Lefty here. Bad title - writing English kinda sucks for lefties - on blackboards/whiteboards I always smudge the letters as a write left to right. Same thing with some pens. And you can't see the letters your just wrote as you move left-to right. Not to mention the English language was around a long time before QWERTY. Truth is, English was heavily left-handed,we'd all be writing right-to-left. More appropriate title would be 'QWERTY is heavily left-handed'
Curious, do you get the actual speeds that comcast tells you you're buying? EPB Chattanooga was the first ISP I had that actually gives me what I pay for..
"This is clearly bait. Pretending this gigabit internet service is available or practical for a startup, much less personal use, is either dishonest or ignorant of the actual situation in Chattanooga."
What are you talking about? I do believe you are the one ignorant of the actual situation in Chattanooga. Gigabit internet service IS available to startups. Hell, its available to residential customers.
I've got the 30Mbps package at home, and it is a true 30meg up and down. They laid fiber all over the city, and it is 100x better than any other internet services I've ever had(I don't think my internet has been down one time since I moved to Chattanooga).
"Generally your choices are making a decent salary working in healthcare with .NET/Java, or making <30k salaries with open source, which generally doesn't go much further than CMS modifications, or working for a CTO that thinks php frameworks are fadish and don't really work in most situations (so he rolled his own)."
I'm making ~50k working for a startup, using ruby, nodejs, mongo, redis...all kinds of open source. And we're hiring.
"And even there, I won't even talk to local companies. I've already wasted enough time hunting local clients only to realize nary a one of them expects to pay > $20/hr."
Not gonna argue with this one :)
I think you are a bit behind the times as to whats going on in Chattanooga.
My school(Tennessee Technological University, graduated a year and a half ago) still requires a semester of C/C++...there were a couple other classes where you needed to know it to interpret the professor's example code, but were allowed to code in other languages if you wanted. I enjoy C, but feel more proficient in other languages as far as getting things done quickly. I guess I just don't use C enough to keep a good grasp of it.
I think students would get more benefit out of being forced to only use C(and assembly?) for the first couple years. It would help them get a better understanding of what the higher-level languages have going on under the hood.
I've been doing web development(Ruby) the past few years. I've played around with extending Ruby with C, but not much.
If you are looking to hire, I might be interested...its about time for a change-up in my life.