They have? I haven't gotten any free books. I think you're making shit up.

Hey look- the exact same links I said in my above post, in a slightly different order. Likely because I hit a different google server today. Wow you are an utter idiot aren't you.

Feynman's statement is one of the most misapplied quotes of our lifetime. You can give the 10000 foot view of a subject in simple terms, usually. And that's what he meant. That's not the purpose of a college course- the purpose is to give you all the details, so you can apply them in new and novel ways. That requires lots of facts being thrown at you, lots of math, and lots of detail. Any attempt to do it otherwise IS being simplistic.

A nice comprimise might be if coursera and edx moved to monthly instead of semesterly courses, running several instances shifted in parallel.

Its kind of hard to list all the prerequisites for everything. Especially since by the time you'd hit AI in any college course, you'd have taken probability and calculus years ago. Do I need to list understanding of the scientific method as a prerequisite for chem 300? The ability to read and write? There is a baseline knowledge you just have to assume- that's why you generally need to take the baseline courses like calc first in college.

What you can't do is take the math out- doing so waters down the course and makes it less usable for those who do have the knowledge, and gives you an incomplete understanding. Far better to have a few drop do to not understanding the math than to not provide the knowledge the course needs to in order to pass them.

Your metric needs improvement too. Cut off the employer part. No employer needs someone to take a MOOC in history, music theory, etc. Yet they exist and people love them. The real metric for success is how many people are able to learn about a field that under other circumstances they never could. Whether they ever use that knowledge, professionally or personally, isn't relevant.

Depends on how you define success. If you define success as being a replacement for college, you're right. They aren't, and likely never will be that. If by success you mean a place where motivated adults can learn about a subject without the costs and commitment of a degree program then they're a rousing success. And that's where the people who start MOOCs went wrong- they were thinking of them as college replacements. Think of them as adult learning at a university level for people who don't plan on making a career out of the knowledge, or for people who want to study a subfield they didn't in college. At that level they work very well. And if someone drops the course its no big deal- they just decided they didn't need it/want it after all.

Here's the top hits in order for me:

Sherrif's office- http://www.teamdane.com/Securi...

Simply hired- clicking through shows that nothing on the first page of results actually calls the job that- the first results are signal support systems specialist, Sr client support specialist, field technician support specialist, Mac Support Specialist, and a SOX compliance officer.

Another link to Dane County

Another job site, a similar mix of results none of which actually use that title, although these tend to match the word security rather than support specialist

And finally a Cisco cert, for those who still give a shit about such things.

And a glass door salary link which shows two people nationwide using that title both at USAA.

Yeah, made up title.

Ghosting takes minutes. Even doing analysis to figure out what's wrong would take far more than the entire process. And if you really have everything automated to the point it can be done in 15-30 minutes, then there's no human input at all- your job is a script that can run nightly on each machine, with 1 guy to update the files the script pulls.

Sys admin? I'm a programmer. Don't have the temperment to be a sysadmin, I'd be miserable at it. I know exactly what dev ops is, I was in the room when a former boss said they were firing the sys admins and we were all now dev ops. It was a miserable experience all around. And that's exactly what devops is 90% of the time- its taking programmers and sticking them with the support job too. Maybe at some place once it worked differently and they really hired for a specific hybrid role- but don't kid yourself its the majority of the time. Usually its just the programmer who can most be spared from the real coding.

So you're a sys admin who specializes in reghosting machines when the auto-updater fails? (Because actually spending the time to fix each machine would be a huge waste of resources over just ghosting a fresh image or rolling to a backup and reinstalling)? Someone needs to do it but I wouldn't give it a fancy title. Much less one with security in it- nothing in there has anything to do with security, its general administration stuff.

Well, we just learned you don't know what a systems programmer is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.... Pretty much the opposite of devops, which in and of itself is usually just an attempt by management to make devs work overtime in support roles instead of hiring more IT people (and usually a bad idea, but that's a side rant).

At my employer (40k employees)

This is supposed to impress someone? The more employees you have, the more deadweight you have, and the higher the probability that an individual working there is just that. The fact you need to state that rather than your accomplishments makes it 100%.

So you don't want to join the highly lucrative job that requires your degree, but you want to join a job where the demand is decreasing and can be more easily outsourced. Not to mention- wtf does a "security support specialist" do? I have 15 fucking years in this field and I could only make a vague guess. A websearch for "define security support specialist" basically had 2 solid definition- one is a guy the sherriff's office was looking to hire that ran the fingerprinting software for booking, the other is someone who would be working at Guantanimo Bay. So you have a made up job title that means exactly nothing. Nor would anyone smart hire right into security in IT anyway- it's a complex field, its the position you graduate into after proving you know your stuff over a period of years, not an entry level position.

If that's what you have a passion for, go for it. Of course I'd say the same thing if you wanted to be a professional soap box racer. But don't complain about your degree when you don't have a full degree, and when you're using it to try to get a job that doesn't actually exist, and to a position that's far above entry level in a declining field. You aren't having problems because of the degree, you're having problems because you're underqualified and over-entitled. Especially don't complain about the utility of the degree if there's other career paths that greatly desire that degree, are highly lucrative, but you don't want to do. That's your fault, not the field's.

CS is for programming. Not IT and definitely not helpdesk. And not vaguely defined "security" jobs. If you want to program, there's a negative unemployment rate in some parts of the country right now and has been for a few years- there's more jobs than people if you have some skill. If you don't want to program or get a phd and do research, its a useless degree. Formerly IT included a lot more programming as systems were highly customized and home built. Now IT is cheap and getting cheaper, because all of the complex tasks are automated or scripted these days with a lot more COTS software. You still need a small number of smart people, but a much smaller team than the old days and not everyone on the team needs to be top notch. Expect that trend to continue.

The other problem- you have an associates degree. Probably from a community college. That's a great thing to do if you're then transferring to a 4 year college to finish your degree. Its absolute garbage for getting a job- you have neither work experience nor the understanding of theory that a full degree should give you, combined with the utter lack of rigor generally associated with a lower college. Basically, it counts for nothing- nobody is going to hire you for hard programming with it, the jobs you are qualified for like simple web dev work would have hired you without it. You'd have been better off writing a portfolio of some simple web pages and apps that you could show off if you weren't willing to get a full degree.

No, it increases it. There's a half dozen ideas I have on the drawing board that I could never touch, because I know it comes too close to filed patents on a dozen issues and I could never protect myself in court. This makes it easier to explore these ideas. If anything, this will lead to more pushing of the boundaries and combining of good ideas to make great software, and fewer people sticking to safe ideas because there's no patent issues.