Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important. Being able to go over a design at a whiteboard together rather than reading the same powerpoint slide separately is important. THe best ideas I've had in my career have been created as a result of talking to my coworkers over lunch/coffee break/tangent from another discussion. Telecommuting is a loss to productivity even if they are perfect about actually working (which having done it for a year- its not an easy thing to do, there's a lot of temptations). Its not only easily worth 15-30k, its worth 2-3 times that to have then onsite. That's ignoring the fact that a large number of people won't be on point when working from home- many without even meaning to cheat the system.

I doubt you paid much attention to this. I do, I've been developing keyboards for 5 years now. Some of those at Swype, some at a second startup (I left Swype a few months after the buyout and have had neither residuals nor stock in the company or its new owner since May 2012), and now well its still on keyboards but I'm under NDA preventing me from stating where. Do all Android users use continuous path input? Of course not. Not even a majority. But a very solid percentage do, and a majority of those wouldn't use a device without it for a phone sized device (answers differ on large tablets where swyping isn't as efficient). So no, I don't think I oversold the importance of the technology- its a blocking issue for millions of people moving to iOS. Would they have moved had it been available when they were making their OS choice? Some large percentage of them would have. Will they now? Who knows- now they're locked in by various apps and expected behavior. We'll see.

THe shift key changes state slightly- colors in blue when manually capped, outlines blue when in autocaps mode. But no, it doesn't show on the keys.

iOS terms of service prevent you from writing a service or daemon except under very specific circumstances. If you do, they'll reject your app from the store. So you have to do a lot of things that should run in the background only when you're in the foreground. Yes, its idiotic- in order to try and avoid a few badly written apps from draining battery power unnecessarily running in the background they've instead prevented entire categories of useful behavior.

Highly doubt it. I worked at Swype. We had deals at the OEM level and shipped preinstalled. That means we made money on every phone shipped. (Some of those deals fell apart post buyout, because the buyer was hard to deal with). They won't get that deal from Apple. So they may make more money per download, or get more paid downloads. But they won't make more money overall.

Did you know you're lieing? I have an Android phone, with Skype on it. Battery uneffected, lasts 2 days of moderate use or 1 day of heavy use including GPS. Skype does not take command of the camera like that, if it did then no other app would be able to claim it and you'd quickly see a problem.

Anyone who ever used an android phone. Swype, Swiftkey, and others do an amazing job. Apple lacks continuous path typing (Swype-like paths to type) which is in every major Android keyboard these days and used by hundreds of millions of people as a faster alternative to thumb typing. Apple's autocorrect is mediocre, Swiftkey and Swype/Nuance kick its ass. And the keyboard does matter- its the most used app on the phone- you use it in texting, emails, even browsing. If it isn't a good experience people will not use your device. Apple lost millions of users who wouldn't consider switching due to the lack of options on iOS. The question is if they're now to embedded into the Android world to be willing to change. I'm guessing Apple lost them permanently by being 4 or 5 years too late with opening up the keyboards api.

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.