I saw a 20' CAT5e cable for about $3 the other day. If you don't need 1000' of cable running about your place, or even the number of cables that you'd get from bulk cable, why spend the money on a spool of CAT5 plus the crimper and whatever else? why not drop a couple bucks on a cable?
Do you buy all your food on pallets from Sam's club too? Some people don't need bulk quantities.
How I read it, it didn't seem to be a bash on Apple but more a statement that you should be made fun of if you run anything but Windows on a PC. Having run Linux quite happily for over a year on my desktop and much longer than that on a server I was left scratching my head as to why Anand would make such a comment.
A good natured rip I can accept fine. But here Anand, who's commentary I've come to respect, is making what seems to be a rip at the start of an informative article. It didn't seem to fit his style.
I guess what really tripped my response though wasn't that it was a rip in general, but he threw it out as the consensus of everybody that those who don't run Windows should and will be made fun of.
If it was a joke perhaps I just overreacted, something I try not to do. This is probably the first time all year I've sent email to somebody over comments they made on the net. But even if it was a joke he should know that it had the effect of putting off one of his regular readers who appreciates good, balanced reviews of PC hardware even if I don't run the same OS as he uses to generate the reviews and test the hardware.
I'm finding myself in an odd position of nearly opposite disconnect actually. I've been running a Linux desktop and server for a while now and when I end up on a Windows box I find myself wondering if certain software which I know exists on Linux has a Win32 port or not, or if there's an analogous application. Then I wonder what kind of hassle one has to go through to get it installed.
Fortunately(?) I've used XP to a decent extent since it's been released, mostly due to availablity of licenses through the university I attend. I wonder how alien the next version of Windows will seem should they change around how settings are changed.
Also note, a few seconds with Google will give you a good impression of the difficulty of getting Linux to play with a given bit of hardware. Also of note is that there's certain older hardware that is dead on Windows past 98SE that still works wonderfully on Linux.
I actually sent Anand an email (no reply yet) stating that I felt this was far outside his normally balanced and reasonable reporting. Apart from the first two being up to debate (no problems here on Linux) the being made fun of part just sticks out like he's being a jerk. I usually don't bother sending email to anybody who posts their opinion to the net because it's almost never worth the time. Here, however, he's adressing a decent sized readership and the least he could do is not make people fear trying something different which may work well for them because they'll be made fun of. Seriously, what does anybody apart from the corporations selling OSes care what I'm running? I don't think you'll gather a dispropotionate amount of criticism for running any one OS over another, unless you insist on holding on to something dead like DOS for a primary desktop. (Waiting for the I still use DOS and like it flames)
Usually I like AnandTech's articles, but I was saddened by that sentence. I hope he wasn't intentionally taking a jab at what's likely a few percent of his readership.
As the other 80 billion people have already stated, Sega's portable the Game Gear had terrible battery life. What they haven't said was that the screen was also far beyond awful.
For those who didn't get one, the screen was a nice backlit LCD. It worked well in the dark, something the Game Boy never did too well until recently. However, it also had poor, poor, poor refresh so that playing Sonic seemed more about memorizing board layout as it became a big blur of colors. Also, like nearly every other portable and unlike every Game Boy I've ever seen, the screen was somewhat difficult to view in bright light because it washed out the backlighting.
Tack on the size of the Game Boy's competitors, except maybe the NeoGeo Pocket, and you'll see that the Game Boy is really the portable machine. It has managed to keep shrinking too, with the exception of the first GBA. I'm somewhat concerned about the apparent size of the DS, it looks somewhat big, even if it has been described as about as wide as the first GBA. That size just doesn't slip in a pocket all that well. Fortunately for Nintendo the PSP doesn't look much smaller from the pics I've seen.
Yeah. I guess that should be around 60% of the buyers;)
These computers are ULTRA-CHEAP. People who care about quality, security, ect dont buy them. This rules out a major part of the typical unix/linux community.
Also they arent fast or so. If someone buys it new, its VERY unlikely his old computer was already running windows xp.
I dont say EVERYBODY warez, but a non-ignorable part.
My parents run a legal copy of XP on a Pentium III 450 that originally came with Windows 98. They just moved from 98 to XP within the last year or so. Their machine before that was a Pentium 150 running DOS. Hey, they move the 98 license over to the old Pentium and have a slick new version of Windows on what I consider old. Apart from Sim City 4, however, it does most everything they want it to do.
If they were to buy a new machine I would expect it to be something relatively cheap and reliable. Just because they aren't spending a grand on parts doesn't mean their computer can't function properly. And when they do, I'll try to convince them to get the machine without an OS, to move XP onto the new machine, 98 back where it belongs, and ditch the ULTRA-CHEAP Pentium (oh yes it was) which still happens to be running. A cheap machine with a 2 GHz or comparable processor would way more than fill their needs. Guess what, there's thousands of parents just like mine which don't need, want, or have bleeding edge hardware.
Besides, a big portion of the Linux community that I know are students who don't have much money and yet still care about their machines. While many of them will either ask politely to have a machine built for them or build their own, some people can't resist a bit of cheap hardware with the knowledge that the power supply or some other random part will likely go. What's a couple hundred bucks plus another fifty down the road for another fully functional machine?
Maybe you're thinking of the business world, but Compaq was pretty popular there too, weren't they? Talk about ULTRA-CHEAP.
Its actually quite true. Here in germany many retailers have "ultra-cheap" PCs, in the 200-300 range, without operating system(well, not without, but with dr-dos or linux,ect). Windows XP is a 50 or 100 addon.
How many people are willing to buy that addon instead of visiting suprnova.org?
My guess would be that it's the number of people who want to know their installation media isn't trojaned from the get-go minus the number of people who just want the hardware to run something like Linux, BSD, Solaris x86, or any other OS. Oh, minus the people who want Windows but can find better prices too. And minus the people who already have a copy of XP on a machine that's dead or about to become dead and just don't want to buy the OS twice.
Shoot, that's a lot of reasons to get a machine without XP preinstalled for extra cash.
Here's a rule of thumb to follow: There is no such thing as a white hat cracker. The distinction is irrevalent. Whether he is breaking into other people's systems to steal from them or to save them, the fact is that they were using someone else's property without permission.
That's a load of complete and utter crap. If I want to become a white hat cracker so that I can assist companies in securing their corporate Linux, BSD, or Windows networks I can go out, purchase some old minimum requirements hardware, purchase software if I'm looking at Windows, setup an environment that is like a corporate network and start testing exploits and looking for holes against common software and network configurations. I can even ask my sysadmin friends if they'd like to play a game to see if they can secure my own network against me. I can then apply this information when requested by a corporate client.
You're under the mistaken impression that all crackers carve through other people's systems without asking. You're wrong. Maybe the best crackers have done so in the past. Maybe many white hats got their start by breaking into systems just to peak. That doesn't apply to everybody though. Keep that in mind before you go and smear the lot of them.
Maybe I misunderstood and he was using the claim he'd broken into corporate networks uninvited as a selling point. In that instance I'd probably agree to the decision to at least think long and hard before making an offer. I guess I just got the impression that he, while not proud of his indiscretion, was airing the dirty laundry.
The interesting thing about this particular topic though, is the relevancy to security jobs. While things like drinking or love of porn may be completely inappropriate topics, cracking corporate networks seems directly related to security of corporate networks. To me it seems that before considering such a person you have to decide on trust or ability to keep them in line. The appropriateness (yes, it's a word) of past actions changes little about how good the person is at those actions. Perhaps you're concerned they would leave a back door somewhere that wouldn't be found. That would be a perfectly valid worry, I'd think, if there was no remorse about past black hat actions.
As for somebody with a DUI, there's no chance if it was a normal driving job. If it was something like a Formula 1 racer or something very specialized (much like a cracker), then I might consider going through the pains of looking over their shoulders and keeping them in line. I suppose it'd balance on how bad I needed said driver, how good they actually were, and what their present state of mind about their transgressions was. If the interview had the person stating they'd driven around at 140 with a BAC of.20 and that was a selling point, well, no. If it was a sorry remorse then there's a chance.
Still, the situation is different because the difference is solely that of societal rules and morals. It's an interesting question to say the least. I do think that those who realize they've done something inappropriate should at least be considered for a second chance though.
You raise a very good point, and nature is not changed lightly. Still, one wonders why we don't simply lock all criminals up for life. Perhaps as people we at least want to believe that we're capable of taking hold of our own fate and changing our nature.
Maybe the cracker was remorseless and didn't deserve another chance. I don't know the details. I'm not even saying that I'd necessarily trust the cracker or not keep a close eye on them. I'm just saying that owning up to there being a problem looks a lot bigger to me than hiding it and in the instance may not hold it against him.
Unfortunately your drunken coder didn't have the strength of conviction to stay dry despite knowing of his problem. I've know alcoholics that have gone both ways. A friend of the family that has 10s of DUIs as well as people who've gone completely dry. I guess not everybody takes care of their own problems. Your drunk's response shows he's using his problem as a crutch for his own failings and not ready to move on yet. But is that one drunk to be the basis of the outcomes for all others?
Hell, maybe it is and I'm just being naive. Faith in people isn't exactly easy to keep up these days.
I suppose in a manner it depends on what he's being hired for. If the thief is needed to do thiefy things and he's honest about crossing moral lines around the office then I'd likely hire him and keep an eye on him.
If it wasn't a job where theify things needed doing then I'd have to think about it. On one hand he could have kept mum about it. If it was something he was never caught doing prior I would be none the wiser. Maybe he's trying to start clean or stay on the right side of the lines, or just wants it all in the clear first. If the information is being provided in earnest and for my sake I wouldn't use it as a disqualifying point. You can bet he'd be watched if he got the job though.
On the other hand, if they're just trying to cover their bases so they don't get screwed over when their prior transgressions are uncovered, then I'm not so sure. In that instance the information isn't being cleared into the light for anybody's benefit but the thief's. This doesn't really seem to be the case for the post I originally replied to though.
As for crackers, there's a fine line between black and white hats, an internal state of morals and conduct. It isn't something one can directly observe since covering it up is possible. I wouldn't doubt there are black hats masquerading as white hats out there that are just good enough to never get caught. From that view, how does one tell the difference?
So is what's being said here equate to 'if the applicant hadn't admitted to hacking a company to demonstrate knowledge, and instead plausibly lied about having worked in a "test" environment configured just like a real company, the debate wouldn't have happened'?
I'm sorry, but at least the person you didn't make an offer to was willing to come forth about it, let people know that he found that sort of behavior acceptable, and give a chance to lay down a set of rules that are perhaps more fitting to his particular morals. He was decent enough to give that opportunity.
I wonder how many people you've worked with have ever done the same things as this individual but haven't owned up to it. I wonder if anybody you've worked with monitored mail for their own amusement and just never set off warning flags during the interview process.
It's one thing to catch somebody doing something after giving them a chance (because of not being told about certain behaviors or not). It's another entirely to deny them a chance after they're trying to be out in the open with you.
Why would a spy come out and say they're a spy? It sets off alarms and unless you're just that damn good, blows any future chance of spying you have. Why would a cracker come out and declare they're a cracker unless they're willing to change their tune while on the job? I guess, unless you're looking for feints within feints.
I'm not saying that these questions are the end all be all of interviews, just that they have their place. Their place, when administered properly, is to inspect how a person reasons given a little time and a tricky question. Even showing a good, honest line of thought but arriving at a suboptimal answer is sufficient, when the questions are administered correctly. People need a little time to think things over, and generally after a little quick thinking the proper way to answer is to start thinking out loud while arriving at whatever answer or answers you come to.
I fully agree that there needs to be diversity in an interview, and go into that in further discussion with the original poster that I replied to. There needs to be some testing beyond just, "Are you creative?" as well.
However, look at the bright side in your case. The silly questions were asked in an incompetent way. Think how much design work may have been presented to you in that way had you actually received a job there? Unreasonable deadlines that are impossible to finish on time. It was probably the mentality of that workplace and not the questions themselves. Instead you found a job where the people actually appreciate your knowledge. I'd bet that if they'd have asked the same questions they wouldn't have rushed you and wouldn't have been fixated on the optimal answer in that short of a timespan. Properly done they should be a way of guaging how a person thinks when confronted with a problem that is too hard to solve in a short time, showing the reasoning process.
And given the choice between a random creative question and "What's your one biggest weakness?" I'll take the hard creative problem anyday.
No, but getting a PhD isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world to do either. Many PhD students survive through sheer determination and work, some are gifted, and I would guess that a few of them don't possess at least some positive trait but rough it out on somebody else's dollar. Thankfully those are typically easy to spot in their general attitude. At least they were during school.
While Google may be missing out on somebody that is truly gifted that doesn't have a PhD, the chances of them finding somebody that knows how to solve challenging problems in one way or another likely increase by looking at PhDs, as opposed to them filtering through countless many applicants.
I somehow doubt that Google would pass up somebody that's been in the field and proven themselves to have a knack for research because they don't have a doctorate as well. Proper references, publications, ideas and determination seem to be a good way to get an inside track at many places.
As for companies wanting only creative genius, who can blame them? If the best and the brightest are lining up to interview with a company there must be something right happening there. It could be a real mess if the company didn't know how to manage PhDs or if they had nobody to do any grunt work. However, picking over whom is best for the job isn't exactly a bad thing. And if some of the people who got in under the tech bubble because of the money start disappearing because they can't code or think their way out of a paper bag, well, so be it.
No need to apologize as no offense was taken. I haven't sunken to thinking everybody on the net is a jerk, and if I had I wouldn't engage in a little friendly debate.
Anyway, I think you're right in thinking that diversity among questions would be best for an interview. Just asking brain teasers isn't enough to get a view about what somebody thinks of UML for instance. I've never given an interview myself, so I can't speak with authority, but I think I'd try to cover as many bases as possible. My last interview involved writting a few functions and then going over with the interviewer as to how they could be optimized. That was really easy for me, but was pretty decent as far as weeding out weak candidates I guess.
But I definately would rather answer straight brain teasers than inane questions like "What's your biggest weakness?" At least brain teasers expose something other than can you memorize answers to the worst interview questions ever.
Sorry to hear about your reimplementation pains. No problem understanding on the argumentative side of things, it just seemed you disliked the problems as well as the reason for having to answer them. You've made yourself much more clear with this go.
You do have a point to some extent, though I'm not sure about the one dimensional elitism thing. Maybe I've just seen different people or places using the questions, but it seems like the brain teasers are more a way to get at how you think than a want for the proper answer. I know I've answered a fair share of brain teasers improperly in that I didn't come up with the optimal answer, but by thinking out loud I've managed to come away looking good because I am capable of creative, research oriented thought. Honestly I've never applied to Google, MS, or Amazon, so I don't know if it's a bunch of elitism or not there.
But I've never seen anything that suggests one method of interview is better than another, either. At least brain teasers expose a subsample of an applicant's thinking process. Honestly curious, how would you conduct an interview?
I've answered my fair share of brain teasers, pattern recognition, cute/stupid questions. This is crap that pisses me off. I'm sure google wants smart people, but they're going to overlook all the people who just get shit done when it needs to be done (and do it well) because they're going for the people who are creative.
No slight intended, but methinks that maybe you're missing the point of these cute, stupid little brain teaser questions. It's certainly one thing to sit down and slam out something that you either know how to create or can come up with a way to create it relatively easily. It is another thing entirely to solve or approximate a solution to a fundamentally difficult problem and then implement it.
To put it in vulgar terms, Google likely doesn't need people to just get shit done, they need creative solutions to problems that don't have a straight forward answer. Do you honestly think figuring out how to retrieve highly relevant web pages from the whole net based on one or two silly little keywords, in fractions of a second no less, is something you just sit down and program? Do you even think it's something you can beat the current top players at by simply engineering it with current methods? No, it's far more akin to those little problems you hate so much. Sure, there's naive solutions that give a lackluster result, but to do it well it's all a game of tradeoffs, new and novel approaches, application of known approaches or extensions of known approaches in the right instances, a dash of brute force, and who knows what else. If it was straight forward and something just solved by getting shit done then Google and its staff of many PhDs would likely be vanishing due to the costs of keeping all those PhDs around opposed to another company running slimmer and just doing it. Instead they're number one in the search engine world because of their pioneering efforts.
The people who enjoy and excel at those questions, seemingly silly on the surface but generally with deeper implications, are the type that are typically good at doing the sort of research that needs to be done to solve the tricky steps.
Again, none of this is meant as a slight and there really is need for people who are good at architecting and implementing solutions with good work ethics. Many applications are at a point where the technical challenges lie in integration of known solutions and those certainly still need good, hard working architects. On the other hand there's still a definate need for people who like toying with silly questions because that generally translates into enjoying playing with the nuances of more research oriented stuff, simply because they're so often similar. Frankly, if you dislike those stupid little problems then you may well dislike the research experience of bashing your head into brick wall after brick wall trying to come up with a novel solution to a problem which has no real feasible solutions at the moment.
Well, if you'd like to ignore the truth of the presidential election not being democratic like everybody who whined about Bush not having the federal popular vote in 2000, feel free. It isn't a statement of personal politics, just an observation of how this fine country and its electoral college works mind you. The point, however, is rather large and definately not a nit. But on to the topic of everybody voting.
Let me start by asking where you are getting that I don't think people should be encouraged to learn and vote? I keep saying that people should be encouraged to become educated and that such education will cause them to want to vote. Quit ignoring that, will you?
And yes, my argument that the poorly educated, lazy people who can't be bothered to learn about what they'd be voting on should be discouraged is elitist. But that doesn't make it bad. I've heard that there were days where being the member of an elite organization was considered a good thing, something to strive for. Now people are called elitist like its derogatory, and a little research to better and educate yourself is looked down upon by "the masses" which are in and cool. Thankfully for the elitists, those too lazy to bother doing 5 minutes of research don't need much disuasion.
How you can say that adding in random noise is democratic I'm not certain. By stating I don't think we should discourage anyone. you're saying we shouldn't discourage the people who pick entirely at random. It doesn't actually add anything but noise to the equation. Filtering out the noise is the goal of so many problems. Here the noise happens to be completely brainwashed or uneducated voters. I'd prefer it be done through education of the noise, and everybody can join the elitist club. But I have no problem telling people maybe they shouldn't voice an unformed opinion as well. Democracy is about hearing the voice of the citizens, not increasing the noise ratio by random votes until it's drowned out.
I think that the people trying to motivate citizens who don't want to vote for any candidate is much more democratic. Even if all those people wrote in Mickey Mouse it would send a loud message and one that demographic wants to send.
So, once again. Encourage people to become educated about politics and voting. Once they're educated they'll be so pissed off they won't think twice about voting, they'll just do it. Voting for the sake of voting and increasing noise isn't something that sounds like a good idea to me. Not discouraging somebody from voting at random is a decidedly bad idea. Discouraging somebody who is self proclaimed "too dumb" to understand anything any candidate says seems logical.
I'd never tell somebody who thinks they know who they want to vote for not to vote. That's their right and I'm vehemently for it. I will try to disuade somebody who's voting to add noise and harm the process or proclaims themselves too dumb to understand a thing.
Yes I know the US is a republic; that is not mutually exclusive with democracy, and in fact the country is often described as a democratic republic.
We're often democratic on a localized scale. Things like voting for local ordinances, bridge rebuilding and other local topics are well managed by tallying the voice of the whole community. But at a federal level, especially in the case of electing our president, we don't do democracy. Since most people are talking about the federal presidential election it's a point worth making. We don't elect a president ourselves. We elect people to elect our president. There's a huge difference and it most emphatically is not a democratic election. At best we (locally and) democratically elect several electors.
You are arguing that we shouldn't encourage the ill-informed to vote -- I would suggest that instead we should encourage them to become more informed.
That is exactly what I argued previously, that we discourage uninformed voting through encouragement of becoming informed. Given there are still many people too lazy to even become marginally informed, we should discourage those who add nothing to the process from bothering to vote.
If one cares about the country then one will want to know something about the process and something about the topics facing it. If one cares that much one will want to vote. It isn't like the opposite is necessarily true though. Making somebody vote doesn't imply they'll suddenly start caring.
Your points are excellent and you stand up this critic well, except you are wrong about this country being a democracy. We all have the right to elect who will elect our president, the electoral college. However, our votes don't count each individually in the final decision. That makes this country explicitly not a democracy.
Don't conceed points that you don't have to, especially when those points are wrong.
Well, then, why bother with elections at all? Why not just appoint you and your 100 friends monarchs-for-life? The whole point of democracy is that everybody gets to vote, not just the people you think are the smartest or the best informed.
First of all, you're under the mistaken thought that the US is a democracy. It isn't, it's a republic. The reason that the US is a republic and not a democracy is the founding fathers were "elitists" as well and didn't want a mob of ignorant idiots ruining the country by directly affecting a process they don't understand. We don't even have a democratic presidential election process, hence the electoral college. We elect people to elect our president.
Some people are a little touchy about who should get the power to elect people and want to think they're special despite being uneducated about the whole process. Some people who can't be buggered to even research beyond smear campaigns think that their voice should be as important as anybody elses. In reality I doubt it should be. Yes, that's terribly elitist. But think if anything else really important operated that way. Would you want to be operated on by common public consensus? Maybe we could poll random people off the street to manage your retirement fund? Or maybe we'd prefer that the knowledge put forth into our important affairs had some education of the topic behind it.
Anyway, I'd still hope that people who have no idea what they're doing sit home and do nothing rather than go and vote randomly, or on the basis of what the television smear campaign ads told them. I'd never say that anybody who's going to vote randomly isn't allowed to do so; I would merely discourage it. I would foremost discourage that outcome by encouraging people to educate themselves. If it comes down to it though, I'd humbly ask that those to busy to figure out what a candidate even stands for not vote.
You would have the ultimate publishing solution. The biggest issue that I personally have with even broadband here in the US is that every provider seems to provide a solution to the masses for a moderately high price and categorize everything else as business class.
I would like to be able to host a lot of media on my site. I already post a lot of pictures, and thankfully for that my audience is typically small. But there are times where I get a couple dozen people simultaneously downloading high res images. I'd like to be able to do that without my access choking. Not only is the speed which people are able to view my pictures slow, but my download goes to pot as my ACKs get lost in the upstream queue. Maybe I'll implement some QoS for me, but that still leaves the uplink as too slow.
The biggest problem seems to be that uplink is an afterthought and about an order of magnitude slower than downlink speeds on most broadband. I'd personally be really, really happy if I could turn the roughly 3Mbps down/385Kbps up cable I have into 2Mbps down/1Mbps up or even 1.5Mbps both ways.
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Do you buy all your food on pallets from Sam's club too? Some people don't need bulk quantities.
A good natured rip I can accept fine. But here Anand, who's commentary I've come to respect, is making what seems to be a rip at the start of an informative article. It didn't seem to fit his style.
I guess what really tripped my response though wasn't that it was a rip in general, but he threw it out as the consensus of everybody that those who don't run Windows should and will be made fun of.
If it was a joke perhaps I just overreacted, something I try not to do. This is probably the first time all year I've sent email to somebody over comments they made on the net. But even if it was a joke he should know that it had the effect of putting off one of his regular readers who appreciates good, balanced reviews of PC hardware even if I don't run the same OS as he uses to generate the reviews and test the hardware.
Fortunately(?) I've used XP to a decent extent since it's been released, mostly due to availablity of licenses through the university I attend. I wonder how alien the next version of Windows will seem should they change around how settings are changed.
Also note, a few seconds with Google will give you a good impression of the difficulty of getting Linux to play with a given bit of hardware. Also of note is that there's certain older hardware that is dead on Windows past 98SE that still works wonderfully on Linux.
Usually I like AnandTech's articles, but I was saddened by that sentence. I hope he wasn't intentionally taking a jab at what's likely a few percent of his readership.
For those who didn't get one, the screen was a nice backlit LCD. It worked well in the dark, something the Game Boy never did too well until recently. However, it also had poor, poor, poor refresh so that playing Sonic seemed more about memorizing board layout as it became a big blur of colors. Also, like nearly every other portable and unlike every Game Boy I've ever seen, the screen was somewhat difficult to view in bright light because it washed out the backlighting.
Tack on the size of the Game Boy's competitors, except maybe the NeoGeo Pocket, and you'll see that the Game Boy is really the portable machine. It has managed to keep shrinking too, with the exception of the first GBA. I'm somewhat concerned about the apparent size of the DS, it looks somewhat big, even if it has been described as about as wide as the first GBA. That size just doesn't slip in a pocket all that well. Fortunately for Nintendo the PSP doesn't look much smaller from the pics I've seen.
Come now, there's way too much prior art for that to be patentable.
These computers are ULTRA-CHEAP. People who care about quality, security, ect dont buy them. This rules out a major part of the typical unix/linux community.
Also they arent fast or so. If someone buys it new, its VERY unlikely his old computer was already running windows xp.
I dont say EVERYBODY warez, but a non-ignorable part.
My parents run a legal copy of XP on a Pentium III 450 that originally came with Windows 98. They just moved from 98 to XP within the last year or so. Their machine before that was a Pentium 150 running DOS. Hey, they move the 98 license over to the old Pentium and have a slick new version of Windows on what I consider old. Apart from Sim City 4, however, it does most everything they want it to do.
If they were to buy a new machine I would expect it to be something relatively cheap and reliable. Just because they aren't spending a grand on parts doesn't mean their computer can't function properly. And when they do, I'll try to convince them to get the machine without an OS, to move XP onto the new machine, 98 back where it belongs, and ditch the ULTRA-CHEAP Pentium (oh yes it was) which still happens to be running. A cheap machine with a 2 GHz or comparable processor would way more than fill their needs. Guess what, there's thousands of parents just like mine which don't need, want, or have bleeding edge hardware.
Besides, a big portion of the Linux community that I know are students who don't have much money and yet still care about their machines. While many of them will either ask politely to have a machine built for them or build their own, some people can't resist a bit of cheap hardware with the knowledge that the power supply or some other random part will likely go. What's a couple hundred bucks plus another fifty down the road for another fully functional machine?
Maybe you're thinking of the business world, but Compaq was pretty popular there too, weren't they? Talk about ULTRA-CHEAP.
How many people are willing to buy that addon instead of visiting suprnova.org?
My guess would be that it's the number of people who want to know their installation media isn't trojaned from the get-go minus the number of people who just want the hardware to run something like Linux, BSD, Solaris x86, or any other OS. Oh, minus the people who want Windows but can find better prices too. And minus the people who already have a copy of XP on a machine that's dead or about to become dead and just don't want to buy the OS twice.
Shoot, that's a lot of reasons to get a machine without XP preinstalled for extra cash.
That's a load of complete and utter crap. If I want to become a white hat cracker so that I can assist companies in securing their corporate Linux, BSD, or Windows networks I can go out, purchase some old minimum requirements hardware, purchase software if I'm looking at Windows, setup an environment that is like a corporate network and start testing exploits and looking for holes against common software and network configurations. I can even ask my sysadmin friends if they'd like to play a game to see if they can secure my own network against me. I can then apply this information when requested by a corporate client.
You're under the mistaken impression that all crackers carve through other people's systems without asking. You're wrong. Maybe the best crackers have done so in the past. Maybe many white hats got their start by breaking into systems just to peak. That doesn't apply to everybody though. Keep that in mind before you go and smear the lot of them.
The interesting thing about this particular topic though, is the relevancy to security jobs. While things like drinking or love of porn may be completely inappropriate topics, cracking corporate networks seems directly related to security of corporate networks. To me it seems that before considering such a person you have to decide on trust or ability to keep them in line. The appropriateness (yes, it's a word) of past actions changes little about how good the person is at those actions. Perhaps you're concerned they would leave a back door somewhere that wouldn't be found. That would be a perfectly valid worry, I'd think, if there was no remorse about past black hat actions.
As for somebody with a DUI, there's no chance if it was a normal driving job. If it was something like a Formula 1 racer or something very specialized (much like a cracker), then I might consider going through the pains of looking over their shoulders and keeping them in line. I suppose it'd balance on how bad I needed said driver, how good they actually were, and what their present state of mind about their transgressions was. If the interview had the person stating they'd driven around at 140 with a BAC of .20 and that was a selling point, well, no. If it was a sorry remorse then there's a chance.
Still, the situation is different because the difference is solely that of societal rules and morals. It's an interesting question to say the least. I do think that those who realize they've done something inappropriate should at least be considered for a second chance though.
Maybe the cracker was remorseless and didn't deserve another chance. I don't know the details. I'm not even saying that I'd necessarily trust the cracker or not keep a close eye on them. I'm just saying that owning up to there being a problem looks a lot bigger to me than hiding it and in the instance may not hold it against him.
Unfortunately your drunken coder didn't have the strength of conviction to stay dry despite knowing of his problem. I've know alcoholics that have gone both ways. A friend of the family that has 10s of DUIs as well as people who've gone completely dry. I guess not everybody takes care of their own problems. Your drunk's response shows he's using his problem as a crutch for his own failings and not ready to move on yet. But is that one drunk to be the basis of the outcomes for all others?
Hell, maybe it is and I'm just being naive. Faith in people isn't exactly easy to keep up these days.
If it wasn't a job where theify things needed doing then I'd have to think about it. On one hand he could have kept mum about it. If it was something he was never caught doing prior I would be none the wiser. Maybe he's trying to start clean or stay on the right side of the lines, or just wants it all in the clear first. If the information is being provided in earnest and for my sake I wouldn't use it as a disqualifying point. You can bet he'd be watched if he got the job though.
On the other hand, if they're just trying to cover their bases so they don't get screwed over when their prior transgressions are uncovered, then I'm not so sure. In that instance the information isn't being cleared into the light for anybody's benefit but the thief's. This doesn't really seem to be the case for the post I originally replied to though.
As for crackers, there's a fine line between black and white hats, an internal state of morals and conduct. It isn't something one can directly observe since covering it up is possible. I wouldn't doubt there are black hats masquerading as white hats out there that are just good enough to never get caught. From that view, how does one tell the difference?
I'm sorry, but at least the person you didn't make an offer to was willing to come forth about it, let people know that he found that sort of behavior acceptable, and give a chance to lay down a set of rules that are perhaps more fitting to his particular morals. He was decent enough to give that opportunity.
I wonder how many people you've worked with have ever done the same things as this individual but haven't owned up to it. I wonder if anybody you've worked with monitored mail for their own amusement and just never set off warning flags during the interview process.
It's one thing to catch somebody doing something after giving them a chance (because of not being told about certain behaviors or not). It's another entirely to deny them a chance after they're trying to be out in the open with you.
Why would a spy come out and say they're a spy? It sets off alarms and unless you're just that damn good, blows any future chance of spying you have. Why would a cracker come out and declare they're a cracker unless they're willing to change their tune while on the job? I guess, unless you're looking for feints within feints.
Time to fire up lynx.
I fully agree that there needs to be diversity in an interview, and go into that in further discussion with the original poster that I replied to. There needs to be some testing beyond just, "Are you creative?" as well.
However, look at the bright side in your case. The silly questions were asked in an incompetent way. Think how much design work may have been presented to you in that way had you actually received a job there? Unreasonable deadlines that are impossible to finish on time. It was probably the mentality of that workplace and not the questions themselves. Instead you found a job where the people actually appreciate your knowledge. I'd bet that if they'd have asked the same questions they wouldn't have rushed you and wouldn't have been fixated on the optimal answer in that short of a timespan. Properly done they should be a way of guaging how a person thinks when confronted with a problem that is too hard to solve in a short time, showing the reasoning process.
And given the choice between a random creative question and "What's your one biggest weakness?" I'll take the hard creative problem anyday.
While Google may be missing out on somebody that is truly gifted that doesn't have a PhD, the chances of them finding somebody that knows how to solve challenging problems in one way or another likely increase by looking at PhDs, as opposed to them filtering through countless many applicants.
I somehow doubt that Google would pass up somebody that's been in the field and proven themselves to have a knack for research because they don't have a doctorate as well. Proper references, publications, ideas and determination seem to be a good way to get an inside track at many places.
As for companies wanting only creative genius, who can blame them? If the best and the brightest are lining up to interview with a company there must be something right happening there. It could be a real mess if the company didn't know how to manage PhDs or if they had nobody to do any grunt work. However, picking over whom is best for the job isn't exactly a bad thing. And if some of the people who got in under the tech bubble because of the money start disappearing because they can't code or think their way out of a paper bag, well, so be it.
Anyway, I think you're right in thinking that diversity among questions would be best for an interview. Just asking brain teasers isn't enough to get a view about what somebody thinks of UML for instance. I've never given an interview myself, so I can't speak with authority, but I think I'd try to cover as many bases as possible. My last interview involved writting a few functions and then going over with the interviewer as to how they could be optimized. That was really easy for me, but was pretty decent as far as weeding out weak candidates I guess.
But I definately would rather answer straight brain teasers than inane questions like "What's your biggest weakness?" At least brain teasers expose something other than can you memorize answers to the worst interview questions ever.
You do have a point to some extent, though I'm not sure about the one dimensional elitism thing. Maybe I've just seen different people or places using the questions, but it seems like the brain teasers are more a way to get at how you think than a want for the proper answer. I know I've answered a fair share of brain teasers improperly in that I didn't come up with the optimal answer, but by thinking out loud I've managed to come away looking good because I am capable of creative, research oriented thought. Honestly I've never applied to Google, MS, or Amazon, so I don't know if it's a bunch of elitism or not there.
But I've never seen anything that suggests one method of interview is better than another, either. At least brain teasers expose a subsample of an applicant's thinking process. Honestly curious, how would you conduct an interview?
No slight intended, but methinks that maybe you're missing the point of these cute, stupid little brain teaser questions. It's certainly one thing to sit down and slam out something that you either know how to create or can come up with a way to create it relatively easily. It is another thing entirely to solve or approximate a solution to a fundamentally difficult problem and then implement it.
To put it in vulgar terms, Google likely doesn't need people to just get shit done, they need creative solutions to problems that don't have a straight forward answer. Do you honestly think figuring out how to retrieve highly relevant web pages from the whole net based on one or two silly little keywords, in fractions of a second no less, is something you just sit down and program? Do you even think it's something you can beat the current top players at by simply engineering it with current methods? No, it's far more akin to those little problems you hate so much. Sure, there's naive solutions that give a lackluster result, but to do it well it's all a game of tradeoffs, new and novel approaches, application of known approaches or extensions of known approaches in the right instances, a dash of brute force, and who knows what else. If it was straight forward and something just solved by getting shit done then Google and its staff of many PhDs would likely be vanishing due to the costs of keeping all those PhDs around opposed to another company running slimmer and just doing it. Instead they're number one in the search engine world because of their pioneering efforts.
The people who enjoy and excel at those questions, seemingly silly on the surface but generally with deeper implications, are the type that are typically good at doing the sort of research that needs to be done to solve the tricky steps.
Again, none of this is meant as a slight and there really is need for people who are good at architecting and implementing solutions with good work ethics. Many applications are at a point where the technical challenges lie in integration of known solutions and those certainly still need good, hard working architects. On the other hand there's still a definate need for people who like toying with silly questions because that generally translates into enjoying playing with the nuances of more research oriented stuff, simply because they're so often similar. Frankly, if you dislike those stupid little problems then you may well dislike the research experience of bashing your head into brick wall after brick wall trying to come up with a novel solution to a problem which has no real feasible solutions at the moment.
Fair enough. Let's extend a collecive wish that people would bother to educate themselves about important issues in this country (and others) then.
Let me start by asking where you are getting that I don't think people should be encouraged to learn and vote? I keep saying that people should be encouraged to become educated and that such education will cause them to want to vote. Quit ignoring that, will you?
And yes, my argument that the poorly educated, lazy people who can't be bothered to learn about what they'd be voting on should be discouraged is elitist. But that doesn't make it bad. I've heard that there were days where being the member of an elite organization was considered a good thing, something to strive for. Now people are called elitist like its derogatory, and a little research to better and educate yourself is looked down upon by "the masses" which are in and cool. Thankfully for the elitists, those too lazy to bother doing 5 minutes of research don't need much disuasion.
How you can say that adding in random noise is democratic I'm not certain. By stating I don't think we should discourage anyone. you're saying we shouldn't discourage the people who pick entirely at random. It doesn't actually add anything but noise to the equation. Filtering out the noise is the goal of so many problems. Here the noise happens to be completely brainwashed or uneducated voters. I'd prefer it be done through education of the noise, and everybody can join the elitist club. But I have no problem telling people maybe they shouldn't voice an unformed opinion as well. Democracy is about hearing the voice of the citizens, not increasing the noise ratio by random votes until it's drowned out.
I think that the people trying to motivate citizens who don't want to vote for any candidate is much more democratic. Even if all those people wrote in Mickey Mouse it would send a loud message and one that demographic wants to send.
So, once again. Encourage people to become educated about politics and voting. Once they're educated they'll be so pissed off they won't think twice about voting, they'll just do it. Voting for the sake of voting and increasing noise isn't something that sounds like a good idea to me. Not discouraging somebody from voting at random is a decidedly bad idea. Discouraging somebody who is self proclaimed "too dumb" to understand anything any candidate says seems logical.
I'd never tell somebody who thinks they know who they want to vote for not to vote. That's their right and I'm vehemently for it. I will try to disuade somebody who's voting to add noise and harm the process or proclaims themselves too dumb to understand a thing.
We're often democratic on a localized scale. Things like voting for local ordinances, bridge rebuilding and other local topics are well managed by tallying the voice of the whole community. But at a federal level, especially in the case of electing our president, we don't do democracy. Since most people are talking about the federal presidential election it's a point worth making. We don't elect a president ourselves. We elect people to elect our president. There's a huge difference and it most emphatically is not a democratic election. At best we (locally and) democratically elect several electors.
You are arguing that we shouldn't encourage the ill-informed to vote -- I would suggest that instead we should encourage them to become more informed.
That is exactly what I argued previously, that we discourage uninformed voting through encouragement of becoming informed. Given there are still many people too lazy to even become marginally informed, we should discourage those who add nothing to the process from bothering to vote.
If one cares about the country then one will want to know something about the process and something about the topics facing it. If one cares that much one will want to vote. It isn't like the opposite is necessarily true though. Making somebody vote doesn't imply they'll suddenly start caring.
Don't conceed points that you don't have to, especially when those points are wrong.
First of all, you're under the mistaken thought that the US is a democracy. It isn't, it's a republic. The reason that the US is a republic and not a democracy is the founding fathers were "elitists" as well and didn't want a mob of ignorant idiots ruining the country by directly affecting a process they don't understand. We don't even have a democratic presidential election process, hence the electoral college. We elect people to elect our president.
Some people are a little touchy about who should get the power to elect people and want to think they're special despite being uneducated about the whole process. Some people who can't be buggered to even research beyond smear campaigns think that their voice should be as important as anybody elses. In reality I doubt it should be. Yes, that's terribly elitist. But think if anything else really important operated that way. Would you want to be operated on by common public consensus? Maybe we could poll random people off the street to manage your retirement fund? Or maybe we'd prefer that the knowledge put forth into our important affairs had some education of the topic behind it.
Anyway, I'd still hope that people who have no idea what they're doing sit home and do nothing rather than go and vote randomly, or on the basis of what the television smear campaign ads told them. I'd never say that anybody who's going to vote randomly isn't allowed to do so; I would merely discourage it. I would foremost discourage that outcome by encouraging people to educate themselves. If it comes down to it though, I'd humbly ask that those to busy to figure out what a candidate even stands for not vote.
I would like to be able to host a lot of media on my site. I already post a lot of pictures, and thankfully for that my audience is typically small. But there are times where I get a couple dozen people simultaneously downloading high res images. I'd like to be able to do that without my access choking. Not only is the speed which people are able to view my pictures slow, but my download goes to pot as my ACKs get lost in the upstream queue. Maybe I'll implement some QoS for me, but that still leaves the uplink as too slow.
The biggest problem seems to be that uplink is an afterthought and about an order of magnitude slower than downlink speeds on most broadband. I'd personally be really, really happy if I could turn the roughly 3Mbps down/385Kbps up cable I have into 2Mbps down/1Mbps up or even 1.5Mbps both ways.