I'm not cool with anyone going through my mail. My concern about you doing it ranks somewhere below the government doing so.
Of course why you were going through my mail is a factor as well. Was it to fix my corrupted mailbox file? Was it something that happened as part of an effort you sincerely believed would end all spam forever, end NSA abuses, destroy the copyright cartels? Or were you just hoping to find some nude pics of myself or my SO? Motive is a very big factor.
There are definitely no shortage of things looking at email is the lesser evil compared to. Even if I'm not okay with it, that might well be because I'm up to the greater evil you are trying to prevent.
See more here, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8271357&cid=50858789
I didn't say anything about Anonymous or the KKK. I was speaking to the logical basis of the GP's argument that if you aren't okay with the police doing something you shouldn't be okay with a private citizen doing it.
Laws are black and white, the real world is very very grey. If it weren't we wouldn't need courts and the constitution wouldn't guarantee the people the ultimate right to block injustice from all branches via the right to jury trial and their power to nullify the law if they feel it is the just thing in this particular case.
All in all violating the privacy of a person and exposing they are a member of a club isn't a particularly harmful thing in and of itself. You aren't damaging someone's person or property. In a sense you are putting them up for a mass jury trial. I'm not saying someone doing something like this should not be charged and made to answer to a jury of their peers. I'm saying that someone trying to do good should be entitled to face a jury of their peers who have actually been informed of their right to nullify the law
Can we condone this in every case? Absolutely not, which is why it is illegal. Is it sometimes necessary to break the law to prevent greater harm? Yes it is. This is the basis for police and military protections (which are not totally illegitimate just heavily abused and taken too far), the civil rights movement, and the fact that the very same IS a valid legal defense in the US and most states. For instance, in Florida medical marijuana was not legal last I checked but medical necessity was a valid legal defense against charges if you are arrested.
Personally, I think that as with most legal charges it comes down to a few key points. Was the intent to prevent a greater evil? Was that evil something which carried a significant risk of harm to others? Was the action committed in this one particular instance the lesser evil? I do not decide, you do not decide, the government is most certainly barred from deciding. This is the entire purpose of juries and why their decisions do not set precedent. It isn't perfect but nullification is the only direct power given to the people. Any one of us has only 1/12 the power to do it in only a single instance but in our Constitutional government it is the people and not any branch of government that has the final say in what was or was not a crime.
Ironically, many members of the KKK got away with crimes as a result of jury nullification in an overwhelmingly racist south. Judges have decided they can lie to juries on the topic, not only not informing of their power to nullify but actually telling them they are not allowed to judge the law. It's a blatant illegal judicial power grab but they found a really good excuse and stuck with it. The Constitution does not limit the basis on which juries may decide your fate and it does not empower judges to set aside jury verdicts, abuse procedural authority to declare mistrials to block nullification, or lie to jurors about it in their instruction. But when all their own peers are behind them, I guess judges don't sweat high treason against the people of the United States much.
You know that this wasn't anonymous right? This was someone else posting garbage to discredit the previously announced 11/5 dump that will be from anonymous.
The police have legal immunity for their crimes while being granted special powers to enable them to commit them and the first amendment only applies to government. Private citizens are granted protections in the Constitution not restrictions while the reverse is true of government. Officials acting in their public capacity do not have protections from the bill of rights as evidenced by the separation of church and state. It is illegal for a government official to bring their religion to their public office/function.
A private citizen not only is granted no protections but must commit civil disobedience at great personal risk to protest for major changes and fight the protected and entrenched powers.
There is no end to the list of things I'm perfectly okay with a private citizen doing while completely opposed to police/military/government doing.
"Isn't VMWare deprecating the vsphere client in favour of the web version? I'm not close enough to the administration to know whether there's missing functionality in the web version"
Yes they are, in 5.5+ and it lacks essential functionality. Since they removed functionality from the cli to push vcenter and the same functionality is notably missing from the web client I think it is a deliberate strategy on their part. You definitely tickled my lazy bone with the suggestion of a client but why mess with vmware anymore? I can rebuild as an openstack configuration and use kvm (or other bits) for that piece. Haproxy/Keepalived takes care of the need for the F5's for my configuration and most configurations I've seen LTMs in and provides a more cloud friendly/portable solution.
If you can't find enough republicans on the list to stymie their political power in congress I'd be amazed... only a little amazed because I'd assume that meant you didn't have the complete list.
That is true. There was a time to look the other way while things corrected themselves but the time when shouting black power is political suicide just as sure as white power should be coming soon. I mean, there was a time like that before but this time it would be because people shouting black power are racist rather than because everyone else is.
BSD is not a commercial OS and isn't in competition with Linux.
Linux brought those things to the consumer desktop. In the 2000's it not only continued to gain functionality but actually gained polish. Today, Linux is at least as polished and pretty as Windows or OSX.
The only people still using BSD (and honestly most of the "hardcore" distributions of Linux) are people who appreciate difficulty for it's own sake. Unlike windows and OSX you trade no functionality for the polished experience. You simply fall back to manual effort when you need more flexibility than the polished tools provide and most of the time the polished tools break none of it.
If you have trouble with rpmbuild; yum -y local vs make; make install and therefore choose the old way and break package management thus finding yourself in a dependency hell a year later... that's because you are ignorant, perhaps willfully, and your outdated and unpolished system that gives you no added functionality is what you deserve.
For myself... I used desktop linux in 98 and have used linux in the server rack since that time. It has taken many forms and flavors for me including LFS for awhile. That was great for learning how everything works under the hood. If you are using anything but a modern user friendly linux on even a 5 yr old desktop and spending more than 2-4 hours configuring and customizing the OS itself on setup (less than windows or OS X) then I have to question your life choices. Unless are learning, why waste time manually doing things the hard way when you can point and click your way to a solid and well configured launch platform for working on the new thing you are learning now? If there is some detail that matters which you can't point and click you way to, why not help improve the polish so you can move on? The point really extends to experienced users of windows and OS X (by which I really mean the latest and greatest edition of OS X in the same way windows is nothing but the latest and greatest NT) as well.
The OS wars are over. You could make a very good argument that Linux won since it is by far the most heavily deployed OS overall. But really it's more that the war itself become obsolete because open software stacks won. Even if you are using windows outside of certain niche environments most of the software you are using is cross platform OSS and most of your experience takes place in the browser or at least the network. It really makes very little difference what OS you use because no OS actually won and therefore everything has to work everywhere.
I switched from a linux desktop back to windows for years because working on third party systems constantly meant needing windows only apps and because windows got me from scratch to a working platform more quickly. Meanwhile I continued using linux as my first choice for... everything else. Now I've switched back to find Linux Mint actually provides a smoother, easier, and prettier experience these days on my brand new high end laptop supporting all the recently released hardware out of the box. It was so quick and easy I actually did spent a little time customizing frivolous things like window behavior, desktop effects, and widgets. I'm not sure I want any new innovation on my desktop. Just keep pace and let things grow more stable. Maybe fix the odd clipboard behavior and inconsistency? Middle click paste is a cool concept but not worth the hassle. Finally fix the quirks of kmixer?
The only thing left was support for the vsphere client. The virtual F5 in my lab ties me to this and the lack of functionality in the web equivalent in newer versions also hampers me here requiring me to virtualize windows. The solution is I'll simply remove both vmware and F5 from my lab. Many enterprises still have these things but that isn't the direction of the future. The future is about the open equivalents that have caught up now on the core functionality you need from these things are easily deployed on any cloud stack giving greater flexibility and automatabil
This sounds like the first major piece of propaganda to counter the political momentum of Sanders.
Almost as bad as CNN's 4000 references to Hillary as "Presidential" and the quick takedown and switch they did when their real poll showed Sanders as the winner of the debate.
Cell phones, xbox, and other devices have the claim that the device accesses their networks and therefore they must retain control. There is no such argument for a wifi router firmware which is in almost every case 99+% modified open code and 100% the property of the end purchaser.
There is a huge security risk, with radar interference the least of it, and no upside to locking people out of their devices to which the manufacturer has no access right after the point of sale.
Most people aren't as technically astute as slashdotters. These will be marketed and return side-by-side with quality drives. No doubt less tech savy consumers will do what they've always done and look at capacity vs price. To them SSD just means blazing fast.
They won't know these are sub-par scams piggy backing on the current buzzwords. Giant SD cards pretending to be the latest SSD chips and with no cache.
It sounds exactly like applied math. You certainly don't need a university for learning that. Beyond that it sounds like applied math through a lens of creativity and ad hoc abstraction. Unless you are majoring in that direction at a really good school you won't even find a professor looking at the world that way in a University let alone be taught it. But learning in tidbits and trying to solve new problems with what you have rather than being taught the textbook answer right off the bat leads there as a natural byproduct.
"And an engineer can tell you how to build it better, cheaper or both."
Both the self taught professional and the fresh out of college kid might well have the title "engineer." You can learn everything they teach at universities on your own now (especially regarding software engineering). It isn't even hard to find.
"And point out that you need redundancy"
Along with everything you'd study on the path to learning how to build such a platform. Not that you'd have to be concerned about nics and power supplies. Your web platform would be cloud based. You'd have redundant systems in place that spawn instances via cloud apis possibly even using nice portable docker containers, software defined networking, systems like puppet that configure them and install packages based on role enforce their state (files kept to checksums, ssh keys installs and logins disabled, firewall policies, services up, everything configured to run on unprivileged accounts, etc) configure new instances on the fly, redundant load balacers which those instances automatically register with, ultralight mq communications bus, redundant and distributed data, geoloction aware dns ties together your load balancers. One true thread per core, cooperative threads with a zero blocking design because the kernel the bottleneck when you need a lot of concurrent connections. If you lose a node or one has an issue you can't automatically resolve via script you just tear it down and auto-spawn a fresh replacement. Automatic seamless in place code deployments that can run the new and old code in parallel in case a rollback is needed. Session draining for zero impact reboots. Distributed log parsing with something like logstash and monitoring agents on every node. Smart certificate based authentication and authorization systems with granular permissions.
There is a huge amount of engineering in a platform like this but it isn't of the theoretically more efficient algorithm variety. The really hard problems are solved already and most everything you need to build the above is free and well documented open source. You just combine it and build an app (which is still challenging of course). Amazon. Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and a million smaller players are ready to take care of the underlying hardware. If you want or need a truly private cloud there is always open stack. Also free, open, and well documented. Set up well and you just buy another rack, plug it in, and your already in place systems detect it, provision it and grow onto it. That leaves only a rack monkey needed and most datacenters will provide one and hands for replacing hardware.
Almost every bit of the best functionality is fully open and documented, just about everything has an API or has one being built and where there is an API there can be automation. Even some of the most feature rich and dense enterprise gear and racks is "open source hardware" now. The same is true of network gear where the best no longer have IOS but have onboard programmable fpgas which handle the data plan while all the logic and control plane is actually handled by a separate linux server.
"Which one would be better? It depends on the person, and it definitely depends on where the former person got their degree.
In my experience, the best people are self-taught, but the best of the best taught themselves in a university environment."
I would agree. I think a big part of why the best are self taught is nurture rather than nature and that universities have lots of concentrated information with fewer gaps to be had but what the same methods that convey that seamless information fail to teach one how to learn, how to improvise and fill round holes with square pegs, and how to scavenge information.
That is why I suggested starting with apprenticeship, a guided self study. Even a couple years and those who do well THEN go to a university. Whether you believe that finds those with the right nature, or nurtures the right learning mindset; the result should be isolating people who already think and explore in a revenous and creative way. Then you unleash them on a massive buffet of information and resources.
I'd put my money on the resulting individuals bneing top of their field.
"Just guessing, I would say that the person with 4 years experience would do better than the person fresh out of college. The person with 8 years experience would probably be about on par with the person with a degree plus 4 years."
"On the other hand, there are plenty of jobs that require a 4 year degree and 6-10 years experience and having 20 years experience isn't going to help you land those jobs."
In my experience they catch up around 8-10yrs of actual experience. At which point in real world terms you have enough experience to be at the top of the profession. More is not going to make you better. Either you are a rockstar or just a 10yr old cog who has managed to avoid getting fired at this point.
But what you outline above is poor hiring practice. In most cases it is "or equivalent experience" even if they don't list it and usually they aren't looking for extra experience to make up for the degree so this stays 10+. Degrees don't make for superior developers/tech workers so mandating them is poor practice but is a reality that it happens for senior six figure positions like this exceptions can often be made for proven rockstars. Companies looking for 10+ are almost always enterprise level so yoiu should expect you won't get the position if your last position wasn't an enterprise position. At 10 years and above it's about Ivy league experience not ivy league degrees. Once you've been paid six figures by a blue chip company and held the position for 2yrs+ you will likely at least get a serious interview when applying for similar positions after that.
If you are just staring out consider how you will get your first position when entry level is four year degree or equivalent experience. It is possible but you'll start at low pay for small employers and spend the next 4 years having to be a rockstar to get to high pay enterprise positions with the same requirements.
"Give them both six months from that starting date and you might be surprised at how quickly things have evened up, and given another six months it'll be all the other way."
Except it won't be and generally never is. It isn't like you learn more at a university, you just alternate between learning more slowly and being dumped mass volumes of information you have zero chance of mastering or retaining. Everything you'll learn at a university is a google search away. In my experience they never catch up. Best case they are about 3 years behind for the rest of their career. Worst case they remain in your bottom 5% and depend on various exploits in the way metrics are done at a company to make the high volume cookie cutter work they churn out look impressive. They are almost never out-of-the-box thinkers and usually the first to point and claim something is unfair. They are the reason for all the red tape.
That quick rule and process violating move that secured the relationship on the new hundred million dollar contract but would have gotten the guy fired if it didn't work... That is never your engineer with the degree, the engineer with the degree is the one complaining that he churned out 10x more cookie cutter work and his stats are better but that guy is getting the promotion or that people look the other way when that guy takes long lunches or that guy gets paid more.
I do however think if you started with a few years in the real world and THEN went to the university you might be ahead of either. But I could be wrong, you might just lose your edge.
The only thing a degree is good for is getting past HR departments and other management tiers that incorrectly believe it correlates with superior employees or at least correlates with better defense of hiring choices.
Is that even really a thing anymore? The things university education used to be good at teaching to provide and advantage are now efficiently encoded into libraries. Leaving university students as people who spent four years training for something and shing up still not actually knowing knowing how to do it.
A self-taught (with a mentor) "code monkey" could learn enough in two years to build a self-healing self-scaling globally distributed fast web platform that can handle a million connections per second.
In the real world the difference between the guru and everybody else isn't deep theory or advanced maths. Almost every problem has been solved already. It's the ability to creatively look at a new problem and find a relationship between it and an efficiently solved problem you do know and adapt the solution. It's the ability to figure out how to get and find all the datapoints you don't already have. Classrooms teach none of that. Classrooms teach fairness, the real world is never fair. Classrooms require a teaching style where everything you need to solve the problem has been given to you. The real world does not, real employers do not. Classrooms teach material in a logical progression. The ability to recognize that progression and utilize the hints provided by it (the biggest of which is that what you just learned or what logically follows from it is part of the answer) almost guarantees academic success. The real world is chaos, where the problem of today may never have been encountered before, may not be perfectly solvable by anything you know or at all, and there may be no hints or all the hints might be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not cool with anyone going through my mail. My concern about you doing it ranks somewhere below the government doing so.
Of course why you were going through my mail is a factor as well. Was it to fix my corrupted mailbox file? Was it something that happened as part of an effort you sincerely believed would end all spam forever, end NSA abuses, destroy the copyright cartels? Or were you just hoping to find some nude pics of myself or my SO? Motive is a very big factor.
There are definitely no shortage of things looking at email is the lesser evil compared to. Even if I'm not okay with it, that might well be because I'm up to the greater evil you are trying to prevent.
See more here, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8271357&cid=50858789
I didn't say anything about Anonymous or the KKK. I was speaking to the logical basis of the GP's argument that if you aren't okay with the police doing something you shouldn't be okay with a private citizen doing it.
Laws are black and white, the real world is very very grey. If it weren't we wouldn't need courts and the constitution wouldn't guarantee the people the ultimate right to block injustice from all branches via the right to jury trial and their power to nullify the law if they feel it is the just thing in this particular case.
All in all violating the privacy of a person and exposing they are a member of a club isn't a particularly harmful thing in and of itself. You aren't damaging someone's person or property. In a sense you are putting them up for a mass jury trial. I'm not saying someone doing something like this should not be charged and made to answer to a jury of their peers. I'm saying that someone trying to do good should be entitled to face a jury of their peers who have actually been informed of their right to nullify the law
Can we condone this in every case? Absolutely not, which is why it is illegal. Is it sometimes necessary to break the law to prevent greater harm? Yes it is. This is the basis for police and military protections (which are not totally illegitimate just heavily abused and taken too far), the civil rights movement, and the fact that the very same IS a valid legal defense in the US and most states. For instance, in Florida medical marijuana was not legal last I checked but medical necessity was a valid legal defense against charges if you are arrested.
Personally, I think that as with most legal charges it comes down to a few key points. Was the intent to prevent a greater evil? Was that evil something which carried a significant risk of harm to others? Was the action committed in this one particular instance the lesser evil? I do not decide, you do not decide, the government is most certainly barred from deciding. This is the entire purpose of juries and why their decisions do not set precedent. It isn't perfect but nullification is the only direct power given to the people. Any one of us has only 1/12 the power to do it in only a single instance but in our Constitutional government it is the people and not any branch of government that has the final say in what was or was not a crime.
Ironically, many members of the KKK got away with crimes as a result of jury nullification in an overwhelmingly racist south. Judges have decided they can lie to juries on the topic, not only not informing of their power to nullify but actually telling them they are not allowed to judge the law. It's a blatant illegal judicial power grab but they found a really good excuse and stuck with it. The Constitution does not limit the basis on which juries may decide your fate and it does not empower judges to set aside jury verdicts, abuse procedural authority to declare mistrials to block nullification, or lie to jurors about it in their instruction. But when all their own peers are behind them, I guess judges don't sweat high treason against the people of the United States much.
You know that this wasn't anonymous right? This was someone else posting garbage to discredit the previously announced 11/5 dump that will be from anonymous.
The police have legal immunity for their crimes while being granted special powers to enable them to commit them and the first amendment only applies to government. Private citizens are granted protections in the Constitution not restrictions while the reverse is true of government. Officials acting in their public capacity do not have protections from the bill of rights as evidenced by the separation of church and state. It is illegal for a government official to bring their religion to their public office/function.
A private citizen not only is granted no protections but must commit civil disobedience at great personal risk to protest for major changes and fight the protected and entrenched powers.
There is no end to the list of things I'm perfectly okay with a private citizen doing while completely opposed to police/military/government doing.
"Isn't VMWare deprecating the vsphere client in favour of the web version? I'm not close enough to the administration to know whether there's missing functionality in the web version"
Yes they are, in 5.5+ and it lacks essential functionality. Since they removed functionality from the cli to push vcenter and the same functionality is notably missing from the web client I think it is a deliberate strategy on their part. You definitely tickled my lazy bone with the suggestion of a client but why mess with vmware anymore? I can rebuild as an openstack configuration and use kvm (or other bits) for that piece. Haproxy/Keepalived takes care of the need for the F5's for my configuration and most configurations I've seen LTMs in and provides a more cloud friendly/portable solution.
Being a stupid and ignorant person who dislikes black people does not make you a member of a radical terrorist organization like the KKK.
This is not a group that sits idle bitching about the guy down the street with other like minded fools.
But unlike being a criminal, being a Klan member indicates you are a bad person.
If you can't find enough republicans on the list to stymie their political power in congress I'd be amazed... only a little amazed because I'd assume that meant you didn't have the complete list.
That is true. There was a time to look the other way while things corrected themselves but the time when shouting black power is political suicide just as sure as white power should be coming soon. I mean, there was a time like that before but this time it would be because people shouting black power are racist rather than because everyone else is.
Come now. Be honest. You are a republican and are pretty sure the list of politicians is going to consist almost entirely of figures from your party.
It's got to really suck knowing that without the Klan your party will lose on the balance of power scale.
Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see anything about managing an ESXi 5.1 server in the documentation for this client.
BSD is not a commercial OS and isn't in competition with Linux.
Linux brought those things to the consumer desktop. In the 2000's it not only continued to gain functionality but actually gained polish. Today, Linux is at least as polished and pretty as Windows or OSX.
The only people still using BSD (and honestly most of the "hardcore" distributions of Linux) are people who appreciate difficulty for it's own sake. Unlike windows and OSX you trade no functionality for the polished experience. You simply fall back to manual effort when you need more flexibility than the polished tools provide and most of the time the polished tools break none of it.
If you have trouble with rpmbuild; yum -y local vs make; make install and therefore choose the old way and break package management thus finding yourself in a dependency hell a year later... that's because you are ignorant, perhaps willfully, and your outdated and unpolished system that gives you no added functionality is what you deserve.
For myself... I used desktop linux in 98 and have used linux in the server rack since that time. It has taken many forms and flavors for me including LFS for awhile. That was great for learning how everything works under the hood. If you are using anything but a modern user friendly linux on even a 5 yr old desktop and spending more than 2-4 hours configuring and customizing the OS itself on setup (less than windows or OS X) then I have to question your life choices. Unless are learning, why waste time manually doing things the hard way when you can point and click your way to a solid and well configured launch platform for working on the new thing you are learning now? If there is some detail that matters which you can't point and click you way to, why not help improve the polish so you can move on? The point really extends to experienced users of windows and OS X (by which I really mean the latest and greatest edition of OS X in the same way windows is nothing but the latest and greatest NT) as well.
The OS wars are over. You could make a very good argument that Linux won since it is by far the most heavily deployed OS overall. But really it's more that the war itself become obsolete because open software stacks won. Even if you are using windows outside of certain niche environments most of the software you are using is cross platform OSS and most of your experience takes place in the browser or at least the network. It really makes very little difference what OS you use because no OS actually won and therefore everything has to work everywhere.
I switched from a linux desktop back to windows for years because working on third party systems constantly meant needing windows only apps and because windows got me from scratch to a working platform more quickly. Meanwhile I continued using linux as my first choice for... everything else. Now I've switched back to find Linux Mint actually provides a smoother, easier, and prettier experience these days on my brand new high end laptop supporting all the recently released hardware out of the box. It was so quick and easy I actually did spent a little time customizing frivolous things like window behavior, desktop effects, and widgets. I'm not sure I want any new innovation on my desktop. Just keep pace and let things grow more stable. Maybe fix the odd clipboard behavior and inconsistency? Middle click paste is a cool concept but not worth the hassle. Finally fix the quirks of kmixer?
The only thing left was support for the vsphere client. The virtual F5 in my lab ties me to this and the lack of functionality in the web equivalent in newer versions also hampers me here requiring me to virtualize windows. The solution is I'll simply remove both vmware and F5 from my lab. Many enterprises still have these things but that isn't the direction of the future. The future is about the open equivalents that have caught up now on the core functionality you need from these things are easily deployed on any cloud stack giving greater flexibility and automatabil
This sounds like the first major piece of propaganda to counter the political momentum of Sanders.
Almost as bad as CNN's 4000 references to Hillary as "Presidential" and the quick takedown and switch they did when their real poll showed Sanders as the winner of the debate.
Enterprises are just another class of consumers.
Cell phones, xbox, and other devices have the claim that the device accesses their networks and therefore they must retain control. There is no such argument for a wifi router firmware which is in almost every case 99+% modified open code and 100% the property of the end purchaser.
There is a huge security risk, with radar interference the least of it, and no upside to locking people out of their devices to which the manufacturer has no access right after the point of sale.
Most people aren't as technically astute as slashdotters. These will be marketed and return side-by-side with quality drives. No doubt less tech savy consumers will do what they've always done and look at capacity vs price. To them SSD just means blazing fast.
They won't know these are sub-par scams piggy backing on the current buzzwords. Giant SD cards pretending to be the latest SSD chips and with no cache.
The problem he is pointing out isn't js specific.
If languages have poor adoption and support you have to reinvent every wheel.
C has it's ups and downs but sucking isn't one of its properties.
It sounds exactly like applied math. You certainly don't need a university for learning that. Beyond that it sounds like applied math through a lens of creativity and ad hoc abstraction. Unless you are majoring in that direction at a really good school you won't even find a professor looking at the world that way in a University let alone be taught it. But learning in tidbits and trying to solve new problems with what you have rather than being taught the textbook answer right off the bat leads there as a natural byproduct.
"And an engineer can tell you how to build it better, cheaper or both."
Both the self taught professional and the fresh out of college kid might well have the title "engineer." You can learn everything they teach at universities on your own now (especially regarding software engineering). It isn't even hard to find.
"And point out that you need redundancy"
Along with everything you'd study on the path to learning how to build such a platform. Not that you'd have to be concerned about nics and power supplies. Your web platform would be cloud based. You'd have redundant systems in place that spawn instances via cloud apis possibly even using nice portable docker containers, software defined networking, systems like puppet that configure them and install packages based on role enforce their state (files kept to checksums, ssh keys installs and logins disabled, firewall policies, services up, everything configured to run on unprivileged accounts, etc) configure new instances on the fly, redundant load balacers which those instances automatically register with, ultralight mq communications bus, redundant and distributed data, geoloction aware dns ties together your load balancers. One true thread per core, cooperative threads with a zero blocking design because the kernel the bottleneck when you need a lot of concurrent connections. If you lose a node or one has an issue you can't automatically resolve via script you just tear it down and auto-spawn a fresh replacement. Automatic seamless in place code deployments that can run the new and old code in parallel in case a rollback is needed. Session draining for zero impact reboots. Distributed log parsing with something like logstash and monitoring agents on every node. Smart certificate based authentication and authorization systems with granular permissions.
There is a huge amount of engineering in a platform like this but it isn't of the theoretically more efficient algorithm variety. The really hard problems are solved already and most everything you need to build the above is free and well documented open source. You just combine it and build an app (which is still challenging of course). Amazon. Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and a million smaller players are ready to take care of the underlying hardware. If you want or need a truly private cloud there is always open stack. Also free, open, and well documented. Set up well and you just buy another rack, plug it in, and your already in place systems detect it, provision it and grow onto it. That leaves only a rack monkey needed and most datacenters will provide one and hands for replacing hardware.
Almost every bit of the best functionality is fully open and documented, just about everything has an API or has one being built and where there is an API there can be automation. Even some of the most feature rich and dense enterprise gear and racks is "open source hardware" now. The same is true of network gear where the best no longer have IOS but have onboard programmable fpgas which handle the data plan while all the logic and control plane is actually handled by a separate linux server.
Any credible university will teach you, that stack overflow is not up to grade and should not be cited as a source in your papers.
Self study guy would have found and utilized it during the first week.
"Which one would be better? It depends on the person, and it definitely depends on where the former person got their degree.
In my experience, the best people are self-taught, but the best of the best taught themselves in a university environment."
I would agree. I think a big part of why the best are self taught is nurture rather than nature and that universities have lots of concentrated information with fewer gaps to be had but what the same methods that convey that seamless information fail to teach one how to learn, how to improvise and fill round holes with square pegs, and how to scavenge information.
That is why I suggested starting with apprenticeship, a guided self study. Even a couple years and those who do well THEN go to a university. Whether you believe that finds those with the right nature, or nurtures the right learning mindset; the result should be isolating people who already think and explore in a revenous and creative way. Then you unleash them on a massive buffet of information and resources.
I'd put my money on the resulting individuals bneing top of their field.
"Just guessing, I would say that the person with 4 years experience would do better than the person fresh out of college.
The person with 8 years experience would probably be about on par with the person with a degree plus 4 years."
"On the other hand, there are plenty of jobs that require a 4 year degree and 6-10 years experience and having 20 years experience
isn't going to help you land those jobs."
In my experience they catch up around 8-10yrs of actual experience. At which point in real world terms you have enough experience to be at the top of the profession. More is not going to make you better. Either you are a rockstar or just a 10yr old cog who has managed to avoid getting fired at this point.
But what you outline above is poor hiring practice. In most cases it is "or equivalent experience" even if they don't list it and usually they aren't looking for extra experience to make up for the degree so this stays 10+. Degrees don't make for superior developers/tech workers so mandating them is poor practice but is a reality that it happens for senior six figure positions like this exceptions can often be made for proven rockstars. Companies looking for 10+ are almost always enterprise level so yoiu should expect you won't get the position if your last position wasn't an enterprise position. At 10 years and above it's about Ivy league experience not ivy league degrees. Once you've been paid six figures by a blue chip company and held the position for 2yrs+ you will likely at least get a serious interview when applying for similar positions after that.
If you are just staring out consider how you will get your first position when entry level is four year degree or equivalent experience. It is possible but you'll start at low pay for small employers and spend the next 4 years having to be a rockstar to get to high pay enterprise positions with the same requirements.
"Give them both six months from that starting date and you might be surprised at how quickly things have evened up, and given another six months it'll be all the other way."
Except it won't be and generally never is. It isn't like you learn more at a university, you just alternate between learning more slowly and being dumped mass volumes of information you have zero chance of mastering or retaining. Everything you'll learn at a university is a google search away. In my experience they never catch up. Best case they are about 3 years behind for the rest of their career. Worst case they remain in your bottom 5% and depend on various exploits in the way metrics are done at a company to make the high volume cookie cutter work they churn out look impressive. They are almost never out-of-the-box thinkers and usually the first to point and claim something is unfair. They are the reason for all the red tape.
That quick rule and process violating move that secured the relationship on the new hundred million dollar contract but would have gotten the guy fired if it didn't work... That is never your engineer with the degree, the engineer with the degree is the one complaining that he churned out 10x more cookie cutter work and his stats are better but that guy is getting the promotion or that people look the other way when that guy takes long lunches or that guy gets paid more.
I do however think if you started with a few years in the real world and THEN went to the university you might be ahead of either. But I could be wrong, you might just lose your edge.
The only thing a degree is good for is getting past HR departments and other management tiers that incorrectly believe it correlates with superior employees or at least correlates with better defense of hiring choices.
Is that even really a thing anymore? The things university education used to be good at teaching to provide and advantage are now efficiently encoded into libraries. Leaving university students as people who spent four years training for something and shing up still not actually knowing knowing how to do it.
A self-taught (with a mentor) "code monkey" could learn enough in two years to build a self-healing self-scaling globally distributed fast web platform that can handle a million connections per second.
In the real world the difference between the guru and everybody else isn't deep theory or advanced maths. Almost every problem has been solved already. It's the ability to creatively look at a new problem and find a relationship between it and an efficiently solved problem you do know and adapt the solution. It's the ability to figure out how to get and find all the datapoints you don't already have. Classrooms teach none of that. Classrooms teach fairness, the real world is never fair. Classrooms require a teaching style where everything you need to solve the problem has been given to you. The real world does not, real employers do not. Classrooms teach material in a logical progression. The ability to recognize that progression and utilize the hints provided by it (the biggest of which is that what you just learned or what logically follows from it is part of the answer) almost guarantees academic success. The real world is chaos, where the problem of today may never have been encountered before, may not be perfectly solvable by anything you know or at all, and there may be no hints or all the hints might be wrong.