I think in a lot of ways this is related to the relative overpowering of desktop computers for daily use. It's been true for years now that computers are highly overpowered for what they are typically used for.
Quad core machine with a million gigs of ram for email and a web browser?
Sure there are LOTS of good reasons for having legitimate CPU power, but a lot of times any random Ghz level processor is going to provide plenty of responsiveness for daily tasks. The only thing I can think of that people typically do that is processor intensive is HD playback, and that is easily accelerated nowadays.
It's not always about absolute performance, it's about "good enough" performance. If ARM is going to supply good enough performance with the additional benefits of being cheaper and more portable, then why NOT use it?
This isn't about ARM versus Intel. This is about having adequately powered portables.
Intel is losing the low-end CPU market. That much is true. But the low-end CPU market is the new middle-end CPU market. I think we are going to see an age where more and more people have "low-end" portables as their main computers. The barrier between low-end, middle-end, and high-end has shifted significantly I think. A few years ago, we all had uses for high-end computers. Nowadays, what would be considered high-end is a waste for most people.
Also, we can't forget the impact of the cloud on this. We don't need a lot of computing power locally now. For many of the types of applications that one would need high cpu for, the cloud potentially provides those solutions for us.
I, for one, don't see myself trading in my desktop at work anytime soon. But I do see myself using my laptop a lot more than my desktop at home. My couch is a lot more comfortable than my computer chair.
"So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality."
A lot of people here are focused on "being smarter" or "doing a better job" or "higher quality"
Excluding all of the self-taught developers, and limiting ourselves only to people who follow the standard "get a 4-year college degree then go out in the real world and work" crowd, as that's pretty sizable. Make extrapolations as necessary.
Remember your first year (or two?) of development? Looking back, you were probably way in over your head, had mentors looking after you, making tons of mistakes etc.
Fast forward 5 years. Can you write code faster? Probably not. Can you write better code? Sometimes. It's all about experiences and learning from them. When you take a new job, or a new project, or a new anything, you call upon past experiences to guide the efforts of this process. It might be something as vague as "I am going to write tests first because I found it helped me earlier", or (ignoring TDD), "I'm not going to write this function like this, because I know the code will be hard to test when I get around to writing a test for it later"
You learn this all from experience. Senior people who have been in the field longer have more experience. They aren't "better" in the sense that they are smarter or have more intelligence, they just know MORE because they've been exposed to more.
It's also why so many people (especially in hacker news) have been successful without degrees. It's not a degree that matters it's EXPERIENCE.
It might be a fine line differentiating between smartness gained from pure intelligence and "smartness" gained via experience, but I think it's an important distinction, and one that I think this post highlights well.
Thanks for the resources guys. It sounds like I need at least a couple of index funds to be adequately diversified, and the books that have been mentioned here have been mentioned in numerous other places that I've seen; time to give them a look and spend at least a little time learning.
As for the people talking about not taking the time to learn, I understand that I'm not going to have crazy returns or anything like that. I just want an investment vehicle that will outperform basic savings accounts and such, and, hopefully, beat inflation.
Also, as for people saying "don't put money in the stock market if you need it in 3-6 years." I certainly won't need it; I was more emphasizing that I want something sooner than 401k, and potentially would like to have it available that soon. T
he more realistic scenario is I use it as a gap retirement fund. I'm 26 now, and would be happy to retire in 25-30 years. This means I need 10-15 years of gap money before 401k becomes viable.
Vanguard has been mentioned multiple times in this thread. I used to have a 401k with them, with a previous employer, but I didn't pay much attention to their offerings. For passively dumping small amounts of money into a small set of ETFs monthly, do they offer a superior service to some of the other online brokers that I mentioned?
My opinion/sense is that Postgres is better in every way, except replication. Which ironically makes it far worse than mysql since you can't easily use it for huge datasets.
Just my opinion. I went to some random school that nobody here is going to know of or care about, and I had a blast at school. College should be a place to have fun at. Realistically, 3+ years out of college nobody cares about your education anymore anyway.
If you really want to go to MIT/etc. or something and kill yourself for 4 years, go for it. I don't think it's necessary, unless you HAVE to work at <insert name of prestigious company> as your first job out of college.
Also, don't underestimate the effect of a full-ride or close to it. Being debt free or nearly so while making 60k+ a year in your early 20s is nothing to scoff at.
If I were in your shoes, knowing what I know now, at 25, and given the options listed, I would take the full ride in a heartbeat.
Quad core machine with a million gigs of ram for email and a web browser?
Sure there are LOTS of good reasons for having legitimate CPU power, but a lot of times any random Ghz level processor is going to provide plenty of responsiveness for daily tasks. The only thing I can think of that people typically do that is processor intensive is HD playback, and that is easily accelerated nowadays.
It's not always about absolute performance, it's about "good enough" performance. If ARM is going to supply good enough performance with the additional benefits of being cheaper and more portable, then why NOT use it?
This isn't about ARM versus Intel. This is about having adequately powered portables.
Intel is losing the low-end CPU market. That much is true. But the low-end CPU market is the new middle-end CPU market. I think we are going to see an age where more and more people have "low-end" portables as their main computers. The barrier between low-end, middle-end, and high-end has shifted significantly I think. A few years ago, we all had uses for high-end computers. Nowadays, what would be considered high-end is a waste for most people.
Also, we can't forget the impact of the cloud on this. We don't need a lot of computing power locally now. For many of the types of applications that one would need high cpu for, the cloud potentially provides those solutions for us.
I, for one, don't see myself trading in my desktop at work anytime soon. But I do see myself using my laptop a lot more than my desktop at home. My couch is a lot more comfortable than my computer chair.