Comments on: TechZing 67 – College? We Don’t Need No Stinking College!

By: TMUser

TMUser — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 04:20:00 +0000

@Dan

That all depends, you could have not known that technology was going to be where it is today but because where we are now you think that 10 years go you could have done differently.

If that was the case with everything why don’t you quit what you are doing right now and do what is going to be the next hot thing in 10 years, heck even 5 years in the future would be a nice start.

By: Dan DeFelippi

Dan DeFelippi — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:32:55 +0000

I agree with how ridiculous US colleges have become. Jason touched on my biggest issue, that they’ve become trade schools. Education should be about learning to think, not learning a trade. Paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn how to create widgets is insane.

When I first entered college for computer engineering after HS I had this wrong mindset. I was going to get a diploma rather than learn. I had no interest in non-computer courses. While I did learn a lot I hated it and dropped out. Learning to code is something anyone semi-intelligent can do with a book, a text editor and a compiler. Eventually I went back to a community college (reasonable tuition) for business but made sure I took additional classes outside my degree such as ethics. I wanted to think. I didn’t care about the diploma.

If I had to do it over again I would have saved the tuition money, taught myself CS, and jumped right into a job.

By: Chris Boesing

Chris Boesing — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:46:57 +0000

Twitter and Facebook use Cassandra only in a few places, not as the overall datastore.
I guess Cassandra failed for Digg because it has a different load than most other companies. I would guess 90% of the interactions with the database of Facebook/Twitter are read-operations, Digg on the other side has a lot more write-operations because of all the diggs.
But what is in my opinion the really interesting part of the whole Digg story is, that they said they weren’t able to scale MySQL anymore.
You get to 500 Servers, have 40 Million USD, are a Top 100 Website and you haven’t figured the scaling thing out? How do you get to 500 Servers but adding another 50 becomes a problem? That’s what I don’t get.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:19:18 +0000

@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh You might want to take a quick look at the documentation for the Titanium desktop platform to double check that what I'm saying is accurate, but unfortunately I think it is. I'm really hoping that Appcelerator transitions their desktop platform to work like their mobile platform as I would love to build some OSX applications using pure Javascript.

By: Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh

Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:03:25 +0000

Ugh, that sucks 🙁

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:48:33 +0000

@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh Sort of. I think if you write your app inside of Webkit like Justin did with Swarm, then yes. But the newer approach that Titanium takes with mobile development is that you don't have HTML and CSS and all that hosted in Webkit, you just write straight Javascript based on an abstracted API. I really wish their desktop platform worked this way, but it seems to be of the older generation and requires you to write your app as if it were a web app or something.

By: Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh

Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 04:38:47 +0000

regarding appcelerator: can you use the same code for desktop and mobile apps?

By: Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh

Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 03:58:32 +0000

Jason, America is no longer the place where if you mess up, you get fired. Instead, you get bailed out and in fact, become richer.

By: Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh

Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 03:22:38 +0000

Forget college. Private schools for toddlers are $20K/yr.

It’s completely retarded and there are two problems:
* Government interference
* Government interference

The government interferes WAY too much in the credit markets by guaranteeing loans. 89% of mortgages for the first half of this year were guaranteed by the damn US government.

There is still a housing bubble.

But you know what? If you can play the bubble game, you’ll do quite well. Education is the current bubble but I suspect it is nearing the end.