Fast Track to a CS Degree? So this guy has been working for five years in the industry, constantly getting raises and praise from his company. And yet he's going to top out quickly because he doesn't have a Computer Science degree. He's been programming for 12 years and has read hundreds of CD books and wants to get a degree in like a year. Is there a way to do this?

Most of the comments were no. A few were maybe from some sort of community college or minor university. The fact is that work experience is not a substitute for school experience. A CS degree is mostly about theory and universities force you to take lots of math and science and some humanities, in addition to the CS courses. It's a total package and something people are rather unlikely to learn in the real world, unless they love reading CS course books.

My take on this matter is that a degree is very important. You have to put in those four years. I don't care how good your programming skills are -- base programmers are a dime a dozen. Really, way too many people have are at the code monkey/script kiddie level of skill, with bad habits and not very useful for real development. There are exceptions, but getting a degree is hard so it does mean something.

MS Office for OSX? Why not for Unix as Well? Ok, so another guy notes that Mac OS X will soon get (actually has already gotten) a native of MS Office. Once you have that, the only thing stopping Microsoft from porting Office to another version of Unix or Linux is their capitalist greed and monopolistic goals.

What most posters point out is that Mac OS X is not Unix. It's built on top of Unix. You can easily port Unix programs to Mac OS X, but you can't do the same porting Mac OS X programs to Unix. Office is written with the Carbon APIs, which means you'd have to port the APIs to Unix. Which is almost the same amount of work as implementing a Mac OS emulator on Unix. What about Mac-on-Linux, isn't that an API port like WINE? No, Mac-on-Linux is an emulator. You need a copy of the Mac ROM to run it.

My take. Will there ever be a version of Microsoft Office for anything other than Windows or Macintosh? Doubtful. It would require forming a team to do the port and then there's marketing and support and the revenue isn't there. Microsoft would need a reason, like a real OpenOffice that gives a reason for companies to switch to Linux or FreeBSD. In any case, what people really want is not Microsoft Office, but office compatibility. A good translator application would do just as well, though if you want to be able to read all the weird extensions to .doc files it might take writing an MS Office clone.

Is Universal Music's Copy Protection a Joke? A news story by Patrick Norton. Universal Music is moving to Midbar Tech's Catus Data Shield (CDS) to provide copy protection on their music CDs. And it works on Windows computers. Put the CD in and all you see is bad music files and a CDS player (wonder if there's a Mac version?). So you can only play the music with the CDS player and it of course won't let you rip the music to MP3 format.

But, CDS doesn't seem to work with at least one DVD drive, the NEC DV-5700A, which is OEMed in Dell computers. For whatever reason, its drivers handle whatever weird error format CDS uses and it shows the tracks correctly, playable with any player. Except for track 1.

Really, what's the point of these forms of copy protection? If they're trying to keep people from making MP3s and distributing them on the Internet, then it won't work. All you need is one person to make a good recording of the analog playing and distribute that. Not quite as good as ripping from the file directly, but good enough that 90% of people won't notice the quality drop. You have to find a different way to protect your copyrights.