The problem with CPAN Testers is that while it can tell you IF your module is broken, it doesn't give you any way to actually get onto Windows to debug the problem. All you can does is guess the fix and upload a new release, and hope for the best.
CPAN Testers is the canary in the coal mine, which is handy, but doesn't actually help clear out the poison.
So what you do is write yourself a Makefile.PL that lists all the dependencies, just like those fancy CPAN modules.
Then you run this...
> cpan .
And the CPAN client will just treat your applications dependencies like a CPAN distribution and run off and install all the dependencies for it in one go.
Purely by chance, I recently ended up sitting next to a D-wave employee while travelling from Philly to New York, and we got to talking about commercial viability.
I was curious at what point they would reach the commercial tipping point, where it would be cheaper to use quantum computation than to do it on regularly processors.
According to him, the point at which they planned to be commercially viable was somewhere in the vicinity of 512 qubits, at that point there was a number of problems that started to become worthwhile doing.
On behalf of the people that are the ones asking for code samples, your response answers 50% of what the employer is looking for.
We're not necesarily looking for someone with tons of open source experience, or who does lots of other work at home.
But for the sort of positions where you DO ask for sample code, you are intentionally looking for people who ARE programmers, not that just DO programming.
For high level positions, I generally ask for 5,000 lines.
The really top notch people are going to have SOMETHING they can provide. This could be work on an open source project, or some insane project they only do at home, or even some shareware tool they make some money off on the side.
But there's generally something.
If you don't have the code, then the question is no longer one about assesing your programming skills, it's now about assessing your personality and profressionalism. Will you make excuses? Will you write something just for the request? Will you offer to program something?
I've even had one guy who came to us from a bank that responded, "I can't show you the code, but I could give you the header files and documentation?" (he was hired)
Since you obviously don't have the code, bear this mind.
In India (at least until recently) it's fairly easy to hire people cheaply that can't afford or doesn't use a computer at home, for whom programming is something they were only trained for an just do at Their Job.
If someone is asking for code samples, at that point they DON'T want people of that calibre. They want GOOD people that they can give responsibility to and trust the decisions of safely.
During the dot-com boom, I got my first job by answering a silly ad like that.
I just put the huge list of skills into the application email, and next to them just noted "yes, yes, no, no, sorta, yes, a little, yes, no, no, no, yes".
Turned out what they wanted was greatly different from that list, but the sheer fact I responded meant I was more or less the only applicant:)
Certainly, I know I'm planning to announce a new (admittedly minor) Microsoft Open Source initiative at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference this year...
But I can't talk about it yet (sorry) until after I've been to Redmond to get my implant:(
> While mass guidelines may be tight, they're decided upon *AFTER* > they decide if they need a rover or a lander. If they needed a > rover with the same science packages, they would put one together.
Not on that mass and cash budget they wouldn't.
If you blow the weight budget, that means more cost to escape velocity, more cost to do correction fires, bigger and heavier heat shielding, and means a bigger diameter shield as well which is harder to fit into available launch vehicles.
Given X amount of cash, you can afford Y amount of weight and complexity.
Thus, the trade off.
If money is no object, then you can build and send anything you like.
Re:Doesn't even have to be live life...
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The short answer, to keep inside the weight budget. When you add wheels, you need to compromise on the science instruments.
So Phoenix packs much better science gear than the rovers, and to compensate they just try to drop it somewhere uniform and with a decent chance of finding what you are looking for regardless of the specific drop point.
Hiring programmers, as in pure straight up programmers, is unlike hiring sysadmins or networking guys or tech support or any of these other jobs in that your entire work product can be sent easily by email.
So although I may give a cursory glance at your past, your school is not going to be particularly interesting to me. I might be impressed if DURING college you've done done some interesting things, like say functional/logic programming, neural nets, cluster programming, and so on, the stuff you don't typically encounter in normal boring programming.
But in the end, you write code for a living. So your REAL resume is far more about your code than it is about your degree.
You learn a LOT more about a programmer by simply asking them to send you 5,000 lines of their best code than you will from a resume.
If you can't put together 5,000 lines of stuff only you wrote at all, or you can't because "I wrote it at the company and they won't let me" that says a lot too (mostly that you don't do any programming at all outside of work, but also that perhaps you don't have any experience working in an enlightened programming culture).
This is why experience on an Open Source project is so valuable. It's a repository you can point to and say "I wrote that" and I can look at the repository logs and verify it.
I get to see what your coding is like. Are you clean, do you comment and document well, do you just cut and paste a lot, are you a leader or a plodder (both of which can be useful).
An Open Source project is job experience with unlimited disclosure.
I don't care if you went to MIT and did computation physics of compressible fluids. If the other guy can show me 10k of well built, maintainable and innovative code, he wins.
Unless he's an asshole to work with. But then the job is his to lose at that point, not yours to win.
There's this box thingy that popped up on my iPhone, and it says
Program 'Super Fun Value Discounts! Press Yes Now!' wants to run a restricted function? Allow?
Yes/No/Cancel
What should I do? I tried to press No, but it just pops up again 1 minute later...
In the same way I don't want battery-leaching Adobe Update 3.1 background processes, or the iMorris Worm on the phone network, I ALSO don't want the hellish disaster of security popup boxes on my PHONE either.
The last damned thing I want to see on the phone network is an iPhone worm getting it's hooks into the core of every iPhone in the default settings, PHONE SPAMMING half the planet, and generally turning the phone network into the same power-hungry firewalled, bloaty security nightmare that the Internet is.
I may hate the way Apple does OS X, but when it comes to the iPhone, if they can keep worms off the phone network and prevent background crapware that will drop my battery life down to 12 hours, I say good on them.
> It's apparent that the main criteria used to determine who gets a mentor org slot is (1) the size of the organization, (2) whether an org participated in years past, and (3) the quality of the ideas list. (Yes, all three criteria were confirmed at one point or another during the afternoon.)
That is not my experience at all.
The Comprehensive C Archive Network org (a port of CPAN to C) was accepted, despite it being essentially only two or three main people (mostly Rusty Russel and I) with a mailing list and an irc channel, and only existing for 3-4 months.
So we apparently got through on the strength of our idea alone.
... and as far as I can tell, most of that growth is all the huge non-modular spaghetti PHP web projects forking endlessly into new varients. I'd like to see that code growth analyzed by unique lines of code or something that factors out all the cut and pasting.
I have a 4-core workstation and ALREADY I get crap usage rates out of it.
Flick the CPU monitor to aggregate usage rate mode, and I rarely clear 35% usage, and I've never seem it higher than about 55% (and even that for only a second or two once an hour). A normal PC, even fairly heavily loaded up with apps, just can't use the extra power.
And since cores aren't going to get much faster, there's no real chance of getting big wins there either.
Unless you have a specialized workload (heavy number crunching, kernel compilation, etc) there's going to simply be no point having more parallelism.
So as far as I can tell, for general loads it seems to be inevitable that if we want more straight line speed, we'll need to start making hardware more attuned for specific tasks.
So in my 16-core workstation of the future, if my Photoshop needs to apply some relatively intensive transform that has to be applied linearly, it can run off to the vector core, while I'm playing Supreme Commander on one generic core (the game) two GPU cores (the two screens) and three integer-heavy cores (for the 3 enemy AIs), and the generic System Reserved Core (for interrupts, and low-level IO stuff) hums away underneath with no pressure.
Hetrogeny also has economics on it's side.
There's very little point having specialized cores when you've only got two.
Once there's no longer scarcity in quantity, you can achieve higher productivity by specialization.
Really, any specialized core that you can keep the CPU usage rates running higher than the overall system usage rate, is a net win in productivity for the overall computer. And over time, anything that increases productivity wins.
As an good EVE Online player knows, the optimal strategy when faced with a sizable bounty on your head is simply to create a new alt character on a trial account (if you aren't one of those crazy people with multiple accounts already), then log in both, fly the bounty out into space and then kill yourself with the alt to collect it.
In real life, I guess the equivalent would be to find another instance of your DNA (family) or someone you trust otherwise (friends) and have them drop a "drama bomb" and out you.
Slashdot Mirror
If one is forced to use an Alias for online life, might as well make it obvious...
If you'd Read My Fucking Article you'd see that the current set is the MINIMUM initial launch set.
The plan once we are running is to start adding more variations as needed. I'd certainly like to have a 2000 instance.
As for the Windows 95 family, as I understand it support was dropped from the current Perl core for anything older than 2000.
The problem with CPAN Testers is that while it can tell you IF your module is broken, it doesn't give you any way to actually get onto Windows to debug the problem. All you can does is guess the fix and upload a new release, and hope for the best.
CPAN Testers is the canary in the coal mine, which is handy, but doesn't actually help clear out the poison.
After the Vista debacle and how easy it was for Samba to implement the new CIFS, Microsoft has surrendered to the inevitable now.
They've now built and operate an interoperability testing laboratory for the Samba team to use to improve integration with Samba.
So what you do is write yourself a Makefile.PL that lists all the dependencies, just like those fancy CPAN modules.
Then you run this...
> cpan .
And the CPAN client will just treat your applications dependencies like a CPAN distribution and run off and install all the dependencies for it in one go.
You probably should have had a look at Strawberry Perl.
Most of the Perl technocrati abandoned ActivePerl for it over the last year, because all the CPAN modules Just Work.
(Full Disclosure: I made Strawberry) :)
I'm working on it...
Purely by chance, I recently ended up sitting next to a D-wave employee while travelling from Philly to New York, and we got to talking about commercial viability.
I was curious at what point they would reach the commercial tipping point, where it would be cheaper to use quantum computation than to do it on regularly processors.
According to him, the point at which they planned to be commercially viable was somewhere in the vicinity of 512 qubits, at that point there was a number of problems that started to become worthwhile doing.
So they still have quite a ways to go.
On behalf of the people that are the ones asking for code samples, your response answers 50% of what the employer is looking for.
We're not necesarily looking for someone with tons of open source experience, or who does lots of other work at home.
But for the sort of positions where you DO ask for sample code, you are intentionally looking for people who ARE programmers, not that just DO programming.
For high level positions, I generally ask for 5,000 lines.
The really top notch people are going to have SOMETHING they can provide. This could be work on an open source project, or some insane project they only do at home, or even some shareware tool they make some money off on the side.
But there's generally something.
If you don't have the code, then the question is no longer one about assesing your programming skills, it's now about assessing your personality and profressionalism. Will you make excuses? Will you write something just for the request? Will you offer to program something?
I've even had one guy who came to us from a bank that responded, "I can't show you the code, but I could give you the header files and documentation?" (he was hired)
Since you obviously don't have the code, bear this mind.
In India (at least until recently) it's fairly easy to hire people cheaply that can't afford or doesn't use a computer at home, for whom programming is something they were only trained for an just do at Their Job.
If someone is asking for code samples, at that point they DON'T want people of that calibre. They want GOOD people that they can give responsibility to and trust the decisions of safely.
Your job is to demonstrate that.
During the dot-com boom, I got my first job by answering a silly ad like that.
I just put the huge list of skills into the application email, and next to them just noted "yes, yes, no, no, sorta, yes, a little, yes, no, no, no, yes".
Turned out what they wanted was greatly different from that list, but the sheer fact I responded meant I was more or less the only applicant :)
Certainly, I know I'm planning to announce a new (admittedly minor) Microsoft Open Source initiative at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference this year...
But I can't talk about it yet (sorry) until after I've been to Redmond to get my implant :(
> While mass guidelines may be tight, they're decided upon *AFTER*
> they decide if they need a rover or a lander. If they needed a
> rover with the same science packages, they would put one together.
Not on that mass and cash budget they wouldn't.
If you blow the weight budget, that means more cost to escape velocity, more cost to do correction fires, bigger and heavier heat shielding, and means a bigger diameter shield as well which is harder to fit into available launch vehicles.
Given X amount of cash, you can afford Y amount of weight and complexity.
Thus, the trade off.
If money is no object, then you can build and send anything you like.
The short answer, to keep inside the weight budget. When you add wheels, you need to compromise on the science instruments.
So Phoenix packs much better science gear than the rovers, and to compensate they just try to drop it somewhere uniform and with a decent chance of finding what you are looking for regardless of the specific drop point.
Hiring programmers, as in pure straight up programmers, is unlike hiring sysadmins or networking guys or tech support or any of these other jobs in that your entire work product can be sent easily by email.
So although I may give a cursory glance at your past, your school is not going to be particularly interesting to me. I might be impressed if DURING college you've done done some interesting things, like say functional/logic programming, neural nets, cluster programming, and so on, the stuff you don't typically encounter in normal boring programming.
But in the end, you write code for a living. So your REAL resume is far more about your code than it is about your degree.
You learn a LOT more about a programmer by simply asking them to send you 5,000 lines of their best code than you will from a resume.
If you can't put together 5,000 lines of stuff only you wrote at all, or you can't because "I wrote it at the company and they won't let me" that says a lot too (mostly that you don't do any programming at all outside of work, but also that perhaps you don't have any experience working in an enlightened programming culture).
This is why experience on an Open Source project is so valuable. It's a repository you can point to and say "I wrote that" and I can look at the repository logs and verify it.
I get to see what your coding is like. Are you clean, do you comment and document well, do you just cut and paste a lot, are you a leader or a plodder (both of which can be useful).
An Open Source project is job experience with unlimited disclosure.
I don't care if you went to MIT and did computation physics of compressible fluids. If the other guy can show me 10k of well built, maintainable and innovative code, he wins.
Unless he's an asshole to work with. But then the job is his to lose at that point, not yours to win.
"I visited the Large Hadron Collider and all I got was this radioactive T-Shirt"
Nope.
There are in fact specific metrics developed specifically for the purpose of quantitatively measure inequality.
Metrics that get to the crux of the problem and ignore the rhetoric and examples like your percentages.
Metrics that can measure change over time in a meaningful way.
He means those.
Hi Kurisu, this is mom.
There's this box thingy that popped up on my iPhone, and it says
Program 'Super Fun Value Discounts! Press Yes Now!' wants to run a restricted function? Allow?
Yes/No/Cancel
What should I do? I tried to press No, but it just pops up again 1 minute later...
In the same way I don't want battery-leaching Adobe Update 3.1 background processes, or the iMorris Worm on the phone network, I ALSO don't want the hellish disaster of security popup boxes on my PHONE either.
The phone network necessarily has standards of reliability and security far higher than the Intarweb.
Banning uncertified code? Banning background processes?
That sounds pretty damned prudent to me.
The last damned thing I want to see on the phone network is an iPhone worm getting it's hooks into the core of every iPhone in the default settings, PHONE SPAMMING half the planet, and generally turning the phone network into the same power-hungry firewalled, bloaty security nightmare that the Internet is.
I may hate the way Apple does OS X, but when it comes to the iPhone, if they can keep worms off the phone network and prevent background crapware that will drop my battery life down to 12 hours, I say good on them.
Nope he's fine.
Now the guy with two cans and TWO strings, he's in trouble.
As I'm sure everyone else that has to try to port software to their so called "Unix" operating system.
> It's apparent that the main criteria used to determine who gets a mentor org slot is (1) the size of the organization, (2) whether an org participated in years past, and (3) the quality of the ideas list. (Yes, all three criteria were confirmed at one point or another during the afternoon.)
That is not my experience at all.
The Comprehensive C Archive Network org (a port of CPAN to C) was accepted, despite it being essentially only two or three main people (mostly Rusty Russel and I) with a mailing list and an irc channel, and only existing for 3-4 months.
So we apparently got through on the strength of our idea alone.
... and as far as I can tell, most of that growth is all the huge non-modular spaghetti PHP web projects forking endlessly into new varients. I'd like to see that code growth analyzed by unique lines of code or something that factors out all the cut and pasting.
Two is totally doable. I can fill two (or the equivalent of two) of my four cores.
Trouble is, filling four cores is quite a bit more iffy.
I have a 4-core workstation and ALREADY I get crap usage rates out of it.
Flick the CPU monitor to aggregate usage rate mode, and I rarely clear 35% usage, and I've never seem it higher than about 55% (and even that for only a second or two once an hour). A normal PC, even fairly heavily loaded up with apps, just can't use the extra power.
And since cores aren't going to get much faster, there's no real chance of getting big wins there either.
Unless you have a specialized workload (heavy number crunching, kernel compilation, etc) there's going to simply be no point having more parallelism.
So as far as I can tell, for general loads it seems to be inevitable that if we want more straight line speed, we'll need to start making hardware more attuned for specific tasks.
So in my 16-core workstation of the future, if my Photoshop needs to apply some relatively intensive transform that has to be applied linearly, it can run off to the vector core, while I'm playing Supreme Commander on one generic core (the game) two GPU cores (the two screens) and three integer-heavy cores (for the 3 enemy AIs), and the generic System Reserved Core (for interrupts, and low-level IO stuff) hums away underneath with no pressure.
Hetrogeny also has economics on it's side.
There's very little point having specialized cores when you've only got two.
Once there's no longer scarcity in quantity, you can achieve higher productivity by specialization.
Really, any specialized core that you can keep the CPU usage rates running higher than the overall system usage rate, is a net win in productivity for the overall computer. And over time, anything that increases productivity wins.
As an good EVE Online player knows, the optimal strategy when faced with a sizable bounty on your head is simply to create a new alt character on a trial account (if you aren't one of those crazy people with multiple accounts already), then log in both, fly the bounty out into space and then kill yourself with the alt to collect it.
In real life, I guess the equivalent would be to find another instance of your DNA (family) or someone you trust otherwise (friends) and have them drop a "drama bomb" and out you.
Once it's over, at least take their money!