The reason most companies ask isn't to stiff you, but to make sure you aren't expecting way more then what they are budgeted for. They don't want to get to negotiations and find out that you were expecting $150k a year when they only had a budget for $90k. If the company is worth its salt, they probably also want to know that you aren't asking for $45k and the market rate is $90k--after all, what is wrong with you at those low prices?
The trick to not pigeon holing yourself is to give them a ballpark. That is all they need--you to put them at ease that they aren't gonna get sticker shock when they hire you.
Give yourself a range of like $20k or so. Make sure that you span the range so that what you really want is somewhere in the lower end of the quote. For example, if you want $90k, make it $85->$100k. Just make sure that the low end is really and truly the absolute minimum you'd accept and the upper bound isn't a huge stretch for your skills and the market rate.
They ask "what is your salary requirements?" You reply "I was hoping for market rate, so ballpark about $80k -> 100k. Obviously that number might be more or less depending on things like my position, hours, benefits. Sound about right?". Now you still have a lot of negotiating power and they don't have to worry that when they want to hire you and need to negotiate salary you aren't gonna ask for $150k.
I once interviewed for a non-profit who asked what my salary requirements were and I said "about $70->$90k" and he immediately shot back "unfortunately we are budgeted for around $55k". With that, we both knew this wasn't gonna work so we didn't bother wasting more time.
Pull a stunt like that and you'd strike out if I was interviewing you. To each their own, but fer christ sakes it is an email client not your main development tool!
Once you start asking religious questions like the ones in your post, you start to look like a person who will be very difficult to work with. After all, if you have major demands for extremely minor things like your email client, what kinds of demands are you going to asking for when it comes to actually doing your job?
Unless you are very careful in your wording, even companies that *do* have have flexible working might take it the wrong way (i.e. "What, you want to slack off?").
I guess the proper question might be--what is the best way to deduce if said company has flex work. My hunch is the answer varies by the size of the company. You probably could very bluntly ask "what is your policy on flexible working" to a big-co, but with a small-co you will have to be more subtle.
The only "solution" is to copy & paste the package names and pray that somebody on some gentoo forum has the exact sequence of steps so you dont hose your system.
But you can cut the wheelchair crowd some slack--they probably can't walk! If you are driving a segway, your legs have to function otherwise you couldn't stand on the damn thing....Although I wonder if you could rig it so it is drivable when you have a broken leg and have a cast + crutches.
Well, maybe they do, but still. It isn't the marketing, it is quite frankly the reality. If anybody thinks like me, they probably consider it yet another sign of how lazy and obese we as a society have become. I mean, we can't even bother to walk down a sidewalk now? Give me a break!
That psychological cue is what makes a Segway rider appear more bully-like and smug
Your theory might be correct if they weren't wearing helmets too. Once you put on a helmet while riding that thing, you just look like a pathetic fat bastard who can't walk and is so scared of hitting something you need a helmet. I mean, dont get me wrong, helmets save lives and yada yada, but still... a helmet on a segway? Really?
The only exception to that rule is when I see a cop driving one. Then I just think about all the tech problems with the device like what if the bad guy pushes the thing over, or why the city thinks it is okay for a city official to use those things on a crowded sidewalk. Bikes can at least kinda shuffle through a crowd. YOu can't easily dismount a segway and walk it through a dense crowd.
I dunno, bottom line is it make you look, well, weak.
IBM is supposedly a technology company. A stapler manufacturing company or a clothing company, I can see still using IE6, but a technology company!? They of all people should have processes in place to ensure their employees are running only the latest technology. How the *hell* can a technology company create a modern, competitive product when its employees are running ancient web browsers!?
That is what happens when you sit around twaddling your thumbs running ancient crusty junk. The web moves too fast for 10 or 5 year deployment cycles. If you want to be competitive, you have to shorten that to a year at most or you'll get left in the digital dust. IE7 has been out for what, 3 years or so? That is about an eternity in web time and if you haven't upgraded your infrastructure to move off IE6 yet, you might want to think about upgrading your entire business model as it is fairly obsolete in the modern world.
Maybe once sites like the WSJ or nytimes stop supporting IE6, execs at these dinosaurs might get the hint. I doubt it though. However, it is entirely their loss and I dont weep a single tear for people who still haven't upgraded. Maybe they should make their business models a *tad* more nimble so they don't get caught with their pants down after being giving a *three-plus year notice*.
Dont forget to add in the fact that Netscape added their fare share of "proprietary tags". Hell didn't they pretty much invent the Cookie as we know it? I think they are pretty much the creator of the TABLE and the always useful BLINK too (though IE did have the ever lovely MARQUEE).
Hell, if you ask me, those proprietary tags were useful things and we need another bloody tag war to shake things up. None of this design by committee bullshit from the W3C. Let the browser vendors invent their own tags and in time something stable and ultimately far more useful will shake out--just like it did with HTML.
The Netscape rewrite had nothing to do with it, and there were other rendering engines and browsers out at the time besides Internet Explorer and Netscape.
Who? IE and Netscape were it. If there was any other players, they must have really sucked because I dont remember any of them.
Netscape did netscape in man. Don't you remember how every version of their browser got worse and worse. Remember how useless IE3 and 4 were? They did such a poor job rendering what was on the web they were only good for typing in "netscape.com" and downloading the real deal. Remember though how much bigger the netscape download got? IRC clients, mail clients, usenet clients, ftp clients, friggen HTML editors? Remember how Netscape got into the whole Portal thing and how hard it became just to find where to download their friggen browser? Then you'd download the 20mb thing and it would crash all the time?
Those guys killed themselves. It was obvious to anybody. Instead of getting better, their browser got worse and worse while IE got better and better. Eventually it just wasn't worth navigating the "Portal" to find their huge binary when IE could render every page just fine. Sadly, IE development stagnated with IE6 and it wasn't until major security bugs coupled with the increasing usability of Firefox that they finally got a clue and pushed out a modern browser.
But seriously, Netscape did themselves in. It doesn't take a "shill" (i.e. somebody who isn't 100% in line with orthadox FSF/RMS brand Freedom(tm)) to see that.
This might be the drink I'm having doing the typing but... You better figure it out soon because testing IE6 is increasingly not worth it. I personally gave up testing my sites in IE6 and only do minimal repair work when something is really busted in IE6.
My sympathy and patience for those still using IE6 has disappeared. You guys aren't worth my time anymore. Giving my users what they want *and* supporting IE6 costs way too much. Thankfully I've got sites like Youtube and Digg who agree and will back the little guy up in giving you IE6 Luddites the finger. Hopefully more will join the party too.
I feel your pain, but ya'll should have been planning your migrations off IE6 years ago. This is what happens when you never update your infrastructure. The longer you use old crap, the more it costs to migrate. You never save money by never upgrading your technology stack. Worse, you risk loosing your competitive advantage--obviously those who can read digg, facebook, and youtube at work are vastly more productive then the geezers you have at your joint running IE6:-)
Now excuse me, the Margarita I was drinking was awefuly strong. Cheers to you anyway!
Because the market share itself has always been made biased by Microsoft's actions
You mean they progressively improved their browser while Netscape progressively made their browser shittier and shittier? There was a time where the only thing IE was good for (IE3) was to download Netscape without using FTP. Eventually the Netscape version got more bloated and more buggy while the IE versions got more stable, and worked with more websites. Eventually there was just not point to downloading the increasingly large download. IIRC Netscape had a mail client, a usenet client, a webpage editor and an IRC client. Remember those were the days when we still used modems, so a 15mb download was a big deal.
Isn't it obvious that Netscape killed Netscape? Doesn't the fact sued Microsoft (just like Sun/Java) cry of desperation? Does the EU not have anything better to do with their time? Are we still fighting this battle? Seriously? Grow up.
Who the fuck writes a file system implementation in GPL!?
Zealots, that is who. People so blinded by their ideology that they cannot think about the long-term issues with their license choice.
GPL is okay for end-user stuff, but it is a horrible choice for protocol libraries, programming languages and well, basically any kind of developer used library.
Oh, actually I'm only half right. Sun and other companies use the GPL as a way to tease you into buying their real stuff. Since you can't modify their GPL stuff*, they hope you'll eventually pony up and by their big-boy stuff so you can modify it.
*(well unless you are okay with your own work becoming GPL'd)
Having it be free software is right for the project because you're not giving software to kids with serious strings attached
Fair enough. But that is a feature just as much as "hand crank charger", "magic LCD that works in direct sunlight", "mesh wireless network", "new OS", etc. You can only add so many features for version 1.0. It seems they wanted to do *everything* for v1 and as a result pushed out a subpar product that was too expensive and too late to market.
Had they stripped out some of the features, maybe went with an off the shelf OS for v1, and maybe put off some other features, they might have had a shipping product in the hands of kids sooner and for less. Maybe v2 could have included a Free as in Freedom(tm) operating system. Maybe v1 had it, but v1 didn't have a crazy LCD on it. Who knows.
Free Software(tm) might be right for the project yes. I actually do not think it is right but none the less, if it was important it still needed to be prioritized.
Besides, the problem wasn't that the code was open, but that they insisted it be RMS Brand Freedom(tm). It waslike trying to provide nutritious food for developing nations while being backed by PETA or trying to sell green tech that was fully endorsed by Greenpeace. You just can't do it because unless you have powerful mainstream backers, PETA, Greenpeace or the FSF will push you too far to the extreme and cause you to lose focus. That is what happened here. Somewhere in the archives, you've even got RMS weighing in on the OLPC--that is the *wrong* kind of person you need to promote the goals of the OLPC. Free Software(tm) is a line-item, nice-to-have feature. It isn't the single most important goal.
The GPL wasn't a problem from a low-level stand point--it might in fact be a very pragmatic license to use. It was a problem because the GPL is perceived to be a very political license and thus drags in all kinds of nonsense that the OLPC guys really didn't need.
. Look at it this way - if kids grew up in Africa, South Asia, and South America with XOs, they'd grow up with a clear alternative to buying MS and Intel products when they wanted computing power
OLPC failed, in part, because they went out of the way to please people like you rather then their potential customers. You aren't their customer, you are an arm-chair quarterback. All you have done is added a thick layer of zealotry and politics that have zero place in the business OLPC was in.
I know this isn't going to make me popular in these parts, but at first I was excited when I heard about OLPC until I read their mission statement. The second I read "Free Software" and "GPL", I knew they were horribly unfocused and would eventually fail. The politics of Free Software(tm) have no place in a non-profit that was supposed to put computers in the hands of children. Pushing those goals in parallel with trying to build a computer from scratch, put together an operating system from scratch, putting together a whole new method of education, and *finally* convincing governments to buy said devices from said organization was asking for way to much. Adding "GPL" and all the baggage that goes with it did nothing but bring out the trolls and zealots and stole only shred of focus the company might have had.
Sadly, my prediction was 100% correct. Had they been merely a non-profit trying to put laptops into the hands of kids in developing nations, while they wouldn't have been on slashdot or any other linux rag much, they probably would have had a much better chance to fulfill their mission. A shame, really.
If you look at the code for slashdot, there is a function that strips out anything that isn't pure virgin ASCII. In other words, if it ain't A-Z, a-z 0-9 and a handful of other symbols blessed by the Queen, it ain't gonna get displayed.
Why do they do this? Probably as a way to partially sanitize user input. Probably 'cause slash was written before the dozens of CPAN modules came along who did a way better job of filtering nonsense out of untrusted user input. Who knows. But it is rather tiring, I agree.
Just like how to solve 10343.34931/9093.9483 without a calculator
You are the guy who doesn't know what the modulo operator is and writes crazy batches of if{} statements rather then doing a simple modulo.
For example, if it is 12 at night, what time will it be 45 hours from now?
Easy:
45hr % 24hr = 21hr
What about AM/PM?
45hr % 12hr = 9hr
AM or PM?
Easy. Watch this little proof: 45hr - 12hr = 33hr 33hr % 24hr = 9hr 33hr % 12hr = 9hr
Since 9 = 9, must be AM.
In the 45 case, 9 != 21, so 45 hours out it must be 9PM.
You'd only be able to solve this if you learned at least a little bit about division and remainders. Many basic check digits use modulo arithmatic to compute their values as well. I've seen code that did exactly what I did above, only with huge if{} statements or worse, huge for() loops...
Personally, I think it is a brilliant interview question.
I too make weird hybrid words. I think my hand doesn't have any practice writing out words and has to revert back to "thinking" about each letter of a word. Just like when you were learning to type and had to think about every letter--with practice you typed in words, not letters. Probably the same kind of deal with handwriting--when you practice, your arm and fingers memorize all the strokes required to draw out each word or syllable.
I wonder, if you watched us write by hand, if our patterns mimicked somebody who was just learning to write. It might help prove my theory right.
Guess it is an American definition and seems to be the source of much confusion:-)
Cursive = That curvy, scripty looking junk where all the letters are connected. Think caligraphy.
"Whatever" = Print, I guess. You know. Normal handwriting where the letters aren't all connected. Not all caps; it is mixed case just like you'd expect. Just not all scripty looking garbage that is impossible to read and impossible for left-handers like me to write.
When I first started college, I used to write all kinds of notes. Eventually I realized that 1) I could never read what I wrote down and 2) I never actually referred to what I wrote anyway. After that, I stopped writing down notes and started to pay attention to what the professor was saying. The grades on my finals didn't change a bit. I think the more you take notes, the less attention you actually pay in class. YMMV
Slashdot Mirror
The reason most companies ask isn't to stiff you, but to make sure you aren't expecting way more then what they are budgeted for. They don't want to get to negotiations and find out that you were expecting $150k a year when they only had a budget for $90k. If the company is worth its salt, they probably also want to know that you aren't asking for $45k and the market rate is $90k--after all, what is wrong with you at those low prices?
The trick to not pigeon holing yourself is to give them a ballpark. That is all they need--you to put them at ease that they aren't gonna get sticker shock when they hire you.
Give yourself a range of like $20k or so. Make sure that you span the range so that what you really want is somewhere in the lower end of the quote. For example, if you want $90k, make it $85->$100k. Just make sure that the low end is really and truly the absolute minimum you'd accept and the upper bound isn't a huge stretch for your skills and the market rate.
They ask "what is your salary requirements?" You reply "I was hoping for market rate, so ballpark about $80k -> 100k. Obviously that number might be more or less depending on things like my position, hours, benefits. Sound about right?". Now you still have a lot of negotiating power and they don't have to worry that when they want to hire you and need to negotiate salary you aren't gonna ask for $150k.
I once interviewed for a non-profit who asked what my salary requirements were and I said "about $70->$90k" and he immediately shot back "unfortunately we are budgeted for around $55k". With that, we both knew this wasn't gonna work so we didn't bother wasting more time.
That is my strategy. Your mileage may vary.
Pull a stunt like that and you'd strike out if I was interviewing you. To each their own, but fer christ sakes it is an email client not your main development tool!
Once you start asking religious questions like the ones in your post, you start to look like a person who will be very difficult to work with. After all, if you have major demands for extremely minor things like your email client, what kinds of demands are you going to asking for when it comes to actually doing your job?
Unless you are very careful in your wording, even companies that *do* have have flexible working might take it the wrong way (i.e. "What, you want to slack off?").
I guess the proper question might be--what is the best way to deduce if said company has flex work. My hunch is the answer varies by the size of the company. You probably could very bluntly ask "what is your policy on flexible working" to a big-co, but with a small-co you will have to be more subtle.
LOL. Yes. Problems upgrading. "Package ${man_blah_blah} blocks ${man_some_other_format}". "Package ${scary_system_package} blocks ${scary_package_with_slightly_different_name}".
The only "solution" is to copy & paste the package names and pray that somebody on some gentoo forum has the exact sequence of steps so you dont hose your system.
Good times.
But you can cut the wheelchair crowd some slack--they probably can't walk! If you are driving a segway, your legs have to function otherwise you couldn't stand on the damn thing. ...Although I wonder if you could rig it so it is drivable when you have a broken leg and have a cast + crutches.
Well, maybe they do, but still. It isn't the marketing, it is quite frankly the reality. If anybody thinks like me, they probably consider it yet another sign of how lazy and obese we as a society have become. I mean, we can't even bother to walk down a sidewalk now? Give me a break!
Your theory might be correct if they weren't wearing helmets too. Once you put on a helmet while riding that thing, you just look like a pathetic fat bastard who can't walk and is so scared of hitting something you need a helmet. I mean, dont get me wrong, helmets save lives and yada yada, but still... a helmet on a segway? Really?
The only exception to that rule is when I see a cop driving one. Then I just think about all the tech problems with the device like what if the bad guy pushes the thing over, or why the city thinks it is okay for a city official to use those things on a crowded sidewalk. Bikes can at least kinda shuffle through a crowd. YOu can't easily dismount a segway and walk it through a dense crowd.
I dunno, bottom line is it make you look, well, weak.
It is called a margarita bud and you were warned :-)
IBM is supposedly a technology company. A stapler manufacturing company or a clothing company, I can see still using IE6, but a technology company!? They of all people should have processes in place to ensure their employees are running only the latest technology. How the *hell* can a technology company create a modern, competitive product when its employees are running ancient web browsers!?
That is what happens when you sit around twaddling your thumbs running ancient crusty junk. The web moves too fast for 10 or 5 year deployment cycles. If you want to be competitive, you have to shorten that to a year at most or you'll get left in the digital dust. IE7 has been out for what, 3 years or so? That is about an eternity in web time and if you haven't upgraded your infrastructure to move off IE6 yet, you might want to think about upgrading your entire business model as it is fairly obsolete in the modern world.
Maybe once sites like the WSJ or nytimes stop supporting IE6, execs at these dinosaurs might get the hint. I doubt it though. However, it is entirely their loss and I dont weep a single tear for people who still haven't upgraded. Maybe they should make their business models a *tad* more nimble so they don't get caught with their pants down after being giving a *three-plus year notice*.
Dont forget to add in the fact that Netscape added their fare share of "proprietary tags". Hell didn't they pretty much invent the Cookie as we know it? I think they are pretty much the creator of the TABLE and the always useful BLINK too (though IE did have the ever lovely MARQUEE).
Hell, if you ask me, those proprietary tags were useful things and we need another bloody tag war to shake things up. None of this design by committee bullshit from the W3C. Let the browser vendors invent their own tags and in time something stable and ultimately far more useful will shake out--just like it did with HTML.
Who? IE and Netscape were it. If there was any other players, they must have really sucked because I dont remember any of them.
Netscape did netscape in man. Don't you remember how every version of their browser got worse and worse. Remember how useless IE3 and 4 were? They did such a poor job rendering what was on the web they were only good for typing in "netscape.com" and downloading the real deal. Remember though how much bigger the netscape download got? IRC clients, mail clients, usenet clients, ftp clients, friggen HTML editors? Remember how Netscape got into the whole Portal thing and how hard it became just to find where to download their friggen browser? Then you'd download the 20mb thing and it would crash all the time?
Those guys killed themselves. It was obvious to anybody. Instead of getting better, their browser got worse and worse while IE got better and better. Eventually it just wasn't worth navigating the "Portal" to find their huge binary when IE could render every page just fine. Sadly, IE development stagnated with IE6 and it wasn't until major security bugs coupled with the increasing usability of Firefox that they finally got a clue and pushed out a modern browser.
But seriously, Netscape did themselves in. It doesn't take a "shill" (i.e. somebody who isn't 100% in line with orthadox FSF/RMS brand Freedom(tm)) to see that.
This might be the drink I'm having doing the typing but... You better figure it out soon because testing IE6 is increasingly not worth it. I personally gave up testing my sites in IE6 and only do minimal repair work when something is really busted in IE6.
My sympathy and patience for those still using IE6 has disappeared. You guys aren't worth my time anymore. Giving my users what they want *and* supporting IE6 costs way too much. Thankfully I've got sites like Youtube and Digg who agree and will back the little guy up in giving you IE6 Luddites the finger. Hopefully more will join the party too.
I feel your pain, but ya'll should have been planning your migrations off IE6 years ago. This is what happens when you never update your infrastructure. The longer you use old crap, the more it costs to migrate. You never save money by never upgrading your technology stack. Worse, you risk loosing your competitive advantage--obviously those who can read digg, facebook, and youtube at work are vastly more productive then the geezers you have at your joint running IE6 :-)
Now excuse me, the Margarita I was drinking was awefuly strong. Cheers to you anyway!
You mean they progressively improved their browser while Netscape progressively made their browser shittier and shittier? There was a time where the only thing IE was good for (IE3) was to download Netscape without using FTP. Eventually the Netscape version got more bloated and more buggy while the IE versions got more stable, and worked with more websites. Eventually there was just not point to downloading the increasingly large download. IIRC Netscape had a mail client, a usenet client, a webpage editor and an IRC client. Remember those were the days when we still used modems, so a 15mb download was a big deal.
Isn't it obvious that Netscape killed Netscape? Doesn't the fact sued Microsoft (just like Sun/Java) cry of desperation? Does the EU not have anything better to do with their time? Are we still fighting this battle? Seriously? Grow up.
Zealots, that is who. People so blinded by their ideology that they cannot think about the long-term issues with their license choice.
GPL is okay for end-user stuff, but it is a horrible choice for protocol libraries, programming languages and well, basically any kind of developer used library.
Oh, actually I'm only half right. Sun and other companies use the GPL as a way to tease you into buying their real stuff. Since you can't modify their GPL stuff*, they hope you'll eventually pony up and by their big-boy stuff so you can modify it.
*(well unless you are okay with your own work becoming GPL'd)
Is that because you are infected with the deadly Microsoft-Hater Disease that Linus warned about? Sounds like it!
You really should be at home resting your brain back into a more sane state before posting here again.
Sad. Seriously. You have the disease. Seek help.
Fair enough. But that is a feature just as much as "hand crank charger", "magic LCD that works in direct sunlight", "mesh wireless network", "new OS", etc. You can only add so many features for version 1.0. It seems they wanted to do *everything* for v1 and as a result pushed out a subpar product that was too expensive and too late to market.
Had they stripped out some of the features, maybe went with an off the shelf OS for v1, and maybe put off some other features, they might have had a shipping product in the hands of kids sooner and for less. Maybe v2 could have included a Free as in Freedom(tm) operating system. Maybe v1 had it, but v1 didn't have a crazy LCD on it. Who knows.
Free Software(tm) might be right for the project yes. I actually do not think it is right but none the less, if it was important it still needed to be prioritized.
Besides, the problem wasn't that the code was open, but that they insisted it be RMS Brand Freedom(tm). It waslike trying to provide nutritious food for developing nations while being backed by PETA or trying to sell green tech that was fully endorsed by Greenpeace. You just can't do it because unless you have powerful mainstream backers, PETA, Greenpeace or the FSF will push you too far to the extreme and cause you to lose focus. That is what happened here. Somewhere in the archives, you've even got RMS weighing in on the OLPC--that is the *wrong* kind of person you need to promote the goals of the OLPC. Free Software(tm) is a line-item, nice-to-have feature. It isn't the single most important goal.
The GPL wasn't a problem from a low-level stand point--it might in fact be a very pragmatic license to use. It was a problem because the GPL is perceived to be a very political license and thus drags in all kinds of nonsense that the OLPC guys really didn't need.
Funny how often that little guy comes in handy, isn't it? :-)
OLPC failed, in part, because they went out of the way to please people like you rather then their potential customers. You aren't their customer, you are an arm-chair quarterback. All you have done is added a thick layer of zealotry and politics that have zero place in the business OLPC was in.
I know this isn't going to make me popular in these parts, but at first I was excited when I heard about OLPC until I read their mission statement. The second I read "Free Software" and "GPL", I knew they were horribly unfocused and would eventually fail. The politics of Free Software(tm) have no place in a non-profit that was supposed to put computers in the hands of children. Pushing those goals in parallel with trying to build a computer from scratch, put together an operating system from scratch, putting together a whole new method of education, and *finally* convincing governments to buy said devices from said organization was asking for way to much. Adding "GPL" and all the baggage that goes with it did nothing but bring out the trolls and zealots and stole only shred of focus the company might have had.
Sadly, my prediction was 100% correct. Had they been merely a non-profit trying to put laptops into the hands of kids in developing nations, while they wouldn't have been on slashdot or any other linux rag much, they probably would have had a much better chance to fulfill their mission. A shame, really.
If you look at the code for slashdot, there is a function that strips out anything that isn't pure virgin ASCII. In other words, if it ain't A-Z, a-z 0-9 and a handful of other symbols blessed by the Queen, it ain't gonna get displayed.
Why do they do this? Probably as a way to partially sanitize user input. Probably 'cause slash was written before the dozens of CPAN modules came along who did a way better job of filtering nonsense out of untrusted user input. Who knows. But it is rather tiring, I agree.
You are the guy who doesn't know what the modulo operator is and writes crazy batches of if{} statements rather then doing a simple modulo.
For example, if it is 12 at night, what time will it be 45 hours from now?
Easy:
45hr % 24hr = 21hr
What about AM/PM?
45hr % 12hr = 9hr
AM or PM?
Easy. Watch this little proof:
45hr - 12hr = 33hr
33hr % 24hr = 9hr
33hr % 12hr = 9hr
Since 9 = 9, must be AM.
In the 45 case, 9 != 21, so 45 hours out it must be 9PM.
You'd only be able to solve this if you learned at least a little bit about division and remainders. Many basic check digits use modulo arithmatic to compute their values as well. I've seen code that did exactly what I did above, only with huge if{} statements or worse, huge for() loops...
Personally, I think it is a brilliant interview question.
I too make weird hybrid words. I think my hand doesn't have any practice writing out words and has to revert back to "thinking" about each letter of a word. Just like when you were learning to type and had to think about every letter--with practice you typed in words, not letters. Probably the same kind of deal with handwriting--when you practice, your arm and fingers memorize all the strokes required to draw out each word or syllable.
I wonder, if you watched us write by hand, if our patterns mimicked somebody who was just learning to write. It might help prove my theory right.
Guess it is an American definition and seems to be the source of much confusion :-)
Cursive = That curvy, scripty looking junk where all the letters are connected. Think caligraphy.
"Whatever" = Print, I guess. You know. Normal handwriting where the letters aren't all connected. Not all caps; it is mixed case just like you'd expect. Just not all scripty looking garbage that is impossible to read and impossible for left-handers like me to write.
When I first started college, I used to write all kinds of notes. Eventually I realized that 1) I could never read what I wrote down and 2) I never actually referred to what I wrote anyway. After that, I stopped writing down notes and started to pay attention to what the professor was saying. The grades on my finals didn't change a bit. I think the more you take notes, the less attention you actually pay in class. YMMV