May I say something regarding your experience with IIT-JEE?
I know atleast three people whose parents had set their hopes unrealistically high about IIT.
When they didn't get through, they just lost it. They completely lost every bit of confidence they had, lost interest in studies, and fucked up their college and careers for good.
I don't blame the parents. Every parent thinks his son/daughter is the next Einstein and instills this "get into IIT or you are an utter failure in life", and sadly this gets drilled into their heads pretty early in life.
What needs to be understood is that not every genius in India gets into IIT, because there just aren't enough seats, and there are too many really smart people around. At the end of it, only those who are smart AND work insanely hard get into. And I really don't think any less of anyone who doesn't, like the parents and the students themselves shouldn't.
Get this in your head: It doesn't matter if you got into IIT or not. At some point, no one cares. Hell, I don't even have a college degree yet because I keep dropping years, and there are still companies trying to lure me with good development jobs and attractive salaries, which freshers start earning only a few years down the line! (I am still a student in India by the way)
If you have a masters degree in CS in a good school and have got to the Google interviews, you must be a pretty smart programmer.
I just wanted to add something to the discussion here.. A lot of sugar is definitely harmful to you, but is it sensible to complete avoid sugar everywhere as if it is poison? Isn't all this a bit hyped up?
Example: I don't drink any processed juice or soda. But I do take sugar in coffee, and I eat chocolates once in a while. Is there any good reason for me to cut down on this sugar intake too? (and replace it with other so called "healthy alternatives" like those with Aspartame?)
There is no harm in asking. I have been conducting interviews for developers in the past couple of days, and I have given honest feedback to everyone who came by. Although HR is not my full time job or specialization..
PHP's two most popular SAPIs are embedded and FastCGI. mod_php is embedded inside of Apache (and is problematic), whereas the FastCGI SAPI communicates via TCP or a Unix socket. The two major (there may be others) FastCGI process managers are spawn-fcgi (a Lighttpd subproject, http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki) and PHP-FPM. The latter is quite stable and has some nifty features (http://php-fpm.org/).
PHP-FPM used to exist as a patch for PHP (http://php-fpm.org/downloads/). It's now in core, and can be built with the --enable-fpm configure flag.
What's "problematic" about mod_php? It's got to be one of the more widely used bits of software out there. Like anything, I'm sure there are tradeoffs involved, but perhaps it's better to be a bit more explicit about what they are rather than stopping at "problematic"?
I've had a couple problems but I wouldn't call it problematic:
1) When you select mod_php/the Apache SAPI, certain functions get disabled like chroot() and pcntl_fork() since they're not safe to be used under Apache. This is annoying when you have some backend scripts that need those functions.
2) If you run PHP with all the popular plugins, you're looking at about 15MB per Apache process/thread. @256 active clients that's almost 4GB of RAM. Insane, especially considering it's loaded in memory whether or not the requested resource is PHP or not.
I recently switched to Nginx+FastCGI and I'm very happy with the speed and memory usage. FPM makes it even better.
For 2, wouldn't most of that memory be either COW or physically shared, read-only? It's been about a year and a half since I've operated a large PHP site, but I don't recall the apache workers getting anywhere close to 15MB each, unless a request was operating on a larger than normal dataset. (this site used curl, gd, memcache, uuid, pspell, tidy, soap, and probably some others I've forgotten, loaded dynamically.)
I wonder if this solves the problem I've had of having a single APC cache across php-cgi children with fastcgi. From what I read handing the process management off to PHP would achieve that, is that what this is doing?
Oh cool, I have read that post before but must have skipped over it. I tried the hackish method in that last comment before but it gave me problems. At the moment given that it's fairly low load what I was doing I just left the default method in place which doesn't share APC.
I like the chocolate bar experiment. Even if the rewards were switched, more people would still opt for the "busy" option. That has very interesting implications:
At times, the reward really doesn't matter. It's the process which is important.
