Why are their poor hiring practices indicative of a problem with the available degree programs to students? Of course, all in-between type jobs would be easier to train for if there was a degree specific to those jobs... but do you really think that anyone went into journalism or art history because there was no software testing degree program available? If they were interested in working with computers, why in the world would they not major (or even minor) in computer science? At best, I could see software testing being being a concentration for students with technology related degrees.

This begs the question: why aren't they hiring fresh, or underemployed CS grads, or people with unrelated engineering backgrounds, to do these jobs, to begin with, if they're finding that the people they hire don't have the appropriate technical skills? I'm guessing that they don't want to pay them well enough to use their expertise. Once they get a degree specific to that field, however, wouldn't they cost just as much as CS grads?

This article is using the fact that they hire people with no relevant training whatsoever, to advocate for a degree in something that should be purely vocational, or on-the-job training. In this job market, it must seem, to recruiters, that their wish are prospective employee and trainer commands, because people are so desperate to get an edge, even in the most basic jobs. This person airing their perspective on the matter shows how skewed their perspective is.

A *regular phone company* has a legally binding, written agreement, which a contract, that you sign, guaranteeing that you will reimburse the phone company for their expenses, primarily your phone, if you stop the service early.

What *T-Mobile* has is a legally binding, written agreement, which is NOT a contract, that you sign, guaranteeing that you will reimburse the phone company for the expense of your phone, if you stop the service early.

So, I think people who are saying that this is different from other cell phone company contracts are clearly telling the truth... not in the standard sense, where everything they say is indisputably correct... rather, in the t-mobile sense, where the "true" part is judged solely on whether or not it's true that they expressed something, and the actual veracity of their words is conveniently ignored for marketing purposes.

This isn't spraying some perfume into rabbits eyes to make sure it doesn't give people a rash, this is doing research to treat and prevent diseases that are killing and disabling an astounding number of people.

I think most people that have come to the ethical conclusion that the thousands of animals that they tested HIV and AIDS treatments on at this facility, are more important than the tens or hundreds of thousands of people that are not dead, and living their lives relatively normally because of that research, probably don't know anyone that was pushed down the terrifying, grueling, tortuous path of a slow AIDS related death.

Their efforts do reach an incredibly broad audience. The number of people that *do* have access to computers, which *do* have internet access, but are *not* running at least Windows XP SP2 (the minimum requirement for recent versions of firefox), or Linux, which the most recent version of Damn Small Linux, by any known measure (OS Market Share stats), is incredibly small.

Damn small linux, requires a 486DX with 16MB of RAM. It is small enough to download with a dial-up connection.
The latest Firefox requires a P4, with 512MB RAM. Not exactly what I would call "High Spec" hardware.

So, who, *precisely*, are these people that have consistent internet access, regular access to computers, but are incapable of running any vaguely recent version of Linux, or WindowsXP?

These are the *actually* underserved groups of people, with this system:

-There are plenty of people who only have access to computers in libraries or shelters for limited amounts of time, who often do not have access for long enough, or consistently enough to take a class.
-There are people who live in remote areas who are well-off enough to have computers, who either don't have internet access, or have connectivity that is not consistent enough to guarantee a connection at any given time, as is required when participating in a class.
-There are many people don't have access to computers, at all.

The audience you claim to be fighting for, really, does not exist in any significant number. There *certainly are* struggling people that don't have access to this system, but the fact that some people have trouble with it when they try to use Firefox 3.6.x is not even a remotely significant contributor to the problem, and anybody making a stink about it is either really not thinking the problem through and just grumbling because it bothers them (a curmudgeon), or just trying to start trouble (a troll.)

Insulting? Possibly. Accurate? Undoubtedly.

referencing:

Obviously, the tone of my response, especially in the passage you cited, was not directed at your want for backwards compatibility, which, stated more civilly, would have gathered a more friendly response; it was targeted at your trollish questioning of the developers and designers competence, and motives. Since I'm a software developer at Harvard (I did not work on this project,) I believe my response was quite appropriate.

"What do you mean this doesn't work with Lynx! Also, I specifically requested GOPHER support over 6 months ago. What the hell?"

Firstly, EdX is an open platform made collaboratively by MIT and Harvard. Coursera is a private company. They're vastly different.

Secondly, the technical and design hurdles that they are overcoming with these products are not trivial, and they are often made significantly less difficult with cutting edge features available to developers on newer browsers. It might not be the difference between something working, or not working... but it will probably be the difference between something working well, using browser-supported code, and some crappy, hackish workaround.

Thirdly, if your definition of "open" requires supporting curmudgeons that arbitrarily decided to stop updating their browser at some point, because it's what you did, and you decided that the world should adapt to you, rather than the other way around, then nobody else cares what your definition of "open" is.

Fourthly, developing for backwards compatibility can easily double your UI development costs if you have to go back to, say, IE6. Doing so makes sense if your target audience is some bureaucracy filled company that refuses to update, that is going to be paying you a boatload of money for your online training service... but if you're offering people free, high quality education... downloading a free browser REALLY isn't much to ask.

I'm sure they would LOVE to have every feature and design idea work with all previous browsers, but it costs a lot of money, effort, and quite possibly functionality that they could not get to work with older browsers, simply to satisfy people too inflexible to adapt, and the tiny portion of people that can't adapt.

Or, it might be deliberately spun that way to give people the impression that they are "putting the safety of the general public" at risk, which, I believe, is one of the unquestionable patriot-act definitions of terrorism?

Yeah... I remember the first time I slashdotted on weed.

Cool... You live somewhere where you can sell them if times get tough?

I generally feel like doing the same thing to the largest internet tramsmission cable I can find, when I disregard all of the good sense and wisdom that I've gained from my prior negative experiences, and actually read the comments on YouTube videos.