Why must everything end up being a utilitarian pursuit? I don't think it is surprising to many that the brain is plastic enough to absorb certain details subconsciously, but isn't it enough that the book engages us during the time we read it. Ideally, we would like all books to have a long lasting impression on us, but that question is on a slightly different note than the question being posed in the article.
Maybe I'm being a prude, or maybe it's just inertia, but does everyone have an easy time replacing a textbook with an electronic device? An argument can probably be made about how ever-advancing technology might make note-taking (and the like) easier, but I often have a hard time detaching myself from the (very) personal experience a book ends up being. I don't just mean the contents of it, but also the feel of having a book in your hand and it being a companion. So much so, that there are times when reflecting back to certain textbooks, I'm reminded of the how the book 'looked' and 'felt'. Almost like how face-to-face conversation differs from over-the-wire.
If an individual decides to be highly competitive by working crazy hours, is that considered bad? Will her colleagues complain to the labor department? A capitalist country's inhabitants, who belong to a system driven only by output and profit, complaining about labor practices, is the biggest oxymoron. Surely, the Chinese industries tactics are understandable?
In order for the Chinese manufacturing industry to be competitive, they indulge in such practices. If you want to remain competitive, one way is to cut costs or increase production, the way they do or by way of technological innovation. Or create high quality products, that consumers would want to buy, instead of the cheap {quality, cost} ones made in China.
The opponents of outsourcing are surely barking up the wrong tree. The Chinese workers surely have a choice of not working there. Agreed, that if they choose to work, life is pretty much miserable. But what if they choose not to work there. Do they go back to their non-existent farms, or to the streets? If such labor laws are enforced, the obvious impact is that oursourcing would move elsewhere. There will always be some country willing to take it up, and not to mention the people who would welcome a respite from their poverty.
The Chinese industry has decided to stay competitive. The people are probably between the devil or the deep sea, and it's all about choosing the better path, which in this case, simply is working 15 hours a day.
No no, I think he speaks of 50 requests from the get go, i.e., 50 requests of 100 friends each, irrespective of the number of servers. These 50 requests is unrelated to the number of friends, it's just some huge number of requests. He claims that no matter how you divide the data, if a certain number of requests create a CPU bottleneck, they'll continue to do so no matter how you increase memory.
Well, this is the underlying logic indeed. What the author mentions is seeing 50 requests for 100 friends, where these friends might be divided into 3 servers. So, the keys are hashed to servers, i.e., if there is only 1 multi-get request, each server would see only 1 request. However, if there are 50 multi-get requests, each server would see 50 requests irrespective of the number of keys (friends) it caters to.
I think the advantages of a university education have been chronicled elsewhere. However, to your specific points:
Yes, it is about building efficient and reliable software, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Even when you build software for fun, you'd like to be robust, else it's the creator who has to pick up the pieces later when trouble strikes. Good professors explain the need for formal verification in programs, and that kind of insight is important for us to understand the limitations of software in the industry today.
I don't think there's anything taught in a university regarding the "efficient and reliable software worldview" that would not lead to a fulfilling career. In fact, its only an advantage, because you have a perspective on why software should be reliable. It's something that people use, and possibly their daily experiences are influenced by how good (reliable+efficient+fast) your software is. What that worldview might give you is to empathize with these very users ... which in fact, is one of the most important take aways from a successful industry career.
All writers I've read are impeccable in their spelling and grammar. Writing may not be only about grammar and spelling, but these are the fundamentals, without which you don't have the right tools at your disposal to affect the sentiments of others.
Building software is fun. Building reliable and efficient software is fun, as much is building software that is fast, and none of these attributes make creating a piece of software less original. These characteristics are the building blocks of good software, originality lies in the idea, what your software is supposed to do, but reliability and efficiency are inherently assumed.
University education is a wonderful opportunity to not only explore computer science but also its interactions with other fields (like neuroscience, electrical engg, etc etc). It's all about finding where your true calling lies in, and a university education only helps with that.
I agree to what you say, but by economic divide in India, I meant, the rich get richer, the poor, frankly cannot get any poorer there and are untouched, maybe even adversely affected by the economic boom.
For the sake of free-market policies and rampant industrialization, people are displaced without their consent. For example, dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people in India.
Successive governments like to publicize decreasing poverty figures, which are constantly rebutted by independent agencies.
A 2007 report by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) found that 77% of Indians, or 836 million people, lived on less than 20 rupees per day (USD 0.50 nominal, USD 2.0 in PPP), with most working in "informal labour sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty."
[http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSDEL218894]
In fact, he does mention Peron's protectionism being a root cause (along with depression and wars) for Argentina's financial woes today. He states that protectionism, regulation, large state enterprises (which are anti-capitalistic themes) have never been 'particularly good for growth'.
I feel he does start of with the capitalistic premise. Only later is education hypothesized as a major culprit.
"...just ask India and China before they modernized and liberalized their economies."
Well, modernization and liberalization of economies have increased the economic divide in India. It's not that liberal economic policies are wrong, just that their implementations are always skewed by greedy corporations. A government's responsibility is not only to cater to cash sinks but also the people they govern, which especially in India, is the poor majority. Of course the GDP goes up, there is no question about that. But at what cost?
This is another economist trying to beat the capitalistic drum. Apart from Peron's protectionist policies (which some call a drive toward self-sustenance), one shouldn't forget contributing factors like the 1948 exclusion of Argentina exports from the Marshall Plan by the Truman administration. Peron might have been mistaken on many counts, but so many things are ignored behind the veil of apparently protectionist policies, like worker protection and upliftment, social infrastructure growth, etc.
What a myopic article, so many things are ignored, he's trying to put blinders on us.