Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by him:

Universities are not technical schools. Ideally, they provide a broad theoretical framework that allows people to develop a career over the next few decades following their graduation. What the article is suggesting is that people be forced to pay for narrow training, pigeonholing them into a career path which may or may not exist (or be practical) in 20 years.

University education is meta-education. It enables life-long learning. Businesses expecting fresh graduates to have received (and paid for) training in technology-dejour is a disturbing trend in the software industry.

It's not a matter of maturity. Many organizations hide behind the disclaimer "we are not an I.T. company", despite having sizable I.T. departments. And despite having this sizable department, which offers mission-critical applications and infrastructure, zero effort is made towards working smarter. Problems are fixed with mandatory overtime, cutting staffing/costs, and "quick-and-dirty" fixes to long standing problems.

I think some companies are starting to understand that their project management methodologies are flawed, but most cannot connect the concepts of "software debt" to decreasing marginal output in their I.T. efforts. An hour of work today is less effective than in the past because you are paying "interest" on your previous bad decisions.

I think that the 27% is reflective of companies that can connect the longevity and cost-effectiveness of I.T. systems to proper project planning, management, and I.T. expertise. Whether or not this is an upper-bound remains to be seen, because a lot of organizations simply don't understand that inventing your own project management ideas dooms you to repeating the same failures that have happened over the last 50 years.

The Android NDK lets you write code in C/C++. http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html

Seriously Slashdot, bring out the nerds. There is so much incorrect information in this thread getting modded up. Hold the obligatory "you must be new here" jokes.

You can write Objective-C on Linux and Windows, it's fully supported by GCC. You meant to say Cocoa. There is no reason why you can't write a QT GUI, or WinAPI application using Objective-C.

But the .NET managed code environment, which is essentially MSIL (a language), certainly is tied to Windows. Most new Windows applications are written in .NET, which creates the same vendor lock-in problem you are trying to bash objective-c for. Mono is too incomplete to count, I'd imagine it lacks support for WPF, WCF, and other emerging .NET technologies.

You can always use MonoTouch (http://xamarin.com/monotouch), if you want to write C# on iOS.

Fixed that for you. For the uninitiated, trimming a string is as simple as

NSString *s = [stringToTrim stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet: [NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]];

The way the language functions is beautiful, but they seriously need to get rid of stuff like this.

Yes that is the point, to separate layout (styling) from semantics. Use a <style> tag if it bothers you that much.

FTFY. I work with developers who share your sentiments. I also feel like bashing my head into my desk when I work on the mangled, crufty, mess of nested tables that has been globbered together over 7 years. I will definitely agree with you that CSS is a pain in the ass to wrap your head around, but it really doesn't take much more than a basic understanding of margin/float/display/padding to do about 90% of layout work.

It cuts the amount of code required by at least a two-thirds. <table><tr><td>Foo</td></tr></table> is more typing than <div>Foo<div>

"There is a club for people who don't like their job, it is called "EVERYBODY"; they meet at a bar".

-Drew Carey

Interest is not purely profit. Interest is designed to offset inflation and the other ways you can spend your money. If I owed you $81,000 would you prefer that paid as a lump sum today or paid as a 0% interest loan over 25 years ($3,2400 /yr)?

So in order to make $100,000 today equal to $100,000 in 25 years, we need interest (at least to cover inflation). So for the purposes of this loan $100,000 (at time 0) == $181,000 (at time 25). In addition to the interest, you pay portions of the $100,000 you borrowed. Each payment of $687 is an uneven mix of Interest payments and Principal payments, the ratio changes as the loan approaches time 25.

So if you stop paying halfway through the loan, you may have paid in total $100,000 (combination of interest and principal). But $100,000 (at time 0) is less than $100,000 (at time 25), the lender loses money.

(Disclaimer: I do not work in the financial industry but as a math nerd I am familiar with basic financial math)

5.5% APR with interest payable monthly
Loan of: $100,000
Payment: $687

Present Value: $72,000
Total Profit: -$28,000

I don't think your math is correct.

Yea that's the way it works in the United States also... Student debts are not dischargeable through bankruptcy. Defaulting on student loans will make you ineligible for government employment, along with garnishments on wages, tax returns, and social security benefits.

I would be very interested to see what percentage of these debts are owed to for-profit institutions (e.g. University of Phoenix). Some of these colleges are owned by publicly traded companies, which provided ample incentive for unethical profiteering. There are colleges in my city that sell absolutely worthless degrees in media related fields, cosmetics, business, and healthcare that cost $60,000+.

If you can't make money, you can't repay debts (blood from a stone). It was a simple idea to follow in the U.S. until some schmuck decided to open for-profit colleges and game the system.

Real private and public modifiers would be nice, but I wish people would take the time to understand why the LISP-like qualities of JavaScript make it awesome. I often find myself wishing that .NET and Java were more like JavaScript. To be an exceptional .NET or Java programmer, you need to know tons and tons of specifics about the language. To be a good JavaScript programmer, all you really have to understand are the concepts related to objects and scope.

I think Java and .NET are great enterprise languages for applications that are 10,000+ lines of code. But writing JavaScript in a message-centric fashion (think LISP or Objective-C) is very pleasing with it's terse expressiveness. The language is flexible, and works great for applications that are developed and maintained by one or two programmers.

But the end seems to be near for good-ol-JavaScript; I feel the same way that the LISP programmers must have felt when C and COBOL began to assert their dominance. I'm sad that this inefficient toy-language will soon be relegated as an obsolete and inferior language.

What additional security measures can be taken to thwart script kiddies like this guy? Is MAC address filtering + WEP/WPA encryption (or one of those) sufficient security. At this point I want to shut the fucking WiFi off, but there are others in the household who wouldn't go for that.

I never meant to promote .NET as a superior alternative. I've probably written more PHP than .NET in my life, I love using it for my own projects. In terms of web stuff (and even the occasional PERL substitute), PHP is a damn good language.