These tests were also just as simple as calculating Pi a thousand times. Based on the description, I was hoping for some tests where a website with a dozen or so complete views with significant bindings were created in both Java and C#. Instead it was just an HTTP request or a page that printed the date.
So, get cracking. What's stopping you from doing the test yourself and publish the results?
My current area of research is in automated database design, and there are only so many hours in the day. My own tests have shown that C# using LINQ performs better for me than either Java or even my best attempts at C++, but these personal experiments are nowhere near publishable. They likely only show that I am more proficient at C#. But that was good enough for me since my objective was to see what language I should be doing my own experiments in right now, not in a fantasy world where I had enough time to become just as efficient in these other languages.
The sad thing about it is that if you actually did some work, some other idiot would complain that your test was dissapointing, and that he was expecting more.
There is a difference between nitpicking and pointing out that a research project did not even come close to meeting its own goals. These tests do hold some value in showing the maximum potential performance of these different frameworks and web servers. But that does not change the fact that these experiments did not test what the project summary said they were trying to test.
These tests were also just as simple as calculating Pi a thousand times. Based on the description, I was hoping for some tests where a website with a dozen or so complete views with significant bindings were created in both Java and C#. Instead it was just an HTTP request or a page that printed the date.
Different frameworks and web servers are going to use varying amounts of overhead, so simple tests really only calculate that overhead. If you are going to provide benchmarks that actually have some meaning then they need to test complex enough behavior to mimic real world usage.
These tests basically just show that Tomcat is faster than IIS for simple scenarios, or perhaps that ASP.NET MVC 4 adds more overhead to page requests than JSP does. Whether this overhead is meaningful when you are processing rich real world web pages is not covered by these tests.
I haven't seen much if any evidence that immigration is a substantial problem there. We have plenty of low income American kids whose families have been here for 200 years.
Just because you have never studied the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 23% of immigrants and their US born children live in poverty, compared to 13.5% of natives and their children. That means immigrants are almost twice as likely to be in poverty.
I just heard about this 4K tablet, and it is the one technology on either the 'good' or 'bad' list that has me excited. I haven't found an estimated price, but if they can make a 20" tablet with 4K resolution for around $2k then there may be hope for a 30"+ monitor with 4K resolution someday. I would buy a monitor like that for $1999 immediately.
I thought deceiving the court was the primary job of lawyers. Every time I have needed lawyers it was either to manipulate the court in ways I didn't believe I was able to, or to provide extra intimidation to the opposition.
If everyone was completely honest and forthcoming, we wouldn't even need lawyers. Judges would work just fine on their own.
Well, you could always just do the research and find out that different European countries really do report infant mortality statistics differently. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm
Honestly, to think they would use different definitions for each country. Why, you must be american.
I disagree. I think that properly researching and formulating more accurate opinions based on that research can be done by anyone, not just Americans.
But it isn't like many people in prison are there for crimes they didn't know they were committing. It is pretty easy to stay out of prison. Even of you don't agree with the laws, it isn't hard to follow them.
I am sure he would rather live in the US and follow our very straight forward laws. And from my conversations with people from China, I would much rather be poor in the US than live like 99% of Chinese citizens.
Even without applying oneself, a genius should be able to grasp something that's so simple that it bores him, so no excuse for bad grades
Since when does grasping something get you good grades? Until college, most of my classes had over 50% of the grade come from homework. Many of them had as much as 80% of the grade come from homework. If you are not doing the homework because you find it to be mindless busywork, it doesn't matter if you grasp the material.
That doesn't make it any less juvenile to not do your homework (I was a very juvenile and arrogant child too). But claiming that you can get A's without applying yourself is ridiculous. In most high school classes, you have to complete almost all of your assignments to get As.
Considering that through much of history men have married women with lower levels of educational attainment and income, and been able to be happy in those relationships without considering their wives "low-lives", I'm not sure why the reverse would be impossible.
Except that all evidence show that the reversal is not happening. There are a lot of biological hurdles that need to be overcome for women to start wanting to marry men that are not as successful as they are. These problems are more obvious in African Americans because there is a greater discrepency between the number of educated black women vs men. This is argued to be one big reason why 70% of black women are single vs 55% for white women.
Smart, successful women do not want unemployed husbands. As a general rule, men look for youth and attractiveness while women look for stature, stability and success. These are gross overgeneralisations, but when applied over an entire population they hold true.
It is going to be pretty hard for our society to overcome this. My fiance is very liberal, and very successful. But she finds unambitious men very unattractive.
It doesn't seem terribly smart to me to destroy your own future because you don't follow the rules and don't work harder.
This is not a fair statement to make about children. Kids do not have the ability to look that far into the future. Girls aren't better students because they are thinking about their future careers, they are better students because of either biological differences and/or society norms that make them more obedient.
The best students are the ones whose parents do a good job of instilling values which will help them later in life. Almost any kid left to their own devices is just going to want to play.
The problem they are pointing out has more to do with how students are graded, not how well they are learning. Since boys still have higher test scores (according to the article), it looks like they are still learning better in a school environment. The problem is how schools grade their students. If grades are too decoupled from the actual learning taking place, there is a problem.
How does this have anything to do with Big Data? Storing large amount of data isn't the important part, it is being able to analyze that data. You do not analyze a movie's data file. You just load and display the movie, which can easy be stored in one large continous file. A Big Data problem would be Netflix trying to determine what kinds of movies to recommend, not storing and then displaying a long movie to users.
It may take longer than 15 minutes to analyze a play, but I doubt it is too much more. At 22 minutes, you can spend a full minute analyzing each player. And some plays only include half of the players on the field. It would take much more than 22 minutes to get every possible statistic about a play, but you could at least get some useful metrics about each players' performance in just a minute.
So say you just look at the handful of players directly involved in a play... say, ten of them. Do you just look at the yards gained? How do you account for things like down and distance factoring into the style of play? A 2-yard run on 3rd-and-1 is much more valuable than a 4-yard run on 2nd-and-10... so how do your statistics weight that?
That is the easy part. Football Outsiders already does that. There are some fairly basic ways to determine a successful play. For football outsiders, on first down you need 45% of the required yards, on second down you need 60% of the required yards, and on third and fourth downs you need 100% of the required yards. So a 2 yard run on 3rd and 1 is more successful than a 4 yard run on 1st and 15.
I am sure that with even more detailed data, it would be easy to come up with even better ways to determine if a play was a success. Sometimes a RB that gets zero yards did a good job if the blocking let him get hit initially two yards behind the line of scrimmage.
Long story short: unless the GMs office understands that statistics are a source of information, and not the be-all and end-all of player value, I can't see this being successful... scheme, coaching, other players are far too impactful on measurable results to make the stats definitive.
Even in baseball these statistics are not definitive. They are just a useful tool. Human perception is very biased and we are poor at being objective. Stats are very objective, but it is very hard to create a model which actually represents reality. Both methods of determining player ability are very flawed, but the goal should be to improve both as much as possible.
Any time someone says something is too difficult, it leaves a window open for someone else to exploit. Unfortunately, it also creates enough fools gold to get plenty of innovators into trouble.
That's where statistics become useful! If a quarterback's throws are consistently dropped by a single receiver then it's the receiver's fault. This can be missed when looking at each play on an individual basis, but in aggregate over a season or two could reveal a significant weakness in the receiving corps or the quarterback.
But these are the kind of statistics they already have, and can already very easily analyze. The problem is that there just aren't enough data points. A good receiver may get 10 targets per game, and a quarterback is going to through on average 1 interception per game out of 40 attempts. That means an average receiver will probably have 4 passes intended for them intercepted each year. Lets say that half of interceptions are the receiver's fault, so that makes 2 per year. You simply are not going to get enough information when one player has 5 interceptions and another has 1. It just isn't enough data.
But a human (or AI) that knows the routes and can identify a poorly run route, a bobbled pass, and an overthrown pass could let you know who was actually at fault for each interception. It just takes a lot more data collection and analysis (a lot more).
Their success will likely depend on how much effort they put into collecting data. If all they look at is the same statistics you can find at CBS Sports, Football Outsiders, etc. then it will probably not help at all. But if they really get serious about data collection, who knows how much insight they could gain.
There are about 130 plays per game, and 256 games per year. That is 33,280 plays to analyze each year. That would increase to about 135k if you include Division 1-A college games. If you had two guys spend 15 minutes analyzing each play (2 guys to reduce errors) then it would take 20 full time employees to do this each year. More if you want to get more immediate results after each week. There are plenty of ex-athletes that couldn't make the pros and are intelligent enough for the work. Probably somewhere around $2 million per year in salary ($500k if you only look at professional games).
Just think of all the information you could gain. The first team to get this right could probably greatly improve their overall defenses and their offensive lines (positions that are very hard to rate with stats). I wonder how many teams know how many seconds thier offensive tackles can block an average defensive lineman, adjusted for their quarterback's mobility on each play, and any number of other mitigating factors.
I was in a similar situation in 2008. I had about five years of experience but when the economy started to tank it was harder for myself and some friends to find employment without a degree (wasn't a problem in the early 2000s). I already had over 60 transferrable credits at a community college from before I left college for a good job offer, but could not find any place to finish a CS degree while working full time.
So I decided to go the online route. But I knew that UoP or Devry would be looked down on, so I needed to get my Masters as well. Plenty of colleges have great night MS programs in CS. I am in my last year at DePaul right now, and once I am finished I will not even list my Bachelor's degree on my resume.
But even my UoP degree opened doors. I obtained a job at a Fortune 100 company, and my boss told me that HR would have never even let her see my resume if I didn't have a degree. I am now a senior developer making twice what I did in 2008, and I still haven't finished my Masters to clear the stench of UoP off my resume.
You just have to be honest with yourself about what you actually want. If you want an education, buy a book (seriously, you could buy about 50 quality books for the cost of a single university class). No college course, even in my Master's program, can compete with reading a book like Code Complete or Head First Design Patterns. But if you want credentials, online schools still give you that.
No, I'm really not. I've been at this for over 30 years. This is a real thing. It's a new thing. It is totally different from anything you or I have ever seen. There is no way that any new software we would accept could suck so hard that this hardware wouldn't serve it fast.
I have only been at this for about 15 years, but at least I still remember 5 1/4 floppies and computers that didn't even have hard drives. I remember people still using Lotus 1-2-3 in the late 90s, and having to help people use old DOS accounting programs on their Windows XP machines. There have always been times when hardware was "good enough" for most peoples' needs.
After thinking about this more, it is mostly just bloated software like Microsoft Windows and Office that has made people constantly feel that their hardware needs to be upgraded. I don't use Linux regularly anymore, but you could pretty much always use Linux quite well on hardware that is 10 years old. The only thing that has ever caused average people to need a computer upgrade every 3-4 years is software that "sucked so hard" that it was necessary.
Your argument just sounds so much like "640K is enough for anyone." You may be right this time, but I think we can already predict some uses for much more powerful machines in the hands of average users (like the machine learning algorithms I mentioned earlier). And like always, there will be new uses we cannot even predict now.
I think you are understimating peoples' abilities to find innovative new uses for future hardware improvements. We may be sitting in a lull right now, but there are already plenty of examples of software tools that are taking advantage of today's top of the line hardware. Machines like Watson are showing that while we are still FAR away from creating actual AI intelligence, we can create very useful tools by abusing brute force machine learning algorithms.
As hardware continues to improve, smart people will continue to find uses for it. 10 year old hardware may be able to run word processessing applications now, but not once hardware gets good enough where machines not only spell check but also fact check, tell you how to spice up your yearly performance assessment with action words, or tell you that the word you just looked up the the thesaurus probably doesn't mean what you think it means.
Then 10 years later people will think that there is no need for better hardware again... until the next smart guy finds a use for it.
While I agree that Microsoft did a very poor job of marketing Expression, a single customer not knowing about the product means nothing (which I think was the point of the parent poster).
If you have worked as a developer in any environment released in the last 5 years, you should definitely know what Expression Studio is. If you work in Visual Studio at all, you should know what Expression Studio. Not knowing this tells far more about a developer's ability to stay knowledgeable about his chosen technology stack than it does about Microsoft's marketing.
Don't forget that most academic code (assignments and projects) is horrible just because it is written by the same bad programmers that will eventually write crappy code for the companies they work for. I wouldn't want to work with at least 80% of the students I have ever been in classes with. In graduate school, my final in our Design Patterns class was so easy I couldn't imagine getting anything wrong, but the average grade with around 65%. And obviously the school decides to curve it so people can pass without actually learning anything.
There is simply far too much software that needs to be written and too few people capable of doing it. That leads to crappy developers getting hired anyway and good developers being rushed.
Based on the complaints of so many in the public regarding the for-profit/online model, I am blown away by the support for MOOCs outside of higher ed.
The complaints about for-profit/online schools are based on the value of those schools compared to their cost. A school like University of Phoenix costs over $500 per credit hour, which is far higher than the industry average. And they provide a severely less valuable education that even the worst brick and mortar schools. No rational people think that MOOCs are going to completely replace real schools, but instead treat them purely as a supplement.
I obtained by bachelors from University of Phoenix after getting my associates at a junior college. I did this because no brick and mortar schools offer late night classes for a BS degree in IT (in 2008 at least), and I needed to work full time to support a family. I know just how bad their education is. I joke around with coworkers about how lowsy the education was. I have also taken a few MOOCs on coursera, and the education there just blows UoP away. There is no verification that the student actually learned anything, but the same can be said for UoP. I never took a proctored exam, or any exam at all for that matter. If someone paid me $20k on top of tuition I could get them a BS in Software Engineering in a couple years for little effort, because they would never have to prove they know anything in person.
The only reason these online schools exist is because real colleges refuse to offer a much needed service (after work hours or online BS degrees). I only got my degree from an online school so I could immediately apply for an MS degree at a real school (DePaul).
Indeed, those results seem pretty conclusive. I yield in the face of my own apparent ignorance:)
The funny thing is, I actually do think Python is a great language for this submitter to learn. With his skills in IT, a good gateway job into a developer position could be working for a QA department. In fact most of the Python job postings I saw were for a QA departments. And at companys that really take QA seriously, there is little difference between QA and software development.
He should start learning either Java or C# IMHO, but Python would be a good start and put him into a QA position quickly.
Not so. Ruby continues to become more popular, and is already significantly ahead of JavaScript,.NET (except C#), LISP, etc. I don't see you can call anything in TIOBE's "A" list a "niche" product.
Ruby has moved down a notch in the list since 2007, but that's just because Objective-C suddenly jumped into the A list, near the top. Other languages like PHP and.NET (again, except for C# in particular) have gone down 2 or more notches during the same period.
TIOBE's A list just means it at least still has a sizeable niche. I never said Ruby or Python were dead languages. The kinds of languages that it considers B are Ada, MATLAB, and Assembly, among others. And if you rightfully ignore the A status and look at its actual rating of 1.7, you can see that even TIOBE regards Ruby as a niche language. I don't know how you can look at that rating and come to any other conclusion. But I think TIOBE's ratings are usually a bit odd (Javascript and C# being so low is astounding), so I wouldn't necessarily use this low rating to prove my point either.
TIOBE does seem to agree with the Anonymous Coward above by saying that C/C++ are the best languages to be proficient with. And learning Java and C# are then pretty easy once you have C/C++ down. Objective-C is a much different language than these, although it is also clearly a great skill to have as well.
Slashdot Mirror
So, get cracking. What's stopping you from doing the test yourself and publish the results?
My current area of research is in automated database design, and there are only so many hours in the day. My own tests have shown that C# using LINQ performs better for me than either Java or even my best attempts at C++, but these personal experiments are nowhere near publishable. They likely only show that I am more proficient at C#. But that was good enough for me since my objective was to see what language I should be doing my own experiments in right now, not in a fantasy world where I had enough time to become just as efficient in these other languages.
The sad thing about it is that if you actually did some work, some other idiot would complain that your test was dissapointing, and that he was expecting more.
There is a difference between nitpicking and pointing out that a research project did not even come close to meeting its own goals. These tests do hold some value in showing the maximum potential performance of these different frameworks and web servers. But that does not change the fact that these experiments did not test what the project summary said they were trying to test.
These tests were also just as simple as calculating Pi a thousand times. Based on the description, I was hoping for some tests where a website with a dozen or so complete views with significant bindings were created in both Java and C#. Instead it was just an HTTP request or a page that printed the date.
Different frameworks and web servers are going to use varying amounts of overhead, so simple tests really only calculate that overhead. If you are going to provide benchmarks that actually have some meaning then they need to test complex enough behavior to mimic real world usage.
These tests basically just show that Tomcat is faster than IIS for simple scenarios, or perhaps that ASP.NET MVC 4 adds more overhead to page requests than JSP does. Whether this overhead is meaningful when you are processing rich real world web pages is not covered by these tests.
I haven't seen much if any evidence that immigration is a substantial problem there. We have plenty of low income American kids whose families have been here for 200 years.
Just because you have never studied the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 23% of immigrants and their US born children live in poverty, compared to 13.5% of natives and their children. That means immigrants are almost twice as likely to be in poverty.
Source
http://www.cis.org/2012-profile-of-americas-foreign-born-population
I just heard about this 4K tablet, and it is the one technology on either the 'good' or 'bad' list that has me excited. I haven't found an estimated price, but if they can make a 20" tablet with 4K resolution for around $2k then there may be hope for a 30"+ monitor with 4K resolution someday. I would buy a monitor like that for $1999 immediately.
I thought deceiving the court was the primary job of lawyers. Every time I have needed lawyers it was either to manipulate the court in ways I didn't believe I was able to, or to provide extra intimidation to the opposition.
If everyone was completely honest and forthcoming, we wouldn't even need lawyers. Judges would work just fine on their own.
bollox.
European stats are compiled by Eurostat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostat
Well, you could always just do the research and find out that different European countries really do report infant mortality statistics differently.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm
Honestly, to think they would use different definitions for each country. Why, you must be american.
I disagree. I think that properly researching and formulating more accurate opinions based on that research can be done by anyone, not just Americans.
You have got to be trolling at this point. Using homeless people to represent what life is like for most people in the US. Get a clue.
But it isn't like many people in prison are there for crimes they didn't know they were committing. It is pretty easy to stay out of prison. Even of you don't agree with the laws, it isn't hard to follow them.
I am sure he would rather live in the US and follow our very straight forward laws. And from my conversations with people from China, I would much rather be poor in the US than live like 99% of Chinese citizens.
Even without applying oneself, a genius should be able to grasp something that's so simple that it bores him, so no excuse for bad grades
Since when does grasping something get you good grades? Until college, most of my classes had over 50% of the grade come from homework. Many of them had as much as 80% of the grade come from homework. If you are not doing the homework because you find it to be mindless busywork, it doesn't matter if you grasp the material.
That doesn't make it any less juvenile to not do your homework (I was a very juvenile and arrogant child too). But claiming that you can get A's without applying yourself is ridiculous. In most high school classes, you have to complete almost all of your assignments to get As.
Considering that through much of history men have married women with lower levels of educational attainment and income, and been able to be happy in those relationships without considering their wives "low-lives", I'm not sure why the reverse would be impossible.
Except that all evidence show that the reversal is not happening. There are a lot of biological hurdles that need to be overcome for women to start wanting to marry men that are not as successful as they are. These problems are more obvious in African Americans because there is a greater discrepency between the number of educated black women vs men. This is argued to be one big reason why 70% of black women are single vs 55% for white women.
Smart, successful women do not want unemployed husbands. As a general rule, men look for youth and attractiveness while women look for stature, stability and success. These are gross overgeneralisations, but when applied over an entire population they hold true.
It is going to be pretty hard for our society to overcome this. My fiance is very liberal, and very successful. But she finds unambitious men very unattractive.
It doesn't seem terribly smart to me to destroy your own future because you don't follow the rules and don't work harder.
This is not a fair statement to make about children. Kids do not have the ability to look that far into the future. Girls aren't better students because they are thinking about their future careers, they are better students because of either biological differences and/or society norms that make them more obedient.
The best students are the ones whose parents do a good job of instilling values which will help them later in life. Almost any kid left to their own devices is just going to want to play.
The problem they are pointing out has more to do with how students are graded, not how well they are learning. Since boys still have higher test scores (according to the article), it looks like they are still learning better in a school environment. The problem is how schools grade their students. If grades are too decoupled from the actual learning taking place, there is a problem.
How does this have anything to do with Big Data? Storing large amount of data isn't the important part, it is being able to analyze that data. You do not analyze a movie's data file. You just load and display the movie, which can easy be stored in one large continous file. A Big Data problem would be Netflix trying to determine what kinds of movies to recommend, not storing and then displaying a long movie to users.
It may take longer than 15 minutes to analyze a play, but I doubt it is too much more. At 22 minutes, you can spend a full minute analyzing each player. And some plays only include half of the players on the field. It would take much more than 22 minutes to get every possible statistic about a play, but you could at least get some useful metrics about each players' performance in just a minute.
So say you just look at the handful of players directly involved in a play... say, ten of them. Do you just look at the yards gained? How do you account for things like down and distance factoring into the style of play? A 2-yard run on 3rd-and-1 is much more valuable than a 4-yard run on 2nd-and-10... so how do your statistics weight that?
That is the easy part. Football Outsiders already does that. There are some fairly basic ways to determine a successful play. For football outsiders, on first down you need 45% of the required yards, on second down you need 60% of the required yards, and on third and fourth downs you need 100% of the required yards. So a 2 yard run on 3rd and 1 is more successful than a 4 yard run on 1st and 15.
I am sure that with even more detailed data, it would be easy to come up with even better ways to determine if a play was a success. Sometimes a RB that gets zero yards did a good job if the blocking let him get hit initially two yards behind the line of scrimmage.
Long story short: unless the GMs office understands that statistics are a source of information, and not the be-all and end-all of player value, I can't see this being successful... scheme, coaching, other players are far too impactful on measurable results to make the stats definitive.
Even in baseball these statistics are not definitive. They are just a useful tool. Human perception is very biased and we are poor at being objective. Stats are very objective, but it is very hard to create a model which actually represents reality. Both methods of determining player ability are very flawed, but the goal should be to improve both as much as possible.
Any time someone says something is too difficult, it leaves a window open for someone else to exploit. Unfortunately, it also creates enough fools gold to get plenty of innovators into trouble.
That's where statistics become useful! If a quarterback's throws are consistently dropped by a single receiver then it's the receiver's fault. This can be missed when looking at each play on an individual basis, but in aggregate over a season or two could reveal a significant weakness in the receiving corps or the quarterback.
But these are the kind of statistics they already have, and can already very easily analyze. The problem is that there just aren't enough data points. A good receiver may get 10 targets per game, and a quarterback is going to through on average 1 interception per game out of 40 attempts. That means an average receiver will probably have 4 passes intended for them intercepted each year. Lets say that half of interceptions are the receiver's fault, so that makes 2 per year. You simply are not going to get enough information when one player has 5 interceptions and another has 1. It just isn't enough data.
But a human (or AI) that knows the routes and can identify a poorly run route, a bobbled pass, and an overthrown pass could let you know who was actually at fault for each interception. It just takes a lot more data collection and analysis (a lot more).
Their success will likely depend on how much effort they put into collecting data. If all they look at is the same statistics you can find at CBS Sports, Football Outsiders, etc. then it will probably not help at all. But if they really get serious about data collection, who knows how much insight they could gain.
There are about 130 plays per game, and 256 games per year. That is 33,280 plays to analyze each year. That would increase to about 135k if you include Division 1-A college games. If you had two guys spend 15 minutes analyzing each play (2 guys to reduce errors) then it would take 20 full time employees to do this each year. More if you want to get more immediate results after each week. There are plenty of ex-athletes that couldn't make the pros and are intelligent enough for the work. Probably somewhere around $2 million per year in salary ($500k if you only look at professional games).
Just think of all the information you could gain. The first team to get this right could probably greatly improve their overall defenses and their offensive lines (positions that are very hard to rate with stats). I wonder how many teams know how many seconds thier offensive tackles can block an average defensive lineman, adjusted for their quarterback's mobility on each play, and any number of other mitigating factors.
I was in a similar situation in 2008. I had about five years of experience but when the economy started to tank it was harder for myself and some friends to find employment without a degree (wasn't a problem in the early 2000s). I already had over 60 transferrable credits at a community college from before I left college for a good job offer, but could not find any place to finish a CS degree while working full time.
So I decided to go the online route. But I knew that UoP or Devry would be looked down on, so I needed to get my Masters as well. Plenty of colleges have great night MS programs in CS. I am in my last year at DePaul right now, and once I am finished I will not even list my Bachelor's degree on my resume.
But even my UoP degree opened doors. I obtained a job at a Fortune 100 company, and my boss told me that HR would have never even let her see my resume if I didn't have a degree. I am now a senior developer making twice what I did in 2008, and I still haven't finished my Masters to clear the stench of UoP off my resume.
You just have to be honest with yourself about what you actually want. If you want an education, buy a book (seriously, you could buy about 50 quality books for the cost of a single university class). No college course, even in my Master's program, can compete with reading a book like Code Complete or Head First Design Patterns. But if you want credentials, online schools still give you that.
No, I'm really not. I've been at this for over 30 years. This is a real thing. It's a new thing. It is totally different from anything you or I have ever seen. There is no way that any new software we would accept could suck so hard that this hardware wouldn't serve it fast.
I have only been at this for about 15 years, but at least I still remember 5 1/4 floppies and computers that didn't even have hard drives. I remember people still using Lotus 1-2-3 in the late 90s, and having to help people use old DOS accounting programs on their Windows XP machines. There have always been times when hardware was "good enough" for most peoples' needs.
After thinking about this more, it is mostly just bloated software like Microsoft Windows and Office that has made people constantly feel that their hardware needs to be upgraded. I don't use Linux regularly anymore, but you could pretty much always use Linux quite well on hardware that is 10 years old. The only thing that has ever caused average people to need a computer upgrade every 3-4 years is software that "sucked so hard" that it was necessary.
Your argument just sounds so much like "640K is enough for anyone." You may be right this time, but I think we can already predict some uses for much more powerful machines in the hands of average users (like the machine learning algorithms I mentioned earlier). And like always, there will be new uses we cannot even predict now.
I think you are understimating peoples' abilities to find innovative new uses for future hardware improvements. We may be sitting in a lull right now, but there are already plenty of examples of software tools that are taking advantage of today's top of the line hardware. Machines like Watson are showing that while we are still FAR away from creating actual AI intelligence, we can create very useful tools by abusing brute force machine learning algorithms.
As hardware continues to improve, smart people will continue to find uses for it. 10 year old hardware may be able to run word processessing applications now, but not once hardware gets good enough where machines not only spell check but also fact check, tell you how to spice up your yearly performance assessment with action words, or tell you that the word you just looked up the the thesaurus probably doesn't mean what you think it means.
Then 10 years later people will think that there is no need for better hardware again ... until the next smart guy finds a use for it.
While I agree that Microsoft did a very poor job of marketing Expression, a single customer not knowing about the product means nothing (which I think was the point of the parent poster).
If you have worked as a developer in any environment released in the last 5 years, you should definitely know what Expression Studio is. If you work in Visual Studio at all, you should know what Expression Studio. Not knowing this tells far more about a developer's ability to stay knowledgeable about his chosen technology stack than it does about Microsoft's marketing.
Don't forget that most academic code (assignments and projects) is horrible just because it is written by the same bad programmers that will eventually write crappy code for the companies they work for. I wouldn't want to work with at least 80% of the students I have ever been in classes with. In graduate school, my final in our Design Patterns class was so easy I couldn't imagine getting anything wrong, but the average grade with around 65%. And obviously the school decides to curve it so people can pass without actually learning anything.
There is simply far too much software that needs to be written and too few people capable of doing it. That leads to crappy developers getting hired anyway and good developers being rushed.
Based on the complaints of so many in the public regarding the for-profit/online model, I am blown away by the support for MOOCs outside of higher ed.
The complaints about for-profit/online schools are based on the value of those schools compared to their cost. A school like University of Phoenix costs over $500 per credit hour, which is far higher than the industry average. And they provide a severely less valuable education that even the worst brick and mortar schools. No rational people think that MOOCs are going to completely replace real schools, but instead treat them purely as a supplement.
I obtained by bachelors from University of Phoenix after getting my associates at a junior college. I did this because no brick and mortar schools offer late night classes for a BS degree in IT (in 2008 at least), and I needed to work full time to support a family. I know just how bad their education is. I joke around with coworkers about how lowsy the education was. I have also taken a few MOOCs on coursera, and the education there just blows UoP away. There is no verification that the student actually learned anything, but the same can be said for UoP. I never took a proctored exam, or any exam at all for that matter. If someone paid me $20k on top of tuition I could get them a BS in Software Engineering in a couple years for little effort, because they would never have to prove they know anything in person.
The only reason these online schools exist is because real colleges refuse to offer a much needed service (after work hours or online BS degrees). I only got my degree from an online school so I could immediately apply for an MS degree at a real school (DePaul).
Indeed, those results seem pretty conclusive. I yield in the face of my own apparent ignorance :)
The funny thing is, I actually do think Python is a great language for this submitter to learn. With his skills in IT, a good gateway job into a developer position could be working for a QA department. In fact most of the Python job postings I saw were for a QA departments. And at companys that really take QA seriously, there is little difference between QA and software development.
He should start learning either Java or C# IMHO, but Python would be a good start and put him into a QA position quickly.
Not so. Ruby continues to become more popular, and is already significantly ahead of JavaScript, .NET (except C#), LISP, etc. I don't see you can call anything in TIOBE's "A" list a "niche" product.
Ruby has moved down a notch in the list since 2007, but that's just because Objective-C suddenly jumped into the A list, near the top. Other languages like PHP and .NET (again, except for C# in particular) have gone down 2 or more notches during the same period.
TIOBE's A list just means it at least still has a sizeable niche. I never said Ruby or Python were dead languages. The kinds of languages that it considers B are Ada, MATLAB, and Assembly, among others. And if you rightfully ignore the A status and look at its actual rating of 1.7, you can see that even TIOBE regards Ruby as a niche language. I don't know how you can look at that rating and come to any other conclusion. But I think TIOBE's ratings are usually a bit odd (Javascript and C# being so low is astounding), so I wouldn't necessarily use this low rating to prove my point either.
TIOBE does seem to agree with the Anonymous Coward above by saying that C/C++ are the best languages to be proficient with. And learning Java and C# are then pretty easy once you have C/C++ down. Objective-C is a much different language than these, although it is also clearly a great skill to have as well.