This sums why we are in this situation in the first place. There's a ton of short term thinking and complaining over the 2-4K a year in training costs a company may absorb. It's a very small part of the compensation plan, and investing in the workforce makes it better for all employers. Instead what happened is employers closed ranks, cut training, decreased college hires and internships. The short term thinking was why invest in workers when you can just use H1B contractors or offshore resources. It was a dumb move. The service providers know the pool of potential employees has shrunk and in return they have jacked up their rates.

I think it was in the kid's best interest. Not that the MCP is worth more than an A+ certification these days. Be that as it may the notoriety will likely bring him opportunities. It could certainly open doors for better education and scholarships. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft didn't kick some freebies and money his way to capitalize on the publicity.

HR BS is one of the reasons I haven't dealt with FTE gigs in a decade. You can make more money in IT being a consulting and at most companies the consulting pimp deals directly with the IT manager. HR is rarely in the loop, often after the contracts have been signed.

The shortage of workers is real but not for the reasons most people think. When I started working as a programer 15 years ago it was pretty common to see interns and college hires in development departments. Then starting in 2001-02 it plummeted. Some bean counter figured out they could hire H1B labor at about the same money as a college hire, why wouldn't you go with the "experienced" candidate. In the last decade i've only seen a handful of college hire programmers.

Ah, but here's the rub, after spending nearly a decade not investing in the next generation of IT they are having a hard time finding resources. This fact did not go unnoticed to the H1B consulting companies. I've actually seen client's jaws drop when WiPro told them they were jumping their rates to well over $100/hr across the board.

As a bright spot I've seen a nice uptick in college hiring at mid cap companies. A lot of them are on-shoring as well after getting burned.

I'm fine with H1B sponsorship, so long as a company can show they put an equal about of time, money and resources into college hire and training programs. When I first started programming it was very common for me to see programming interns and college hires. I consult with many mid and large companies, and I haven't seen a programming intern in 7 years. I've seen two college hires in that time as well. At some point in the 2000s some bone headed bean counter figured they could pay an H1B about the same as a college hire. If that's the case, hire the "experienced" resource. The problem is that created a devastating hole in Junior level programmers for almost a decade. Now companies are finally starting to hire college folks again they want to increase the H1B levels again, and repeat the cycle over again.

Was it an actual DC-10?

Delta operated the DC-10 twice, once on lease from United before the L-1011s could be delivered (retired in 77), and again when Delta acquired Western Airlines in 1987 (Retired a couple years later in 1989). They did keep the Lockhead L-1011s Tristars into the 2000s and they are often confused for the DC-10.

Huh? Northwest Airlines flew them until 2007. What killed the plane for commercial service is the same thing that killed every other tri-jet. Third Engine meant higher costs both in terms of fuel and maintenance. On the other hand cargo airlines love the tri and quad jets because of the high MOTW and ALR ratings, plus they can buy them for a song in the secondary market.

I've been using since it was a German Company called Astaro. Good stuff.

By far the best solution I've come across. It's a enterprise class product you can use at home for free. All you need is a PC with a couple NICs. I use a cheap fanless Dual Core 2GHZ Atom machine with a couple gig of RAM. It's a turn key solution with a lot of options.

It has all the whiz bang VPN and firewall features you'd want. Plus a bunch of intrusion detection, malware and virus features. Really the list feature list is huge. The only limit is the home edition is limited to 50 active devices.

Indeed. It helps that R is the learning language many stats programs use in college these days. Often the college kids no more than the experienced Matlab/SAS folks. It also helps that many "big data" databases will natively run R code. HP Vertica in fact will split and optimize R between all the nodes in the cluster.

R is definitely a language on the rise for big data applications.

American, Delta and United are the top three airlines in the US. Seat maps and seat assignments can change several times between time of purchase and flight. That's because routing can change every time there are Irregular Operations (IROPS) and the fleet movement changes to deal with it. I.e. Weather, Mechanical issues, etc.

None of the top three airlines have homogenous configurations. American is a mix of US Airways and American, United is a mix of Continental and United and Delta is a Mix of Northwest, TWA, and a slew of secondary market planes from Airtran, various Red Chinese carriers and European carriers and Delta.

Southwest only has 737s and coach class, but they have 5 different versions of that plane with drastically different capacities.

That's great, and I use these sites all the time. BUT, the majority of flyers are casual leisure passengers. They are unlikely to figure out which of the dozen 757 configurations Delta offers they are flying on. They just don't fly often enough. I think the model would be turned on it's head if minimum seat pitch was a required to be shown when presenting prices.

They go farther than Apple in a number of areas. The primary one is Apple's dev tools are free. Microsoft's developer tool set ranges from $600 to over $13,000 per seat.

To clarify, when I say run I'm talking about as HTML/CSS/JS, not using the Java web plugin.

I think that's a pretty dated view of Java. If I'm writing a web service endpoint most of the heavy lifting happens with some very simple method/class @Annotations. My controller classes tend to be in the tens of lines, not hundreds of lines.

The days of writing a some inordinately overthought out factory pattern are long gone for a lot of stuff and the JVM does all sorts of optimizations to make the performance gap between VM and Native pretty small.

There almost needs to be two separate considerations. From a language standpoint Java is a bit middle of the road. It has some well known pain factors, but more or less it's one of the easier OO languages to master. It's used in a lot of high profile web site.

The VM on the other hand does a lot of interesting things under the covers that make the language quite fast. When JRuby hit the scene it was faster than the core ruby project at quite a few things because the VM was doing all sorts of optimizations behind the scenes. Also, because the Java OP code is so stable with relatively few changes per major release you have a bit of a boom in languages you can run inside the Java VM. You get all the benefits of the R&D Sun and Oracle put into JIT, while retaining the ability to do interesting and contemporary things with your language.

Clojure, Groovy, Scala, Python being the primary languages with another 16 that can compile to Java Op code.

Were Java fails mostly is as a client application, running with some sort of Windows GUI. Sure, you can do it, but it realistically people who do Java Swing apps are writing some sort of thick client that could almost always could run inside a contemporary browser without any plugins.