Ah your right my bad. How similar are they? Both use Obj-C cocoa. Articles I've found say that UIKit is based on Application Kit which is the UI versions for iOS and OS X respectively. Of course things are more than just a UI but still lots of transferable skills if not complete binary compatibility. This might be a case of MS copying something with a slight improvement. MS is of course famous for promising something only to drop the feature by the time of final release so I guess we'll see how truly pain free WP->arm win 8->x86 win 8 really is for Metro.
I think that is exactly it. If I recall correctly pipelining came out first in the RISC area which helped a lot. It took a few years for the CISC chips to follow suit.
Finding the parallelism needed to keep busy is hard at all levels. Instruction level parallelism down at the op level and task level parallelism at the core level. Small transistor count operations that can be data-paralleled for speed is all fine and dandy but finding enough chunks consistently to keep all of those parallel channels full is hard. Clumping things into more complicated tasks that can keep one section of the cpu busy for a while increases the likelihood that another one of "those" will come up soon especially if you allow for out of order execution. Similarly building up independent tasks (applications, clients to serve, etc) is the easiest way to consistently keep all the CPU cores busy. Everything else used to parallelism a logical task across CPUs involves more difficulty (deadlocks, cache coherency etc) in managing the parallelism well and an inherit cost of parallelism (and limit on performance increase a la Amdhal's Law).
When transistors were large the time needed to move data around within the CPU was more significant, as the die shrinks the time needed to move things around shrinks and the more transistor width hops that can be made in a single clock cycle (so more of the "far stuff" is accessible in a single tick).
It doesn't make sense to decide on a state by state basis whether or not birth control will be taught in PE class or not, or whether or not money will go to abortion clinics, or... These are common issues.
Wrong. People are not all alike, and it's unfair for 535 people to dictation personal issues to 360 million people. Communities should government themselves, first, without interference. Common issues are only those things that everyone can agree upon, and those are all enumerated in the Constitution of the US and the states.
True people aren't alike but I'd argue that you probably can't find a single point in the constitution that everyone would agree with. Example right to bare arms, anti-racism amendments, women vote etc. Probably (hopefully) a majority of people agree these are good things but I suspect the number of people that disagree with them are in the millions.
Breaking things down to smaller size government doesn't help. Having a town of 50 people decide on a personal issue doesn't make it right, it just makes it passable because there is a small enough group of people that the chances of something that the majority of people wouldn't agree to can be represented by the local majority. In my experience the smaller the group making the decision the less likely the policies are to be moderate. Put ten people in a room to decide what food will be served on Fridays at the cafeteria and if you have a few taco lovers you'll have tacos every Friday. Doesn't mean it is fair to the people that didn't want that, or that it is even what the taco lovers themselves would want but it is what is settled for because it is an easy agreement to make. You can end up with minority groups that are extremely deprived of tolerable living conditions because of a small number of very vocal people that make up the majority (or at least the majority of people that care enough to vote on the issue). Small legislative groups make for the high probability of concentrations of truly odd communes of people living under laws that are far from what the constitution/bill of rights/normal "God given" rights of a person are. Laws become because of a chance concentration of likeminded individuals not a truly "government by the people" rooting out of what a "reasonable individual" would expect from a government.
Lastly: personal choice - a lot of the issues I mentioned earlier are personal choices that are being infringed. People usually don't care about their right to have an abortion for example, the ones that are upset with R v Wade are that ones that want to force their personal beliefs on everyone else, regardless of what they believe. Similarly with no evolution in classroom rules (which I might add is protecting yourself from the possibility of your children believing something different than you by keeping them ignorant of anything different than what you believe), "dry" counties, anti-gay marriage laws, bans on gays in the military, abstinence only sex ed etc. It isn't protecting people's beliefs it is protecting them from people that might believe/act differently than they like often by promoting ignorance in children so they won't try believing/doing anything contrary to their parents' beliefs. This is not a right that I think should be protect from a central government ban. You have a right to believe and act as you wish as long as it doesn't interfere with others rights to believe and act as they wish.
It doesn't and it won't from what I've saw on MS talks. Win 8 is meant to be a (not yelling just plain text emphasizing:-)) PLATFORM SWITCH + backwards compatiblity not platform switch + BACKWARDS COMPATIBLITY.
ie: your old stuff on an x86 platform will continue to work just fine. Your new stuff will work on both x86 and ARM. But old stuff non-ARM will not work. The idea (wishful thinking) is everyone is supposed to switch to Metro Style apps if at all possible running on the WinRT (Win32 is on the path to depreciation/isn't the "standard" API anymore) and you'll likely get Win Phone support for free or very cheaply. That said ARM will have.Net 4.5/common API with x86 so you could port your existing program to the new.Net or recompile your C++/Fortran/Pascal (with all the fun macros necessary to support different architectures) and run. So either way you are likely going to need some work to rebuild your app and for moderate sized apps/anything you can possibly dream of a user using a tablet for you probably should think about putting the effort into making it a WinRT/Metro style app.
I think MS finally clued into the power of a cross platform platform (a la iPad/iPhone/OS X) versus lots of redesign for each platform. That said: I hate the touch centric model. Great for a novice computer user or someone in an awkward position (laying back on a couch, in a moving car, etc) but for everyone else expecting quick interaction keyboard and mouse are the way to go.
Sorry a lot of that is irrelevant/already solved by technology. The vast majority of this is griping about no representation non-elected rulers. Essentially marshal law of a people with no say in how the country is governed etc. Last time I checked the US doesn't have a monarch (though only having two parties with any chance of power is pretty damn close IMHO). ex. judges "dependent on his Will alone" nope you don't have that. At least except for the supreme court (and than only the members unfortunate to drop dead during the presidents term). People aren't transported "overseas" (substitute "vast distances" here I guess) for made up offenses (except of course non-americans but they don't count right?). I think people are pretty damned pampered if they compare now to the problems of "ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns" and "undistinguished destruction of all ages".
I don't agree with the NDAA either but (admittedly wikipedia) "the NDAA text affirms the President's authority to detain, via the Armed Forces, any person "who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012 . This is just putting into writing the "authority" that the president already had, and I might add was used by Bush for ~7 years prior to Obama. I don't think Obama could close Gitmo/stop these things because the republicans wouldn't let him. So he was pretty much left with:
a) continuing to do something that isn't explicitly written down as something he can do, or b) get the legislature to make explicit those powers (and cover his ass).
Regardless I don't see how small government helps. You'd still end up with the same thing except at a smaller government scale Alabama might be arresting people for "driving while black" under their Governors authority, Arizona would be using cattle prods on illegal immigrants, etc. A ridiculous law/power isn't ridiculous because it comes from a centralized authority, is is ridiculous by its own right. A small level of break down of things that are common does lead to a large amount of inconsistencies/inefficiencies. It doesn't make sense to decide on a state by state basis whether or not birth control will be taught in PE class or not, or whether or not money will go to abortion clinics, or... These are common issues. We aren't talking about growing crops for example, where people in NY city might not care about it as long as it ends up on their plate at a reasonable price, these are things of value, common interest that should be decided once and managed consistently so that opportunities and obligations to society are consistent for all Americans/Mexicans/Whateverians (not US centric since I'd rather not just focus on the US system as the small versus large government issue is common).
It's not just posting. Once they have your personal details and a cookie on your computer they get your "stuff you don't want them to have" by tracking you wherever you go. That is the problem. I might like Zebra porn but don't want Zebra porn ads showing up magically wherever I browse. Most people are not/. types either so they don't even have a clue they are being tracked.
What do the Founding Fathers have to do with it? Is the country supposed to remain exactly the same even if a large part of the population no longer agrees with a 55 guys that have been dead for nearly 200 years and chief complaint was the accessibility of horse and buggy parking in front of the local dry goods store?
Times change. Before telecommunications/airplanes breaking things down to the lowest level made sense on an efficiency grounds: a large amount of resources had to be spent to move things around/get decisions from the central government to Nevada by buggy. That isn't the problem anymore. I'm not saying central govenment is always efficient but it can be. Some things make sense on a country wide basis: education standards, labor law, criminal law etc. People have a fundamental right to these services/consistency of expectations of what they can and can't do and they shouldn't be different from one area to another because the local county voted on spending the money on a new water fountain in front of town hall or the mayor happens to be religion X and is opposed to evolution on personal grounds so says that the vast majority of scientists opinions shouldn't be heard in science class.
I read it differently "that is NOT a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency" ie the new bill will be for private works NOT included in sec 101 t 17.
Simply stopping to use the site doesn't help. They still can match your browsing to your old fb account to track you. A lot (hundreds of millions) of people had accounts before this scandal broke. Simply "don't use it any more" isn't going to work since the accounts continue to exist until you delete them and a company that is less than ethical in tracking you might very well delete all data that you entered into your account without deleting the info they got from their tracking cookies and some sort of identifier so they can keep targeting ads at you. My thing with facebook: I don't use it other than ~once a month when I'm trying to contact someone I haven't for a while and don't have contact info for. Which again deleting your account will not help with. It would be nice if you had a personal directory option similar to LinkedIn where you could just search the users profile pic and info page rather than needing a wall, having linked access to other sites etc. Not everyone is a professional acquaintance and you might not have any idea if it is a girl who that girl married (so what her name is now) what they studied and where etc so you can't easily use other sites.
But you are missing out on all the cyber stalking possibilities. Want to know if that cute girl from high school is still cute? Often Facebook is the only way to find out;-)
I agree here to some extent. Things like Joe drinks Miller has little use unless you can either convince Joe to drink something else, or convince Joe to buy more Miller from you. The information that is useful I think is the non-obvious. Say they were able to figure out that guys named Joe drinking Miller prefer trucks. Than they can sell that information and voila, Joe sees lots more truck ads than car ads everywhere he goes. Since it is an order of magnitude more valuable to have Joe click on an ad than just show him one this increases the odds of this high value activity and makes each display ad more valuable since it is more targeted.
A lot? No about 2.5% of them given a two tailed distribution. How many $500 bills are you willing to launch in space with a 0.025 probability of recovering it?
Yes but... if someone working for that company tries to enter the US than they might try to enforce those laws. That is the problem when you do something illegal even illegal in another country it limits your future options. Heck americans think their laws apply everywhere so much that one of my coworkers was there for training and was talking about vacations. The group asked where he has been and looked at him like he just raped a 3 year old in front of them when he said he had been to Cuba and it was nice. They were so afraid that they didn't even want him going on the internet to show them the resort he stayed at. Crazy.
Not to mention: "Attorneys believe a Steve Jobs action figure released after his death violates the 'right of publicity,' which is a state law that protects one's image" does Apple own the rights to Steve Jobs' likeness? They can probably get them on the copies of the Apple logo but what shirt he wears and his face? Come on. His wife/heirs maybe but not the company he worked for.
Very good point. I'm somewhat in the same boat: my code is owned by someone else or it is code that is for projects that I'm working on/want to keep the IP for. Either way I'm not likely to be showing the code to anyone. I guess with my own code I could find snippets to show provided that it doesn't expose what my product idea is but still. As others suggested real world problems that have been encountered in the project you are hiring for and solved would be a good test. Make it obvious enough where the problem is and see how the candidate approaches figuring out exactly what is wrong and fixing it.
But it doesn't prove that you can code or come up with ideas yourself. So if it is being used in an interview to determine if you are a good developer I think it is pretty meaningless. It is good to be able to find things on the internet and be able to use them appropriately but you don't want to be in a situation where you find out too late that your new star developer can't come up with ideas on their own and what you want doesn't exist yet to copy.
No the point is that they aren't getting a good idea of your abilities since there is no guarantee that the code you show them is yours. The only way to know for sure that someone can solve problems or program is to sit them down and have them do it in front of you. Looking at old projects doesn't work. Even old employers might not be good enough because you might not get a good idea of how much of the ideas were theirs and how much they were just dumping someone else's logic into code form.
Yep. There are few companies I know of that can afford their devs to not be creative though (perhaps healthcare and military being the exception since they are highly speced out systems up front usually). Customer has a problem and dev/support can figure out to do it with existing program but if they aren't smart enough to come up with a better workflow/software to fix that repeating customer problem more cleanly your program will continue to be a piece of crap for example. For small companies creativity is what they need because they don't have a dedicated designer/architect etc so they need someone that can say, oh wait why don't we completely flip the approach to the problem around and use hadoop to make this run faster or something. Lastly: it is rare that a company is hiring someone that they just want to be a dev they want them to grow and be more valuable, some day lead a team, a project, etc. A company owner usually is dreaming how big the company will get if the company grows 10X than some of the people that are working for you now need to be able to become managers/architects.
Perhaps. The article says "looking at real code" is better. Again perhaps. For example the problem there is: did they really write the code, if so how long did it take? Did someone else suggest fixes etc? You don't know. I mean 300 lines of beautiful C is all fine and dandy but if it took you 3 months to write it and half of it is cut and pasted from the web how good is it really?
What brain teasers hopefully do is take a problem close to the types of things you see in the job. Even though it is all programming different companies either due to industry or existing infrastructure/policies tend to have different types of coding "puzzles" that come up again and again. Hopefully this test problem is one you haven't seen before and they get to see how you approach something you don't already know how to solve, how close to a good design do you get on the first interation, if they point out a problem how you go about fixing it etc. All real world important stuff to know about someone.
Yeah I was somewhere between id 100k-200k but inactive for a year or so and lost my login (didn't use the same email account, didn't remember my login). I think it is all about how the article is written though. It is okay to bring up old denied news I guess as long as you mention that both parties deny it or whatever. Just because a deal isn't going to happen doesn't mean if it were to happen it might be interesting/good idea/ruin the world as we know it.
Yes because being on call might be part of the job description. If you are getting 2X or more times a normal salary and have specialized skills your employer isn't likely to keep a bunch of spare "yous' around for after hours support. You're special which means in the ways you are special you are expected to "make it go" whenever it is needed. That is part of the reason for the good salary: you have more responsibility. Oh and you can add that on call is a very nice leash much preferable to actually having to sit at a desk at 10pm "just in case". Getting paid beer money to watch Star Trek reruns and than (at least anywhere I've worked) getting overtime pay if you actually get called is a pretty sweet deal.
Not saying MS is completely blameless here but if you both were having audio driver issues perhaps it isn't MS's fault (assuming MS didn't write the audio driver). Windows crashing because of a driver isn't MSs fault: might argue about the driver model of the OS etc, but bottom line is if the driver wasn't buggy they wouldn't be likely to crash.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah your right my bad. How similar are they? Both use Obj-C cocoa. Articles I've found say that UIKit is based on Application Kit which is the UI versions for iOS and OS X respectively. Of course things are more than just a UI but still lots of transferable skills if not complete binary compatibility. This might be a case of MS copying something with a slight improvement. MS is of course famous for promising something only to drop the feature by the time of final release so I guess we'll see how truly pain free WP->arm win 8->x86 win 8 really is for Metro.
Nope not without recompiling/fixing whatever problems arise, or in the case of .net porting to .net 4.5.
I think that is exactly it. If I recall correctly pipelining came out first in the RISC area which helped a lot. It took a few years for the CISC chips to follow suit.
Finding the parallelism needed to keep busy is hard at all levels. Instruction level parallelism down at the op level and task level parallelism at the core level. Small transistor count operations that can be data-paralleled for speed is all fine and dandy but finding enough chunks consistently to keep all of those parallel channels full is hard. Clumping things into more complicated tasks that can keep one section of the cpu busy for a while increases the likelihood that another one of "those" will come up soon especially if you allow for out of order execution. Similarly building up independent tasks (applications, clients to serve, etc) is the easiest way to consistently keep all the CPU cores busy. Everything else used to parallelism a logical task across CPUs involves more difficulty (deadlocks, cache coherency etc) in managing the parallelism well and an inherit cost of parallelism (and limit on performance increase a la Amdhal's Law).
When transistors were large the time needed to move data around within the CPU was more significant, as the die shrinks the time needed to move things around shrinks and the more transistor width hops that can be made in a single clock cycle (so more of the "far stuff" is accessible in a single tick).
It doesn't make sense to decide on a state by state basis whether or not birth control will be taught in PE class or not, or whether or not money will go to abortion clinics, or ... These are common issues.
Wrong. People are not all alike, and it's unfair for 535 people to dictation personal issues to 360 million people. Communities should government themselves, first, without interference. Common issues are only those things that everyone can agree upon, and those are all enumerated in the Constitution of the US and the states.
True people aren't alike but I'd argue that you probably can't find a single point in the constitution that everyone would agree with. Example right to bare arms, anti-racism amendments, women vote etc. Probably (hopefully) a majority of people agree these are good things but I suspect the number of people that disagree with them are in the millions.
Breaking things down to smaller size government doesn't help. Having a town of 50 people decide on a personal issue doesn't make it right, it just makes it passable because there is a small enough group of people that the chances of something that the majority of people wouldn't agree to can be represented by the local majority. In my experience the smaller the group making the decision the less likely the policies are to be moderate. Put ten people in a room to decide what food will be served on Fridays at the cafeteria and if you have a few taco lovers you'll have tacos every Friday. Doesn't mean it is fair to the people that didn't want that, or that it is even what the taco lovers themselves would want but it is what is settled for because it is an easy agreement to make. You can end up with minority groups that are extremely deprived of tolerable living conditions because of a small number of very vocal people that make up the majority (or at least the majority of people that care enough to vote on the issue). Small legislative groups make for the high probability of concentrations of truly odd communes of people living under laws that are far from what the constitution/bill of rights/normal "God given" rights of a person are. Laws become because of a chance concentration of likeminded individuals not a truly "government by the people" rooting out of what a "reasonable individual" would expect from a government.
Lastly: personal choice - a lot of the issues I mentioned earlier are personal choices that are being infringed. People usually don't care about their right to have an abortion for example, the ones that are upset with R v Wade are that ones that want to force their personal beliefs on everyone else, regardless of what they believe. Similarly with no evolution in classroom rules (which I might add is protecting yourself from the possibility of your children believing something different than you by keeping them ignorant of anything different than what you believe), "dry" counties, anti-gay marriage laws, bans on gays in the military, abstinence only sex ed etc. It isn't protecting people's beliefs it is protecting them from people that might believe/act differently than they like often by promoting ignorance in children so they won't try believing/doing anything contrary to their parents' beliefs. This is not a right that I think should be protect from a central government ban. You have a right to believe and act as you wish as long as it doesn't interfere with others rights to believe and act as they wish.
It doesn't and it won't from what I've saw on MS talks. Win 8 is meant to be a (not yelling just plain text emphasizing :-)) PLATFORM SWITCH + backwards compatiblity not platform switch + BACKWARDS COMPATIBLITY.
ie: your old stuff on an x86 platform will continue to work just fine. Your new stuff will work on both x86 and ARM. But old stuff non-ARM will not work. The idea (wishful thinking) is everyone is supposed to switch to Metro Style apps if at all possible running on the WinRT (Win32 is on the path to depreciation/isn't the "standard" API anymore) and you'll likely get Win Phone support for free or very cheaply. That said ARM will have .Net 4.5/common API with x86 so you could port your existing program to the new .Net or recompile your C++/Fortran/Pascal (with all the fun macros necessary to support different architectures) and run. So either way you are likely going to need some work to rebuild your app and for moderate sized apps/anything you can possibly dream of a user using a tablet for you probably should think about putting the effort into making it a WinRT/Metro style app.
I think MS finally clued into the power of a cross platform platform (a la iPad/iPhone/OS X) versus lots of redesign for each platform. That said: I hate the touch centric model. Great for a novice computer user or someone in an awkward position (laying back on a couch, in a moving car, etc) but for everyone else expecting quick interaction keyboard and mouse are the way to go.
Sorry a lot of that is irrelevant/already solved by technology. The vast majority of this is griping about no representation non-elected rulers. Essentially marshal law of a people with no say in how the country is governed etc. Last time I checked the US doesn't have a monarch (though only having two parties with any chance of power is pretty damn close IMHO). ex. judges "dependent on his Will alone" nope you don't have that. At least except for the supreme court (and than only the members unfortunate to drop dead during the presidents term). People aren't transported "overseas" (substitute "vast distances" here I guess) for made up offenses (except of course non-americans but they don't count right?). I think people are pretty damned pampered if they compare now to the problems of "ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns" and "undistinguished destruction of all ages".
I don't agree with the NDAA either but (admittedly wikipedia) "the NDAA text affirms the President's authority to detain, via the Armed Forces, any person "who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012 . This is just putting into writing the "authority" that the president already had, and I might add was used by Bush for ~7 years prior to Obama. I don't think Obama could close Gitmo/stop these things because the republicans wouldn't let him. So he was pretty much left with:
a) continuing to do something that isn't explicitly written down as something he can do, or
b) get the legislature to make explicit those powers (and cover his ass).
Regardless I don't see how small government helps. You'd still end up with the same thing except at a smaller government scale Alabama might be arresting people for "driving while black" under their Governors authority, Arizona would be using cattle prods on illegal immigrants, etc. A ridiculous law/power isn't ridiculous because it comes from a centralized authority, is is ridiculous by its own right. A small level of break down of things that are common does lead to a large amount of inconsistencies/inefficiencies. It doesn't make sense to decide on a state by state basis whether or not birth control will be taught in PE class or not, or whether or not money will go to abortion clinics, or ... These are common issues. We aren't talking about growing crops for example, where people in NY city might not care about it as long as it ends up on their plate at a reasonable price, these are things of value, common interest that should be decided once and managed consistently so that opportunities and obligations to society are consistent for all Americans/Mexicans/Whateverians (not US centric since I'd rather not just focus on the US system as the small versus large government issue is common).
It's not just posting. Once they have your personal details and a cookie on your computer they get your "stuff you don't want them to have" by tracking you wherever you go. That is the problem. I might like Zebra porn but don't want Zebra porn ads showing up magically wherever I browse. Most people are not /. types either so they don't even have a clue they are being tracked.
Times change. Before telecommunications/airplanes breaking things down to the lowest level made sense on an efficiency grounds: a large amount of resources had to be spent to move things around/get decisions from the central government to Nevada by buggy. That isn't the problem anymore. I'm not saying central govenment is always efficient but it can be. Some things make sense on a country wide basis: education standards, labor law, criminal law etc. People have a fundamental right to these services/consistency of expectations of what they can and can't do and they shouldn't be different from one area to another because the local county voted on spending the money on a new water fountain in front of town hall or the mayor happens to be religion X and is opposed to evolution on personal grounds so says that the vast majority of scientists opinions shouldn't be heard in science class.
I read it differently "that is NOT a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency" ie the new bill will be for private works NOT included in sec 101 t 17.
The bill actually says "private-sector" several times. Is work done by a private organization still considered private when it receives public funds?
Simply stopping to use the site doesn't help. They still can match your browsing to your old fb account to track you. A lot (hundreds of millions) of people had accounts before this scandal broke. Simply "don't use it any more" isn't going to work since the accounts continue to exist until you delete them and a company that is less than ethical in tracking you might very well delete all data that you entered into your account without deleting the info they got from their tracking cookies and some sort of identifier so they can keep targeting ads at you. My thing with facebook: I don't use it other than ~once a month when I'm trying to contact someone I haven't for a while and don't have contact info for. Which again deleting your account will not help with. It would be nice if you had a personal directory option similar to LinkedIn where you could just search the users profile pic and info page rather than needing a wall, having linked access to other sites etc. Not everyone is a professional acquaintance and you might not have any idea if it is a girl who that girl married (so what her name is now) what they studied and where etc so you can't easily use other sites.
Wiener's schnitzel.
But you are missing out on all the cyber stalking possibilities. Want to know if that cute girl from high school is still cute? Often Facebook is the only way to find out ;-)
I agree here to some extent. Things like Joe drinks Miller has little use unless you can either convince Joe to drink something else, or convince Joe to buy more Miller from you. The information that is useful I think is the non-obvious. Say they were able to figure out that guys named Joe drinking Miller prefer trucks. Than they can sell that information and voila, Joe sees lots more truck ads than car ads everywhere he goes. Since it is an order of magnitude more valuable to have Joe click on an ad than just show him one this increases the odds of this high value activity and makes each display ad more valuable since it is more targeted.
A lot? No about 2.5% of them given a two tailed distribution. How many $500 bills are you willing to launch in space with a 0.025 probability of recovering it?
Yes but ... if someone working for that company tries to enter the US than they might try to enforce those laws. That is the problem when you do something illegal even illegal in another country it limits your future options. Heck americans think their laws apply everywhere so much that one of my coworkers was there for training and was talking about vacations. The group asked where he has been and looked at him like he just raped a 3 year old in front of them when he said he had been to Cuba and it was nice. They were so afraid that they didn't even want him going on the internet to show them the resort he stayed at. Crazy.
Not to mention: "Attorneys believe a Steve Jobs action figure released after his death violates the 'right of publicity,' which is a state law that protects one's image" does Apple own the rights to Steve Jobs' likeness? They can probably get them on the copies of the Apple logo but what shirt he wears and his face? Come on. His wife/heirs maybe but not the company he worked for.
Very good point. I'm somewhat in the same boat: my code is owned by someone else or it is code that is for projects that I'm working on/want to keep the IP for. Either way I'm not likely to be showing the code to anyone. I guess with my own code I could find snippets to show provided that it doesn't expose what my product idea is but still. As others suggested real world problems that have been encountered in the project you are hiring for and solved would be a good test. Make it obvious enough where the problem is and see how the candidate approaches figuring out exactly what is wrong and fixing it.
But it doesn't prove that you can code or come up with ideas yourself. So if it is being used in an interview to determine if you are a good developer I think it is pretty meaningless. It is good to be able to find things on the internet and be able to use them appropriately but you don't want to be in a situation where you find out too late that your new star developer can't come up with ideas on their own and what you want doesn't exist yet to copy.
No the point is that they aren't getting a good idea of your abilities since there is no guarantee that the code you show them is yours. The only way to know for sure that someone can solve problems or program is to sit them down and have them do it in front of you. Looking at old projects doesn't work. Even old employers might not be good enough because you might not get a good idea of how much of the ideas were theirs and how much they were just dumping someone else's logic into code form.
Yep. There are few companies I know of that can afford their devs to not be creative though (perhaps healthcare and military being the exception since they are highly speced out systems up front usually). Customer has a problem and dev/support can figure out to do it with existing program but if they aren't smart enough to come up with a better workflow/software to fix that repeating customer problem more cleanly your program will continue to be a piece of crap for example. For small companies creativity is what they need because they don't have a dedicated designer/architect etc so they need someone that can say, oh wait why don't we completely flip the approach to the problem around and use hadoop to make this run faster or something. Lastly: it is rare that a company is hiring someone that they just want to be a dev they want them to grow and be more valuable, some day lead a team, a project, etc. A company owner usually is dreaming how big the company will get if the company grows 10X than some of the people that are working for you now need to be able to become managers/architects.
What brain teasers hopefully do is take a problem close to the types of things you see in the job. Even though it is all programming different companies either due to industry or existing infrastructure/policies tend to have different types of coding "puzzles" that come up again and again. Hopefully this test problem is one you haven't seen before and they get to see how you approach something you don't already know how to solve, how close to a good design do you get on the first interation, if they point out a problem how you go about fixing it etc. All real world important stuff to know about someone.
Yeah I was somewhere between id 100k-200k but inactive for a year or so and lost my login (didn't use the same email account, didn't remember my login). I think it is all about how the article is written though. It is okay to bring up old denied news I guess as long as you mention that both parties deny it or whatever. Just because a deal isn't going to happen doesn't mean if it were to happen it might be interesting/good idea/ruin the world as we know it.
Yes because being on call might be part of the job description. If you are getting 2X or more times a normal salary and have specialized skills your employer isn't likely to keep a bunch of spare "yous' around for after hours support. You're special which means in the ways you are special you are expected to "make it go" whenever it is needed. That is part of the reason for the good salary: you have more responsibility. Oh and you can add that on call is a very nice leash much preferable to actually having to sit at a desk at 10pm "just in case". Getting paid beer money to watch Star Trek reruns and than (at least anywhere I've worked) getting overtime pay if you actually get called is a pretty sweet deal.
Not saying MS is completely blameless here but if you both were having audio driver issues perhaps it isn't MS's fault (assuming MS didn't write the audio driver). Windows crashing because of a driver isn't MSs fault: might argue about the driver model of the OS etc, but bottom line is if the driver wasn't buggy they wouldn't be likely to crash.