I should also add that for our own uses ("our" meaning this company that I am at), we have a very short sit time for the users. If this were for children in school, it could be that they play this game every now and then, and perhaps an hour at a time, over the course of a semseter or school year.
But for the things that we create - the person is given a CD that is part of a seminar, and then they watch the person giving a lecture on the subject, working their way through the CD. This is all projected in front of them, and sometimes they follow along on their laptops.
The games that come about from that are a strange beast because they are usually team based (one side of the room against the other), and they can't have secrecy since everything that we can give them (beyond the CD itself) is on the screen that they both see at the same time. It can't be a game of reflexes since the moderator is manipulating the screen, and each team gets different questions.
There are instances that we do where it is a single player on a laptop, or a handheld - and those are much easier to write. There are also instances that we do where the user will be coming back to it frequently over the course of a year or more - that also is nice because you can have it be a lot more complex.
But to make a game that someone can understand in a few seconds, play in a team against another team, and also learn an overall point from in an hour or even less... that is a hard thing.
I think a lot of posts on here (not just this thread but the whole overall thread) have had some great ideas - but unfortunately they are hard to implement in many situations.
We try very hard to come up with games where it isn't obvious that you are learning, and then our clients come back and want us to change it all around so that it is much more explicit... it makes me wonder why we even bother with the game (if we get rid of the "game" then they complain that it is too straightforward and boring).
The company I'm currently at (although only until mid-May) is an eLearning company. We have to deal with this stuff all of the time. We are already moving more towards the wireless/handheld market and we are trying to develop learning games as well.
It is relatively easy to make a game. It is significantly harder to make it a fun game. It is even harder to make it a fun game that you can learn from. We have spent a lot of time working on it, and I almost wonder if it is a contradiction in terms - the learning has to be transparent to the user or else they will percieve it as work and even things that would normally be fun, very quickly becoming tiresome and annoying.
There are instances where you can combine games and *work* (the doom port that allowed you to kill processes) - but there are very few good instances of games where you explicitly learn. There are many games that have inherant spatial learning that is part of it, or small puzzles that are solved - all well and good for maze exercises and working the logic part of your brain. But for developing and learning towards an end goal of a concrete subject - say to learn Spanish - or to learn about how the body metabolizes a certain drug - or what increases the incidence of heart attacks in certain people... Then you get into a tough area.
Oregon Trail and Math Blaster are two games that come to mind that taught something and were vaguely fun... but given the choice to play those, or GTA III - I think I know what everyone would chose.
Are you implying that we (humans) have never found a cure for a viral disease?
If so, then you might want to look into the commonality between mumps, smallpox, rubella(German measles), and polio.
Although I would have to agree with you that the quest for alien life is pretty pointless if they are going to put the "intelligent" marker on the requirements for what they seek. "Intelligent" is not a fixed term and varies by culture and... well, by species.
It would be cool (and useless) if a hard drive were then fashioned to look like a bullet. Then you could swap in and out the hard drives as you would bullets out of the clips. The more bullets that the clip held, then the greater potential disk space.
Perhaps if you wanted to trade songs with a friend, then you could arrange them all on a single drive (bullet) and then load your mp3 player (ak clip) into your weapon and fire it over to him. That way, even if you don't have an internet connection, you can shoot it a considerable distance.
My biggest pet peeve of Macs universally is... Mac people. I can't stand them.
On several occasions over the past 8 years I've considered buying a Mac. I hear/read/see these people fighting over Macs as if they were arguing a religion. At first glance, it makes me think "wow, they are really into that - maybe there really is something behind that?!"
The first time this happened to me was 1995. My roommate in college had a Mac and he had it setup to play sounds on various events. I, not really doing much useful with computers at that point, found that to be fantastic. I wanted one. I let him know that and he promptly started his speech, telling me how great it is - it reminded me of what happens if you invite a Jehovah's Witness into your home and ask them why you should convert. But then around the same time, it came to be known to me that his OS could only do one thing at a time. He seemed okay with it, and I couldn't really imagine why exactly I would need to be doing multiple things at the same time. But then it hit me - when his computer does XYZ, it plays a sound. When it does ABC, it plays a sound. A smile crossed my face and I set his computer to play Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" everytime that he got an e-mail. Everytime he got mail, it played, and for over 7 mins he couldn't do anything else. Usually within that 7 min span he would get more mail... meaning that as soon as it was done playing the music, it would then download more mail... and play more music. I think he fixed it late at night when he was likely to get less mail. He was angry with me, and really didn't see that as any downside to his OS. It made me decide that I would get a Win95 system. It had more memory, was faster, cheaper, and it could do more than one thing at once.
Years passed and I ran into many more zealots (I was an art major and worked with many people that were Mac Nazis - trying to force everyone around them into their following). I listened to what they said, and then if I ever found something that worried me about it (power supplies catching fire was a big one), I would ask them about it, and then when they would become irate that I would question their beliefs, I'd make a note not to bring that up again around them.
More years passed and the new Mac Ti PowerBooks came out. The power supplies setting fires problem was solved, these things now multitasked, and were great for battery life. MacOS X was on these things, and it was the first time I thought it might really be time to get one.
On one hand, they have a UI that is pretty... but then, do I ever do anything that requires a pretty UI? Not really. I have Linux and FreeBSD machines that I just ssh into to do the bulk of my work, so I really only need a laptop that I can work with. The Mac cases are beautiful... but they conduct heart beautifully too - and since I spend the bulk of my time sitting in various places with a laptop on me... well, on top of my lap - heat isn't really what I'm striving for. My current PC laptop gets hot enough - not sure I want to actually fry my skin. The current laptops are so nice - 15" screens - but then, my current one has a 15" screen, half a gig of RAM, and a faster Athlon in it. And my current one was cheaper ($1K). Still, I try to be as open minded as possible - I know there is plenty about Windows that I dislike, so it isn't that I'm not willing to leave it. I have tried Linux, but the visual experience there... well, while I don't ask much... I still apparently ask too much for Linux on a laptop. My current laptop has a rocker switch right there between two buttons at the bottom of the trackpad. That allows me scroll pages... never really thought it would be that useful... but hot damn, it really is. I can't work on a laptop now that doesn't have something very similar. People tell me that I can get a mouse with a ton of buttons and use that with my Mac laptop... fantastic - that is just what I wanted with my laptop - more stuff to add to it. The whole
My friends always joked around about wanting to give very concrete answers.
Like when asked how many tractors there are in the US, answer "7". If the person asks how you got it, just be very confident that you are right and you shouldn't be questioned.
On a side note - when interviewing, don't correct the person interviewing you. Even if they say something a little off, don't correct them. It is feasible that the person is a manager and is just filling in for a programmer that couldn't make that time slot to interview you and is reading a script of questions. Or it is always even possible the person is just screwing around with you. I was interviewing a girl and was looking down at her resume mainly thinking how no matter what opinion I gave of her, it wouldn't matter - the CEO was going to make his own decision in his own magical way - which was largely based on how the people did at dinner when drunk (we were consultants, so that is part of the lifestyle... if you are young). I see on her resume that she has "SQL" in there, but she hasn't mentioned ever working with it. I ask her what projects she has done with "sequel" and continued to read over her resume, not all that interested in what the hell she had to say - I was just passing time and trying not to look down her wide open blouse. She proceeded to push her hand out over her resume to catch my attention and as if to say "stop" and she says "oh, I think you mean ESS-QUE-EL" - I smiled and nodded and said, of course. In my head I was thinking "oops, someone's not getting hired"
I told that story to my coworkers and for about a week after that, no matter what anyone was saying, we'd just stick our hands in their face and say "oh, I think you mean ESS-QUE-EL"
I'm trying to recall a time on Slashdot when people were generally in consensus that what a company was doing sucked balls, and it wasn't Microsoft that they were ranting on about.
I have to admit, from the looks of all of this, they are really shooting themselves in the foot... or both feet, a kneecap, and their right hip in this case.
Maybe I'm naive, but I have to ask, "How do you enforce this?"
More importantly - why should I care?
If Amazon had a "pedophile" section - that might bother me. Or if there were a chat room on Amazon where people might actually be able to interact with an unsupervised 12 year old... then I might see how that is bad.
But if a kid is allowed to post up a review... I'm not seeing why the hell that matters - other than the review might suck. Even then, 12 is still pretty mature - 5 year olds... maybe even 7 year olds - but 12? Hell, that is middle school! Those are young adults.
But the truth of the matter - if you really wanted to get Amazon to care about kids on the site - make it clear to them that you would have bought the product, but you didn't because you saw that a 12 year old reviewed the product and was *obviously* unsupervised - therefore you went and bought the product elsewhere. Then Amazon will have reason to care. Even then, I don't see why they should have to care why some people are just insanely uptight and apparently have a lot of free time on their hands.
I would also think that a larger problem isn't the kids posting reviews, but actually buying crap.
Doesn't tell me if he or she is gonna crack when they've got an angry engineer on the phone wondering why/usr/local is locked down
Of all my friends that interviewed with MS - I never heard them asked this question (like I have said in my other posts - I have lots of management consultant friends that were asked questions vaguely like that - "how many lawn mowers are there in the US").
The MS questions were usually more logic based things that showed how they would think through a problem.
The traditional grid of dots, connect them all with N number of lines where N looks impossible - you then have to draw the lines so that their length exceeds the dimensions of the box... perhaps where the "thinking outside of the box" thing came from.
MS also does the "you are in a room with 3 light switches and in the room next door there are 3 light bulbs on the wall, etc etc"
We've all heard them - some are much more geared towards seeing how logically one thinks - which are actually useful for finding programmers.
Also, those people that have noted that they would ask specific programming questions have a valid point - but the majority of interviews that will have these questions are for people that are straight out of college - nearly any company that is smart will plan on teaching you everything and will assume that regardless of how good a school you went to, you know nothing - but if it is a good school, you learned *how* to learn/think and you are good at it. That is what the questions are going for.
I was just going to post nearly the same thing. Hot damn.
What about people posing as kids? Say I get on there and post a review that says I'm a 12 year old girl. Does it matter what my review says then? Do I have to ask my parents?
Out of all of the injustices in the world right now - children posting on Amazon without the parents knowing is pretty much at the top of the list if you ask me.
That reminds me of my freshman year Chem final. I don't recall the exact wording of the question, but it was something like "Describe three ways to get a 3 molar solution of something something something." And I think I recall the amount that they wanted was relatively large. One of my ways was "Call Fisher Scientific and give them your credit card number. Barring any major postal carrier or trucking strikes, you should have your solution within 3 business days - faster if you used an express method." From what I have heard of others that have had that class since, I'm now used as an example of what not to do. To think that my real life has become much like a despair poster makes me uncertain to feel bad, or laugh and pump my fist triumphantly. Either way, my dad found it funny (he was an analytical chemistry prof at the time).
There is also the story (likely an urban legend) (which perhaps influenced my choice of answers on that test) of the student that had a physics test and on it was a question that said "Using only a barometer, how could you measure the height of." The student then answers using various methods beyond any "normal" use of a barometer. One was using the sun and measuring the length of its shadow and the shadow of the building and then the math of similar triangles. Another was to get its weight and drop it off of the top of the building, counting how long it took before it crashed on the ground. Another was to find the building custodian and bribe him by offering him the barometer in exchange for the information about the building. There were likely more, but those are all of the answers I can recall that didn't use it for measuring pressure changes.
I know these only vaguely as Microsoft questions (and these questions are retardedly easy compared to the real ones) - but more as Management Consulting questions. When Monitor, Mercer, Parthenon, etc interview - they use these b/c it is the type of reasoning that they use all of the time.
For the gas station one - you need to know the vague population of the US if you want to give them a number answer - but they are really happy if you just explain the correct solution aloud with variables. You need to be able to give a working estimate of how many people in what sort of area one gas station can service, and then figure out how many people over what area (useable area) of the states is then available - then you can determine the need that is there and then what portion of that is filled.
Management consultants hardly ever have real numbers in front of them when they are working on projects - they have theoretical scenerios and they need to be able to quickly estimate figures to see what paths would lead to higher profit figures... well, usually they are hired for increased profit nominally - but whatever they suggest is ignored and then layoffs happen and are blamed on the management consultants - allowing the higher ups to look as if it weren't their decision, but an outside decision to better the company (although frequently the case IS that layoffs would help the company).
Sorry, but not really. It isn't a bait and switch.
Were they to say that it was $20 a month and you would get 3 movies at a time, and then you see that they are billing you $2000 a month... that would be a bait and switch.
Or if they were advertising that you would get 3 Land Cruisers at a time for $20 a month... when they started sending you DVDs instead - that is a bait and switch.
But when they tell you that you subscribe for X amount and you get to rent movies that are on your list AND they tell you that not all are necessarily available immediately and they fully display the system to you on your UI - and then they follow through on everything that they told you... that isn't a bait and switch. You are still getting the movies, and you are paying the amount agreed to... nothing has been switched from the agreed contract.
I hardly think that having to wait for a movie is a bait and switch tactic.
Were they to show you an ad saying that if you clicked right now, you would be able to rent 80 movies a month for a low price of $14/month - and then you clicked that link and it said that you were just too late for that offer, but they will gladly sell you a great deal of 3 movies per month for $20/month.... THAT would be a bait and switch.
Or if they told you that you would be getting a brand new car every month, and instead DVDs showed up.
The "study" that this user did was too small to draw any conclusive proof from, so your anger over the "bait and switch" (in quotes because it is your words and not a real bait and switch) - he even notes it at the end of the article.
Yeah - when I used it for well over a year, all of the current movies that I wanted were always available. The movies that had long waits were old movies like The Falcon and the Snowman. Other than those old movies, I never had a wait at all (perhaps this is new, I haven't had Netflix for a few months now).
I would assume those waits were because they have fewer copies of the older (less popular? I doubt there is much clamor for The Falcon and the Snowman) movies and then many copies of the recent movies that people are really going to want to get.
Netflix would technically be pleased at you ending your account.
They have stated in the past how long they need someone to hold on to a movie in order for them to make money on it, and it is a relatively long time - I think 5 days when I read it - perhaps it has since changed.
When I had Netflix, there was a return center in my state which would get my returns in the same day. So that means I would usually order a movie on one day, get it the next day or the day after. Watch it that night, and then send it out the next day. They would then get it that day or the next. Repeat. So I would have movies out (in terms of me actually holding on to them, not in terms of transit times) 1-3 days. I rented a ton of movies that way too and it wasn't until the very end that I started holding onto them longer. I then stopped seeing a reason to keep my account and cancelled (although apparently my account still exists for some amount of time, so that if I want to start up again, I still have my settings).
I don't know how many of their users hold movies the required length of time - but Netflix is making money, so I would assume that many people do hold on long enough.
Hell, in Cambridge/Boston (and I presume any crowded city), you will see cars all the time that show the signs of not needing a space that is longer than the length of your car. It can even be a few inches shorter.
There were multiple times I've come out to see someone squeezed up against my car and another car on the other side of them.
So presumably, as long as your car has modern plastic/springy bumpers, and you don't care about it (specifically the transmission I would guess), then just cram it in to the spot and enjoy your parking spot.
Granted this will bend your license plate, crack your bumpers, perhaps ding your fenders, and likely lose you some paint... but hey, it is worth it to park.
Usually you see this technique on Honda Civics and other cars of that size and price range. The big BMW/Mercedes/etc seem to like their cars too much. Although you also tend to see a lot of Jeeps doing it - they are higher up, so it usually does less damage to them and more damage to others.
Sometimes in my commute I see a VW Beetle that has a sign up touting what percent desiel that it is running. Apparently the less traditional desiel, the cheaper - but the performance goes way down. "Car Talk" on NPR had a caller asking all about it during one show in the past few months.
Slashdot Mirror
choices always were a problem for you. what you need is someone strong to guide you. :)
LOL - no - that would be an online bank of course.
(if you've seen the SNL skit, I suppose that makes a lot more sense)
Sounds like some good points.
I should also add that for our own uses ("our" meaning this company that I am at), we have a very short sit time for the users. If this were for children in school, it could be that they play this game every now and then, and perhaps an hour at a time, over the course of a semseter or school year.
But for the things that we create - the person is given a CD that is part of a seminar, and then they watch the person giving a lecture on the subject, working their way through the CD. This is all projected in front of them, and sometimes they follow along on their laptops.
The games that come about from that are a strange beast because they are usually team based (one side of the room against the other), and they can't have secrecy since everything that we can give them (beyond the CD itself) is on the screen that they both see at the same time.
It can't be a game of reflexes since the moderator is manipulating the screen, and each team gets different questions.
There are instances that we do where it is a single player on a laptop, or a handheld - and those are much easier to write.
There are also instances that we do where the user will be coming back to it frequently over the course of a year or more - that also is nice because you can have it be a lot more complex.
But to make a game that someone can understand in a few seconds, play in a team against another team, and also learn an overall point from in an hour or even less... that is a hard thing.
I think a lot of posts on here (not just this thread but the whole overall thread) have had some great ideas - but unfortunately they are hard to implement in many situations.
We try very hard to come up with games where it isn't obvious that you are learning, and then our clients come back and want us to change it all around so that it is much more explicit... it makes me wonder why we even bother with the game (if we get rid of the "game" then they complain that it is too straightforward and boring).
The company I'm currently at (although only until mid-May) is an eLearning company. We have to deal with this stuff all of the time. We are already moving more towards the wireless/handheld market and we are trying to develop learning games as well.
It is relatively easy to make a game.
It is significantly harder to make it a fun game.
It is even harder to make it a fun game that you can learn from.
We have spent a lot of time working on it, and I almost wonder if it is a contradiction in terms - the learning has to be transparent to the user or else they will percieve it as work and even things that would normally be fun, very quickly becoming tiresome and annoying.
There are instances where you can combine games and *work* (the doom port that allowed you to kill processes) - but there are very few good instances of games where you explicitly learn.
There are many games that have inherant spatial learning that is part of it, or small puzzles that are solved - all well and good for maze exercises and working the logic part of your brain.
But for developing and learning towards an end goal of a concrete subject - say to learn Spanish - or to learn about how the body metabolizes a certain drug - or what increases the incidence of heart attacks in certain people... Then you get into a tough area.
Oregon Trail and Math Blaster are two games that come to mind that taught something and were vaguely fun... but given the choice to play those, or GTA III - I think I know what everyone would chose.
Are you implying that we (humans) have never found a cure for a viral disease?
... well, by species.
If so, then you might want to look into the commonality between mumps, smallpox, rubella(German measles), and polio.
Although I would have to agree with you that the quest for alien life is pretty pointless if they are going to put the "intelligent" marker on the requirements for what they seek. "Intelligent" is not a fixed term and varies by culture and
It would be cool (and useless) if a hard drive were then fashioned to look like a bullet. Then you could swap in and out the hard drives as you would bullets out of the clips. The more bullets that the clip held, then the greater potential disk space.
Perhaps if you wanted to trade songs with a friend, then you could arrange them all on a single drive (bullet) and then load your mp3 player (ak clip) into your weapon and fire it over to him. That way, even if you don't have an internet connection, you can shoot it a considerable distance.
Just don't hit any pregnant women vacuuming.
My biggest pet peeve of Macs universally is... Mac people. I can't stand them.
On several occasions over the past 8 years I've considered buying a Mac. I hear/read/see these people fighting over Macs as if they were arguing a religion.
At first glance, it makes me think "wow, they are really into that - maybe there really is something behind that?!"
The first time this happened to me was 1995. My roommate in college had a Mac and he had it setup to play sounds on various events. I, not really doing much useful with computers at that point, found that to be fantastic. I wanted one. I let him know that and he promptly started his speech, telling me how great it is - it reminded me of what happens if you invite a Jehovah's Witness into your home and ask them why you should convert.
But then around the same time, it came to be known to me that his OS could only do one thing at a time. He seemed okay with it, and I couldn't really imagine why exactly I would need to be doing multiple things at the same time. But then it hit me - when his computer does XYZ, it plays a sound. When it does ABC, it plays a sound.
A smile crossed my face and I set his computer to play Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" everytime that he got an e-mail. Everytime he got mail, it played, and for over 7 mins he couldn't do anything else. Usually within that 7 min span he would get more mail... meaning that as soon as it was done playing the music, it would then download more mail... and play more music.
I think he fixed it late at night when he was likely to get less mail.
He was angry with me, and really didn't see that as any downside to his OS.
It made me decide that I would get a Win95 system. It had more memory, was faster, cheaper, and it could do more than one thing at once.
Years passed and I ran into many more zealots (I was an art major and worked with many people that were Mac Nazis - trying to force everyone around them into their following).
I listened to what they said, and then if I ever found something that worried me about it (power supplies catching fire was a big one), I would ask them about it, and then when they would become irate that I would question their beliefs, I'd make a note not to bring that up again around them.
More years passed and the new Mac Ti PowerBooks came out. The power supplies setting fires problem was solved, these things now multitasked, and were great for battery life.
MacOS X was on these things, and it was the first time I thought it might really be time to get one.
On one hand, they have a UI that is pretty... but then, do I ever do anything that requires a pretty UI? Not really. I have Linux and FreeBSD machines that I just ssh into to do the bulk of my work, so I really only need a laptop that I can work with.
The Mac cases are beautiful... but they conduct heart beautifully too - and since I spend the bulk of my time sitting in various places with a laptop on me... well, on top of my lap - heat isn't really what I'm striving for. My current PC laptop gets hot enough - not sure I want to actually fry my skin.
The current laptops are so nice - 15" screens - but then, my current one has a 15" screen, half a gig of RAM, and a faster Athlon in it. And my current one was cheaper ($1K).
Still, I try to be as open minded as possible - I know there is plenty about Windows that I dislike, so it isn't that I'm not willing to leave it.
I have tried Linux, but the visual experience there... well, while I don't ask much... I still apparently ask too much for Linux on a laptop.
My current laptop has a rocker switch right there between two buttons at the bottom of the trackpad. That allows me scroll pages... never really thought it would be that useful... but hot damn, it really is. I can't work on a laptop now that doesn't have something very similar.
People tell me that I can get a mouse with a ton of buttons and use that with my Mac laptop... fantastic - that is just what I wanted with my laptop - more stuff to add to it. The whole
Intel's compiler brags that it is totally compatible with gcc and gives a 30% speed increase to the final result on an Intel processor.
On my code I have seen that to be very true - but I have never bothered trying it on "other people's" code.
How much of it can you compile with that, and what sorts of speed increases (if any) do you see?
I would imagine there isn't much speed increase if it won't even successfully compile of course - but if it works, then is it noticably better?
And I suppose this is only applicable on Linux boxes that are using rpm since the icc installer seems to require that.
the chick terminator comes in all naked, but it looks like they keep her hair covering her fun bags.
for me, it isn't a good action movie where a futuristic legion of killer robots destroy our race unless I get to see some naked chicks.
My friends always joked around about wanting to give very concrete answers.
Like when asked how many tractors there are in the US, answer "7". If the person asks how you got it, just be very confident that you are right and you shouldn't be questioned.
On a side note - when interviewing, don't correct the person interviewing you. Even if they say something a little off, don't correct them. It is feasible that the person is a manager and is just filling in for a programmer that couldn't make that time slot to interview you and is reading a script of questions. Or it is always even possible the person is just screwing around with you.
I was interviewing a girl and was looking down at her resume mainly thinking how no matter what opinion I gave of her, it wouldn't matter - the CEO was going to make his own decision in his own magical way - which was largely based on how the people did at dinner when drunk (we were consultants, so that is part of the lifestyle... if you are young).
I see on her resume that she has "SQL" in there, but she hasn't mentioned ever working with it. I ask her what projects she has done with "sequel" and continued to read over her resume, not all that interested in what the hell she had to say - I was just passing time and trying not to look down her wide open blouse.
She proceeded to push her hand out over her resume to catch my attention and as if to say "stop" and she says "oh, I think you mean ESS-QUE-EL" - I smiled and nodded and said, of course. In my head I was thinking "oops, someone's not getting hired"
I told that story to my coworkers and for about a week after that, no matter what anyone was saying, we'd just stick our hands in their face and say "oh, I think you mean ESS-QUE-EL"
I'm trying to recall a time on Slashdot when people were generally in consensus that what a company was doing sucked balls, and it wasn't Microsoft that they were ranting on about.
I have to admit, from the looks of all of this, they are really shooting themselves in the foot... or both feet, a kneecap, and their right hip in this case.
Maybe I'm naive, but I have to ask, "How do you enforce this?"
More importantly - why should I care?
If Amazon had a "pedophile" section - that might bother me. Or if there were a chat room on Amazon where people might actually be able to interact with an unsupervised 12 year old... then I might see how that is bad.
But if a kid is allowed to post up a review... I'm not seeing why the hell that matters - other than the review might suck. Even then, 12 is still pretty mature - 5 year olds... maybe even 7 year olds - but 12? Hell, that is middle school! Those are young adults.
But the truth of the matter - if you really wanted to get Amazon to care about kids on the site - make it clear to them that you would have bought the product, but you didn't because you saw that a 12 year old reviewed the product and was *obviously* unsupervised - therefore you went and bought the product elsewhere.
Then Amazon will have reason to care.
Even then, I don't see why they should have to care why some people are just insanely uptight and apparently have a lot of free time on their hands.
I would also think that a larger problem isn't the kids posting reviews, but actually buying crap.
Doesn't tell me if he or she is gonna crack when they've got an angry engineer on the phone wondering why /usr/local is locked down
Of all my friends that interviewed with MS - I never heard them asked this question (like I have said in my other posts - I have lots of management consultant friends that were asked questions vaguely like that - "how many lawn mowers are there in the US").
The MS questions were usually more logic based things that showed how they would think through a problem.
The traditional grid of dots, connect them all with N number of lines where N looks impossible - you then have to draw the lines so that their length exceeds the dimensions of the box... perhaps where the "thinking outside of the box" thing came from.
MS also does the "you are in a room with 3 light switches and in the room next door there are 3 light bulbs on the wall, etc etc"
We've all heard them - some are much more geared towards seeing how logically one thinks - which are actually useful for finding programmers.
Also, those people that have noted that they would ask specific programming questions have a valid point - but the majority of interviews that will have these questions are for people that are straight out of college - nearly any company that is smart will plan on teaching you everything and will assume that regardless of how good a school you went to, you know nothing - but if it is a good school, you learned *how* to learn/think and you are good at it.
That is what the questions are going for.
I was just going to post nearly the same thing.
Hot damn.
What about people posing as kids? Say I get on there and post a review that says I'm a 12 year old girl. Does it matter what my review says then? Do I have to ask my parents?
Out of all of the injustices in the world right now - children posting on Amazon without the parents knowing is pretty much at the top of the list if you ask me.
At least we can see the short answer - that being that you will never get hired by any of these companies that would ask such questions.
That reminds me of my freshman year Chem final. I don't recall the exact wording of the question, but it was something like "Describe three ways to get a 3 molar solution of something something something." And I think I recall the amount that they wanted was relatively large.
One of my ways was "Call Fisher Scientific and give them your credit card number. Barring any major postal carrier or trucking strikes, you should have your solution within 3 business days - faster if you used an express method."
From what I have heard of others that have had that class since, I'm now used as an example of what not to do. To think that my real life has become much like a despair poster makes me uncertain to feel bad, or laugh and pump my fist triumphantly.
Either way, my dad found it funny (he was an analytical chemistry prof at the time).
There is also the story (likely an urban legend) (which perhaps influenced my choice of answers on that test) of the student that had a physics test and on it was a question that said "Using only a barometer, how could you measure the height of
The student then answers using various methods beyond any "normal" use of a barometer.
One was using the sun and measuring the length of its shadow and the shadow of the building and then the math of similar triangles.
Another was to get its weight and drop it off of the top of the building, counting how long it took before it crashed on the ground.
Another was to find the building custodian and bribe him by offering him the barometer in exchange for the information about the building.
There were likely more, but those are all of the answers I can recall that didn't use it for measuring pressure changes.
did it make you flinch?
I know these only vaguely as Microsoft questions (and these questions are retardedly easy compared to the real ones) - but more as Management Consulting questions. When Monitor, Mercer, Parthenon, etc interview - they use these b/c it is the type of reasoning that they use all of the time.
For the gas station one - you need to know the vague population of the US if you want to give them a number answer - but they are really happy if you just explain the correct solution aloud with variables.
You need to be able to give a working estimate of how many people in what sort of area one gas station can service, and then figure out how many people over what area (useable area) of the states is then available - then you can determine the need that is there and then what portion of that is filled.
Management consultants hardly ever have real numbers in front of them when they are working on projects - they have theoretical scenerios and they need to be able to quickly estimate figures to see what paths would lead to higher profit figures... well, usually they are hired for increased profit nominally - but whatever they suggest is ignored and then layoffs happen and are blamed on the management consultants - allowing the higher ups to look as if it weren't their decision, but an outside decision to better the company (although frequently the case IS that layoffs would help the company).
Or say the whole "address that they send it to" deal.
I personally don't feel it is worth the effort to keep moving every month just to get free movies.
Sorry, but not really. It isn't a bait and switch.
Were they to say that it was $20 a month and you would get 3 movies at a time, and then you see that they are billing you $2000 a month... that would be a bait and switch.
Or if they were advertising that you would get 3 Land Cruisers at a time for $20 a month... when they started sending you DVDs instead - that is a bait and switch.
But when they tell you that you subscribe for X amount and you get to rent movies that are on your list AND they tell you that not all are necessarily available immediately and they fully display the system to you on your UI - and then they follow through on everything that they told you... that isn't a bait and switch.
You are still getting the movies, and you are paying the amount agreed to... nothing has been switched from the agreed contract.
I hardly think that having to wait for a movie is a bait and switch tactic.
Were they to show you an ad saying that if you clicked right now, you would be able to rent 80 movies a month for a low price of $14/month - and then you clicked that link and it said that you were just too late for that offer, but they will gladly sell you a great deal of 3 movies per month for $20/month.... THAT would be a bait and switch.
Or if they told you that you would be getting a brand new car every month, and instead DVDs showed up.
The "study" that this user did was too small to draw any conclusive proof from, so your anger over the "bait and switch" (in quotes because it is your words and not a real bait and switch) - he even notes it at the end of the article.
Yeah - when I used it for well over a year, all of the current movies that I wanted were always available.
The movies that had long waits were old movies like The Falcon and the Snowman.
Other than those old movies, I never had a wait at all (perhaps this is new, I haven't had Netflix for a few months now).
I would assume those waits were because they have fewer copies of the older (less popular? I doubt there is much clamor for The Falcon and the Snowman) movies and then many copies of the recent movies that people are really going to want to get.
Netflix would technically be pleased at you ending your account.
They have stated in the past how long they need someone to hold on to a movie in order for them to make money on it, and it is a relatively long time - I think 5 days when I read it - perhaps it has since changed.
When I had Netflix, there was a return center in my state which would get my returns in the same day.
So that means I would usually order a movie on one day, get it the next day or the day after. Watch it that night, and then send it out the next day. They would then get it that day or the next. Repeat.
So I would have movies out (in terms of me actually holding on to them, not in terms of transit times) 1-3 days. I rented a ton of movies that way too and it wasn't until the very end that I started holding onto them longer. I then stopped seeing a reason to keep my account and cancelled (although apparently my account still exists for some amount of time, so that if I want to start up again, I still have my settings).
I don't know how many of their users hold movies the required length of time - but Netflix is making money, so I would assume that many people do hold on long enough.
Hell, in Cambridge/Boston (and I presume any crowded city), you will see cars all the time that show the signs of not needing a space that is longer than the length of your car.
It can even be a few inches shorter.
There were multiple times I've come out to see someone squeezed up against my car and another car on the other side of them.
So presumably, as long as your car has modern plastic/springy bumpers, and you don't care about it (specifically the transmission I would guess), then just cram it in to the spot and enjoy your parking spot.
Granted this will bend your license plate, crack your bumpers, perhaps ding your fenders, and likely lose you some paint... but hey, it is worth it to park.
Usually you see this technique on Honda Civics and other cars of that size and price range.
The big BMW/Mercedes/etc seem to like their cars too much.
Although you also tend to see a lot of Jeeps doing it - they are higher up, so it usually does less damage to them and more damage to others.
Ahh, the joys of parallel parking.
Sometimes in my commute I see a VW Beetle that has a sign up touting what percent desiel that it is running.
Apparently the less traditional desiel, the cheaper - but the performance goes way down. "Car Talk" on NPR had a caller asking all about it during one show in the past few months.