Its only a bad question if you're giving them a fill-in-the-blank test.
Good answers include things like:
"Its in httpd.conf. There is a comment line next to it describing it. I don't remember the exact directive because I haven't changed it in 2 years."
"Its on the apache.org site."
What the interviewer is looking for is how comfortable you are in that environment. You may or may not know something but as long as you know you don't need to know it, you're ok.
One of my favorite questions while interviewing some people that would be programming on Unix boxes was "Which editor do you use?" or "which shell?" I'd tell them there was no right answer and they were free to use whatever they wanted here. My reasoning was simple, a Unix programmer has an opinion on those two things usually and if not, they have to at least know what those things are off the top of their head. If they have to answer something like "I double-click the file, whatever editor that is" they can work somewhere else.
Keep in mind that the answer isn't always what's being asked for. What they are interviewing for is expertise in the field and there are many ways to demonstrate that.
I'm an emacs user but I hate the CTRL key to the left of 'a'. I like having CTRL keys on both sides as I use them like a shift key and use the CTRL key from the opposite hand that is typing the letter.
I think the Happy Hacking keyboard is programmable, but can't put alt and ctrl keys both on the sides of the spacebar.
Now all these windows keys are gumming up the works, sitting right between CTRL and ALT. My current solution is that I have a couple SGI granite keyboards.
Has anyone seen a keyboard that has just CTRL and ALT to *both* sides of the normal sized space bar?
Also, the backspace has to be a double sized key. I use that more than I use the Enter key. I truly hate those keyboards that have the quintuple sized Enter.
They don't have a monopoly in the database world. This would be the non-monopoly product trying to extend the influence of the operating system, not the other way around.
Every time I hear that software price is only a small consideration in TCO, I wonder where licensing administration goes in that TCO. Be sure to file this one in there too.
I've also never seen acquisition costs for free software, "well I've got a meeting with the vendor this afternoon. we're gonna haggle over the price of 20 seats."
Or another way of looking at this is that the GoF had a limited imagination and didn't describe any patterns that don't involve OO. This can actually contribute to the problem by naming some OO patterns when there are tons of ways to do things non-OO that work perfectly well.
Then what you have purchased is a TRUCK. An SUV is nifty marketing term for soccer moms that can't buy a mini-van for when dad has to be seen in it. Its these purchases that he's saying are ugly.
The SUV carrying a single person with no cargo around city streets is wasteful.
All of this reminds me of the joke, "Four wheel drive just means you get stuck farther out."
First, a unilateral declaration of peace will do little but make dictator's feel more secure.
Establishing the UN and giving equal votes to other countries was a mistake. We are in fact better than everyone else.
All France and Germany had to do was say, "Iraq is innocent of any wrong doing. We accept full responsibility for whatever they might do." I've heard nobody vouch for Iraq.
I agree completely. The only problem is that I haven't seen a a seamless business process yet. Personally, I want ultimate flexibility in my coders and systems (in a business coding project).
If I were coding phone switches, software engineering would be the proper approach. If there is a bug, its in the code or the switch was built wrong. Once built, the switch will always perform the same way.
In business there are few guarantees that aything will stay the same. What's more, its rare that an process that is already in full swing has been captured perfectly. This is because there are people involved. These people do things like make special deals with special customers. I'll take my pick of 5 coders and jump straight into coding versus 20 software engineers trying to keep up with rapid changes in a large business. There definitely needs to be more doing and less planning.
Seriously though, Python is so consistent the documentation works well. This is definitely a strength of Python.
For those beginning in Perl, here are some quick tips to learning it faster:
on the command line, type "perldoc". Use this like "perldoc -f open" to learn about the open function. Type "perldoc perl" for a list of different docs that can be viewed with perldoc.
Buy the camel book (Programming Perl, 3rd edition). Don't read it straight through, look up the parts you need but try to eventually read all of it. Toward the back of the book is a section with error messages. The single biggest leap in my Perl programming experience occurred when I found this section. When you get a cryptic error message, look it up in the back of the Programming Perl book and 9 times out of 10 it will say something like "this usually occurs when you tried to do xxx" and its right. Unfortunately I read the book straight through and didn't get to that section until about 2 months into using Perl.
If you're unsure how a feature should work, guess. A lot of the features of Perl become intuitive in a hard-to-document English language sort of way. Larry's a linguist and there is a definite pattern of how Perl listens to your commands even if its hard to describe. This way of doing things is odd to a lot of people but I think its the main reason that there is an interesting overlap between Perl and LISP programmers (not the Perl sysadmin types, they wouldn't beat LISP with a stick).
Tips for learning Python:
Get an editor that handles the space versus tab thing or you'll go crazy.
Make sure you have the newest stuff. These guys are still developing fast and at a high quality so there's no reason to miss out on something new and good.
These are just tidbits from learning the languages. I'm not so great with Python, so I don't offer much advice there because I'm not sure I've learned it right yet. Perl feels quite at home on Unix, which is where I've been paid to work for the last 7 years or so. Python has a definite good feel to it that appeals to the mathematician side of me, but when I want to satisfy that I use LISP (I don't get paid for that though).
"Found" in a rock pool isn't exactly how it all came about either. They have probably looked thousands of places cataloging millions of strains of bacteria. Its not like they wandered up to a pool and the damn thing had a sign on it.
If its so "obvious" that it should be common knowledge just because it was found in a pool, how come it wasn't stumbled upon before? The fact that it has been found now is good indication that drug companies have been encouraged to look for such things.
I do think it would be an interesting economic model though to put a bounty on certain types of drugs, say $2 billion for a antibiotic-resistant staph antibiotic. When funded by the whole world, numbers like $10billion for major drugs wouldn't be that high. Insurance companies would likely offer bounties as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Its only a bad question if you're giving them a fill-in-the-blank test.
Good answers include things like:
"Its in httpd.conf. There is a comment line next to it describing it. I don't remember the exact directive because I haven't changed it in 2 years."
"Its on the apache.org site."
What the interviewer is looking for is how comfortable you are in that environment. You may or may not know something but as long as you know you don't need to know it, you're ok.
One of my favorite questions while interviewing some people that would be programming on Unix boxes was "Which editor do you use?" or "which shell?" I'd tell them there was no right answer and they were free to use whatever they wanted here. My reasoning was simple, a Unix programmer has an opinion on those two things usually and if not, they have to at least know what those things are off the top of their head. If they have to answer something like "I double-click the file, whatever editor that is" they can work somewhere else.
Keep in mind that the answer isn't always what's being asked for. What they are interviewing for is expertise in the field and there are many ways to demonstrate that.
The other answer is "because manholes are round".
Begin minor holy war:
I'm an emacs user but I hate the CTRL key to the left of 'a'. I like having CTRL keys on both sides as I use them like a shift key and use the CTRL key from the opposite hand that is typing the letter.
I think the Happy Hacking keyboard is programmable, but can't put alt and ctrl keys both on the sides of the spacebar.
Now all these windows keys are gumming up the works, sitting right between CTRL and ALT. My current solution is that I have a couple SGI granite keyboards.
Has anyone seen a keyboard that has just CTRL and ALT to *both* sides of the normal sized space bar?
Also, the backspace has to be a double sized key. I use that more than I use the Enter key. I truly hate those keyboards that have the quintuple sized Enter.
They don't have a monopoly in the database world. This would be the non-monopoly product trying to extend the influence of the operating system, not the other way around.
Don't worry, its only 8 colors with a bright/dim bit.
We cannot allow a t-shirt cannon gap!
A bigger benefit than float is that they usually entail cutting up the box and sending in the original receipt, voiding many return policies.
Every time I hear that software price is only a small consideration in TCO, I wonder where licensing administration goes in that TCO. Be sure to file this one in there too.
I've also never seen acquisition costs for free software, "well I've got a meeting with the vendor this afternoon. we're gonna haggle over the price of 20 seats."
Quite clearly any use of the legal system to circumvent the lifetime services (which provide copyrighted materials) would be a violation of the DMCA.
Or another way of looking at this is that the GoF had a limited imagination and didn't describe any patterns that don't involve OO. This can actually contribute to the problem by naming some OO patterns when there are tons of ways to do things non-OO that work perfectly well.
Damn, I accidentally just bought a Firebird when I meant to download a browser.
A professional journalist probably doesn't have his editor review his /. posts.
Then what you have purchased is a TRUCK. An SUV is nifty marketing term for soccer moms that can't buy a mini-van for when dad has to be seen in it. Its these purchases that he's saying are ugly.
The SUV carrying a single person with no cargo around city streets is wasteful.
All of this reminds me of the joke, "Four wheel drive just means you get stuck farther out."
So you would vouch for Saddam to lead Iraq into a peaceful future?
And you understand mathematics well enough to judge that others do or don't understand mathematics?
First, a unilateral declaration of peace will do little but make dictator's feel more secure.
Establishing the UN and giving equal votes to other countries was a mistake. We are in fact better than everyone else.
All France and Germany had to do was say, "Iraq is innocent of any wrong doing. We accept full responsibility for whatever they might do." I've heard nobody vouch for Iraq.
I agree completely. The only problem is that I haven't seen a a seamless business process yet. Personally, I want ultimate flexibility in my coders and systems (in a business coding project).
If I were coding phone switches, software engineering would be the proper approach. If there is a bug, its in the code or the switch was built wrong. Once built, the switch will always perform the same way.
In business there are few guarantees that aything will stay the same. What's more, its rare that an process that is already in full swing has been captured perfectly. This is because there are people involved. These people do things like make special deals with special customers. I'll take my pick of 5 coders and jump straight into coding versus 20 software engineers trying to keep up with rapid changes in a large business. There definitely needs to be more doing and less planning.
MySQL is a troll all by itself since it brings out all the database bigots.
Documentation...bah!
Seriously though, Python is so consistent the documentation works well. This is definitely a strength of Python.
For those beginning in Perl, here are some quick tips to learning it faster:
on the command line, type "perldoc". Use this like "perldoc -f open" to learn about the open function. Type "perldoc perl" for a list of different docs that can be viewed with perldoc.
Buy the camel book (Programming Perl, 3rd edition). Don't read it straight through, look up the parts you need but try to eventually read all of it. Toward the back of the book is a section with error messages. The single biggest leap in my Perl programming experience occurred when I found this section. When you get a cryptic error message, look it up in the back of the Programming Perl book and 9 times out of 10 it will say something like "this usually occurs when you tried to do xxx" and its right. Unfortunately I read the book straight through and didn't get to that section until about 2 months into using Perl.
If you're unsure how a feature should work, guess. A lot of the features of Perl become intuitive in a hard-to-document English language sort of way. Larry's a linguist and there is a definite pattern of how Perl listens to your commands even if its hard to describe. This way of doing things is odd to a lot of people but I think its the main reason that there is an interesting overlap between Perl and LISP programmers (not the Perl sysadmin types, they wouldn't beat LISP with a stick).
Tips for learning Python:
Get an editor that handles the space versus tab thing or you'll go crazy.
Make sure you have the newest stuff. These guys are still developing fast and at a high quality so there's no reason to miss out on something new and good.
These are just tidbits from learning the languages. I'm not so great with Python, so I don't offer much advice there because I'm not sure I've learned it right yet. Perl feels quite at home on Unix, which is where I've been paid to work for the last 7 years or so. Python has a definite good feel to it that appeals to the mathematician side of me, but when I want to satisfy that I use LISP (I don't get paid for that though).
Will hack for booze.
Then you can wait until a socialist or communist country discovers this drug, ok?
(bite 'hand-that-feeds)
Knowing that profits from this drug will fund future research which will produce more life saving drugs, how much profit should they make?
"Found" in a rock pool isn't exactly how it all came about either. They have probably looked thousands of places cataloging millions of strains of bacteria. Its not like they wandered up to a pool and the damn thing had a sign on it.
If its so "obvious" that it should be common knowledge just because it was found in a pool, how come it wasn't stumbled upon before? The fact that it has been found now is good indication that drug companies have been encouraged to look for such things.
I do think it would be an interesting economic model though to put a bounty on certain types of drugs, say $2 billion for a antibiotic-resistant staph antibiotic. When funded by the whole world, numbers like $10billion for major drugs wouldn't be that high. Insurance companies would likely offer bounties as well.
Or else you would be able to do anything you want but it might kill you or anyone standing near.
ROLLBACK MSSQL