Agreed, very sad. Most know him for Star Trek, as do I, but he was also a great voice actor as well. His narrations in Civilization 4 were the best the series has ever seen. He will be greatly missed.

I've had very competent developers who had next to no clue about how DNS works. They could do their job just fine with that. Me? Personally, I'm not up to snuff with the finer points of SQL queries and all the joins that exists and when it makes sense to create an index, etc. Could I find out? Most likely, but I haven't had the need to recently.

I think that's true, and not every developer out there will know everything anymore. It's just too vast a space.

That said though, I do find that there is a general dumbing down of the development community overall with the advent of high level frameworks. It used to be that you had to be pretty technically competent in order to program. Now, things have been simplified so much that a lot of people who would never have been able to program back when the popular languages were C/C++ are able to get jobs as app developers. That's not necessarily a bad thing since the frameworks shortened app development time and made it so there are more people to fill jobs. But, it does mean that if you have a job that does require that strong, deep knowledge of how things work you are going to have to look harder. The same kinds of strong technical types who could have been very able C programmers 20 years ago are still present today in the web development landscape, but think of it like signal to noise ratio: if they are the "signal", there's a lot more noise to sort through now.

As a good example of this, I worked on a web hosting team for a very large company. Our average time from posting to hiring was actually about a year. There were plenty of developers around, but we needed the kind who understood (or could be trained to understand) lower layer technologies, such as HTTP, DNS, some of the auth technologies like basic or Kerberos, the web server itself (IIS), F5 load balancers, and that sort of stuff. Those are the kind of things that have to be in place for web apps to run. And as it turns out, many people can slap together a website with high level frameworks but a much smaller percentage are able to learn the underlying technologies at a deep level. And unfortunately, of the internal developers we knew could handle it, most said "No, I don't want to worry about that low level stuff... that's why we like have you hosting guys around to handle it for us!" So we would always have to post externally, and it would take about a year, almost never less than six months.

So if you've got a need for someone to just write basic apps, you can fill that fast, but if you need a "deep" programmer just expect that it's going to take a very long time to find one, but if your compensation is adequate you will probably get there eventually.

Stop trying to spend money to get girls to code.

I would also argue that it's hypocritical to spend money trying increase female presence in CS if we aren't going to spend similar amounts erasing the gap in other male dominated fields, such as garbage collecting, construction, being an auto mechanic, plumbing, etc. And for that matter, where's the money pile for encouraging men to become nurses?

But yes, I agree, we should stop spending money on this. It doesn't work anyway.

It makes your right wingers look like the dorks you are in full view of a wide audience, please keep it up

And you assume he's right wing because? You don't have to be right wing (I hope) in order to question the judgement of using a comedy show as a primary news source.

Jon Stewart switches to a different tone (or faces a different camera) when he is presenting jokes or opinions. That's why he is so trusted by young people.

The gen Y's, X's and Millenials have lived so long in a spin induced world that they have learned from the Daily Show how to decipher bullshit mountain and as a result, the show has taught them better critical thinking skills and made them better news consumers than anybody who lets their senses get twisted by buying into bullshit mountain

Wow, just wow. So you are basically admitting that you've given up trying to think critically about things and instead decipher what's true based on what kind of tone people use? So all anyone has to do to get you to believe something is make the right face at you? I'm a millenial, and there are WAY to many people in our generation that think like you and think a comedy show is a primary news source (you probably think that about the onion too... or maybe not because a print paper can't make the proper facial expression at you). But fortunately not all of us have been dumbed down that much.

M'kay... and what 'other' news source would be more grounded in reality? Maybe Fox News? Oh, that's right... Fox News fell back to the statement that they are 'opinion' so that they could not be sued for misrepresentation of the facts

Actually, yes, Fox News would be a considerably better source than a comedy show. They don't just make up facts out of thin air (in that respect they are also significantly better than NBC and Brian Williams). And for the record, they've never said they are an "opinion" network. I don't know where you pulled that made up fact from (probably the Daily Show). Fox News is a news channel that also carries opinion shows like O'Reilly and Hannity. But those are clearly labeled as opinion and you should know that going in. Their actual news shows with Chris Wallace, Bret Bair, Greta, etc, are all real news shows and have never been labeled as opinion.

Mainstream news mixes truth, halftruths, and opinions and presents them all in the same manner.

No, they don't all do that. Just because John Stewart does it for laughs on a clearly labeled comedy show, or just because Brian Williams does it because he apparently has ego problems, doesn't mean everyone else must therefore be lying.

I remember reading my local (conservative) newspaper (end to end on a daily basis) as a kid a realizing that I had to filter out the right-wing bias that the local publisher would insert (they were owned by the Quayle family)

Given your obvious lack of judgement and lack of independently trying to verify facts, one would have to question whether you weren't just filtering out all the things that didn't agree with your preconceived notions.

Considering how much he - the admitted source of fake news

The big problem with him, or at least with his show, is that many in my generation (millenials) don't seem to understand that he is peddling fake news for entertainment value. Way to many people cite "The Daily Show" as their primary source of news. Democracy requires an informed electorate, and it's a huge problem when many voters are not paying attention and are instead turning to fantasy as their source of news in the world.

Really the problem is more the citizenry than Stewart, but someone less talented than him wouldn't have caused such a big impact.

There was an era, probably inherited from the big-iron computing model, where we strived for stability and long uptimes. I guess that era is now gone, with rapid-release and lots of little things constantly needing the system to restart.

I don't think it's gone completely. For the consumer, yes, it's over, because they want the latest and greatest NOW regardless of possible flaws. I think the only reason consumers ever had a non rolling release model is because tech originally started with the enterprise and for the enterprise, and trickled down to the consumers. It wasn't until later that things became so consumer centric with a consumer driven model like rolling release.

But enterprise hasn't ceased to exist, and there is still a lot of money there. And that money goes first and foremost to companies who provide functional, stable products that don't require a lot of maintenance or upgrades for a while. Because in enterprise IT, upgrades and maintenance cost more than the software, and minimizing those costs are paramount.

So I think non-rolling releases will continue in the enterprise, and I think for evidence of that you can just look at all the companies that dumped Firefox and went back to IE when Firefox switched to rolling release. Many large IT shops had spokespeople saying new releases of Firefox were coming out so fast that they couldn't certify app compatibility before the next one dropped, and Microsoft jumped on it, pointing out that they were still doing non-rolling releases. Microsoft's market share has dropped off a cliff with consumers of course, but if you look large enterprise's, IE is absolutely everywhere, probably as much as it has ever been. No one does long term, stable support of old stuff like Microsoft's Enterprise and Compatibility browser modes, and there's still a demand for that.

I would heartily recommend you consider the action/adventure education that is the public school system.

Lol, like the adventure where you can try to outrun armed gunmen/students, try to avoid getting beat up by a bully or verbally ripped to shreds every day by a group of nasty teenage girls? Or maybe you would enjoy sitting in a gym for several hours while they comb the school for bombs due to a phoned in threat? HAHAHAHA, some adventure! And that's to say nothing of the "adventures" you can take on the drugs being sold by other students.

Seriously, I'm a product of the public schools, and all of those things happened to me or my friends, with only two exceptions: I never got shot at, and I never took drugs, though other students were definitely doing illegal things. But bullies hitting you, verbal abuse, bomb threats and lock downs (multiple times), all of that happened. So this idea that the public schools are some "developmental and social utopia" and parents who keep their kids at home are "depriving them of an adventure" is seriously misguided.

That said, my wife and I are planning to homeschool our three when they get to be that age, but it's not even primarily for the reasons above. We have many reasons, such as:

1. 1. My wife would really enjoy it, and is likely to be more dedicated and invested in my kids' success than any teacher.
2. 2. Homeschooling academics can be more rigorous. As an engineer, I consider math to be the foundation of all my success, and common core has turned math into a laughingstock. Enter homeschooling, where I can pick the "Singapore Math" curriculum. Singapore typically scores number 2 every year on the international math achievement exams, their math program is entirely in (British) English, and I can have their exact program for my kids instead of common core.
3. 3. If a kid struggles with the approach used by a certain curriculum (for example, maybe they are more visual and the curriculum isn't), you just switch to another curriculum because there are many to choose from. The point is to get the knowledge into the kid, and homeschooling allows a vast variety of methods to achieve that end.
4. 4. I can teach all kinds of classes that get left out of highschools but shouldn't be, such as deeper courses in govt/civics, economics courses (why are these, at best, an elective rather than a requirement in highschools?), life skills classes such as personal finance, etc.
5. 5. I can teach them about Christianity as well, church history and other additional subjects that are important to our family but not allowed in schools.
6. 6. Stupid ideas like giving every kid a tablet so that they can be texting/distracted instead of learning can be banned from my homeschool. (My sister is a public school teacher in a district that does this, and she said it makes teaching much harder because the kids are distracted).

Frankly, I see the public schools declining in matters of academic rigor, discipline/safety, silly ideas like letting every kid have a tablet in class so that they can be distracted instead of learning, etc. I just don't see much benefit to my kids being there anymore. Homeschool is so much better in all those areas, and now that so many are doing it the social interaction problems are going away. There are many other kids in nearby homes, coops, etc to be with. So at least at this point, we are full steam ahead on home schooling.

Please re-read the comment. I was not referring to any photo. I was referring to a diorama. As in, a 3D replica of the moon landing. It is definitely there. Go in the front door of the Nehru planetarium into that main room where they have multiple exhibits, and the loudspeakers call everyone to go from place to place. In the back right of that room there is a diorama of the moon landing, and they stuck one of those toothpick flags in there next to the astronaut. And it's an Indian flag, not an American flag. Obviously you didn't look close enough.

Actually, I don't think that's the hardest problem. Our innovation team at work brought in a pair of Google glasses and let us try them out. Frankly, they are exceedingly underwhelming. The screen is really small, but worse, the resolution seems low and the colors aren't very great, so it's actually really hard to read. And it's not really like a HUD or anything like that. You have to really take your attention away from everything else to read the screen, so in that respect it's not very immersive and it feels like you are doing two things at once: interacting with the real world or interacting with glass (just like how you can either look at the world or look at your smartphone). The real potential would be if you could walk around and have immersive information show up around products, etc, without you having to take your eyes completely off them.

And another design problem with them is that they get really hot. Like uncomfortably hot when you touch them, like those old laptops always were when you set them on your lap.

So to me, privacy concerns matter, but I don't think the average citizen thinks about privacy all that much. I think to them, as well as myself, the big issue is an underwhelming design, combined with an exorbitant price ($1500) and really no practical application for it yet. It doesn't mean it won't ever succeed, of course. I just read an article reminding people that cars were around about 40 years before they became actually decent, and PDAs have been around since the 80s but only really took off when the smartphone craze kicked off. Someday, we may look back on this as the first step towards a technology that everyone has, but for now, they really aren't that great and there are many reasons they failed.

One other thought... while the time for coding animations, events, etc for a front end UI without a framework *may* have passed, doing coding for webpages from scratch probably does still exist in some large, complex web applications, especially if you are working on server side processing code of some sort (though I would still expect you would use some kind of framework, like the .Net framework or PHP). But obviously something like Amazon.com would require armies of developers writing a lot of code from scratch. But that isn't what you run into anymore on your typical small to medium websites. So I guess it depends where you work and what you work on.

Yeah, the time for coding them from scratch probably passed about 7-8 years ago. Can you still code them from scratch today? Yes, technically you can, but at most employers you would be way to slow on the productivity side. As a web developer and web hosting guy for a large Fortune 500 company, I can tell you that marketers expect to be able to get a very nice site with lots of bells and whistles up within just a few days anymore, with all kinds of custom features that allow them to edit the page without a developer. To meet that kind of demand, you can't code from scratch. You really need to use a CMS tool to handle the editing/admin functionality, and then some sort of RAD framework, whether it be .Net MVC, JQuery, AngularJS, etc (or multiple of these frameworks) to quickly set up the rest of your custom functionality. Otherwise they'll just go to someone else who can do it faster so that they can meet their ever shrinking time to market campaign goals. This, by the way, is one of the reasons I'm no longer a developer. I personally enjoyed the nitty gritty of coding from scratch, and got bored quickly from just doing "information plumbing", where you pull from one or two databases, get to do a tiny bit of code but mostly the framework does everything interesting. I know lots of people prefer that because they don't want to deal with low level stuff, but that's not my bag.

I was in Mumbai just over a year ago and went to the Nehru planetarium. They had a diorama there of the first moon landing. Everything looked perfect, from the Apollo spacecraft to the little astronaut in a space suit standing on the Lunar surface. There was one blatant problem though... they replaced the American flag with the Indian flag! My boss (also American) and I had a good time laughing about that.

.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.

Lol, are you serious about that? That's not true at all! I work at a fortune 500 company and it's the exact opposite: it's Java that everyone is trying to weed out. There are several reasons for this, but they include these three things: Java's performance is slower than .Net, Java's IDEs are not as good as .Net's (Visual Studio is probably the best IDE ever built), and most importantly, the constant daily updates of Java to fix security flaws are driving everyone crazy and causing support nightmares. When haven't you recently turned on your computer only to have Java say an update is ready to install, and then pop up it's really slow installer to do it (that tries to install Ask.com as your homepage to boot)?

And one other thing about Java and another reason enterprises are trying to weed it out... the various Java application servers sprawling all over the place are seriously annoying and make supporting Java well a massive undertaking of training and manpower. In my organization, we have purchased Java applications from vendors that are based on all of these: Oracle Weblogic, IBM Websphere, Apache Tomcat, Redhat JBoss, and Apache Geronimo, and we have to figure out how to admin and support them all. And worse, none of these are as good as .Net/IIS, which is what we've chosen for all custom development that we do in house.

Plus, there are other things about .Net that make it better than many alternatives. For one thing, it's not a language, it's a runtime. There are all variety of languages you can use, which means you can use .Net whether your programmers come from a C syntax background or a Visual Basic type of background. And when it comes to web technologies, MVC and other .Net contributions are excellent: much better than the Java equivalents. And IIS is a fantastic web servers these days. True, it got off to a rocky, buggy start and trailed Apache for years, up through the IIS 6 days, but with IIS 7 and above it's actually much better than Apache, both in ease of administration and more importantly, in performance (why is Apache still spawning processes for every request that comes in... don't they realize the overhead of that??). A lot of the performance reasons that are behind people switching from Apache to Nginx are also capabilities that IIS has.

So I really don't understand where this bashing of .Net comes from, but I'm guessing a lot of it is from open source fanboys that love to hate Microsoft and have never taken time to use the recent (last 3-5 years) iterations of it's products. I totally get that a lot of people up to now have certainly preferred open source because it is free, but with .Net going that way a lot of you should try it. Having used Java and .Net both, I'd never in a million years pick Java over .Net. And I'd never pick PHP over .Net either, because that technology is pretty much the equivalent of what Microsoft's classic ASP was a decade ago, and .Net is far ahead of it now.