There, corrected it for you. 20 years ago, most people in college have had no problem paying attention to lectures. YMMV.

That's your prejudice showing. All the great teachers in college in the past century had no problem doing their great teaching with lectures (among other means).

If you have trouble paying attention to lectures and learning from it, have you considered that, perhaps, you shouldn't be in college to begin with?

This may sound bad (as Nelson no doubt intended) for subjects that are relatively recent, such as anything IT related, or the more advanced courses. But tell me, how much meaningful changes were there in the past 20 years for introductory subjects like algebra or calculus? Or the introductory to intermediate courses for most physical sciences?

Go read the Feynman Lectures and tell me how much change was needed due to advances since it was given? Except for maybe a mention of Higgs and LHC somewhere?

Education is not entertainment, if the subject matter have not changed, why should a good lecture needs to change for the sake of change? It's not like we are giving the lecture to the same audience 20 times. Except, maybe, due to the decrease in competency of the students?

Did you, like many posters above, equated mobile apps == trash in your mind already?

Just TomTom costs like $100, Minecraft is like $7, some dictionaries are like $20, so is XCOM, FF VI is $16. Just browse in the "Top Grossing" chart and you can see the more expensive apps. A $50 app is nothing to be surprised about.

So how much have you paid for $5-10 apps that don't have in-app purchase?

The poll asked for spending on "mobile apps", not restricted to in-app purchase. It is funny too see you automatically assumed it only counts in-app purchase, does that mean you ever only install free apps, so in-app purchase is the only place you had a chance to pay?

There are other posters saying $1 is nothing so they won't even consider paying it. But if $1 really means nothing to them, they got to have bought a few $1 apps already, it costs nothing, right?

For a phone that costs anywhere from $200-600, over 1/2 of the respondents in /. spend less than $10 a year on apps, just goes to show you how worthless it is for app developers to listen to anything /.ers have to say. This isn't where the market is.

Did the researchers also study aggression that result from job experience?

In my experience, frustration coming from you job is usually many times that which can come from a game, any game.

With a game, you can just give up and play another game if the frustration reached a certain level. With you job, most people don't have that luxury.

Either that, or the OP simply have no idea how databases work at all.

If OP has any idea how database (any database, not just relational) works, he would be talking about data and transaction volumes, access patterns, transactional requirements, data integrity constraints, retention and housekeeping requirements, etc.

Instead, as you said, he talked about devices platforms, communication protocols, language and runtime environment which are all irrelevant to choosing database. (ok, the last may be a bit relevant depending on which database used)

That's your problem right there. Obviously, the unsaid assumption is that, by someone "new", they really mean someone "cheap".

There was never any difficulty in finding motivated and smart people when companies are willing to pay. The problem is most companies are NOT willing to pay.

You know this is the same battle cry for every "aggressively scheduled" death-march project? Old devs like me, who have heard this battle cry more times than I can remember, will recognize it for what it is - B.S.

Gamble is gamble. Sure, someone wins the lottery once in a while, but making a huge gamble is NOT the only way to plan for success.

Your idea is no different from "passionate" execs calling for developers to work 12 hours a day for months because "we can't succeed without giving 120%!"

Sorry, have seen these "aggressive" projects crash and burn too many times (along with the fools who heed the battle cry) to NOT realize this is BS. Successful projects come from careful planning and the discipline in not take too large a bite. I went from one successful project to another, to another, ..., not by gambling big, but by not taking unjustified chances, and always have a fallback plan.

The GP is right on the money. If you ask the founders of any successful startup, chances are they have failed at least once in the past. Only by knowing when to stop can they try again later. If they had insisted on digging themselves deeper in any one of their past failures, chances are they would be able to try again and eventually succeed.

Cuz that sell eyeballs? Which is more attract to Joe Public - "It could be a wing!" or "Meh, likely nothing found"?

Do you still have that quaint idea that "news" is for informing people and reporters are supposed to be objective and level-headed, or even, (gasp!) competent in subject knowledge being reported? It hasn't been that way for at least decades already.

Exactly, the correct comparison should be "technical analysis" in stock markets, which can be applied to any stock you like with the same level of (un)success.

Without an underlying theory of how things work, which also needs to be somewhat correct, trying to predict future trends simply by using past data is just dumb curve fitting - with a curve of enough degrees of freedom, you can fit any data, but that doesn't mean its prediction would be any better than random guess.

You mean, like providing education, health care, law enforcement, etc to the people, so the "workforce" don't have to pay for private teachers, medicine, or private guards? Or infrastructures like roads, mass transit trains, electricity, clean water, broadband internet, etc, so the workforce don't have to live near the company, buy electric generators, etc? Or lower tax rate, which is effectively higher pay?

Where do you draw the line?

If companies stop at that, I think most people would be fine with it.

But with the endless chase for ever MORE PROFIT, it is not enough for an employee to generate enough value to offset their own cost + profit, they have to generate more value than their hypothetical offshore counterpart.

So if you cost $100 and generate $120 value, but the other guy in India cost $20 and generated only $25, well, the company can hire 5 India guy to generate $125 for the same cost of $100, so bye bye to your job.

YOU would think that the guy in India is crap, producing only $25 value, less than a quarter of yours, but you are in fact competing with 5 of them, which combined to give more value to the company than you could!

THIS is the reason offshoring will never give you good results, NOT because of some inherent incompetence of the people in the other country, but because the company is unwilling to pay for good talent!

I have seen this mentality more than I cared to - "offshoring is to cut cost, so we can't pay enough for qualified people!"

I mean, this is CRAZY. All businesses complained about the difficulty in finding talent. Considering that the USA (for example), is only about 5% of world's population, while India and China combined have like 40%, even if the portion of qualified people in those 2 countries are just 1/10 compared to the US, it would mean, but raw numbers, there are almost (80%) just as many qualified people there as in the US!

But of course, being talented as they are (and 10x as rare in their country compared to as in the US), they would command a higher pay relative to their countries average worker, but that "higher" pay would still be significantly LESS than what the same qualified staff in US would be taking.

It would still be a win-win situation, to have a bigger talent pool, just as highly qualified staff, etc, etc. But NO, offshore is a LOW COST resource pool, we CAN'T pay anyone that much more than the average salary! Yeah, the insanity of HR everywhere, we pay the average salary but want the top-tiered employees, and only those with passion, too!

So, essentially the same TEXT in audio format? Doesn't that simply proved the point that the TEXT is already the, conceivably, most concise and precise representation of your idea?

And yes, I have used and taught other people to use webMethods in the past, over 10 years ago when it was still "new".

It might be "successful" in the sense that the company is financially successful. But "successful" in the sense it lets you program better than text? Only if you consider taking 5-10 times as long write the same logic compared to writing plain text in Java as "better". Good luck trying to debug a program from its visual representation.

People who learned webMethods before learning Java have trouble understanding basic concepts as exception handling, and have even more trouble with OO concepts such as polymorphism, or even basic Objects, as they cannot see the objects in the visual representation of the logic flow.

THIS. The same reason why picture books only works for story for pre-school kids.

When the thought one wish to express reaches a certain level of complexity, it went beyond what a 2D image can express.