I'm pretty sure that nobody thought it was impossible to render a rounded rectangle on a mac. I mean, I can draw one in Logo on an Apple ][ in nothing flat.
Actually what was a big deal was not tracing the outline of a rounded rectangle quickly (no big deal), but making every single overlapping window on the screen have a rounded rectangle outline rather than a plain rectangle. Yes, even back to the original Macintosh, every window had rounded corners, and you could see other windows behind it in the corners. Pretty impressive for an 8 MHz processor, don't you think? It was even possible to make oval-shaped windows or star-shaped windows that overlapped with others, and it worked great. Windows didn't get a similar capability until Windows 95, about a decade later - and even then, windows were all rectangular by default because they probably hadn't optimized the code as much.
In it, they refer to the need for the seed to be "irreducible." Checking further in the article, this is just a $64 word that means "prime." If the number needs to be prime, just say so, don't use a word that nobody will understand, followed eventually by an oblique definition that's hard to understand.
Except that they're not talking about a prime number, they're talking about irreducible polynomials, and that is in fact the proper term. The definition is similar to the definition of a prime number, but they're not the same and they don't have exactly the same properties. Also, the term "prime polynomial" is perhaps avoided because it is too easily confused with polynomials that generate a lot of prime numbers. So irreducible polynomial is definitely the proper term.
I would rather a Wikipedia article be correct first, and easy to understand second.
When you run a restaurant, the things you must do to get a good ranking from reviewers is have good food, good service and good atmosphere. It's fairly obvious.
Maybe it seems obvious to you. But how would you feel if you were a talented chef running a restaurant that was quite popular with your customers and served unique food, but you got a poor rating from Zagat because the reviewer thought your food had unusual flavors?
Good food vs bad food is obvious in some cases, but there's a lot of gray area in the middle. Same with judging the quality of websites.
And yet if you take out the quotes then almost all of the results on the first page contain the answer to your question.
You should almost never use quotes when searching Google. Google already pays attention to your word order even without quotes - compare "girl crazy" to "crazy girl".
Why was this modded as flamebait? Look me up, I really do work at Google. I'd be happy to pass this on to the Gmail team, I think it deserves a response.
And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.
Except that the functions they're being asked to implement are RIDICULOUSLY easy. Anyone who has actually done a fair amount of programming ought to be able to implement functions like strlen, strstr, strcmp, etc in about two minutes, tops. These are not tricky brain teasers - if you write real software you probably call those functions (or equivalent methods in C++ or Java or Python) dozens of times per day. So you know exactly what they do, and you've written functions a hundred times more complicated than that before. It's trivial.
I think the problem is that people go into college, do the bare minimum in their C.S. classes, never play around with programming for fun, and then expect to get a job at Microsoft or Google. Sorry, those companies are not interested in someone who just did the bare minimum in their classes and didn't take the time to actually experiment in their chosen field. All it takes is a little curiousity in the weekends, a little extra effort on some of your class projects, and a couple of summer internships, and by the time you graduate you can be an excellent programmer - if you're still enjoying it by then, companies like Microsoft and Google will be drooling over you.
Microsoft's questions like strlen are not meant to identify good employees. They're meant to weed out the people who haven't even learned the basics yet. And when the vast majority of applicants fall in that category, no wonder Bill Gates feels the way he does.
I wonder where you get the notion that the Chinese people "might (otherwise) be unaware of" government censorship and repression - they live there, every day.
But that's the funny thing about censorship. Of course the Chinese people know that they're being censored, but how are they supposed to know what is being censored?
even if they did it on purpose I think the customer is a jerk:.002 cents is 500 kbytes for 1 cent, 1 megabyte for 2 cents, 5 megabytes for 10 cents. That's outrageously cheap and obviously not correct.
Really? In the U.S. it's pretty common to have unlimited Internet access for $40/month. Now, of course there are different definitions of "unlimited", but for the sake of argument let's say that I download for 1 hour every night - that's pretty reasonable, right? With a 256 kbit Internet connection (most people would have even faster than that) I could download a little over 100 MB in an hour. In a month, that'd be 3 GB. $40/month divided by 3 GB is 0.0013 cents per kilobyte. That's 1/1000 of a cent (not of a dollar), or less than what the guy in the story was quoted.
Or, think of it this way: the guy apparently downloaded 35893 kilobytes in a month. That's only ~36 megabytes - hardly anything! That's like downloading one album from the iTunes Music Store. And he was charged $72? No wonder he was mad.
5 megabytes for 10 cents is only cheap for a cell phone. For a shared home broadband connection it's pretty average.
With the exception of the Mars rovers, most of NASA's recent history has been riddled with failures, mistakes and oversights.
The fact that you can't think of any recent NASA successes other than the Mars rovers proves that you have no idea what you're talking about. One huge recent success was Cassini, the mission to Saturn. Sadly, the news media doesn't report on most of NASA's smaller projects, but in the last ten years NASA has also launched several Earth-orbiting satellites to make new measurements of our environment and climate, and several missions beyond our planet to help us better understand our solar system and the universe we live in, including two sample return missions and two Mars orbiters. Plus the Mars Exploration Rovers, of course. Most of NASA's missions in the last 10 years have been unparalleled successes, not "riddled with failures, mistakes and oversights".
What I don't get is when do people have time to use WiFi at an airport? Most of the time when I have been in airports I was running from plane to plane, grabbing something to eat, and maybe calling my office quickly. It is pretty rare when I have had more than a hour lay over on a flight.
The official statistics are that airlines have about a 75% on-time arrival record. Even if not all of those flights departed late, my experience has been that 20% of flights don't even start boarding until a half-hour or more after the scheduled time.
It also depends on the airport. Your connecting flight in O'Hare is a lot more likely to be delayed!
Point being, I travel a lot, and I often find myself with an extra hour or two to kill at an airport - sometimes more.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. IE is compatible with the most sites. Out of all of IE's competitors, Firefox is far more compatible than all of the others. The more popular Firefox gets, the more this will be true.
You beat me to it. Seriously though, firefox is highly overrated. Is it better than IE6? Without question. Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.
But in terms of compatibility with the vast majority of websites, Firefox is far ahead of every other competitor.
I'm a power user. I routinely switch between Camino, Safari, Firefox, and IE under CrossOver as I'm browsing different sites and designing web pages. But for my friends who aren't power users and want something that "just works", I always recommend Firefox. It's safer than IE and has a few nice features that they'll appreciate, but is still simple and most importantly, is going to work on 99% of the sites they visit. Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and others all have compatibility problems.
Ummm, you don't have to change your personality and wardrobe to get a girlfriend. In fact, that's a recipe for getting a girlfriend who won't last. However, if you don't already, I do agree that you should bathe, use deodorant, mouthwash and toothpaste, and wear comfortable, clean clothes.
Stop asking out the "prettiest" girls everywhere you go and start paying attention to the ordinary ones. Don't ask out anyone you think is really unattractive (if you really don't like the way they look, don't pretend you do), but start talking to girls who are nice looking in your opinion but not "totally hot". You'll be surprised how much more beautiful they'll seem when you find one with a great personality that meshes with yours.
I just went and speced out a hefty Mac and a Dell. Had to go with the super duper video since it was the only model both offered.
Dual 3.0Ghz Xeon 4GB Memory (4x 1GB sticks on both, ECC on both) 4X 500GB SATA drives 512MB NVidia Quadro DVD +/- everything drive No monitor on either system
Apple: $7,449 firm Dell: $5,575 before the infamous Dell discounting starts
You messed up something on Dell's page. I just configured it and got $6,960. I think you forgot to include the graphics card on the Dell - you do realize that you chose a graphics card that costs ~$1500 for this comparison?
It's hard to imagine that there is $1200 worth of electronics in the new Dell computer I just got at work.
Is is that hard to imagine? The three most expensive parts in your computer were almost certainly your flat-screen monitor, your processor, and your video card. Processor pricing is exponential - you often pay double to get something only 10% faster than the next model down. And a $1200 computer probably came with a nice 3-D graphics card; half the electronics of a PS2 or XBox are inside your computer!
To be honest, if you want to do "useless"/interesting research, your best bet may be a government lab. There's plenty of pie-in-the-sky research at places like JPL.
I worked at JPL for five years. There's some great research going on there - I wouldn't exactly call it pie-in-the-sky research, but definitely high-risk research. However, don't expect to land a job there and get to do whatever you want: expect to spend 30% of your time writing grant proposals. And in order to get those funded, you will usually need to propose ideas that have some hope of producing a short-term benefit.
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I'm pretty sure that nobody thought it was impossible to render a rounded rectangle on a mac. I mean, I can draw one in Logo on an Apple ][ in nothing flat.
Actually what was a big deal was not tracing the outline of a rounded rectangle quickly (no big deal), but making every single overlapping window on the screen have a rounded rectangle outline rather than a plain rectangle. Yes, even back to the original Macintosh, every window had rounded corners, and you could see other windows behind it in the corners. Pretty impressive for an 8 MHz processor, don't you think? It was even possible to make oval-shaped windows or star-shaped windows that overlapped with others, and it worked great. Windows didn't get a similar capability until Windows 95, about a decade later - and even then, windows were all rectangular by default because they probably hadn't optimized the code as much.
What do you think MIT would do if China offered them a billion dollars for their /8?
They'd laugh. MIT's endowment is approximately 8.4 billion.
Ah, sign extend - the infamous SEX instruction!
In it, they refer to the need for the seed to be "irreducible." Checking further in the article, this is just a $64 word that means "prime." If the number needs to be prime, just say so, don't use a word that nobody will understand, followed eventually by an oblique definition that's hard to understand.
Except that they're not talking about a prime number, they're talking about irreducible polynomials, and that is in fact the proper term. The definition is similar to the definition of a prime number, but they're not the same and they don't have exactly the same properties. Also, the term "prime polynomial" is perhaps avoided because it is too easily confused with polynomials that generate a lot of prime numbers. So irreducible polynomial is definitely the proper term.
I would rather a Wikipedia article be correct first, and easy to understand second.
When you run a restaurant, the things you must do to get a good ranking from reviewers is have good food, good service and good atmosphere. It's fairly obvious.
Maybe it seems obvious to you. But how would you feel if you were a talented chef running a restaurant that was quite popular with your customers and served unique food, but you got a poor rating from Zagat because the reviewer thought your food had unusual flavors?
Good food vs bad food is obvious in some cases, but there's a lot of gray area in the middle. Same with judging the quality of websites.
And yet if you take out the quotes then almost all of the results on the first page contain the answer to your question.
You should almost never use quotes when searching Google. Google already pays attention to your word order even without quotes - compare "girl crazy" to "crazy girl".
Why was this modded as flamebait? Look me up, I really do work at Google. I'd be happy to pass this on to the Gmail team, I think it deserves a response.
I work at Google. Email me with more information and I'll pass it on to the Gmail team.
And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.
Except that the functions they're being asked to implement are RIDICULOUSLY easy. Anyone who has actually done a fair amount of programming ought to be able to implement functions like strlen, strstr, strcmp, etc in about two minutes, tops. These are not tricky brain teasers - if you write real software you probably call those functions (or equivalent methods in C++ or Java or Python) dozens of times per day. So you know exactly what they do, and you've written functions a hundred times more complicated than that before. It's trivial.
I think the problem is that people go into college, do the bare minimum in their C.S. classes, never play around with programming for fun, and then expect to get a job at Microsoft or Google. Sorry, those companies are not interested in someone who just did the bare minimum in their classes and didn't take the time to actually experiment in their chosen field. All it takes is a little curiousity in the weekends, a little extra effort on some of your class projects, and a couple of summer internships, and by the time you graduate you can be an excellent programmer - if you're still enjoying it by then, companies like Microsoft and Google will be drooling over you.
Microsoft's questions like strlen are not meant to identify good employees. They're meant to weed out the people who haven't even learned the basics yet. And when the vast majority of applicants fall in that category, no wonder Bill Gates feels the way he does.
I wonder where you get the notion that the Chinese people "might (otherwise) be unaware of" government censorship and repression - they live there, every day.
But that's the funny thing about censorship. Of course the Chinese people know that they're being censored, but how are they supposed to know what is being censored?
Remember that the cost of the phone is included in a contract, and that's why you get the termination fee if you cancel early.
I brought my own phone with me when I switched to Cingular recently. They still forced me to sign up for a 1-year contract. That's just wrong.
even if they did it on purpose I think the customer is a jerk: .002 cents is 500 kbytes for 1 cent, 1 megabyte for 2 cents, 5 megabytes for 10 cents. That's outrageously cheap and obviously not correct.
Really? In the U.S. it's pretty common to have unlimited Internet access for $40/month. Now, of course there are different definitions of "unlimited", but for the sake of argument let's say that I download for 1 hour every night - that's pretty reasonable, right? With a 256 kbit Internet connection (most people would have even faster than that) I could download a little over 100 MB in an hour. In a month, that'd be 3 GB. $40/month divided by 3 GB is 0.0013 cents per kilobyte. That's 1/1000 of a cent (not of a dollar), or less than what the guy in the story was quoted.
Or, think of it this way: the guy apparently downloaded 35893 kilobytes in a month. That's only ~36 megabytes - hardly anything! That's like downloading one album from the iTunes Music Store. And he was charged $72? No wonder he was mad.
5 megabytes for 10 cents is only cheap for a cell phone. For a shared home broadband connection it's pretty average.
Don't adwords work by ordering the ad results by highest bidder?
No.
With the exception of the Mars rovers, most of NASA's recent history has been riddled with failures, mistakes and oversights.
The fact that you can't think of any recent NASA successes other than the Mars rovers proves that you have no idea what you're talking about. One huge recent success was Cassini, the mission to Saturn. Sadly, the news media doesn't report on most of NASA's smaller projects, but in the last ten years NASA has also launched several Earth-orbiting satellites to make new measurements of our environment and climate, and several missions beyond our planet to help us better understand our solar system and the universe we live in, including two sample return missions and two Mars orbiters. Plus the Mars Exploration Rovers, of course. Most of NASA's missions in the last 10 years have been unparalleled successes, not "riddled with failures, mistakes and oversights".
6. Women like to pose for DSLR then to teensy point and shoot.
I'm sold!
What I don't get is when do people have time to use WiFi at an airport?
Most of the time when I have been in airports I was running from plane to plane, grabbing something to eat, and maybe calling my office quickly.
It is pretty rare when I have had more than a hour lay over on a flight.
The official statistics are that airlines have about a 75% on-time arrival record. Even if not all of those flights departed late, my experience has been that 20% of flights don't even start boarding until a half-hour or more after the scheduled time.
It also depends on the airport. Your connecting flight in O'Hare is a lot more likely to be delayed!
Point being, I travel a lot, and I often find myself with an extra hour or two to kill at an airport - sometimes more.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. IE is compatible with the most sites. Out of all of IE's competitors, Firefox is far more compatible than all of the others. The more popular Firefox gets, the more this will be true.
You beat me to it. Seriously though, firefox is highly overrated. Is it better than IE6? Without question. Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.
But in terms of compatibility with the vast majority of websites, Firefox is far ahead of every other competitor.
I'm a power user. I routinely switch between Camino, Safari, Firefox, and IE under CrossOver as I'm browsing different sites and designing web pages. But for my friends who aren't power users and want something that "just works", I always recommend Firefox. It's safer than IE and has a few nice features that they'll appreciate, but is still simple and most importantly, is going to work on 99% of the sites they visit. Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and others all have compatibility problems.
Sorry, didn't mean to put words in your mouth! It does sound like we're of the same opinion.
I have seen a lot of geeks and nerds, though, who fail to find a girlfriend because they go after the hottest girl in the room.
Except that Yi Zhang is a she
Ummm, you don't have to change your personality and wardrobe to get a girlfriend. In fact, that's a recipe for getting a girlfriend who won't last. However, if you don't already, I do agree that you should bathe, use deodorant, mouthwash and toothpaste, and wear comfortable, clean clothes.
Stop asking out the "prettiest" girls everywhere you go and start paying attention to the ordinary ones. Don't ask out anyone you think is really unattractive (if you really don't like the way they look, don't pretend you do), but start talking to girls who are nice looking in your opinion but not "totally hot". You'll be surprised how much more beautiful they'll seem when you find one with a great personality that meshes with yours.
I just went and speced out a hefty Mac and a Dell. Had to go with the super duper video since it was the only model both offered.
Dual 3.0Ghz Xeon
4GB Memory (4x 1GB sticks on both, ECC on both)
4X 500GB SATA drives
512MB NVidia Quadro
DVD +/- everything drive
No monitor on either system
Apple: $7,449 firm
Dell: $5,575 before the infamous Dell discounting starts
You messed up something on Dell's page. I just configured it and got $6,960. I think you forgot to include the graphics card on the Dell - you do realize that you chose a graphics card that costs ~$1500 for this comparison?
You honestly don't think that clever Google engineers would be able to tell the difference between real user queries and queries from this bot?
It's hard to imagine that there is $1200 worth of electronics in the new Dell computer I just got at work.
Is is that hard to imagine? The three most expensive parts in your computer were almost certainly your flat-screen monitor, your processor, and your video card. Processor pricing is exponential - you often pay double to get something only 10% faster than the next model down. And a $1200 computer probably came with a nice 3-D graphics card; half the electronics of a PS2 or XBox are inside your computer!
To be honest, if you want to do "useless"/interesting research, your best bet may be a government lab. There's plenty of pie-in-the-sky research at places like JPL.
I worked at JPL for five years. There's some great research going on there - I wouldn't exactly call it pie-in-the-sky research, but definitely high-risk research. However, don't expect to land a job there and get to do whatever you want: expect to spend 30% of your time writing grant proposals. And in order to get those funded, you will usually need to propose ideas that have some hope of producing a short-term benefit.