I followed the idea of get a skill, start working, and learn on the side. I recommend it to everyone.
I started with a $4K to get my MSCE in 1999. I took 10 weeks of classes, got my MCSE exams done in three months (I was a bit of a computer guy already who'd been hacking around a PC since my Adam in 1984 when I was 7). I got a $30K a year job before I even finished my exams. The job came with tuition reimbursement. I got an English Degree with that Tuition Reimbursement. I'd have done Computer Science, but the colleges where I lived didn't have night classes for it. So I also liked creative writing (just as fun as creative coding to me). 6 years of night classes and I had my BA of Creative Writing degree, paid for by tuition reimbursement and, oh by the way, I years of experience as a Network Engineer.
Instead of a college grad with no experience, I was a college grad with 6 years experience.
I quickly got another job, that also paid tuition reimbursement. I took a few CS courses, not a full degree, just enough to qualify to get a masters of CS. Now, I have taken all the course work for a Masters of CS and just have my thesis left. I owe exact $0 in student loans.
This path is open to everyone. You don't have to do "Computers." It could be a nursing certificate. An apprenticeship for an Electrical company, and you get a degree and become a general contractor. FYI, it is best to do large companies because they are more likely to have tuition reimbursement. But even if they don't, who cares if you make enough money to afford it.
I firmly believe that 4 years of college with no work is not very beneficial for young kids when compared to working and getting your degree on the side. Sure the social life is a bit harder and there is less of it, but there I had enough of it.
Would you rather after 4 years leave college a degree and 0 years experience and 100k to 200k in debt. Or would you rather work and go to college at night for 6 years, and you leave college with a degree, 6 years experience, and $0 of debt?
My rule of thumb is never owe more than one semester of college or $3500 (whichever is less) at a time.
DO NOT GO INTO LARGE DEBT FOR EDUCATION!!!!
Disney didn't understand why Tron had a following
on
Tron 3 Is Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
Tron 2 bombed because the writers and producers understood that the original Tron had a following, but they don't understand why. They still don't. They left out most of the details that made the original Tron awesome. They completely failed to appease the Tron fans, and they failed to please the general populace too.
Computers were new when Tron came out. It was intense to even be a "user" and many computer users were also computer scientists, which is why in the game a "user" was revered like a demigod. The society in Tron reflected the geek society in the real world.
Now the "user" is anybody. The demigods would be the computer scientists, Network Engineers, and Administrators. The users would be pretty much drones now, controlled in most ways by the demigods.
Where was this in Tron 2? It was just absent. This is just one example of how they completely missed by lack of understanding.
Science is wrong way more often that it is right! This is not actually a problem. It is part of the scientific method.
Science is about observing. Creating a "hypothesis." Testing the hypothesis. Changing the hypothesis based on observations and tests. Until a hyptothesis can't be proven wrong, in which case it becomes a "theory." If a hypothesis can be 100% proven with no possible chance of altering, it becomes a law.
There are very few laws. For example, the law of gravity, even if we only have theories on how gravity works, gravity is itself a law.
So with gravity, a hypothesis was proposed that every item, despite the size and weight appear to drop at the same speed. Many tests made this a hypothesis. Then someone drops a feather, and based on observing the feather falling more slowly, the theory is called into question. Test are done. The theory is no longer in question because someone observes air and found evidence that while gravity acts on objects at the same rate, air doesn't. Add in the variable air and the theory of gravity still stands. We have the law of gravity.
However, there are many theories where when the theory is called into question, it is flat out proven wrong.
So for any given law there are multiple (mt) of theories. For any given theory theory their are multiple (mh) hypotheses. So for every law that science comes up with, there are many incorrect scientific assumptions (isa). Number of times science is wrong is vastly more than the number of times science is right,
Because something is the "currently accepted theory" doesn't mean it is correct. People often say things like, you are an idiot if you don't believe in the "Theory of Foo." However, the fact that the "Theory of Foo" is still a theory means that isn't proven yet. As a proper scientist, we continue to question everything until it is proven to such an extent that it becomes a law.
However doubting a theory because we don't have 100% evidence is different than doubting a theory because it doesn't jive with some religious belief. There are too many variable for either science or religion to make blatant, "your wrong, I'm right" statements. When either side does so, they look foolish.
I find it interesting that the scientific method is pretty much the same method as faith.
Faith = Believe something, act on it, if it is true, your faith is confirmed. Scientific method: Hypthosize something. Test it. If your tests support your hypothesis, your theory is confirmed.
Also, sometimes results of scientific experiments don't always mean what one might think they mean. For example, science is trying to recreate the first moment when something moves from a lifeless element to a living thing (even if only a single-celled organism).There are many who say, once man can do this, it will forever disprove the idea of intelligent design. However, as soon as man does this, we also just proved the possibility of intelligent design. We proved man could use its intelligence to design and create life. At that point, all we proved is the necessary steps to create life. Further suppositions such as saying that since man can create life it proves that there is or there is no God are just suppositions are completely not part of the scientific method.
I like pay per mile. Everyone should pay for what they use. It was easy to tax gas when 100% of the cars used gas. This doesn't "target" electric cars, it simply includes them, and they should be included.
We need to tax the amount that is needed to maintain the roads. Everyone who uses the roads should pay. Those who use the roads more, should pay more. If you have a 50 mile commute, you pay $0.75 each way ($1.50 a day). You also need 50 miles of road to be maintained. You also are increasing the load on the roads for 50 miles. If you have a 4 mile commute, you pay $0.06 cents each way for a ($.12 a day).
Manager: (looks at Dev 2) Kanban board says you moved Blah task to done yesterday and pulled in foo task today. Dev 1: Yes. Manager: Good work. Need anything from me or the team. Dev 1: No
Manager: (looks at Dev 2) Kanban board says you moved Oober1 task to done yesterday and pulled in Gobblygook task today.
Kanban board says you moved blah task to done yesterday and pulled in foo task today. Dev 2: Yes. Manager: Need anything from me or the team. Dev 2: Yes, I need help from Dev 1 to do Gobblygook. Manager: (looks at Dev 1) Dev 1, can you talk to Dev 2 about gobblygook after standup. Dev 1: Yes
Manager: (looks at Dev 3) Kanban board says you moved Whatsit task to done yesterday and pulled in WrongWork task today. Dev 3: Oops. Yes, I finished Whatsit yesteday, but I pulled in the wrong story. I am working on RightWork. Manager: Fix the Kanban board mistake. Need anything from me or the team on RightWork. Dev 3: Nope
Manager: (Looks at Tester) Kanban board says you finished tests for oober1 and you are working on testing Blah. Tester: Yes, there was one bug, I verbally told Dev 2, he fixed it. I retested an now all tests pass. I am testing Blah now. Manager: Good work.Need anything from me or the team. Tester: I'll maybe need to speek to Dev 1 about Blah sometime after lunch.
Why would I learn objective-c (which I already learned and loath) or Swift, when I can code in C#.
Sure objective-C will be nice for a fast thin layer between a big game and the OS. Many consumer apps already exists.
The big white space now is enterprise apps. You watch, C# is going to own the enterprise app market thanks to Visual Studio 2015, open source.NET, and Xamarin.
You create the View that an object is supposed to look like, then you simply bind the object to that View. Most controls exists, either out of the box or purchased third party controls, and all you have to do is define it.
Hey loved it. It felt like a game to him. He wasn't overwhelmed. He was excited. He said, "I am going to be a computer worker like you daddy" afterwords.
So she is saying Woman aren't as good as men at negotiating? I thought the point here was that Women are equal to men. Which is it? Are women equal to men, or aren't they?
She is also saying that this supposedly margin of pay difference that supposedly proves we are still a sexist society is caused by women negotiating with less skill than men. So she is blaming women for their own low salaries and she is removing the blame on sexism.
So that means we have reached equality and women are be treated equally to men because a man with poor negotiating skills gets paid less too.
So I am a Software Engineer with an undergrand in English (Creative Writing emphasys), minor in Spanish, a Masters of Computer Science (well, I have my thesis left). I have worked as a Network Engineer and Level III Support Engineer before becoming a developer. So since my career is the marriage of a humanity (English) and computer science, does that make me the most valuable?
No, I am not saying "believe in God over evolution." I am just saying that looking at DNA without considering the possibility of intelligent design is myopic.
At least some DNA studies should assume intelligent design.
Start looking at DNA and everything that interacts with it as a programming language created by something intelligent.
In a programming language, there is code and data. Code contains all the method and functions to do small amounts of work. Data is used or acted upon by the code. Data can be read only, read/write/delete, etc...
Think of our bodies as a biological artificial intelligence created using this biological programming language.
Use open source codecs and include the codecs and their source on the media
1. An MP4 on an SD Card. 2. A DVD - in a case and shrink-wrapped. 3. A USB thumb drive. 4. Also A shrinkwrapped tablet in a sealed container might last 100 years.
Put the Video on a tablet. Shut down the tablet. Remove the battery from the tablet. Shrink wrap the tablet and place the tablet in a sealed container.
Now all they have to do is add a battery in the future or connect power and turn the tablet on to see the video.
Whenever I create a new install, physical or vm, setting the option to show file extensions is one of the first tasks. If a VM, it is a task to run before the first snapshot.
Tablets for Work failed! They are consumer devices.
Now, my Surface Pro 3 on the other hand. It rocks. It is a tablet, every bit as awesome as the iPad or Kindle, yet I can do my work on it too. Sure Microsoft missed the Tablet explosion, but now that it is over, everyone but Microsoft, and hardware manufacturers who put Windows on their devices, is missing the hybrid market.
.NET is slowly beeing weeded out of the enterprise though and that's a trend I don't want to see diminished by devs picking up.NET because it's now "open source". It's OK to hate.NET, open source or not.
You are blowing smoke with this comment. The exact opposite is happening and in a big way.
Look, I am a FreeBSD guy, but Microsoft is winning whether you think so or not..NET is rapidly growing in the enterprise!
Why? 1. Because it is a well thought-out language that is easy to write, easy to learn. 2. Because the IDE is second to none. Visual Studio is so far ahead of anything else out there one wonders if any other IDE can catch up ever. It takes dozens of searching and finding plugins to even get Eclipse close to the same functionality and you just can't get there. Eclipse still hasn't reached VS 2008 quality let alone VS 2013 quality. 3. Everyone always says "If only we could rewrite it, it would be better." Well,.NET is basically a rewrite of Java (thanks to the Sun lawsuit)..Net is fully-backed by Microsoft who invests a ton of money into it, as apposed to Java which doesn't have as much investment. Microsoft fixed a ton of the java issues with the rewrite and haven't looked back. Java has been behind for years. 4. Microsoft has been putting out open source for years. WiX, Orchard, Entity Framework, etc... 5. The new generation doesn't hate Microsoft or Apple or anyone (OK some Linux zealots might, but not many), they just love technology and when it comes to development,.NET as a complete package including language, IDE, build tools, etc, is the best out there. 6. NuGet
So there are some misconceptions about.NET vs C#. Sites like tiobe shows a list of popular languages. However, what it doesn't show is that multiple of these languages are.NET languages. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
C# 4.3% VB 1.8% F# 0.8% C++ - You can code in.NET with C++. It is hard to know what percent of the C++ tiobe is.NET. I would guess that it is 2%.
That means.NET is really 9% and growing.
Now, because the Surface Pro 3 is the best tablet on the market now, and selling like gangbusters, pretty soon, all those Apple and Google app developers will be moving to create new.NET versions. Well, they will find cross platform tools like Xamarin to meet their needs and suddenly they won't be coding in anything but.NET anymore.
Have you seen the new Yahoo plugin for Chrome. I hate the thing myself but it is ingenious. It turns Chrome into essentially a Yahoo browser. Just by getting a bunch of users who don't know better to install it, they are going to increase their usage of Yahoo.
I am an English Major and a Senior Software Developer.
The best thing I ever did for my career was get a degree in English instead of Computer Science. Some Computer Science course can be learned in their entirety from reading online for a few hours. College is below average at best when it comes to teaching about writing quality code.
If you are an English major, then you understand language syntax and importance. All programming is, is language syntax. I took a couple programming course at a Junior College. I have infinite opportunities to use my English degree.
Now, after learning on my own, I earned (well, I still have a thesis to offically finish) a Masters of Computer Science from Utah State University (The online classes are designed so you remotely participate in the real class they teach on-campus). If your undergrad is not computer science, then there is really only one prereq class you must pass. And USU is pretty cheap, $10-$12 for my in-state Masters of Science in Computer Sciences.
Find a place that will hire you as a coder, and then
This is huge and will take off because there are big companies that would save a lot of money by using it. For example, WordPress.com, which hosts billions of images, does pay for their bandwidth. They have a simple plugin that compresses all uploaded images. All they have to do is change their plugin to use BPG and suddenly the billions of blogs out there using smaller images? That is the majority of their image bandwidth. And it is cut in half.
Sure both storage and bandwidth seem bloated. But on a large scale, such as WordPress.com, this could mean hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in drive space and bandwidth savings each year.
Now, DeviantArt and other image gallery companies will see the same benefit.
Then this moves to WordPress.org and the other half the bloggers on the internet start using it too.
Now that WordPress uses that image type, every consumer who right-clicks and downloads those images now needs to be able to open BPG files.
When there is money to be made or saved, a technology will take off.
Are any Certifications Worth Going For? Yes. Any cert if worth going for.
Why? Because HR and Hiring Managers are filtering
If you have 10 resumes, some with 4 years experience, and some with 4 years experience and a cert, and they want to narrow down the candidates, guess what the HR and Hiring managers are going to use? The cert will make the difference.
Also, certs can result in higher pay when the offer comes. Again, this is often just arbitrary bias by HR and the Hiring managers.
If you get certs in areas that you have practical experience, you will probably "really" learn and you won't be a paper cert. If you get a cert in an area that you don't have practical knowledge, it might be paper, but it might help show you can learn a new product you don't know.
Or It is extremely unlikely that these mechanisms evolved in parallel, so *it's extremely likely that* all lifeforms were created using the same Biological programming language: i.e. DNA.
And there might be other biological programming languages. Would it not be possible for us to detect that instead of DNA, a similar bio-technology would work on a planet with different temperatures and atmosphere.
Our programming language, DNA, works on this planet, but a separate language works on other planets.
If different bio-programming languages allow life on other planet types than earth, then the number of possibly inhabited planets becomes nearly infinite.
So you you prove that man can create life in a lab (abiogenesis), what do you think that proves?
Here is all it proves:
Intelligent beings (in this case man) can create life.
Now 100% of your scientific abiogenesis tests required intelligent design (humans). So since in your test, the life didn't begin without intelligent intervention because it required intelligent humans to set up the lab and create the perfect environemnt, did you not just demonstrate that life on earth was also likely created by an intelligent being?
Slashdot Mirror
I followed the idea of get a skill, start working, and learn on the side. I recommend it to everyone.
I started with a $4K to get my MSCE in 1999. I took 10 weeks of classes, got my MCSE exams done in three months (I was a bit of a computer guy already who'd been hacking around a PC since my Adam in 1984 when I was 7). I got a $30K a year job before I even finished my exams. The job came with tuition reimbursement. I got an English Degree with that Tuition Reimbursement. I'd have done Computer Science, but the colleges where I lived didn't have night classes for it. So I also liked creative writing (just as fun as creative coding to me). 6 years of night classes and I had my BA of Creative Writing degree, paid for by tuition reimbursement and, oh by the way, I years of experience as a Network Engineer.
Instead of a college grad with no experience, I was a college grad with 6 years experience.
I quickly got another job, that also paid tuition reimbursement. I took a few CS courses, not a full degree, just enough to qualify to get a masters of CS. Now, I have taken all the course work for a Masters of CS and just have my thesis left. I owe exact $0 in student loans.
This path is open to everyone. You don't have to do "Computers." It could be a nursing certificate. An apprenticeship for an Electrical company, and you get a degree and become a general contractor. FYI, it is best to do large companies because they are more likely to have tuition reimbursement. But even if they don't, who cares if you make enough money to afford it.
I firmly believe that 4 years of college with no work is not very beneficial for young kids when compared to working and getting your degree on the side. Sure the social life is a bit harder and there is less of it, but there I had enough of it.
Would you rather after 4 years leave college a degree and 0 years experience and 100k to 200k in debt. Or would you rather work and go to college at night for 6 years, and you leave college with a degree, 6 years experience, and $0 of debt?
My rule of thumb is never owe more than one semester of college or $3500 (whichever is less) at a time.
DO NOT GO INTO LARGE DEBT FOR EDUCATION!!!!
Tron 2 bombed because the writers and producers understood that the original Tron had a following, but they don't understand why. They still don't. They left out most of the details that made the original Tron awesome. They completely failed to appease the Tron fans, and they failed to please the general populace too.
Computers were new when Tron came out. It was intense to even be a "user" and many computer users were also computer scientists, which is why in the game a "user" was revered like a demigod. The society in Tron reflected the geek society in the real world.
Now the "user" is anybody. The demigods would be the computer scientists, Network Engineers, and Administrators. The users would be pretty much drones now, controlled in most ways by the demigods.
Where was this in Tron 2? It was just absent. This is just one example of how they completely missed by lack of understanding.
Science is wrong way more often that it is right! This is not actually a problem. It is part of the scientific method.
Science is about observing. Creating a "hypothesis." Testing the hypothesis. Changing the hypothesis based on observations and tests. Until a hyptothesis can't be proven wrong, in which case it becomes a "theory." If a hypothesis can be 100% proven with no possible chance of altering, it becomes a law.
There are very few laws. For example, the law of gravity, even if we only have theories on how gravity works, gravity is itself a law.
So with gravity, a hypothesis was proposed that every item, despite the size and weight appear to drop at the same speed. Many tests made this a hypothesis. Then someone drops a feather, and based on observing the feather falling more slowly, the theory is called into question. Test are done. The theory is no longer in question because someone observes air and found evidence that while gravity acts on objects at the same rate, air doesn't. Add in the variable air and the theory of gravity still stands. We have the law of gravity.
However, there are many theories where when the theory is called into question, it is flat out proven wrong.
So for any given law there are multiple (mt) of theories. For any given theory theory their are multiple (mh) hypotheses.
So for every law that science comes up with, there are many incorrect scientific assumptions (isa).
Number of times science is wrong is vastly more than the number of times science is right,
Because something is the "currently accepted theory" doesn't mean it is correct. People often say things like, you are an idiot if you don't believe in the "Theory of Foo." However, the fact that the "Theory of Foo" is still a theory means that isn't proven yet. As a proper scientist, we continue to question everything until it is proven to such an extent that it becomes a law.
However doubting a theory because we don't have 100% evidence is different than doubting a theory because it doesn't jive with some religious belief. There are too many variable for either science or religion to make blatant, "your wrong, I'm right" statements. When either side does so, they look foolish.
I find it interesting that the scientific method is pretty much the same method as faith.
Faith = Believe something, act on it, if it is true, your faith is confirmed.
Scientific method: Hypthosize something. Test it. If your tests support your hypothesis, your theory is confirmed.
Also, sometimes results of scientific experiments don't always mean what one might think they mean. For example, science is trying to recreate the first moment when something moves from a lifeless element to a living thing (even if only a single-celled organism).There are many who say, once man can do this, it will forever disprove the idea of intelligent design. However, as soon as man does this, we also just proved the possibility of intelligent design. We proved man could use its intelligence to design and create life. At that point, all we proved is the necessary steps to create life. Further suppositions such as saying that since man can create life it proves that there is or there is no God are just suppositions are completely not part of the scientific method.
Happy contemplating . . .
I like pay per mile. Everyone should pay for what they use. It was easy to tax gas when 100% of the cars used gas. This doesn't "target" electric cars, it simply includes them, and they should be included.
We need to tax the amount that is needed to maintain the roads. Everyone who uses the roads should pay. Those who use the roads more, should pay more.
If you have a 50 mile commute, you pay $0.75 each way ($1.50 a day). You also need 50 miles of road to be maintained. You also are increasing the load on the roads for 50 miles.
If you have a 4 mile commute, you pay $0.06 cents each way for a ($.12 a day).
The problem is that people don't understand the types of documentation that they need. More people should read this article: (yes, I wrote it)
The 8 Types of Technical Documentation and Why Each Is Important
http://www.rhyous.com/2011/07/...
The three minutes standup
Manager: (looks at Dev 2) Kanban board says you moved Blah task to done yesterday and pulled in foo task today.
Dev 1: Yes.
Manager: Good work. Need anything from me or the team.
Dev 1: No
Manager: (looks at Dev 2) Kanban board says you moved Oober1 task to done yesterday and pulled in Gobblygook task today.
Kanban board says you moved blah task to done yesterday and pulled in foo task today.
Dev 2: Yes.
Manager: Need anything from me or the team.
Dev 2: Yes, I need help from Dev 1 to do Gobblygook.
Manager: (looks at Dev 1) Dev 1, can you talk to Dev 2 about gobblygook after standup.
Dev 1: Yes
Manager: (looks at Dev 3) Kanban board says you moved Whatsit task to done yesterday and pulled in WrongWork task today.
Dev 3: Oops. Yes, I finished Whatsit yesteday, but I pulled in the wrong story. I am working on RightWork.
Manager: Fix the Kanban board mistake. Need anything from me or the team on RightWork.
Dev 3: Nope
Manager: (Looks at Tester) Kanban board says you finished tests for oober1 and you are working on testing Blah.
Tester: Yes, there was one bug, I verbally told Dev 2, he fixed it. I retested an now all tests pass. I am testing Blah now.
Manager: Good work.Need anything from me or the team.
Tester: I'll maybe need to speek to Dev 1 about Blah sometime after lunch.
Manager: Great job team. Keep up the good work.
Stand up ends.
Why would I learn objective-c (which I already learned and loath) or Swift, when I can code in C#.
Sure objective-C will be nice for a fast thin layer between a big game and the OS.
Many consumer apps already exists.
The big white space now is enterprise apps. You watch, C# is going to own the enterprise app market thanks to Visual Studio 2015, open source .NET, and Xamarin.
I think you just descript WPF and XAML.
You create the View that an object is supposed to look like, then you simply bind the object to that View. Most controls exists, either out of the box or purchased third party controls, and all you have to do is define it.
Best UI ever made or designed.
Didn't Hiro, from Big Hero 6, make these? Do they include the neuro transmitter?
My 7 year old just finished an Hour of Code on http://code.org/learn too.
Hey loved it. It felt like a game to him. He wasn't overwhelmed. He was excited. He said, "I am going to be a computer worker like you daddy" afterwords.
Wait.
So she is saying Woman aren't as good as men at negotiating? I thought the point here was that Women are equal to men.
Which is it? Are women equal to men, or aren't they?
She is also saying that this supposedly margin of pay difference that supposedly proves we are still a sexist society is caused by women negotiating with less skill than men. So she is blaming women for their own low salaries and she is removing the blame on sexism.
So that means we have reached equality and women are be treated equally to men because a man with poor negotiating skills gets paid less too.
Did I miss anything here?
So I am a Software Engineer with an undergrand in English (Creative Writing emphasys), minor in Spanish, a Masters of Computer Science (well, I have my thesis left). I have worked as a Network Engineer and Level III Support Engineer before becoming a developer. So since my career is the marriage of a humanity (English) and computer science, does that make me the most valuable?
No, I am not saying "believe in God over evolution." I am just saying that looking at DNA without considering the possibility of intelligent design is myopic.
At least some DNA studies should assume intelligent design.
Start looking at DNA and everything that interacts with it as a programming language created by something intelligent.
In a programming language, there is code and data. Code contains all the method and functions to do small amounts of work. Data is used or acted upon by the code. Data can be read only, read/write/delete, etc...
Think of our bodies as a biological artificial intelligence created using this biological programming language.
What if it DNA is code or a database.
Who knows what is used and what isn't?
Don't use one medium, use many.
Use open source codecs and include the codecs and their source on the media
1. An MP4 on an SD Card.
2. A DVD - in a case and shrink-wrapped.
3. A USB thumb drive.
4. Also A shrinkwrapped tablet in a sealed container might last 100 years.
Put the Video on a tablet.
Shut down the tablet.
Remove the battery from the tablet.
Shrink wrap the tablet and place the tablet in a sealed container.
Now all they have to do is add a battery in the future or connect power and turn the tablet on to see the video.
Whenever I create a new install, physical or vm, setting the option to show file extensions is one of the first tasks. If a VM, it is a task to run before the first snapshot.
The GPL isn't as free as the MIT. They made it more free.
Why do you have a problem with "more free"?
Tablets for Work failed! They are consumer devices.
Now, my Surface Pro 3 on the other hand. It rocks. It is a tablet, every bit as awesome as the iPad or Kindle, yet I can do my work on it too. Sure Microsoft missed the Tablet explosion, but now that it is over, everyone but Microsoft, and hardware manufacturers who put Windows on their devices, is missing the hybrid market.
.NET is slowly beeing weeded out of the enterprise though and that's a trend I don't want to see diminished by devs picking up .NET because it's now "open source". It's OK to hate .NET, open source or not.
You are blowing smoke with this comment. The exact opposite is happening and in a big way.
Look, I am a FreeBSD guy, but Microsoft is winning whether you think so or not. .NET is rapidly growing in the enterprise!
Why? .NET is basically a rewrite of Java (thanks to the Sun lawsuit). .Net is fully-backed by Microsoft who invests a ton of money into it, as apposed to Java which doesn't have as much investment. Microsoft fixed a ton of the java issues with the rewrite and haven't looked back. Java has been behind for years. .NET as a complete package including language, IDE, build tools, etc, is the best out there.
1. Because it is a well thought-out language that is easy to write, easy to learn.
2. Because the IDE is second to none. Visual Studio is so far ahead of anything else out there one wonders if any other IDE can catch up ever. It takes dozens of searching and finding plugins to even get Eclipse close to the same functionality and you just can't get there. Eclipse still hasn't reached VS 2008 quality let alone VS 2013 quality.
3. Everyone always says "If only we could rewrite it, it would be better." Well,
4. Microsoft has been putting out open source for years. WiX, Orchard, Entity Framework, etc...
5. The new generation doesn't hate Microsoft or Apple or anyone (OK some Linux zealots might, but not many), they just love technology and when it comes to development,
6. NuGet
So there are some misconceptions about .NET vs C#. Sites like tiobe shows a list of popular languages. However, what it doesn't show is that multiple of these languages are .NET languages. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
C# 4.3% .NET with C++. It is hard to know what percent of the C++ tiobe is .NET. I would guess that it is 2%.
VB 1.8%
F# 0.8%
C++ - You can code in
That means .NET is really 9% and growing.
Now, because the Surface Pro 3 is the best tablet on the market now, and selling like gangbusters, pretty soon, all those Apple and Google app developers will be moving to create new .NET versions. Well, they will find cross platform tools like Xamarin to meet their needs and suddenly they won't be coding in anything but .NET anymore.
Have you seen the new Yahoo plugin for Chrome. I hate the thing myself but it is ingenious. It turns Chrome into essentially a Yahoo browser. Just by getting a bunch of users who don't know better to install it, they are going to increase their usage of Yahoo.
I am an English Major and a Senior Software Developer.
The best thing I ever did for my career was get a degree in English instead of Computer Science. Some Computer Science course can be learned in their entirety from reading online for a few hours. College is below average at best when it comes to teaching about writing quality code.
If you are an English major, then you understand language syntax and importance. All programming is, is language syntax. I took a couple programming course at a Junior College. I have infinite opportunities to use my English degree.
Now, after learning on my own, I earned (well, I still have a thesis to offically finish) a Masters of Computer Science from Utah State University (The online classes are designed so you remotely participate in the real class they teach on-campus). If your undergrad is not computer science, then there is really only one prereq class you must pass. And USU is pretty cheap, $10-$12 for my in-state Masters of Science in Computer Sciences.
Find a place that will hire you as a coder, and then
This is huge and will take off because there are big companies that would save a lot of money by using it. For example, WordPress.com, which hosts billions of images, does pay for their bandwidth. They have a simple plugin that compresses all uploaded images. All they have to do is change their plugin to use BPG and suddenly the billions of blogs out there using smaller images? That is the majority of their image bandwidth. And it is cut in half.
Sure both storage and bandwidth seem bloated. But on a large scale, such as WordPress.com, this could mean hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in drive space and bandwidth savings each year.
Now, DeviantArt and other image gallery companies will see the same benefit.
Then this moves to WordPress.org and the other half the bloggers on the internet start using it too.
Now that WordPress uses that image type, every consumer who right-clicks and downloads those images now needs to be able to open BPG files.
When there is money to be made or saved, a technology will take off.
Any cert "IS" worth going for. Sorry for the typo.
Are any Certifications Worth Going For? Yes. Any cert if worth going for.
Why? Because HR and Hiring Managers are filtering
If you have 10 resumes, some with 4 years experience, and some with 4 years experience and a cert, and they want to narrow down the candidates, guess what the HR and Hiring managers are going to use? The cert will make the difference.
Also, certs can result in higher pay when the offer comes. Again, this is often just arbitrary bias by HR and the Hiring managers.
If you get certs in areas that you have practical experience, you will probably "really" learn and you won't be a paper cert.
If you get a cert in an area that you don't have practical knowledge, it might be paper, but it might help show you can learn a new product you don't know.
Or It is extremely unlikely that these mechanisms evolved in parallel, so *it's extremely likely that* all lifeforms were created using the same Biological programming language: i.e. DNA.
And there might be other biological programming languages. Would it not be possible for us to detect that instead of DNA, a similar bio-technology would work on a planet with different temperatures and atmosphere.
Our programming language, DNA, works on this planet, but a separate language works on other planets.
Recently the number of earth like palnets was estimated to be 8.8 billion. http://www.nbcnews.com/science...
If different bio-programming languages allow life on other planet types than earth, then the number of possibly inhabited planets becomes nearly infinite.
So you you prove that man can create life in a lab (abiogenesis), what do you think that proves?
Here is all it proves:
Intelligent beings (in this case man) can create life.
Now 100% of your scientific abiogenesis tests required intelligent design (humans). So since in your test, the life didn't begin without intelligent intervention because it required intelligent humans to set up the lab and create the perfect environemnt, did you not just demonstrate that life on earth was also likely created by an intelligent being?