I write literare code. Have been writing it for almost 10 years. I document what I am trying to do, and then write the code. I repeat the same thing when I get to more complex parts.
Means my code is well documented, and just as important, debuggable by other people.
No comments in the code means no brain in the code.
Assuming they are already sorted, you can do a binary search, and check if the number is to the left of the current value examined, or to the right
if (nums[i] == i+1) then the missing number is to the right, else it is right here or to the left.
If this test is done often compared to number of insertions, keep the array sorted on insertions.
Otherwise revert to the 55-sum method. You could also modify the insert method to keep the sum updated, and you will spend no lookup time finding the number.
What I have been doing is to ask subjective questions regarding former projects / programming.
Ask them what they liked about the task, what they didn't like, what problems did they have, choices made etc. You should also ask into the persons role in previous projects - He might not fit the role he will have in your company.
A strong personaliuty often shows that a person has drive and energy, and their problem solving skills can also be seen if you ask questions that can't be answered. Try to ask how they would solve a type of task like what they will be hired for. Have them write som pseudo code on paper. Surprisingly many can't, or are too afraid to make mistakes to be worthy of an IT job.
Also did interviews in the 3rd world. Man was it hard to find good people there. So many was not having independent thoughts and initiative. They could not code, but coould cite books on the subject, down to spelling errors. So the only way to test them is to try to have them solve problems.
All the above, including the coding part holds true for all IT jobs, including DBA and SysAdm. They need to be able to write some simple programs / queries.
You might end up typing the wrong number, getting in contact with something secret, and get 5 years in prison for hacking.
The fact that they had to shut down their wireless LAN is not the fault of the "hacker" here, but it is the fault of the community's suppliuer, who ought to cover the costs, as he must have given very bad advice.
US laws needs to be made a little closer to reality, rather than being created to protect incompetent companies, who does far too little to protect themself or their products. They make the profits, the government gets all the trouble.
You don't need traffic shaping. Just make sure your TCP receive buffer size is 15 time larger than your TCP transmit buffer size, and the ACKs will be sent in a timely manner.
Works perfectly for me. Disadvantage is, that this is a setting you must set on all machines.
The patent does not cover compression of pictures to minimize storage space. Only to minimize bandwidth needed for transmission.
So their patent does not cover JPEG in cameras, for storing pictures on your disk, but possible only using JPEG to do on-the-fly compression of images.
Here is from the patent application:
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing signals to remove redundant information thereby making the signals more suitable for transfer through a limited-bandwidth medium
If they have let the patent run for 15+ years without claiming their IP, then they have abused their patent in such a way that it should no longer be valid.
IMHO, this is what should happen. If you do not try to stop people using your patent in public, and you are aware of it, then it should become void. If you don't stop abuse because you don't know if it is patent infringement, then the patent is too weak, and you will void your rights to come much later and sue.
Disclaimer: I am a skydiver, has slightly more than 300 jumps, so I am not really that experienced.
I have been doing a jump from 22000 ft = 6700 meters. And I also experienced the thin air, making it more difficult to turn, and my speed max was around 300 km/h, where it normally tops at 200 km/h on a normal skydive.
At deployment time (1000 meters / 3500 ft), the thick air near the planet had slowed me to below 180 km/h.
When it comes to software, lots of the errors are caused by bad design or a people who have not been thinking. Often many errors are of the same basic type.
The real way to test is, that when you find a few errors of one type, you call it a design error, and sends it back to the developers so they canfix this type of error all over their software. This is much more efficient than having the developers focus on 10 single instances of the same error.
This type of test really ought to be done internally over a few iterations , but most often the people you use for testing don't find the,.
A good way to fix bugs is to at least have someparts the debugging done by groups of 2 people, letting person1 explain for person 2 what the code does. This will force 2 people to think, and will give better code quality. This is called Extreme Programming these days, but I have used it years before it was invented, and it works perfectly for debugging.
I completely agree with you. I am also writing the comment before the code, and has been trying to teach it as well.
The main problem with much programming today is, that people don't think before they code. Spending the little extra time clarifying and expressing your thoughts will help coding quality, as well as provide the comments.
I have been there, teaching programmers advanced subjects. They are not good at thining themself, and move the project in any direction. So they continue even if they can see it is the wrong way. You ordered them to do it.
You can expect to spend close to the same amount of time writing specs as you would programming it. And when it comes to the rest, like debugging etc, you will end up totaling more time spent locally than if you wrote it yourself.
The only way to run such a project is to send a programmer or a technical project manager down there, with a briefcase under his arm wit the specs and docs. That is how we ended up doing it. Make sure this is a strong personality, yet not a bullying type. And make sure to give him a pile of businesscards with an impressive title.
I would not hesitate much doing it, If I could get people cheap enough, and we needed man-years of coding. But it would require a person who has been in the project from early on taking it down there with him. nThat is the key to success.
PS: You might get junior level programmers / university studets etc to work for you full time for the same money. Might be worth considering.
I have been stationed in Bangladesh and Uganda, working for a web company (and we were in the ISP business in Denmark as well before the telcos took over).
The main problem in these countries are, that they all are competitors, and the do not have a local Internet eXchange. So all national traffic goes across their slow satellite connection. They would gain a shitload of bandwidth if they started peering to each other, and got local providers of hosting services.
And if they could share some transparent proxy servers as well, their commom bandwidth would be more than doubled.
My experience, especially in Uganda, was that they were downloading music all the time. If Africa got better linked, they could probably also keep lots of that on a national level.
Their problem right now is not the price of bandwidth, but the usage of it, and the missing local peering. There is a reason why the american ISPs do peering between each other, rather than having it done in Singapore. And that is costs.
But these countries thinks too small. Way too small. And are afraid the competitor might also make money.
If we start funding the Internet connections of 3rd world countrie, where should we stop ? All the ISPs there are private sector companies, competing in a free market. They should work together, send up an african telecomms sattellite, and hook up to the Internet wherever they could get the best offer.
Suse / VA Linux should get the games, release them cheap / for free to get people to switch over to Linux.
Not sure what the agreements with id Software, Bungie, etc says. But I would be more than willing to pay the original came companies their $2 royalty for each game I could legally download.
Why did Microsoft want all those e-mail addresses ? Why did they bully the company to deliver them out ? This is something that would probably require a court order in Denmark. At least most companies would not voluntarily give out their customer information.
I think Lindows is doing a bad thing by handing over that info.
Firewire is cheap these days, and pretty fast (50Mbyte/second) even it its first generation.
Sony laptops, and most Dells have Firewire these days. And so des camcorders etc. It is a standard.
And it has the speed we need.
USB is only designed for mouse and keyboard. Take a webcam, a radio tuner, a sound capture board, an MP3 player, a scanner. Pick any two of these, and you will most likely experience dropouts due to overloading the biandwidth.
But all exisiting encrypted data would be de-cryptable.
So to keep things a secret, you should probably sell the stuff to the chinese AND the russians. They will keep it secret for some years, until they can make the best use of it.
Takes the burden of how/when to tell the world off your shoulders, and you can even make a lot of money:)
As there is always data/software in the computer that is copyright protected, this means that the OS will basicly prevent any software not signed/issued by Microsoft from running on the machine.
Great. A MS only OS. And MS only drivers. Guess you need to give Microsoft the source code before they sign your program. And they will of course not abuse it and rename your product from Stacker to DoubleSpace,compile it and sell it under their own name.
I have been using Grip on Linux. It is the best tool I have yet seen for this.
It will read the audio at full speed, buffer it on the harddrive while converting, eject CD, start new rip when next CD is inserted.
So it takes a few minutes per CD, and you could easily do 20-50 CDs in a few hours if you have harddisk space for them to be buffered before conversion.
First of all, I have been out training people in joint venture companies in Bangladesh and Uganda. So I have been out in the 3rd world. This was done with government funding as part of the danish private sector programme under Danida.
The one thing to remember here is, that you can deliver food aid to the poor countries, you can do many things to help, but the only thing that will have a lasting effect is education and training. Make it possible for them to sell their skills or goods, and it will be to the good of the country.
You can't help all the poor people at once, but you can help make a middle class, and make the country richer.
Why are people dying in northern Uganda as an example ? They are dying because gangs of bandits and robbers are there. They no longer have any political reason for what they do, so they are plain criminals. They attack, kill, rape, plunder people who are not protected by the military.
So the way to help the poor people up there is to kill all the robbers. Is this a solution ? If we make the country richer, the robbers might come back. Or the government will get resources to eliminate them.
If there wasn't profits in AIDS research, governments would fund it, andthus the taxpayers.
The main problem with the medical / biotech industry right now is, that they have realized that a cure / vaccine is a BAD thing. They can make much more money by only selling medical products that you have to take the rest of your life to survive.
They are getting worse than the drug dealer selling crack to kids in school.
Slashdot Mirror
The CEO has falsely accused you af spreading virus and attacking his network.
So you need a lawyer right now, so you can get some compensation, and teach the CEO not to go public when he don't have a clue.
His accusations probably damaged your reputation and self esteem for life. That must be wort a few million.
In Denmark, all the cheapest DVD players are region free.
Region protection an Macrovision costs money, so that crap is saved.
I write literare code. Have been writing it for almost 10 years. I document what I am trying to do, and then write the code. I repeat the same thing when I get to more complex parts.
Means my code is well documented, and just as important, debuggable by other people.
No comments in the code means no brain in the code.
Only works for Pascal programmers. C programmers knows that the thumb is in index 0, and the index finger is #1.
Assuming they are already sorted, you can do a binary search, and check if the number is to the left of the current value examined, or to the right
if (nums[i] == i+1) then the missing number is to the right, else it is right here or to the left.
If this test is done often compared to number of insertions, keep the array sorted on insertions.
Otherwise revert to the 55-sum method. You could also modify the insert method to keep the sum updated, and you will spend no lookup time finding the number.
What I have been doing is to ask subjective questions regarding former projects / programming.
Ask them what they liked about the task, what they didn't like, what problems did they have, choices made etc. You should also ask into the persons role in previous projects - He might not fit the role he will have in your company.
A strong personaliuty often shows that a person has drive and energy, and their problem solving skills can also be seen if you ask questions that can't be answered. Try to ask how they would solve a type of task like what they will be hired for. Have them write som pseudo code on paper. Surprisingly many can't, or are too afraid to make mistakes to be worthy of an IT job.
Also did interviews in the 3rd world. Man was it hard to find good people there. So many was not having independent thoughts and initiative. They could not code, but coould cite books on the subject, down to spelling errors. So the only way to test them is to try to have them solve problems.
All the above, including the coding part holds true for all IT jobs, including DBA and SysAdm. They need to be able to write some simple programs / queries.
You might end up typing the wrong number, getting in contact with something secret, and get 5 years in prison for hacking.
The fact that they had to shut down their wireless LAN is not the fault of the "hacker" here, but it is the fault of the community's suppliuer, who ought to cover the costs, as he must have given very bad advice.
US laws needs to be made a little closer to reality, rather than being created to protect incompetent companies, who does far too little to protect themself or their products. They make the profits, the government gets all the trouble.
You don't need traffic shaping. Just make sure your TCP receive buffer size is 15 time larger than your TCP transmit buffer size, and the ACKs will be sent in a timely manner.
Works perfectly for me. Disadvantage is, that this is a setting you must set on all machines.
So their patent does not cover JPEG in cameras, for storing pictures on your disk, but possible only using JPEG to do on-the-fly compression of images.
Here is from the patent application:
If they have let the patent run for 15+ years without claiming their IP, then they have abused their patent in such a way that it should no longer be valid.
IMHO, this is what should happen. If you do not try to stop people using your patent in public, and you are aware of it, then it should become void. If you don't stop abuse because you don't know if it is patent infringement, then the patent is too weak, and you will void your rights to come much later and sue.
Disclaimer: I am a skydiver, has slightly more than 300 jumps, so I am not really that experienced.
I have been doing a jump from 22000 ft = 6700 meters. And I also experienced the thin air, making it more difficult to turn, and my speed max was around 300 km/h, where it normally tops at 200 km/h on a normal skydive.
At deployment time (1000 meters / 3500 ft), the thick air near the planet had slowed me to below 180 km/h.
When it comes to software, lots of the errors are caused by bad design or a people who have not been thinking. Often many errors are of the same basic type.
The real way to test is, that when you find a few errors of one type, you call it a design error, and sends it back to the developers so they canfix this type of error all over their software. This is much more efficient than having the developers focus on 10 single instances of the same error.
This type of test really ought to be done internally over a few iterations , but most often the people you use for testing don't find the,.
A good way to fix bugs is to at least have someparts the debugging done by groups of 2 people, letting person1 explain for person 2 what the code does. This will force 2 people to think, and will give better code quality. This is called Extreme Programming these days, but I have used it years before it was invented, and it works perfectly for debugging.
I completely agree with you. I am also writing the comment before the code, and has been trying to teach it as well.
The main problem with much programming today is, that people don't think before they code. Spending the little extra time clarifying and expressing your thoughts will help coding quality, as well as provide the comments.
I have been there, teaching programmers advanced subjects. They are not good at thining themself, and move the project in any direction. So they continue even if they can see it is the wrong way. You ordered them to do it.
You can expect to spend close to the same amount of time writing specs as you would programming it. And when it comes to the rest, like debugging etc, you will end up totaling more time spent locally than if you wrote it yourself.
The only way to run such a project is to send a programmer or a technical project manager down there, with a briefcase under his arm wit the specs and docs. That is how we ended up doing it. Make sure this is a strong personality, yet not a bullying type. And make sure to give him a pile of businesscards with an impressive title.
I would not hesitate much doing it, If I could get people cheap enough, and we needed man-years of coding. But it would require a person who has been in the project from early on taking it down there with him. nThat is the key to success.
PS: You might get junior level programmers / university studets etc to work for you full time for the same money. Might be worth considering.
I have been stationed in Bangladesh and Uganda, working for a web company (and we were in the ISP business in Denmark as well before the telcos took over).
The main problem in these countries are, that they all are competitors, and the do not have a local Internet eXchange. So all national traffic goes across their slow satellite connection. They would gain a shitload of bandwidth if they started peering to each other, and got local providers of hosting services.
And if they could share some transparent proxy servers as well, their commom bandwidth would be more than doubled.
My experience, especially in Uganda, was that they were downloading music all the time. If Africa got better linked, they could probably also keep lots of that on a national level.
Their problem right now is not the price of bandwidth, but the usage of it, and the missing local peering. There is a reason why the american ISPs do peering between each other, rather than having it done in Singapore. And that is costs.
But these countries thinks too small. Way too small. And are afraid the competitor might also make money.
If we start funding the Internet connections of 3rd world countrie, where should we stop ? All the ISPs there are private sector companies, competing in a free market. They should work together, send up an african telecomms sattellite, and hook up to the Internet wherever they could get the best offer.
Cooperation is the keyword.
Suse / VA Linux should get the games, release them cheap / for free to get people to switch over to Linux.
Not sure what the agreements with id Software, Bungie, etc says. But I would be more than willing to pay the original came companies their $2 royalty for each game I could legally download.
We have seen like one season here in Denmark.
It is the one american TV series that I am watching (back in the old days it was X-Files, and I saw Voyager at some point as well).
I can only agree that this is a winner.
I agree.
It is not like digital copy protection has not been cracked before.
Examples:
European D2MAC standard for SatTV - uses smartcard with DES encryption. CRACKED completely.
DVD - DVD is region protected / encoded. It is digital, so it must be secure. CRACKED.
Music CDs with protection: CRACKED
Most websites: CRACKED
Why did Microsoft want all those e-mail addresses ? Why did they bully the company to deliver them out ? This is something that would probably require a court order in Denmark. At least most companies would not voluntarily give out their customer information.
I think Lindows is doing a bad thing by handing over that info.
Firewire is cheap these days, and pretty fast (50Mbyte/second) even it its first generation.
Sony laptops, and most Dells have Firewire these days. And so des camcorders etc. It is a standard.
And it has the speed we need.
USB is only designed for mouse and keyboard. Take a webcam, a radio tuner, a sound capture board, an MP3 player, a scanner. Pick any two of these, and you will most likely experience dropouts due to overloading the biandwidth.
But all exisiting encrypted data would be de-cryptable.
:)
So to keep things a secret, you should probably sell the stuff to the chinese AND the russians. They will keep it secret for some years, until they can make the best use of it.
Takes the burden of how/when to tell the world off your shoulders, and you can even make a lot of money
As there is always data/software in the computer that is copyright protected, this means that the OS will basicly prevent any software not signed/issued by Microsoft from running on the machine.
Great. A MS only OS. And MS only drivers. Guess you need to give Microsoft the source code before they sign your program. And they will of course not abuse it and rename your product from Stacker to DoubleSpace,compile it and sell it under their own name.
I have been using Grip on Linux. It is the best tool I have yet seen for this.
It will read the audio at full speed, buffer it on the harddrive while converting, eject CD, start new rip when next CD is inserted.
So it takes a few minutes per CD, and you could easily do 20-50 CDs in a few hours if you have harddisk space for them to be buffered before conversion.
First of all, I have been out training people in joint venture companies in Bangladesh and Uganda. So I have been out in the 3rd world. This was done with government funding as part of the danish private sector programme under Danida.
The one thing to remember here is, that you can deliver food aid to the poor countries, you can do many things to help, but the only thing that will have a lasting effect is education and training. Make it possible for them to sell their skills or goods, and it will be to the good of the country.
You can't help all the poor people at once, but you can help make a middle class, and make the country richer.
Why are people dying in northern Uganda as an example ? They are dying because gangs of bandits and robbers are there. They no longer have any political reason for what they do, so they are plain criminals. They attack, kill, rape, plunder people who are not protected by the military.
So the way to help the poor people up there is to kill all the robbers. Is this a solution ? If we make the country richer, the robbers might come back. Or the government will get resources to eliminate them.
If there wasn't profits in AIDS research, governments would fund it, andthus the taxpayers.
The main problem with the medical / biotech industry right now is, that they have realized that a cure / vaccine is a BAD thing. They can make much more money by only selling medical products that you have to take the rest of your life to survive.
They are getting worse than the drug dealer selling crack to kids in school.