kaos

I'm trying to decide what I want to do with my web development/design/computer skills. I have been coding PHP/MySQL for seven years. I'm 19, a sophomore in college. I don't want to study computer science in college because I want more diversity in my education, so my real question is, OUTSIDE of college, what should I do? I currently make $15 an hour coding, but I am about to transfer to another university where I will lose this job. I really want to combine my skills with another field, like electronics or biology or something. I will be studying environmental science with a concentration in policy and a minor in econ. I'm not sure if I should look for a job at the new school doing something similar to keep my career in web development going or not. While $15/hr is good for a 19 year old, it's only $30,000 a year full-time which is not a great salary. Also, environmental science would probably also only land me a job at $30,000 a year. I'm wondering how much money I will be looking at. Any ideas? Thanks.

I'm not 100% sure either, but I tend to think of architecture as a structure thing, meaning organization, protocols, APIs, file hierarchies, etc. I feel like a designer might design the user interface and idealize what it will do whereas an architect might decide how the project is organized, what classes/methods it will use, their params and return values, database structure, etc. Here's wikipedia for you: "The architect makes high-level design choices much more often than low-level choices. In addition, the architect may sometimes dictate technical standards, including coding standards, tools, or platforms, so as to advance business goals rather than to place arbitrary restrictions on the choices of developers. Note that software architects rarely deal with the physical architecture of the hardware environment, confining themselves to the design methodology of the code." "Software design is a process of problem-solving and planning for a software solution. After the purpose and specifications of software are determined, software developers will design or employ designers to develop a plan for a solution. It includes low-level component and algorithm implementation issues as well as the architectural view." So yeah... looks like the architect plans the project out and the designer actually writes most of the code.

Hey good job for learning to code at your age I learned PHP when I was in 7th grade and it's changed my life. A year ago when I got a job (just a month after I enrolled in 4 year university) as a web developer and it pays $15 an hour. I don't really know anyone else my age except maybe a few engineering interns that get paid that well, plus the job is really chill, fun, and challenging. If you are looking to keep going with coding, you should give web languages like PHP and jQuery - a library for JavaScript that is REALLY nice btw - look. I'm seeing a huge trend where society is moving from hard, download-and-install apps to web apps. But if you want a good compiled language, I agree with everyone else, look at C/C++ as a good standard language or maybe Java if you want something super cross-platform.

Congrats on PHP! I use it every day at work and love it. You'll definitely be more marketable I think with knowledge of PHP. While you're at it, have you considered learning MySQL or JavaScript?

I've done this before to a video game client. The problem is that variables loose their names so you don't know what anything represents and there is no hierarchy of files for organization or anything like that, as Captain said. I don't remember what I used but it was called a decompiler, not a disassembler. Hope you can get your formulas re-worked out without too much trouble.

Okay I was outside today and I saw a weird bug that looked very exotic. I looked more closely and it basically looked like a catterpiller with the head of a butterfly. It was having a VERY hard time walking around and it kept getting flipped over. I've never seen a bug like this before at all and I couldn't find any results in google that looked similar. I took some pictures of it and a short video. Is anybody interested in the pictures? If so I can post them. Also, any ideas what it was, like was it a mutant caterpillar that only half morphed into a butterfly?

Alright maybe i'll change the answer for 9.

That one would be easier for people with coding experience, due to the coding definition of "append." But anybody should be able to get it. Yeah, I originally started this post a few months ago, but I though I would revive it now that the riddle is back up and running.

Quick question, why is cable able (haha that rhymes ) to deliver extremely high quality, high resolution to televisions (HD) with pretty much zero lag, yet when it sends information to a computer (just a few MB of data for example) it can be painfully slow? That seems stupid to me, maybe they could give the internet more speed in the future.

Hey a while back I had made a post regarding a riddle that I've made. Well, that riddle gradually died out as people figured it out, and later on, it truly died when my webhost canceled my account. Well, now that I have a new web host, its back! I plan on adding more to the riddle and/or new riddles. http://riddle.studymachine.org Enjoy , and don't be afraid to share hints and answers with each other. Just please make your answers hard to read or something so you don't spoil it for everyone else. P.S. If you are the first to figure out a level, your name goes in the records.

I recently saw a show on physics that said something about some universal constant(s) might actually have been different billions of years ago, implying that these constants change. Does anybody know where I can get some more info on this?

Understood.

Ok this is all very interesting to me. I understand that space is not surrounded by anything, or inside of anything. So if not, then can it even have a shape? And if it DOES have a shape, wouldn't you have to find an edge? I mean, what if it's shape was a U for example. If that was true, there could be a galaxy on one tip of the U and another on the other tip. Then the fastest distance should be between the tips, but that would be impossible. This sounds very very much like the whole wormhole theory where taking a shortcut between places by bending space, except that this is without bending. This is the same thing but space would already naturally be like that. Also, how is it possible for everything to be moving farther away from everything unless there is a specific point in the center? There is no possible way that I can imagine for any number of things to move so that they are all moving away from eachother at the same time without there being a point. I'm not trying to disagree, just trying to understand. Thanks

Ok I'm happy to help look hard for the answer. Now that I know nobody knows the answer off the top of their head. My first guess though is that those questions are probably unanswered. I'll look around for some theories.

Everybody always says you have to measure things such as speed and distance relative to something else, which is true. But what if everything has an absolute position within the universe. Like the universe was a big 3D grid, with the center being the point of the Big Bang. It is expanding infinatly, on all sides, but the center is still the same. That means that everything could be measured to have an absolute position within the universe. How to measure the dead center of the universe? Equal distances from all sides, because it is expanding at an equal rate on all sides right? Also you could argue that things are moving so fast and even expanding, so they are never in the same place.