Could anyone translate into inoffensive plain english? How is this different from any other business plan?
If you're wondering how this is different from any other business plan, you're doing better than me. After reading the article, I'm still trying to figure out what the business plan is.
So far I understand that it starts with "get a bunch of people together", but I can't see how to get from there to "profit!".
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft had a problem: They just weren't cool enough any more. For the past decade, Microsoft's hiring strategy had worked on a very simple model: "Everybody wants to work here, so we just have to decide which people we want." When Microsoft stopped being cool, they suddenly had to work a lot harder, and in a completely different way, to attract the employees they needed. In a mature company, the hiring process works both ways; the applicant tries to convince the employer to hire them, and the employer tries to convince the applicant that they would like to have the job. Just like Microsoft ten years ago, Google is in the middle of shifting from "the cool place where everybody wants to work" to being one of many options to be judged each on their individual merits.
When I visited Google in August, I spent the entire day inside a 10'x10' room answering questions. When I asked questions of my interviewers, the response was always either "I don't know anything about that, you should ask someone else", or "I'd love to talk about that, but I've got a time limit and lots of questions I need you to answer". I don't blame my interviewers for this; they did the best they could. I blame HR for setting up the process the way they did. In the end, Google was absolutely certain that they wanted to hire me, but they hadn't done anything to convince me that I wanted the job they were offering. None of my interviewers took me to their corner of the building and showed me what it was like to work at Google; none of my interviewers talked about the interesting problems they had worked on recently; in fact, none of them told me even remotely as much about Google as I had learned in 15 minutes of looking at the Google jobs website.
Was the hiring process unusually bungled in my case? Probably -- Google HR had trouble figuring out what I do (which is a separate issue for Google to fix. Note to recruiters: If you can't understand something on someone's CV, ask someone with a technical background to explain it to you. The question "do you have a Master's degree?" should never be asked of someone who has a doctorate). But even if they had decided what job I was being considered for before starting to interview me, I doubt it would have made any difference.
If you want to hire good people, be prepared to spend at least as much time showing them why they should accept your offer as you do deciding if you want to make them an offer. "We're cool" may be enough to convince some people; but the smarter people are, the less likely they are to drink Kool-Aid.
I'm starting to wonder about the sanity of Spamhaus' lawyers -- or if they really have lawyers at all. So far their arguments seem to have been
1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead. 2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that. 3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.
While I do not doubt Spamhaus' credentials as really nice people, this is hardly relevant to the case in question.
The ideal resume structure depends upon the job for which one is applying. A resume I recently used was slightly under 200 lines of (up to) 78 characters of ASCII text; its sections were "Education" (2 degrees, 5 lines), "Scholarships" (3 entries, 3 lines), "Awards" (5 entries, 5 lines), "Employment" (3 entries, 8 lines), "Research" (8 entries, 60 lines), "Other activities" (10 entries, 20 lines), "Publications" (10 entries, 25 lines), "Software written" (3 entries, 15 lines), and "Grep bait" (3 lines). Obviously, this was heavily weighted towards pointing out my research abilities; this makes sense, since I was applying for a job doing research.
If I had been applying for a position as a programmer, I would probably have swapped the positions and lengths of the "Software written" and "Research" sections. If I was applying for a scholarship, I would have listed more of the awards I've received. If I was applying for a job at a company which didn't have a reputation for applying computers to the task of filtering resumes, I would have omitted the "Grep bait" section.
It's not rocket science: Decide what job you want, decide what you would like to see on a resume if you were hiring someone for that job, and then write that resume.
VHF transmitters are MUCH cheaper than 2.4GHz stuff and also usually can crank out more power, and also VHF passes through walls much better.
Don't VHF transmitters need to be about 10x larger? IANAEE, but I thought there was a linear relationship between wavelength and the size of antenna needed, which would make VHF less than ideal for use in devices like laptops and PDAs.
AMD claims that its quad core is true quad core, while Intel's is two dual-cores grafted together
Note to AMD: We don't care about the implementation details. We care about performance, cost, and power consumption; the clock speed, cache sizes, and how cores talk to each other is irrelevant.
For all I care, Intel's "quad core" processor could be using a team of psychic circus midgets.
Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?
Yes -- both.
The fact that Google's book search increases book sales in no way diminishes the fact that Google is violating the authors/publishers copyright. If those publishers are intelligent, they will give permission for Google to do this; but they have a right to not give that permission.
Quoth the article: PCM chips use the same material, chalcogenide, that's used inside to store data in a rewritable optical discs.
For a system designed to "sustain millions of read/write cycles", this seems a bit strange -- last I heard, CD-RW disks were limited to a few hundred rewrites, never mind millions.
In France, introduction is just for introducing what you are trying to show in your paper, for defining the subject area, etc.
The "state of the art" chapter comes right after it (... and actual reference list is at the end...). Then, at the 3rd chapter, you start presenting your own research.
Ok, so my "introduction" is your "introduction + state of the art"; and instead of having one (or two) chapters at the start of my thesis, I had a section at the start of each chapter.
Either way, I think it's reasonable to count the appendix containing the list of references as "overhead" rather than "content".
Maybe your field just didn't have enough other people:)
Yes, that's probably a fairly accurate assessment. The third chapter of my thesis essentially says "here's a problem which several people think requires exponential time to solve. Here's a linear-time algorithm for solving it.":-)
References are not padding. They serve the important purpose of showing that you are aware of previous research in the same area, showing where your research fits into the body of knowledge...
No. That's whan an Introduction is for. References exist so that future readers can find the material to which you are referring if they want more details.... and making it more obvious what new stuff you discovered in your research.
That's simple: Anything which isn't in the Introduction is my own research. Don't students have to sign a paper saying "this thesis is my own work" at your institution?
You might want to review the order in which you present your information.
The order is quite simple: First I present a new algorithm; then I present two applications of it. It would be absurd to present the material in any other order.
The fact that the first chapter draws upon some very difficult material and is easier to understand having first read and understood how the algorithm will be applied is a good reason for recommending that the chapters be read out-of-order; but it wouldn't justify using a theorem before proving it.
I can't believe how many blank pages there were in this dude's thesis! Interesting work, but come on, at least do what we normally do when we can't make our 90 page requirement... use larger fonts, make the margins 1.5", double-lines, etc.
A thesis doesn't have to be long in order to contain good research. My doctoral thesis is only 81 pages, and 20 pages of that is overhead (front matter, table of contents, list of symbols, preface, advice to the reader concerning the order in which chapters should be read, epilogue, and references).
While I'm as quick to fawn over Google, let's give credit to "Daniel Bleichenbacher, a cryptographer with Bell Labs" for finding it.
To be entirely fair, my understanding is that Bleichenbacher said "hey guys, I just found a bug in some non-openssl crypto code, you guys should check to see if you have a similar bug". It was the people from Google who said "ok, let's look through the openssl source code and see if it does anything dumb like this".
I would hope that all serious users of OpenSSL have already patched this. FreeBSD and Debian were on top of it the same day it was announced.
I don't know about Debian, but FreeBSD didn't issue an advisory until the day after this went public. We have a very strict policy about making sure that security updates won't break anything, and OpenSSL's original patch was broken and not fixed until a day later.
In general you're right, though -- we hear about security issues before they go public and make sure we have advisories and patches ready.
Re:"Age of Electronic voting?
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course, I wouldn't be satisfied by anything but publishing the voters' choices. Not by name -- give them an anonymous unique voter ID so that they look at the database, they can say "ah, they got mine right".
Not good enough: They might give all the people expected to vote for the Democratic candidate the same voter ID. If any of those people end up voting republican, the only visible discrepancy would be that some Republican votes were counted as Democratic -- which obviously wouldn't be considered cause for a recount if the Republican candidate won!
What you need is to give each voter an secret unique ID, and have them record a nonce (i.e., random number) on their ballot in addition to their vote. Then publish the (ID, nonce, vote) tuples; if two voters were assigned the same ID, it will be obvious when they pick different random nonces.
Quoth the summary: They found that levels [of dissolved oxygen] were 10 to 30 times lower than normal, down to 0.5 milliliters per liter, a characteristic of hypoxia.
In other news, having low levels of dissolved glucose in the bloodstream is a characteristic of hypoglycaemia; having lots of money is a characteristic of being rich; and a complete cessation of brain function is a characteristic of death.
A couple of weeks ago I did 'the interview loop' at that leading search engine. I had already told my recruiter that there wasn't any point asking me about 200-level material, and aside from one silly question about topological sorting my phone interviewer respected that. When I arrived for my on-site interviews, several interviewers apologized about being required to ask really easy questions. They asked their questions; I provided my answers; they asked why my solution wasn't the same as their solution; I explained that my solution was asymptotically faster; and we moved on to more interesting discussions.
Having not interviewed at that leading online retailer, I don't know if the situation is the same there; but my impression at that leading search engine was that my interviewers were very quick to recognize that I was more qualified than they were and to adapt their interviewing appropriately.
You missed the really secret message, which was hidden in the italics, not the boldface. Unfortunately the punctuation was lost, but here's the secret message (including punctuation):
Separate each of them, too. Small humans are kind of primitive; slower, tedious documents -- better idea. BAM!
I think he's conveying instructions on how to teach children: One-on-one teaching, using simple and straightforward teaching materials.
Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in.
It is much cheaper -- and more fuel efficient -- to transport 2 tons of food in a single shipment than it is to transport 2 tons of food in a thousand 2kg shipments inside separate vehicles. Yes, the food you buy from the grocery store had to be shipped there, but economies of scale apply to the pre-grocery-store shipping.
A lot of people here don't seem to understand the problem with this GPL clause: Archives.
Suppose I redistribute binaries for a GPLed program, and the package I distribute is updated every week. On the server where I distribute the packages, I only need to distribute the latest version of the compiled code; however, due to the GPL requirements, I have to keep source packages available for the next 3 years -- that is, I need to keep 150+ source packages available.
It's easy to make the source code available in the same place as the executable code. Making the source code available in that same place for the next three years gets expensive.
... caused some to ponder whether the ever-more-popular Skype hadn't just turned itself into a huge security risk.
The fact that Skype is designed to be unfirewallable is not a security risk: Any site which wants to block Skype should have a policy prohibiting its use.
The security risk is users who ignore such policies, and system configurations which allow said users to install and use Skype.
Slashdot Mirror
Could anyone translate into inoffensive plain english? How is this different from any other business plan?
If you're wondering how this is different from any other business plan, you're doing better than me. After reading the article, I'm still trying to figure out what the business plan is.
So far I understand that it starts with "get a bunch of people together", but I can't see how to get from there to "profit!".
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft had a problem: They just weren't cool enough any more. For the past decade, Microsoft's hiring strategy had worked on a very simple model: "Everybody wants to work here, so we just have to decide which people we want." When Microsoft stopped being cool, they suddenly had to work a lot harder, and in a completely different way, to attract the employees they needed. In a mature company, the hiring process works both ways; the applicant tries to convince the employer to hire them, and the employer tries to convince the applicant that they would like to have the job. Just like Microsoft ten years ago, Google is in the middle of shifting from "the cool place where everybody wants to work" to being one of many options to be judged each on their individual merits.
When I visited Google in August, I spent the entire day inside a 10'x10' room answering questions. When I asked questions of my interviewers, the response was always either "I don't know anything about that, you should ask someone else", or "I'd love to talk about that, but I've got a time limit and lots of questions I need you to answer". I don't blame my interviewers for this; they did the best they could. I blame HR for setting up the process the way they did. In the end, Google was absolutely certain that they wanted to hire me, but they hadn't done anything to convince me that I wanted the job they were offering. None of my interviewers took me to their corner of the building and showed me what it was like to work at Google; none of my interviewers talked about the interesting problems they had worked on recently; in fact, none of them told me even remotely as much about Google as I had learned in 15 minutes of looking at the Google jobs website.
Was the hiring process unusually bungled in my case? Probably -- Google HR had trouble figuring out what I do (which is a separate issue for Google to fix. Note to recruiters: If you can't understand something on someone's CV, ask someone with a technical background to explain it to you. The question "do you have a Master's degree?" should never be asked of someone who has a doctorate). But even if they had decided what job I was being considered for before starting to interview me, I doubt it would have made any difference.
If you want to hire good people, be prepared to spend at least as much time showing them why they should accept your offer as you do deciding if you want to make them an offer. "We're cool" may be enough to convince some people; but the smarter people are, the less likely they are to drink Kool-Aid.
I'm starting to wonder about the sanity of Spamhaus' lawyers -- or if they really have lawyers at all. So far their arguments seem to have been
1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.
While I do not doubt Spamhaus' credentials as really nice people, this is hardly relevant to the case in question.
Also, it's "Curricula Vitae", not "Curriculum Vitae", unless he was reading a CV which arrived in multiple volumes.
The ideal resume structure depends upon the job for which one is applying. A resume I recently used was slightly under 200 lines of (up to) 78 characters of ASCII text; its sections were "Education" (2 degrees, 5 lines), "Scholarships" (3 entries, 3 lines), "Awards" (5 entries, 5 lines), "Employment" (3 entries, 8 lines), "Research" (8 entries, 60 lines), "Other activities" (10 entries, 20 lines), "Publications" (10 entries, 25 lines), "Software written" (3 entries, 15 lines), and "Grep bait" (3 lines). Obviously, this was heavily weighted towards pointing out my research abilities; this makes sense, since I was applying for a job doing research.
If I had been applying for a position as a programmer, I would probably have swapped the positions and lengths of the "Software written" and "Research" sections. If I was applying for a scholarship, I would have listed more of the awards I've received. If I was applying for a job at a company which didn't have a reputation for applying computers to the task of filtering resumes, I would have omitted the "Grep bait" section.
It's not rocket science: Decide what job you want, decide what you would like to see on a resume if you were hiring someone for that job, and then write that resume.
VHF transmitters are MUCH cheaper than 2.4GHz stuff and also usually can crank out more power, and also VHF passes through walls much better.
Don't VHF transmitters need to be about 10x larger? IANAEE, but I thought there was a linear relationship between wavelength and the size of antenna needed, which would make VHF less than ideal for use in devices like laptops and PDAs.
AMD claims that its quad core is true quad core, while Intel's is two dual-cores grafted together
Note to AMD: We don't care about the implementation details. We care about performance, cost, and power consumption; the clock speed, cache sizes, and how cores talk to each other is irrelevant.
For all I care, Intel's "quad core" processor could be using a team of psychic circus midgets.
Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?
Yes -- both.
The fact that Google's book search increases book sales in no way diminishes the fact that Google is violating the authors/publishers copyright. If those publishers are intelligent, they will give permission for Google to do this; but they have a right to not give that permission.
Quoth the article:
PCM chips use the same material, chalcogenide, that's used inside to store data in a rewritable optical discs.
For a system designed to "sustain millions of read/write cycles", this seems a bit strange -- last I heard, CD-RW disks were limited to a few hundred rewrites, never mind millions.
In France, introduction is just for introducing what you are trying to show in your paper, for defining the subject area, etc.
The "state of the art" chapter comes right after it (... and actual reference list is at the end...). Then, at the 3rd chapter, you start presenting your own research.
Ok, so my "introduction" is your "introduction + state of the art"; and instead of having one (or two) chapters at the start of my thesis, I had a section at the start of each chapter.
Either way, I think it's reasonable to count the appendix containing the list of references as "overhead" rather than "content".
Maybe your field just didn't have enough other people :)
:-)
Yes, that's probably a fairly accurate assessment. The third chapter of my thesis essentially says "here's a problem which several people think requires exponential time to solve. Here's a linear-time algorithm for solving it."
References are not padding. They serve the important purpose of showing that you are aware of previous research in the same area, showing where your research fits into the body of knowledge...
... and making it more obvious what new stuff you discovered in your research.
No. That's whan an Introduction is for. References exist so that future readers can find the material to which you are referring if they want more details.
That's simple: Anything which isn't in the Introduction is my own research. Don't students have to sign a paper saying "this thesis is my own work" at your institution?
You might want to review the order in which you present your information.
The order is quite simple: First I present a new algorithm; then I present two applications of it. It would be absurd to present the material in any other order.
The fact that the first chapter draws upon some very difficult material and is easier to understand having first read and understood how the algorithm will be applied is a good reason for recommending that the chapters be read out-of-order; but it wouldn't justify using a theorem before proving it.
I can't believe how many blank pages there were in this dude's thesis! Interesting work, but come on, at least do what we normally do when we can't make our 90 page requirement... use larger fonts, make the margins 1.5", double-lines, etc.
A thesis doesn't have to be long in order to contain good research. My doctoral thesis is only 81 pages, and 20 pages of that is overhead (front matter, table of contents, list of symbols, preface, advice to the reader concerning the order in which chapters should be read, epilogue, and references).
While I'm as quick to fawn over Google, let's give credit to "Daniel Bleichenbacher, a cryptographer with Bell Labs" for finding it.
To be entirely fair, my understanding is that Bleichenbacher said "hey guys, I just found a bug in some non-openssl crypto code, you guys should check to see if you have a similar bug". It was the people from Google who said "ok, let's look through the openssl source code and see if it does anything dumb like this".
I would hope that all serious users of OpenSSL have already patched this. FreeBSD and Debian were on top of it the same day it was announced.
I don't know about Debian, but FreeBSD didn't issue an advisory until the day after this went public. We have a very strict policy about making sure that security updates won't break anything, and OpenSSL's original patch was broken and not fixed until a day later.
In general you're right, though -- we hear about security issues before they go public and make sure we have advisories and patches ready.
Of course, I wouldn't be satisfied by anything but publishing the voters' choices. Not by name -- give them an anonymous unique voter ID so that they look at the database, they can say "ah, they got mine right".
Not good enough: They might give all the people expected to vote for the Democratic candidate the same voter ID. If any of those people end up voting republican, the only visible discrepancy would be that some Republican votes were counted as Democratic -- which obviously wouldn't be considered cause for a recount if the Republican candidate won!
What you need is to give each voter an secret unique ID, and have them record a nonce (i.e., random number) on their ballot in addition to their vote. Then publish the (ID, nonce, vote) tuples; if two voters were assigned the same ID, it will be obvious when they pick different random nonces.
Quoth the summary:
They found that levels [of dissolved oxygen] were 10 to 30 times lower than normal, down to 0.5 milliliters per liter, a characteristic of hypoxia.
In other news, having low levels of dissolved glucose in the bloodstream is a characteristic of hypoglycaemia; having lots of money is a characteristic of being rich; and a complete cessation of brain function is a characteristic of death.
Thus spake thewiz:
Our bedroom is for sleeping, sex, and private time together.
Am I the only person who finds it concerning that thewiz felt that it was necessary to list "sex" and "private time together" separately?
Having not interviewed at that leading online retailer, I don't know if the situation is the same there; but my impression at that leading search engine was that my interviewers were very quick to recognize that I was more qualified than they were and to adapt their interviewing appropriately.
You missed the really secret message, which was hidden in the italics, not the boldface. Unfortunately the punctuation was lost, but here's the secret message (including punctuation):
Separate each of them, too. Small humans are kind of primitive; slower, tedious documents -- better idea. BAM!
I think he's conveying instructions on how to teach children: One-on-one teaching, using simple and straightforward teaching materials.
Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in.
It is much cheaper -- and more fuel efficient -- to transport 2 tons of food in a single shipment than it is to transport 2 tons of food in a thousand 2kg shipments inside separate vehicles. Yes, the food you buy from the grocery store had to be shipped there, but economies of scale apply to the pre-grocery-store shipping.
Zend Source Encryption has not been rendered useless, because it never existed in the first place.
Zend Source Obfuscation, on the other hand, has not been rendered useless because it was already useless in the first place.
A lot of people here don't seem to understand the problem with this GPL clause: Archives.
Suppose I redistribute binaries for a GPLed program, and the package I distribute is updated every week. On the server where I distribute the packages, I only need to distribute the latest version of the compiled code; however, due to the GPL requirements, I have to keep source packages available for the next 3 years -- that is, I need to keep 150+ source packages available.
It's easy to make the source code available in the same place as the executable code. Making the source code available in that same place for the next three years gets expensive.
... caused some to ponder whether the ever-more-popular Skype hadn't just turned itself into a huge security risk.
The fact that Skype is designed to be unfirewallable is not a security risk: Any site which wants to block Skype should have a policy prohibiting its use.
The security risk is users who ignore such policies, and system configurations which allow said users to install and use Skype.