I agree with you. I started my CompSci degree a few years ago without any programming experience. The first intro-class was quite challenging as I had never programmed before. It took me a while to get used to the quirks but I became better after sufficient practice. Like anything else, programmers only get good after they have put in the hours to learn programming and the programming language. Its like music or sports or even academics. Practice makes perfect.
In fact, the yen and the dollar have been rising in recent weeks. The Pound and the Euro have taken a beating.Hard to say what might happen to the Chinese RMB as the rate is set within a narrow band by the Chinese govt.
Thats interesting. By that token, Facebook or other social networks are in some ways, restricted by what they can do because of the way people use the network
amcharts.com is great. They have really good customizable flash charts and I believe they have PHP support as well. We code in PHP and we are very satisfied with their charting tools
Perhaps it is true that people don't take invites on facebook seriously as they can see the list of people. If there are too many people invited, they might not feel obligated to respond. What if you had a dedicated invite service and you could not observe the number of people coming (say to a dinner or a party etc). Would you feel more obliged to respond?
We spent a few weeks before the deadline editing and re-editing our application. We only submitted it a day before it was due.
Perhaps there were many groups like us who had thought about applying a while and spent time editing their application before sending in the last few days.