Point taken. Although, you have raised and interesting point about scalability in that it has a lot less to do with the language and more to do with what you have to scale. Wikipedia, for example, serves most of their content out of Squid, meaning that the PHP code has to do little work, relatively speaking.
Archive.org uses Java, if not other languages, running behind the scenes. They are definitely not PHP top to bottom.
I am skeptical that Capital One really run their entire application on PHP. Financial institutions are usually tied into old legacy middleware written in non-PHP languages, if not for performance reasons, because they have been in business longer than PHP has been around.
Not really familiar with the others, so I'd love to read more about their infrastructure if you have some info.
I think for the purposes of this discussion, we can ignore the usual components that are not written in PHP like web servers and databases, but components that are written in house to support the app are fair game, otherwise, Facebook is all PHP and Twitter is all Rails.
Twitter is still on Rails. Some backend processes that would not have never used Rails in the first place are written in Scala, but which massive scale project doesn't use a number of different languages to make it all work?
It is not like colleges have exclusive rights to some mythical book that holds all of the worlds knowledge; past, present, and future. If someone was able to come up with the concepts and math behind optical physics before, someone can do it again.
If you believe your time is more valuable than using it to reinvent the wheel, you can pay someone for the information. College is one place to purchase that knowledge, but hardly the only vendor.
It really depends on what you want out of life. If you goal is to make money, education will not help you get there. If your goal is to develop transformational technologies, education might help you get there.
He's telling the to throw that away after, what? A year? 2 years? That isn't "risk", it's certain loss.
The past two years of your life and everything you learned during that time does not suddenly disappear the day you decide to do something else. Nothing is thrown away or lost unless you think the piece of paper at the end is the only value gained from school.
That solid foundation is great for personal growth, but not all that useful in business. The value of education should not be discounted, but if you goal is to make money, college is not the right place to be. This program recognizes that fact, and allows those who's goal is to make money to get on to the right track. Those who are in college for the right reasons will not be interested anyway.
In reality, the one who does a better job marketing him or herself will get the job. A degree is one way to market yourself, but I am not certain that it is the best way. The amount one would spend on college is a lot of money that could be spent elsewhere; a TV advertisement, for example.
I don't know, Apple seems to be moving towards merging iOS and OS X.
Lion includes a full screen mode that looks suspiciously like the iOS interface. It wouldn't be too difficult to have, for example, UIScrollView provide a scrollbar when a mouse is present, and respond to drags on touch devices.
I have only played with the Android SDK for a short amount of time, is there something in its design that would prevent modifying it for use with a mouse (and I do not mean simulating touches) in the future?
While I am not a RoR fanboy, it actually acted much like a cult band, influencing development on many other platforms, especially ones that were more static like Java server-side development.
Exactly. No matter what language you are using, if you are working on a website that is free of legacy code, the codebase will almost certainly have received inspiration from Rails. You cannot successfully hype any product unless that product has real value behind it.
Even if you own the iPad hardware, Apple still owns iOS. If you wish to install software on your iPad that has no connection with Apple in order to allow you to install your own software, you are free to do so.
I come from the other point of view. I find that architecture requirements naturally follow UI requirements. Iterations through the design process reveal differing directions that code, such as API definitions, may need to follow.
It seems to me that the real problem is that many developers are completely removed from the design process. Without understanding how the UI came to be, you are going to be left with an API or other architecture decisions as an afterthought.
I live in a very rural area in North America and have not travelled to a place in recent times without 3G coverage. I like to listen to radio over 3G while driving, so I am acutely aware of any reception issues while out in open spaces over long hauls. A couple of years ago I might have agreed with you, but those times are past us.
I cannot speak for Android, but my iPhone does exactly what you describe with the audio. It will reduce the volume of the music and let the GPS software have its audio time, just like the car units.
I do not deny that there are places that do not have the coverage necessary to provide navigation over the internet, but if you are on a road that has other cars on it, you should have no problem. Besides, there is nothing about smartphones that require them to fetch GPS maps from the internet. It is not a limitation of the hardware or operating system.
I think I could cleanly fit an iPad in my dash if I removed the climate controls. One would just need to replace them with an interface to the iPad plus an app to make it usable. Unfortunately, the iPad is not a very good device to interface with.
An employer is just a client of your business. The product of your business is your time. When a given client relationship ends, your role in your company shifts to that of a sales, but you are still employed. Last time I checked, salesman was still considered a real job.
Granted, sales-related experience when applying for an engineering role may not help you get the job. Then again, it just might.
Whether they work or not is irrelevant. The point is that they exist so let the people choose if they want to board a flight that has the high security rigmarole, the flight with minimal security, or the flight with no security. In other words, let the market decide.
I see nothing wrong with offering flights with enhanced security measures for those who do not feel safe travelling on non-secured flights, but why does every single flight have to go through the same scrutiny? America claims to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. If someone is brave enough to board a plane that could be filled with terrorists waiting to do terrible things to them, why should they not be free to do so?
Regular physical examinations by your doctor are important to ensure good health, but the government does not force anyone to visit the doctor. Why does the government feel it is so important to care about your safety while in the air, but not while on the ground? Enforcing regular doctor visits by law would save more lives than airport screening, yet only the latter is legally mandated. Why?
It wasn't many years ago that 75% of the population were employed as farmers. A new invention, the tractor, replaced the majority of farm workers with machines. Today, only 2% of the population still work on farms, yet we do not have a 73% unemployment rate.
Twenty years ago people were claiming that robots would be the death of the employment and that we'd all be out of work in twenty years. Here we are. The employment rate has not changed significantly over that time.
We have been replacing jobs with machines for a long, long time. Will the result in employment rates for the next twenty years really be any different than the trends of the past?
Perhaps my wording was poor, but if you have knowledge of the structure of the data in advance, you are not thinking about the kinds of applications I am. Only the user knows what the structure of each record is going to be as they enter it.
Yes, you can still do it with SQL, but it is very, very ugly. Why would you try to shoehorn the problem into SQL when databases exist that are designed for the job?
NoSQL is not about ACID. Several NoSQL databases are ACID compliant. NoSQL is about not using SQL to query a database. Some NoSQL databases are even relational, just like SQL.
You can, of course, create a key/value table in a SQL database, but then you are just creating your own NoSQL database on top of SQL. Why wouldn't you use a database designed to store data in that format, in that case?
The big boys are using NoSQL databases because it is easier (read: cheaper) to scale than relational (SQL) databases. That does not mean relational databases cannot scale.
The small startups are using NoSQL because there is, more and more, a push in the web app market to store data which does not fit into any schema. Several of the NoSQL options are very good at handling that kind of data, SQL, not so much.
Yes, there are a handful of people that think they need a Facebook-scale database before they have even released their project into the world, but they are the exception. Most people are using NoSQL databases because they are a better fit for the job than a traditional SQL database. Those people will not argue that SQL cannot do the job, just that a NoSQL database can do the job better.
Happened to me once. The ABS kicked in during a stop on dry pavement, which increased my overall stopping distance considerably. There was no danger to me at the time, thankfully, but it could have potentially been a problem if the situation were different.
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken. Although, you have raised and interesting point about scalability in that it has a lot less to do with the language and more to do with what you have to scale. Wikipedia, for example, serves most of their content out of Squid, meaning that the PHP code has to do little work, relatively speaking.
Archive.org uses Java, if not other languages, running behind the scenes. They are definitely not PHP top to bottom.
I am skeptical that Capital One really run their entire application on PHP. Financial institutions are usually tied into old legacy middleware written in non-PHP languages, if not for performance reasons, because they have been in business longer than PHP has been around.
Not really familiar with the others, so I'd love to read more about their infrastructure if you have some info.
I think for the purposes of this discussion, we can ignore the usual components that are not written in PHP like web servers and databases, but components that are written in house to support the app are fair game, otherwise, Facebook is all PHP and Twitter is all Rails.
Which major website has an entire application stack written in PHP? Honest question.
Facebook, for example, is known for their PHP use (if you consider HipHop to be PHP), but they use Java, C++, and Python where Twitter uses Scala.
Twitter is still on Rails. Some backend processes that would not have never used Rails in the first place are written in Scala, but which massive scale project doesn't use a number of different languages to make it all work?
It is not like colleges have exclusive rights to some mythical book that holds all of the worlds knowledge; past, present, and future. If someone was able to come up with the concepts and math behind optical physics before, someone can do it again.
If you believe your time is more valuable than using it to reinvent the wheel, you can pay someone for the information. College is one place to purchase that knowledge, but hardly the only vendor.
It really depends on what you want out of life. If you goal is to make money, education will not help you get there. If your goal is to develop transformational technologies, education might help you get there.
The past two years of your life and everything you learned during that time does not suddenly disappear the day you decide to do something else. Nothing is thrown away or lost unless you think the piece of paper at the end is the only value gained from school.
That solid foundation is great for personal growth, but not all that useful in business. The value of education should not be discounted, but if you goal is to make money, college is not the right place to be. This program recognizes that fact, and allows those who's goal is to make money to get on to the right track. Those who are in college for the right reasons will not be interested anyway.
In reality, the one who does a better job marketing him or herself will get the job. A degree is one way to market yourself, but I am not certain that it is the best way. The amount one would spend on college is a lot of money that could be spent elsewhere; a TV advertisement, for example.
I don't know, Apple seems to be moving towards merging iOS and OS X.
Lion includes a full screen mode that looks suspiciously like the iOS interface. It wouldn't be too difficult to have, for example, UIScrollView provide a scrollbar when a mouse is present, and respond to drags on touch devices.
I have only played with the Android SDK for a short amount of time, is there something in its design that would prevent modifying it for use with a mouse (and I do not mean simulating touches) in the future?
Exactly. No matter what language you are using, if you are working on a website that is free of legacy code, the codebase will almost certainly have received inspiration from Rails. You cannot successfully hype any product unless that product has real value behind it.
Even if you own the iPad hardware, Apple still owns iOS. If you wish to install software on your iPad that has no connection with Apple in order to allow you to install your own software, you are free to do so.
I come from the other point of view. I find that architecture requirements naturally follow UI requirements. Iterations through the design process reveal differing directions that code, such as API definitions, may need to follow.
It seems to me that the real problem is that many developers are completely removed from the design process. Without understanding how the UI came to be, you are going to be left with an API or other architecture decisions as an afterthought.
I live in a very rural area in North America and have not travelled to a place in recent times without 3G coverage. I like to listen to radio over 3G while driving, so I am acutely aware of any reception issues while out in open spaces over long hauls. A couple of years ago I might have agreed with you, but those times are past us.
I cannot speak for Android, but my iPhone does exactly what you describe with the audio. It will reduce the volume of the music and let the GPS software have its audio time, just like the car units.
I do not deny that there are places that do not have the coverage necessary to provide navigation over the internet, but if you are on a road that has other cars on it, you should have no problem. Besides, there is nothing about smartphones that require them to fetch GPS maps from the internet. It is not a limitation of the hardware or operating system.
I think I could cleanly fit an iPad in my dash if I removed the climate controls. One would just need to replace them with an interface to the iPad plus an app to make it usable. Unfortunately, the iPad is not a very good device to interface with.
How, exactly, is a gap on your resume possible?
An employer is just a client of your business. The product of your business is your time. When a given client relationship ends, your role in your company shifts to that of a sales, but you are still employed. Last time I checked, salesman was still considered a real job.
Granted, sales-related experience when applying for an engineering role may not help you get the job. Then again, it just might.
The money could be given to the competition.
Why? It is already documented.
Whether they work or not is irrelevant. The point is that they exist so let the people choose if they want to board a flight that has the high security rigmarole, the flight with minimal security, or the flight with no security. In other words, let the market decide.
I see nothing wrong with offering flights with enhanced security measures for those who do not feel safe travelling on non-secured flights, but why does every single flight have to go through the same scrutiny? America claims to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. If someone is brave enough to board a plane that could be filled with terrorists waiting to do terrible things to them, why should they not be free to do so?
Regular physical examinations by your doctor are important to ensure good health, but the government does not force anyone to visit the doctor. Why does the government feel it is so important to care about your safety while in the air, but not while on the ground? Enforcing regular doctor visits by law would save more lives than airport screening, yet only the latter is legally mandated. Why?
It wasn't many years ago that 75% of the population were employed as farmers. A new invention, the tractor, replaced the majority of farm workers with machines. Today, only 2% of the population still work on farms, yet we do not have a 73% unemployment rate.
Twenty years ago people were claiming that robots would be the death of the employment and that we'd all be out of work in twenty years. Here we are. The employment rate has not changed significantly over that time.
We have been replacing jobs with machines for a long, long time. Will the result in employment rates for the next twenty years really be any different than the trends of the past?
Perhaps my wording was poor, but if you have knowledge of the structure of the data in advance, you are not thinking about the kinds of applications I am. Only the user knows what the structure of each record is going to be as they enter it.
Yes, you can still do it with SQL, but it is very, very ugly. Why would you try to shoehorn the problem into SQL when databases exist that are designed for the job?
NoSQL is not about ACID. Several NoSQL databases are ACID compliant. NoSQL is about not using SQL to query a database. Some NoSQL databases are even relational, just like SQL.
You can, of course, create a key/value table in a SQL database, but then you are just creating your own NoSQL database on top of SQL. Why wouldn't you use a database designed to store data in that format, in that case?
The big boys are using NoSQL databases because it is easier (read: cheaper) to scale than relational (SQL) databases. That does not mean relational databases cannot scale.
The small startups are using NoSQL because there is, more and more, a push in the web app market to store data which does not fit into any schema. Several of the NoSQL options are very good at handling that kind of data, SQL, not so much.
Yes, there are a handful of people that think they need a Facebook-scale database before they have even released their project into the world, but they are the exception. Most people are using NoSQL databases because they are a better fit for the job than a traditional SQL database. Those people will not argue that SQL cannot do the job, just that a NoSQL database can do the job better.
Happened to me once. The ABS kicked in during a stop on dry pavement, which increased my overall stopping distance considerably. There was no danger to me at the time, thankfully, but it could have potentially been a problem if the situation were different.