I know that moderation is carried out by monkeys at typewriters when they have a bit of time after finishing a chapter of Shakespeare, but how exactly is explaining things from a potential interviewer's perspective "off topic" when the article is about the question of how to land a job?
No. If I'm handed a resume that I deem completely unsuitable, I won't bother.
How do these people make it to your short list of interviews before being able to use your spider senses on them?
It depends on what we are hiring for and who is screening the interviews. If a resume looks remotely interesting, I will usually do a phone screen. If I'm looking at hiring an intern or fresh-out, I will usually peruse the resumes in the local university's database.
Also there are reasons people develop a chip on their shoulder. I've put my time in the trenches. Sure I'm jaded by the process.
See, the fact that you're jaded enough to have a chip on your shoulder isn't helpful, or even a good indication that you will do well at all in situations where not everybody's goals and capabilities are perfectly aligned. Since such situations arise often in real life, I recommend doing something about that. Although I never had a chip like you describe, I have had other issues, and I found the book "That'S Outside My Boat Letting Go Of What You Can't Control" by Charlie Jones and Kim Doren to be very helpful. There are a lot of similar books out there. Spend a couple of hours in the self-help section of B&N and find one that speaks to you, and then read it carefully and really think about what it says. If you find the right book, you will realize that in retrospect, it was all silly common sense stuff, but for some reason, you had a mental block against it before you read the book.
Who would you honestly hire?
I thought I made that clear. But, in any case, I personally don't give a rat's ass about how well-connected somebody is. It doesn't reflect well on me if I'm not getting the job done. If I'm getting pressure from above to hire somebody who isn't going to be helpful, I'll walk. I've left places for less grief than that.
As far as going "to the same university as me," well, I don't have a degree, so I don't care about that.
Now, let's get to you. I don't really care that much about your degree or your straight A's, although I will take a look at the courses you took to figure out what you SHOULD have learned. I went to an even cheaper college than you (self-taught). About you being fully capable of doing the job; well, I'd like to see what you've done on your resume. Especially these days, if you don't have any other employment on your resume I can ask you about, there is no good reason for you to not have some open-source cred -- otherwise, I won't think you're passionate about doing technical stuff -- that you were just partying when you went to school, and that it's just a job to you. Finally, during the interview process we WILL have some whiteboard time where I will give you, not stupid Microsoft-style problems, but some problems representative of what you will encounter at work, just to watch how you think.
From my experience, I think my expectations and motivations are fairly similar to others around me. But I have always worked for highly technical companies, and have worked for semiconductor companies for the last decade and a half, and for these companies, results and getting it right the first time count for a lot.
I can't speak to your past experiences, but I can assure you, that as someone who doesn't even have a degree, I have had my share of rejections in hiring in the past, but except for the odd month here or there, I have been gainfully employed for over 31 years. So, at one particular employer or another, you may be competing against the President's daughter, or the owner's best customer's kid, or whoever, for a position which would report to some guy who's the world's worst brown-noser and is all about projecting the right image to upper management. So now you're upset that you lost the job. That's a REALLY stupid attitude. Seriously, you wouldn't have wanted to work for that guy anyway. Believe me, I have, and it sucks royally, because he's all about abusing his employees to try to make himself look good to HIS management.
When I'm interviewing a candidate like you, I can probably detect a bit about your opinion of how the world works, and also a bit about your opinion of yourself as the "needle in the haystack." So, depending on exactly how you comport yourself in the interview, I might be viewing you as "incredibly naive", or as an "arrogant asshole", or as having "the world's biggest chip on his shoulder."
So try to be sweet and hide your contempt of the process you assume I am using for hiring. You probably won't get hired if I think you're just "incredibly naive", but you certainly won't get hired if I put you into one of the other two categories.
For PR/sales/schmoozing type jobs, it might be "who you know."
But, I don't know any technical people who want to be known as the one who brought the bozo in, even if they stand to gain a $5000.00 bonus from HR for a hiring recommendation.
So, pem's law for getting a technical job:
It's not just what you know; it's who you know who knows what you know.
When I'm trying very hard to make a program do what I want it to, the more hoops I have to jump through for every iteration of trying to make it work, the madder I get.
then you replied:
You must be a Windows user or haven't updated to an Apple OS past the old world Macs.
I have been racking my brain for the last half hour, trying to figure out what I wrote that bothered you so much that you felt compelled to resort to this sort of name-calling, but I can't figure it out, so expect a communication from my lawyer demanding compensation for this terrible libel you have committed about my computing practices in front of the entire slashdot community.
I use some software that uses FlexLM, and that can use a NIC address for a license key. So inadvertently having lots of machines that could run the same copy wouldn't be a BAD thing...:-)
If a user who goes through three levels of menus, opens an advanced configuration window, checks three checkboxes, and hits the 'A' key gets a weird error message for his trouble, that's a little bug.
When I'm trying very hard to make a program do what I want it to, the more hoops I have to jump through for every iteration of trying to make it work, the madder I get. So, the fact that the software has dark corners that you can get to like this is already a major strike against it...
I don't necessarily disagree, but, you can't stop at hardware. Airfoil design, drug design, bridge design, basically anything. We are getting to the point where what people call "math" in this argument can be used to simulate anything and give you almost whatever confidence level you want that it is going to work.
Anyway, my argument about "effort" wasn't amount. A restaurant busboy or dishwasher, or someone who mows lawns for a living expends considerably more effort than I do. My argument was basically about the KIND of effort.
"One is simulated based on math and the other is a very expensive working / failing product"
That's silly. All the design work and running the simulations together winds up being more expensive that the mask in a lot of cases. (A large part of the expense of the first run of silicon is the lost time to market when you get it wrong.)
Also, you missed the part where I said the risk approached zero because the non-patentable prior art of the simulation showed that the expensive hardware was going to work.
You also missed the part where I said that you can put the exact same "code" (Verilog or VHDL RTL) into an FPGA (and you can buy general-purpose FPGA boards that can be reprogrammed over and over, just like computers can be programmed over and over with software) or into a hard coded chip. Using the FPGA is NOT a simulation; NOT pure math, because you can hook it up to other devices and make it do physical things. Now, you have three implementations -- simulation, implementation in an FPGA via a bitstream that looks just like software, and implementation in gates. (Oh, btw, the tiny little patented part is very small and could be implemented on a multi-chip shuttle run for a couple of thousand dollars in a non-bleeding edge technology.) Oh, and by the way, there is a fourth implementation. You can take either the RTL you are simulating in the computer, and actually hook the computer up to other parts of the final circuit, and now the computer itself (which may be very fast these days compared to the requirements for the hardware you are building) is an actual part of a physical process.
Now, which of these four implementations is or isn't patentable, and why?
A good lawyer could probably argue that this doesn't apply.
Claim 1(a) requires "dividing an information item into a common portion and a unique portion".
It may be that the patent covers the case where the unique portion is empty, but then again maybe not, especially if the computer never takes the step to find out! In other words, if you treat every item as a common item (even if there is only one copy), there is a good chance the patent might not apply.
(There is also a good chance that the patent is written the way it is specifically because it doesn't apply to that case -- it may be that there is prior art in one of the referenced patents.)
There is a difference between "describe-able with math" and "is math".
Perhaps, but that difference is small, and shrinking everyday. I think that is why several people, including myself, feel that it is splitting hairs to let the whole math thing get in the way of the debate. It's a distraction. I believe that most, if not all software patents are bogus, and many hardware patents are bogus, but that does not *necessarily* mean that there should be no software patents, just that we're going about the whole patenting thing the wrong way.
Or to put it another way....
Simulations of CMOS computer chips are so good that (in most cases, if you are not doing a shrink to a new node where there are new physical problems to find), if you design a circuit, you can simulate it (using software), and have well above 90% confidence that it will work just like your sim after you spend a million bucks to build a mask set to do the photolithography do do the chip. (If you think about it, that must be true, else no one would bother building any really dense silicon chips at all because it would be too risky.)
SO...
The design, as simulated by the computer, just using software and math, is not patentable, because it's "just math." But OTOH, the design, as put into the real hardware, should then not be patentable, because its operation is utterly predictable (and predicted) by the non-patentable prior-art act of simulating it!
Now, you can use all the weasel words you want to distinguish the hardware from the software, and in fact, this is probably, kind of, sort of, how we got to the weasel words that allow software patenting "in conjunction with a machine." BUT, there is (to my mind) a fundamental problem that a chip designer using math and software tools to build hardware is not doing a job that is FUNDAMENTALLY more difficult or technical, or more important to the economy, or which requires more invention, or greater math skills, or even skills which are really that different than a lot of highly skilled software designers.
So, what distinguishes the results to make one patentable and the other one not. Well, we've already got "one is realized in real hardware." OK, where does that leave a logic design that could be stuffed into an FPGA or into a real chip? In one case, it's quasi-software -- easily reprogrammable, arguably as non-patentable as software should be. In the other case, it's an invention realized in hardware.
For a living, I write software, I write hardware that gets synthesized into CMOS, and I do emulation of the hardware in FPGAs. To me, these are all fundamentally the same, and it would be intellectually dishonest for me to argue otherwise. OTOH, I am the inventor or co-inventor of 16 patents, mostly hardware, and mostly junk -- the kind of patents that big companies put in their arsenals for the whole "mutually assured destruction" thing that fell apart with the arrival of non-practicing patent trolls.
So, my opinion is that the system is broken, but that in trying to fix the system, it is a counterproductive distraction to try to split hairs between hardware and software.
How do you get on this whitelist? It may well be that metadata must be supplied for that to happen. Is the metadata also stored with the list? What does the metadata consist of?
Maybe nothing but the IP address is stored on the list, but any additional data stored on the list is essentially a cross-site cookie.
Arguably, one of the shortcomings is that the US has more (a lot more) than one bullet, and isn't afraid to use them. Unlike either Sheriff Andy or Deputy Barney, the US can be quite unlovable.
But the point is, C is very difficult to code and debug some advanced algorithms in. Yes, once you do, it will be faster, but in the programming contest (and often in real life) exploring different algorithms and getting stuff working at all will be faster in Python.
In fact, probably enough faster in Python that, even if C is required for speed, you could do the prototype in Python and then recode it in C faster than if you just started off coding it in C.
I know I'm a heretic, but all this stuff is way too complicated. Let's say that I code a little Python application I can give out to people. The hard part is they need to download Python (or I could freeze the app and they could download a multi-megabyte file). In any case, once it's downloaded, it's not my deal any more. I can explain to them where there files are, how to back them up, etc. It's perfect for little open source apps.
But with this web stuff, now, if I want to persist data, I need to do it for them, or write some wacky code for backup, or whatever. It's too tightly coupled to the browser.
The best of both worlds would be a browser option that allows the user to associate a website with a local directory. Then, an in-browser application could read and write files on the local filesystem.
This whole deal of "give each application 10MB" or whatever in some invisible space that is on the user's hard disk is just making some default decisions on the user's behalf without making him think, which is a reasonable model for some things. But why can't we use the browser to deploy desktop applications that the user doesn't need to install, and that don't need to be written in Java or use some other probably broken or browser specific special mojo?
The whole thing is security theater as bad as the DHS has. All the fancy stuff doesn't seem to affect the ability of real, dedicated, virus writers to inflict incalculable damage on millions of computers, but the idea that a web application could ask the user "Can you give me a directory where I can store the data I create for you?" sends these trained professionals into a worse tailspin than somebody who inadvertently walks through airport security in actual shoes...
I can buy a 250GB laptop drive for $55 at Fry's, or a 500 GB drive for around $70, and new laptops typically come with a lot more than 30 GB, so, for many users, the recommendation to just dump the entire DVD onto the drive seems quite sound.
h.264 will probably go obsolete in 6 years, when the submarine surfaces and the patent holders decide to start suing everyone who uses it.
The thing about submarine patents is you don't know which technology is actually in the crosshairs until they pop to the surface. Anybody who has been sued by patent trolls will tell you that independent invention is not a defense. Neither is the excuse that you couldn't see the patent, or that the patent only tenuously describes what has been implemented if you squint just right.
I thought I saw a couple of mean dogs in the background fighting next to a slimy-looking, cowering puppy, in that dogs playing poker picture, but it was kinda hard to tell because the room isn't all that well illuminated.
Slashdot Mirror
Did they glue the transparent aluminum to the regular stuff before carving, or can they treat it to make it transparent later?
I know that moderation is carried out by monkeys at typewriters when they have a bit of time after finishing a chapter of Shakespeare, but how exactly is explaining things from a potential interviewer's perspective "off topic" when the article is about the question of how to land a job?
No. If I'm handed a resume that I deem completely unsuitable, I won't bother.
It depends on what we are hiring for and who is screening the interviews. If a resume looks remotely interesting, I will usually do a phone screen. If I'm looking at hiring an intern or fresh-out, I will usually peruse the resumes in the local university's database.
See, the fact that you're jaded enough to have a chip on your shoulder isn't helpful, or even a good indication that you will do well at all in situations where not everybody's goals and capabilities are perfectly aligned. Since such situations arise often in real life, I recommend doing something about that. Although I never had a chip like you describe, I have had other issues, and I found the book "That'S Outside My Boat Letting Go Of What You Can't Control" by Charlie Jones and Kim Doren to be very helpful. There are a lot of similar books out there. Spend a couple of hours in the self-help section of B&N and find one that speaks to you, and then read it carefully and really think about what it says. If you find the right book, you will realize that in retrospect, it was all silly common sense stuff, but for some reason, you had a mental block against it before you read the book.
I thought I made that clear. But, in any case, I personally don't give a rat's ass about how well-connected somebody is. It doesn't reflect well on me if I'm not getting the job done. If I'm getting pressure from above to hire somebody who isn't going to be helpful, I'll walk. I've left places for less grief than that.
As far as going "to the same university as me," well, I don't have a degree, so I don't care about that.
Now, let's get to you. I don't really care that much about your degree or your straight A's, although I will take a look at the courses you took to figure out what you SHOULD have learned. I went to an even cheaper college than you (self-taught). About you being fully capable of doing the job; well, I'd like to see what you've done on your resume. Especially these days, if you don't have any other employment on your resume I can ask you about, there is no good reason for you to not have some open-source cred -- otherwise, I won't think you're passionate about doing technical stuff -- that you were just partying when you went to school, and that it's just a job to you. Finally, during the interview process we WILL have some whiteboard time where I will give you, not stupid Microsoft-style problems, but some problems representative of what you will encounter at work, just to watch how you think.
From my experience, I think my expectations and motivations are fairly similar to others around me. But I have always worked for highly technical companies, and have worked for semiconductor companies for the last decade and a half, and for these companies, results and getting it right the first time count for a lot.
I can't speak to your past experiences, but I can assure you, that as someone who doesn't even have a degree, I have had my share of rejections in hiring in the past, but except for the odd month here or there, I have been gainfully employed for over 31 years. So, at one particular employer or another, you may be competing against the President's daughter, or the owner's best customer's kid, or whoever, for a position which would report to some guy who's the world's worst brown-noser and is all about projecting the right image to upper management. So now you're upset that you lost the job. That's a REALLY stupid attitude. Seriously, you wouldn't have wanted to work for that guy anyway. Believe me, I have, and it sucks royally, because he's all about abusing his employees to try to make himself look good to HIS management.
Good luck!
So try to be sweet and hide your contempt of the process you assume I am using for hiring. You probably won't get hired if I think you're just "incredibly naive", but you certainly won't get hired if I put you into one of the other two categories.
But, I don't know any technical people who want to be known as the one who brought the bozo in, even if they stand to gain a $5000.00 bonus from HR for a hiring recommendation.
So, pem's law for getting a technical job:
Maybe because you believe in the Unix way of small programs to do a single thing well?
then you replied:
I have been racking my brain for the last half hour, trying to figure out what I wrote that bothered you so much that you felt compelled to resort to this sort of name-calling, but I can't figure it out, so expect a communication from my lawyer demanding compensation for this terrible libel you have committed about my computing practices in front of the entire slashdot community.
I use some software that uses FlexLM, and that can use a NIC address for a license key. So inadvertently having lots of machines that could run the same copy wouldn't be a BAD thing... :-)
When I'm trying very hard to make a program do what I want it to, the more hoops I have to jump through for every iteration of trying to make it work, the madder I get. So, the fact that the software has dark corners that you can get to like this is already a major strike against it...
Anyway, my argument about "effort" wasn't amount. A restaurant busboy or dishwasher, or someone who mows lawns for a living expends considerably more effort than I do. My argument was basically about the KIND of effort.
That's silly. All the design work and running the simulations together winds up being more expensive that the mask in a lot of cases. (A large part of the expense of the first run of silicon is the lost time to market when you get it wrong.)
Also, you missed the part where I said the risk approached zero because the non-patentable prior art of the simulation showed that the expensive hardware was going to work.
You also missed the part where I said that you can put the exact same "code" (Verilog or VHDL RTL) into an FPGA (and you can buy general-purpose FPGA boards that can be reprogrammed over and over, just like computers can be programmed over and over with software) or into a hard coded chip. Using the FPGA is NOT a simulation; NOT pure math, because you can hook it up to other devices and make it do physical things. Now, you have three implementations -- simulation, implementation in an FPGA via a bitstream that looks just like software, and implementation in gates. (Oh, btw, the tiny little patented part is very small and could be implemented on a multi-chip shuttle run for a couple of thousand dollars in a non-bleeding edge technology.) Oh, and by the way, there is a fourth implementation. You can take either the RTL you are simulating in the computer, and actually hook the computer up to other parts of the final circuit, and now the computer itself (which may be very fast these days compared to the requirements for the hardware you are building) is an actual part of a physical process.
Now, which of these four implementations is or isn't patentable, and why?
Claim 1(a) requires "dividing an information item into a common portion and a unique portion".
It may be that the patent covers the case where the unique portion is empty, but then again maybe not, especially if the computer never takes the step to find out! In other words, if you treat every item as a common item (even if there is only one copy), there is a good chance the patent might not apply.
(There is also a good chance that the patent is written the way it is specifically because it doesn't apply to that case -- it may be that there is prior art in one of the referenced patents.)
Perhaps, but that difference is small, and shrinking everyday. I think that is why several people, including myself, feel that it is splitting hairs to let the whole math thing get in the way of the debate. It's a distraction. I believe that most, if not all software patents are bogus, and many hardware patents are bogus, but that does not *necessarily* mean that there should be no software patents, just that we're going about the whole patenting thing the wrong way.
Or to put it another way....
Simulations of CMOS computer chips are so good that (in most cases, if you are not doing a shrink to a new node where there are new physical problems to find), if you design a circuit, you can simulate it (using software), and have well above 90% confidence that it will work just like your sim after you spend a million bucks to build a mask set to do the photolithography do do the chip. (If you think about it, that must be true, else no one would bother building any really dense silicon chips at all because it would be too risky.)
SO...
The design, as simulated by the computer, just using software and math, is not patentable, because it's "just math." But OTOH, the design, as put into the real hardware, should then not be patentable, because its operation is utterly predictable (and predicted) by the non-patentable prior-art act of simulating it!
Now, you can use all the weasel words you want to distinguish the hardware from the software, and in fact, this is probably, kind of, sort of, how we got to the weasel words that allow software patenting "in conjunction with a machine." BUT, there is (to my mind) a fundamental problem that a chip designer using math and software tools to build hardware is not doing a job that is FUNDAMENTALLY more difficult or technical, or more important to the economy, or which requires more invention, or greater math skills, or even skills which are really that different than a lot of highly skilled software designers.
So, what distinguishes the results to make one patentable and the other one not. Well, we've already got "one is realized in real hardware." OK, where does that leave a logic design that could be stuffed into an FPGA or into a real chip? In one case, it's quasi-software -- easily reprogrammable, arguably as non-patentable as software should be. In the other case, it's an invention realized in hardware.
For a living, I write software, I write hardware that gets synthesized into CMOS, and I do emulation of the hardware in FPGAs. To me, these are all fundamentally the same, and it would be intellectually dishonest for me to argue otherwise. OTOH, I am the inventor or co-inventor of 16 patents, mostly hardware, and mostly junk -- the kind of patents that big companies put in their arsenals for the whole "mutually assured destruction" thing that fell apart with the arrival of non-practicing patent trolls.
So, my opinion is that the system is broken, but that in trying to fix the system, it is a counterproductive distraction to try to split hairs between hardware and software.
Maybe nothing but the IP address is stored on the list, but any additional data stored on the list is essentially a cross-site cookie.
This is the mother of all cookies.
Oh, I dunno, just about anything can blow up if you treat it right.
Q. What's the difference between electrical engineers and civil engineers?
A. Electrical engineers build weapons systems; civil engineers build targets.
Arguably, one of the shortcomings is that the US has more (a lot more) than one bullet, and isn't afraid to use them. Unlike either Sheriff Andy or Deputy Barney, the US can be quite unlovable.
India, the Barney Fife of nations.
In fact, probably enough faster in Python that, even if C is required for speed, you could do the prototype in Python and then recode it in C faster than if you just started off coding it in C.
But that's just my experience.
And since it's a programming contest, the limits on coding time are probably a more difficult obstacle than the limits on run time.
I can only respond to this statement by quoting Wolfgang Paul: "Not only is it not right, it's not even wrong!"
But with this web stuff, now, if I want to persist data, I need to do it for them, or write some wacky code for backup, or whatever. It's too tightly coupled to the browser.
The best of both worlds would be a browser option that allows the user to associate a website with a local directory. Then, an in-browser application could read and write files on the local filesystem.
This whole deal of "give each application 10MB" or whatever in some invisible space that is on the user's hard disk is just making some default decisions on the user's behalf without making him think, which is a reasonable model for some things. But why can't we use the browser to deploy desktop applications that the user doesn't need to install, and that don't need to be written in Java or use some other probably broken or browser specific special mojo?
The whole thing is security theater as bad as the DHS has. All the fancy stuff doesn't seem to affect the ability of real, dedicated, virus writers to inflict incalculable damage on millions of computers, but the idea that a web application could ask the user "Can you give me a directory where I can store the data I create for you?" sends these trained professionals into a worse tailspin than somebody who inadvertently walks through airport security in actual shoes...
I can buy a 250GB laptop drive for $55 at Fry's, or a 500 GB drive for around $70, and new laptops typically come with a lot more than 30 GB, so, for many users, the recommendation to just dump the entire DVD onto the drive seems quite sound.
The thing about submarine patents is you don't know which technology is actually in the crosshairs until they pop to the surface. Anybody who has been sued by patent trolls will tell you that independent invention is not a defense. Neither is the excuse that you couldn't see the patent, or that the patent only tenuously describes what has been implemented if you squint just right.
Thanks for the confirmation.