Screw RIM. I only know about it because I've been following QNX. Frankly, I'd love to see RIM go under, get taken over, and QNX ending up in the hands of someone who'll reopen the source and let me legally continue my projects I was working on before RIM got their mitts on it.:)
Feels a bit weird cheering for the OS yet hoping the house collapses while everyone else seems to be the other way around; loving the company but eh'ing the OS change
IQ means intelligence quotient. It is a mathematical value. It's not a general term meaning quiz. Any self-respecting geek would be offended at this abuse of the term!
No, they write websites in ruby. The question wasn't relevant to the task at hand, just a critical thinking test. A critical thinking test where pausing to think about the problem was apparently the incorrect response.. *shrug*
This did cross my mind. There's also the fact that if they did hire me they would have had to pay a percentage on top of my wage to an external recruiter who got my foot in the door for me which reinforces this theory.
Somehow I don't think this is what they were doing, otherwise they would have given me more than 2 seconds to respond, and I would hope that pausing to think through the problem instead of rushing down one path or another would be a correct response.
I do think this behavioral test is a good thing, only people who aren't really cut out to be developers would get angry at an impossible question. Real developers would relish the challenge:)
This would be preferable to what one company I applied for a job with did recently. Gave me a fairly straight forward maths problem involving modulus, gave me about *5* seconds to solve it using real code and not just pseudocode. Sure, that was fine. Then they added the caveat 'What if % is an expensive operation? how would you work around it?'. Turns out it was a trick question. They were expecting you to statically store the result explicitly instead of finding different maths that achieved the same result dynamically but more efficiently. less than 2 seconds later the interviewer interjected with the answer before I had a chance to even say or do anything right *or* wrong.
I don't see how *this* particular kind of quizzing *can* weed good candidates from bad, it's stacked against everyone equally. It's hostile. I'm pretty sure they didn't ever find the 'right' candidate.
I'm all for puzzles and quizzes to test someone's experience and ability and problem solving skills during job applications, but they MUST a) be unambiguous otherwise you're just being a jerk, and b) must be given a reasonable amount of time to actually perform them otherwise, again, you're just being a jerk.
Every other week I'm required to work with concepts and frameworks and languages and technologies I hadn't yet experienced in my prior 20 years engineering/programming/coding/whatever. A quick RTFM, a google, and a juryrig testbench script later and I'm up to speed. I think that last bit, is the bit that bites most people who are the kind of people not cut out for programming. They can't abstract the problem and apply their existing knowledge to it in order to understand it in the first place. They just aren't wired like that. On the other hand, I'm sure they can all dance to some degree. I however can not. I'm not wired like that.
Rubbish. If *any* of these points were true, HP would be the ONLY vendor, and you couldn't get anything but a windows7 phone and a winCE router/firewall/nas/tv/stereo/modem/access point. And everything would be x86. And everything would be leased instead of bought. And linux would effectively be stone cold dead in the grave for many years now.
Think again. Very few PC makers could afford the hit of losing the Windows volume discount they get - which is currently on the condition that ALL their PCs have Windows pre-installed.
If to you a computer simply means a desktop or workstation, then maybe. I still don't think it'll be that big an issue because the kind of people who even CARE that there is an OS besides windows, the ones who end up migrating away when they realize there's something else, are the kinds of people who will likely be building their own rigs anyway (either as gamer tweakers or just general nerds). No 'ma and pa' I've ever known who tried linux on a whim ever migrated away from windows. Why would they? Then their Word for Windows wouldn't run and lets be honest, libre/open office is still a few yards behind Word and will be for the near future. And then, there's that whole anti-competitive practices thing. Sure it might swing in the US of A but I doubt the EU won't be rubbing their hands together thinking 'Oh boy! They walked right into another expensive lawsuit with ample fines to line our coffers!'
I do still think it's a horrendous precedent and a general fucktard thing for them to do, but I doubt it'll have the impact everyone is thinking. It never has! Remember the whole 'omg TPM is going to lock us to a specific vendor!' crisis a couple years back? How did that pan out?:P
The solution is pretty simple, for both fighting Secure Boot mandates AND the 1%:
DON'T BUY IT IF IT'S NOT WHAT YOU WANT.
Vote with your dollar, it's mightier than the pen by far. Sure the masses will buy their secure boot locked-to-win8 pcs but vendors WILL still provide options for you and I. Microsoft subsidies and kickbacks aren't going to cover the loss they'd make if they culled our end of the market. Can you imagine someone buying a windows 8 secure-boot-locked pc to use as a router/firewall? Or as a Xen host for a medium-sized office? Or for driving a SAN?? Those 'OS market share' stats really *REALLY* do not highlight the true penetration of linux and bsd in the real world. Vendors know this too otherwise they wouldn't waste their time.
Protesting and complaining online isn't going to do squat. Moving all your business away from your usual vendor and towards a 'friendly' one sure as hell will, and faster than you could ever imagine too.:)
Wow you really don't understand how it works do you. You don't get to choose if your upstream uses the list, or if someone else ont he other side of the world who wishes to email you something legitimate's ISP uses it, or if any of the relays along the way uses it.
When you send email, it doesn't necessary go directly from person A's PC to person B's PC. Any of the intervening machines can use an RBL - with or without your knowledge or permission. Even if you own your own mail server, I can promise an RBL somewhere along the line is still filtering what hits it. Even if you proclaim 'I do not choose to use this service!' - no one will hear you.
I've also had customers end up on the blacklist incorrectly for reasons as innocuous as some 3rd party contracted inexperienced low-level techie ticked the wrong box on their Exchange management interface when trying to fix an unrelated problem. Spamhaus lists aren't just automated - they're pro-active. They scan target MXs for configuration details and 'potential' problems, then if any single 1 POTENTIAL problem is seen, BAM blacklisted. And then getting them off the blacklist after such a silly otherwise-inconsequential mishap costs a buttload of time, and unlike the 3rd party contractor, my time is expensive.
My favorite part though, is where, after you move to remove a false-positive-flagged customer from Spamhaus, they warn you 'if this happens JUST ONE MORE TIME from this IP, the blacklisting will be permanent with no means for dispute'
They are fascists. Fascists performing a job everyone wants nd needs, but still fascists pushing their ideals onto people who don't necessarily want them. There has to be a better way.
Also, blocking the service IS taking away a valuable item from A2B - for an ISP that's oxygen. It's damaging and crippling. They were effectively attacked and continued to be attacked until they gave in to unreasonable demands. That IS blackmail. Valuable items need not be tangible physical goods - intellectual property is valuable, time is valuable, reputation is also valuable.
Someone earlier mentioned the ISP in question, Cyberbunker, routes traffic for The Pirate Bay - maybe the 'valuable item' is part of a 3rd party's agenda spamhaus is getting paid to implement.. [insert conspiracy theory here]
If they are deploying said compiled binaries by hand... onto embedded hardware, then it makes perfect sense.
The only thing here that really stands out is lack of version control, there really isn't a situation where that is justifiable. All the other points, I could easily invent or recount some corner case where they make sense...
And I disabled it anyway because I didn't like how Disqus tries to post my comments directly to my facebook wall without asking me for confirmation first. Disqus is complicit with the facebook privacy problem, and may even facilitate it.
It's not like a fisheye lens is complex, expensive, or hard to procure. There really is nothing hurting the plausibility of this.
And on the electronics side, a little MSP430 controller, short-range ZigBee radio that gets triggered when you go through some checkpoint, it could last quite a while with only a moderately beefier battery than what's already in them. And also quite cheap these days
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Screw RIM. I only know about it because I've been following QNX. Frankly, I'd love to see RIM go under, get taken over, and QNX ending up in the hands of someone who'll reopen the source and let me legally continue my projects I was working on before RIM got their mitts on it. :)
Feels a bit weird cheering for the OS yet hoping the house collapses while everyone else seems to be the other way around; loving the company but eh'ing the OS change
There needs to be an 'obvious' moderation option. Did anyone seriously not know this already?
Which in turn leads to irony and the lament of unintended pun.
IQ means intelligence quotient. It is a mathematical value. It's not a general term meaning quiz. Any self-respecting geek would be offended at this abuse of the term!
No, they write websites in ruby. The question wasn't relevant to the task at hand, just a critical thinking test. A critical thinking test where pausing to think about the problem was apparently the incorrect response.. *shrug*
Or maybe I offended them by offering up a better solution than they had imagined :P
This did cross my mind. There's also the fact that if they did hire me they would have had to pay a percentage on top of my wage to an external recruiter who got my foot in the door for me which reinforces this theory.
It's like you were actually there.. :)
Somehow I don't think this is what they were doing, otherwise they would have given me more than 2 seconds to respond, and I would hope that pausing to think through the problem instead of rushing down one path or another would be a correct response .
:)
I do think this behavioral test is a good thing, only people who aren't really cut out to be developers would get angry at an impossible question. Real developers would relish the challenge
In hindsight though, I'm really glad I didn't get that position. I'd hate to work for someone so near-sighted and irrational. :)
This would be preferable to what one company I applied for a job with did recently. Gave me a fairly straight forward maths problem involving modulus, gave me about *5* seconds to solve it using real code and not just pseudocode. Sure, that was fine. Then they added the caveat 'What if % is an expensive operation? how would you work around it?'. Turns out it was a trick question. They were expecting you to statically store the result explicitly instead of finding different maths that achieved the same result dynamically but more efficiently. less than 2 seconds later the interviewer interjected with the answer before I had a chance to even say or do anything right *or* wrong.
I don't see how *this* particular kind of quizzing *can* weed good candidates from bad, it's stacked against everyone equally. It's hostile. I'm pretty sure they didn't ever find the 'right' candidate.
I'm all for puzzles and quizzes to test someone's experience and ability and problem solving skills during job applications, but they MUST a) be unambiguous otherwise you're just being a jerk, and b) must be given a reasonable amount of time to actually perform them otherwise, again, you're just being a jerk.
An oft-cited[citation needed] but inaccurate example is..
Every other week I'm required to work with concepts and frameworks and languages and technologies I hadn't yet experienced in my prior 20 years engineering/programming/coding/whatever. A quick RTFM, a google, and a juryrig testbench script later and I'm up to speed. I think that last bit, is the bit that bites most people who are the kind of people not cut out for programming. They can't abstract the problem and apply their existing knowledge to it in order to understand it in the first place. They just aren't wired like that. On the other hand, I'm sure they can all dance to some degree. I however can not. I'm not wired like that.
Rubbish. If *any* of these points were true, HP would be the ONLY vendor, and you couldn't get anything but a windows7 phone and a winCE router/firewall/nas/tv/stereo/modem/access point. And everything would be x86. And everything would be leased instead of bought. And linux would effectively be stone cold dead in the grave for many years now.
Think again. Very few PC makers could afford the hit of losing the Windows volume discount they get - which is currently on the condition that ALL their PCs have Windows pre-installed.
If to you a computer simply means a desktop or workstation, then maybe. I still don't think it'll be that big an issue because the kind of people who even CARE that there is an OS besides windows, the ones who end up migrating away when they realize there's something else, are the kinds of people who will likely be building their own rigs anyway (either as gamer tweakers or just general nerds). No 'ma and pa' I've ever known who tried linux on a whim ever migrated away from windows. Why would they? Then their Word for Windows wouldn't run and lets be honest, libre/open office is still a few yards behind Word and will be for the near future.
:P
And then, there's that whole anti-competitive practices thing. Sure it might swing in the US of A but I doubt the EU won't be rubbing their hands together thinking 'Oh boy! They walked right into another expensive lawsuit with ample fines to line our coffers!'
I do still think it's a horrendous precedent and a general fucktard thing for them to do, but I doubt it'll have the impact everyone is thinking. It never has! Remember the whole 'omg TPM is going to lock us to a specific vendor!' crisis a couple years back? How did that pan out?
nah THIS is a cheap tablet
The solution is pretty simple, for both fighting Secure Boot mandates AND the 1%:
:)
DON'T BUY IT IF IT'S NOT WHAT YOU WANT.
Vote with your dollar, it's mightier than the pen by far. Sure the masses will buy their secure boot locked-to-win8 pcs but vendors WILL still provide options for you and I. Microsoft subsidies and kickbacks aren't going to cover the loss they'd make if they culled our end of the market. Can you imagine someone buying a windows 8 secure-boot-locked pc to use as a router/firewall? Or as a Xen host for a medium-sized office? Or for driving a SAN?? Those 'OS market share' stats really *REALLY* do not highlight the true penetration of linux and bsd in the real world. Vendors know this too otherwise they wouldn't waste their time.
Protesting and complaining online isn't going to do squat. Moving all your business away from your usual vendor and towards a 'friendly' one sure as hell will, and faster than you could ever imagine too.
They didn't make the first one actually, only the first successful one, an important distinction in a case like this
Wow you really don't understand how it works do you. You don't get to choose if your upstream uses the list, or if someone else ont he other side of the world who wishes to email you something legitimate's ISP uses it, or if any of the relays along the way uses it.
When you send email, it doesn't necessary go directly from person A's PC to person B's PC. Any of the intervening machines can use an RBL - with or without your knowledge or permission. Even if you own your own mail server, I can promise an RBL somewhere along the line is still filtering what hits it. Even if you proclaim 'I do not choose to use this service!' - no one will hear you.
I've also had customers end up on the blacklist incorrectly for reasons as innocuous as some 3rd party contracted inexperienced low-level techie ticked the wrong box on their Exchange management interface when trying to fix an unrelated problem. Spamhaus lists aren't just automated - they're pro-active. They scan target MXs for configuration details and 'potential' problems, then if any single 1 POTENTIAL problem is seen, BAM blacklisted. And then getting them off the blacklist after such a silly otherwise-inconsequential mishap costs a buttload of time, and unlike the 3rd party contractor, my time is expensive.
My favorite part though, is where, after you move to remove a false-positive-flagged customer from Spamhaus, they warn you 'if this happens JUST ONE MORE TIME from this IP, the blacklisting will be permanent with no means for dispute'
They are fascists. Fascists performing a job everyone wants nd needs, but still fascists pushing their ideals onto people who don't necessarily want them. There has to be a better way.
Also, blocking the service IS taking away a valuable item from A2B - for an ISP that's oxygen. It's damaging and crippling. They were effectively attacked and continued to be attacked until they gave in to unreasonable demands. That IS blackmail. Valuable items need not be tangible physical goods - intellectual property is valuable, time is valuable, reputation is also valuable.
Someone earlier mentioned the ISP in question, Cyberbunker, routes traffic for The Pirate Bay - maybe the 'valuable item' is part of a 3rd party's agenda spamhaus is getting paid to implement.. [insert conspiracy theory here]
If they are deploying said compiled binaries by hand... onto embedded hardware, then it makes perfect sense. The only thing here that really stands out is lack of version control, there really isn't a situation where that is justifiable. All the other points, I could easily invent or recount some corner case where they make sense...
And I disabled it anyway because I didn't like how Disqus tries to post my comments directly to my facebook wall without asking me for confirmation first. Disqus is complicit with the facebook privacy problem, and may even facilitate it.
It's not like a fisheye lens is complex, expensive, or hard to procure. There really is nothing hurting the plausibility of this.
And on the electronics side, a little MSP430 controller, short-range ZigBee radio that gets triggered when you go through some checkpoint, it could last quite a while with only a moderately beefier battery than what's already in them. And also quite cheap these days