But for a developer like me, who has roughly 2 kilogramms of hardware on his desk, wired to the computer via several USB connections, moving places is a huge deal. Just like every principle, it may be beneficial, it may be the most horrible idea ever. It depends on the circumstances.

I very much agree. While the tech itself looks promising, everybody and their grandma try to shoehorn blockchain into everything, no matter how it fits. And let's be frank, with all the issues surrounding Bitcoin, we have a better precedent on blockchain having issues than on blockchain solving them.

See it this way: Due to the not-so-integrated circuits back then, tinkering was pretty much the mainstream norm. Heck, I remember CRT TVs coming with a maintenance manual telling you which capacitator to change in what case. Nowdays, it's all integrated and mainstream tech isn't tinkerable (mostly, that dude who got an integrated headphone jack into his iPhone is a hero). Still, if you want to tinker, there's loads of fun to be had. It's just not mainstream anymore. But if you want, you can order an 8 bit computer self-assembly kit with programming instructions, for example. Or order the schematics and buy the parts yourself. Or understand the schematics and overclock it. I recently backed a Kickstarter which recreates the Altair on a ruler, meaning that if it's fun to program in REAL machine language (assembly in text files which get translated into machine language is one step further away from the tech running the code), then I'll do it.

Hands down Python. JavaScript is ubiqitous, but let's say, it wasn't designed, it evolved. And it shows. Same goes for PHP. HTML/CSS isn't programming, it's markup. Python is in high demand, it's (mostly) well-structured and it tends to be recommended as a beginner's/learner's language a lot.

Scilab seems like the way to go. Several of my scientific co-workers use that for dealing with data sets doing all kinds of stuffs that physics does with data, including non-linear axes.

Age is a lame excuse, quite frankly. While it's true that older people tend to have less neural plasticity than youngsters, we, techies, are in the perfect field to keep our brains fresh throughout the decades. The change is real. Around 2000, a user name and password were enough. There was not enough e-commerce going around for bad guys to catch on as they go where there's money to be had. There wasn't enough expertise either, e-commerce was both not established enough to be a target and not established enough for bad guys to have worked out "solutions" to rip everyone off. With the years, both business and crime models evolved and grew, both in numbers and sizes (although most crime models boil to the same basic set of principles, many of them already described in the 70s and 80s). You don't need an expensive lock and alarm system living in a hardly populated suburb with low crime, do you? The internet changed, it used to be that suburb but now it's basically a downtown ghetto, so security had to be upped. Those are objectively measurable aspects. An aspect that AFAIK is purey my subjective opinion unless proven otherwise are stupid people. Masses of stupid people. A decade or two ago, there was internet but it was only for the few die-hards. Nowadays, everyone and his grandma is on the internet and the more people there are, the more stupid people there are as masses tend to be stupid so the more measures have to be taken to babysit idiots. I'd go as far as to claim that the effective IQ of a huge set of people is the avergave IQ divided by the square root of the number of people. But I think I'm starting to digress...

Haven't thought of that before, but thanks for the headsup!

RAID isn't a good replacement for a backup, especially internal RAID. A backup on an external RAID 1 isn't a horrible idea though. A backup on a single external drive is, as a matter of fact, way safer, than to a single internal drive. Since the drive isn't powered up all the time, it doesn't wear out as fast as the internal drive. Unless he keeps plugged it in 24/7, then it's indeed a dumb idea. My GF runs backups with Windows' built-in backupper on her external USB 3.0 drive which she plugs in roughly once a week. While that's definitly not enterprise-grade, it's far from a bad backup strategy.