Over the past two years, I have bought at least four used Apple computers from the 2010-2012 era. (Three macmini and one 13" MBP; one of each are late 2012 models) Because, frankly, IMHO, the newer ones are less desirable due to non-upgradeable soldered crap, and also Intel's mobile CPUs not getting much better since then. The macmini is great, just hook it up to a modern TV set (except for the few that won't let you turn off overscan and image processing), fill it with RAM (hopefully 16GB) and you're ready to go.
I didn't have a problem with the Retina thing, or even USB-C, just with soldering and gluing fucking everything down, and forcing you to buy upgrades at initial purchase instead of a year or two later when you need them (and when they are cheaper). These aren't low-end price-sensitive computers, they are "Pro" computers, you don't need to save five bucks by leaving out DIMM or SSD sockets. Also, a "Pro" laptop doesn't need to be so thin you can cut yourself.
And they really should have made a macPad, it's embarrassing that they didn't come out with a Surface Pro equivalent before Microsoft. (Honestly, I think a vertical touch-screen is bullshit, but in a pad it makes a lot of sense.)
To add insult to injury, in Europe and in my country, you end up paying around 300-400 dollars more for an iPhone, and 600 hundred more for a Macbook than the equivalent models in the US."
It's called Value Added Tax, and being a simple Murrican, I don't pretend to understand what it means other than Shit Costs A Lot More. Not that we don't have sales tax here, it still adds 100-200 dollars to the price of a laptop, but we don't try to hide it in the price of the product.
That and the very design changes in TFA were literally the first thing I thought of when I heard about the fiasco. (I had to hear about it, because I can't be arsed to care about the crap that comes out of Hollywood these days, so I was watching something else.)
Seriously, they put the thing that would have just been read before opening the envelope ("Best Actress") at the bottom of the card in mice type? If it were at the top, the error would have been instantly obvious.
Seriously, what do you expect from anyone his age? Back then AOL pretty much was the internet for average people, unless you had access to the real internet through a university or (sometimes) your place of work.
If all you can think of asking a candidate about is algorithms
Did you even read my comment? It's not about the fucking algorithm, it's how they write the code, especially under the pressure of half a dozen people (the potential future co-workers) watching them. (which is why you're having them do it on a whiteboard, so everyone can watch) Bubble sort is trivial enough that even if you don't remember it, you should be able to stumble on it with hints, which the interviewer should be giving.
A much bette rscenario would be to get them to talk about a project they know well from their background
And yet you still wouldn't know if they could code their way out of a wet paper bag. Having been involved in a few of these interviews as one of the "future co-workers", it is scary how pathetic some of these people are at coding.
Seriously? Aside from the two basic problems (not everyone knows what sudoku is, and asking for C code in an interview for a Perl job), the biggest one is, what the fuck, I've spent much time trying to make a sudoku solver and it's not something you can do in the time of an interview, or the space of a handwritten page, unless, I suppose, they expect you to do the lame exhaustive search version because they don't care about inefficient code -- and people here are complaining about bubble sort? (I was trying to do the pattern recognition style, which can get really involved.)
And if you are still deluded enough to think that you can hear that difference, there's always pono. Because some people are delusional enough to think that we need 24/192 audio everywhere, not just in mixing where you need the extra precision because you're altering the original data with lossy transformations.
Have you been in on a whiteboard interview with recent CS grads? That's "grads" as in they already received their degree. I did a few times a dozen or so years ago, and it was scary. "Reverse a linked list" was particularly fun to watch, because Data Structures is a fundamental class in a CS degree. The ones that tried to write in Java were probably the worst, because they had no concept of pointers. The EE grads consistently knew more than the CS grads.
Bubble sort is four operations: two loops, a compare, and a swap. It's not just simple, it's idiomatic. And it demonstrates that you understand the basics of how sorting works, rather than as some magic black box that takes one lump of data and returns another sorted lump of data with who knows how much dependence on heap usage. Did you know you can use bubble sort on a singly-linked list? If you have data in a small linked list (not uncommon in the embedded world), this (combined with linked-list-fu) will let you sort something that isn't in a tidy little array. And for small data sets, bubble sort isn't that much worse, and the code will be easier to understand. If it isn't fast enough, you can always replace it with something better.
It's better to be right and a little slower (especially with the speeds of modern jellybean CPUs), rather than implementing your own version of a "faster" sort and getting it wrong. It's hard to get four operations wrong. In embedded, you don't want subtly wrong code lying around in your product. I had one case where a subtle bug caused a relay to sometimes not change state. Four (!) years later we figured out it wasn't just the relays not getting enough coil current. Ripping out the interrupt-based code and replacing it with foreground-only code not only got rid of the bug (interrupt synchronization errors can be truly evil), but the code was a couple hundred bytes smaller, too. (the device had 4K of flash)
I had whiteboard interviews where the interviewer had no clue about coding, so every question regarding clarification to the task where unanswered and the interviewer even got a bad impression of my skills.
The interview isn't just for them to decide if they want you. I wouldn't want to work for a company where the interviewer in a whiteboard interview was clearly clueless, because he probably isn't the only one. And I have had an interview where it was clear that they didn't understand what they were really asking.
As to the "implement a bubblesort on the whiteboard" I have had these kinds of interviews and have always passed them with:
"I'll do it if you want, but I'll certainly make at least one error.
The point of that is to see you implement a relatively simple algorithm, not for you to make something perfect. The one I got was "reverse a linked list" (along with "copy a file", which I already knew backwards and upside-down). The first thing I did was immediately assume that it wasn't too hard, and the second thing was to remember all the linked list stuff from Data Structures class in my second year of college. Later, when we finally got enough budget for me to be on the other side of the table, I was shocked at how many then recent CS grads (early 2Ks) failed at both. The EE grads did much better.
Oh, and not only can I do a bubble sort from memory, but I know it's less inefficient if the inner loop goes downward, and once in a programming contest, I even coded a bubble sort for a singly-linked list. Ask for any more complicated short (shell sort, quick sort, etc.) and yeah, that's "look it up" time. Bubble sort is good for an interview because it's simple enough to do from memory, just two loops, a compare, and a swap, and it shows that you understand the basic concepts of sorting.
And yeah, "estimate the number of foo" questions are super retarded. If I was asked to do one, I would say "Seriously?" and give them The Look. Because they never weren't stupid, at least for hiring developers. Riddles (like crossing a bridge that only supports so much weight) are another matter, because there's a specific answer that can be determined by elimination if you have the necessary patience.
These days radio exposes people to corporate music that has been chosen by suits. The only music stations around here that I care to listen to at all are an oldies station that a few years ago changed their format from '50s and '60s to '70s and '80s (no new music there), and (rarely) a rock station that dates back to the '80s (mostly for the novelty of them having lasted so long). I get my new music via the internets.
IMHO, western music has sucked since the 90s. Try Asia. Most of my new music in the past fifteen+ years has come from Japan, except for a bit of industrial metal from Germany. Also, there's quite a bit of fresh coming from the soundclouds these days.
Actually, it's not quite that easy. Do it wrong and you bounce out into space, at least for long enough that your oxygen runs out. And as I recall, Apollo had to brake more than once on re-entry.
There is a setting in System Preferences -> Security & Privacy that controls this. The default is "Mac App Store and identified developers". The other two options are "Mac App Store" and "Anywhere". The latter gives you an "are you really sure?" prompt and then shuts the fuck up. There is also protection of the OS directories (even root can't fuck with them), starting in 10.10 (or is it 10.11?), unless you perform the proper magickal ceremony to disable it, which includes starting a command-line shell after a reboot into recovery mode. And once you've done it, it also shuts the fuck up about it.
So if you know what you're doing, you can go back to more or less normal Unix hacking, but you won't have to worry about grandma getting pwned.
Slashdot Mirror
Over the past two years, I have bought at least four used Apple computers from the 2010-2012 era. (Three macmini and one 13" MBP; one of each are late 2012 models) Because, frankly, IMHO, the newer ones are less desirable due to non-upgradeable soldered crap, and also Intel's mobile CPUs not getting much better since then. The macmini is great, just hook it up to a modern TV set (except for the few that won't let you turn off overscan and image processing), fill it with RAM (hopefully 16GB) and you're ready to go.
I didn't have a problem with the Retina thing, or even USB-C, just with soldering and gluing fucking everything down, and forcing you to buy upgrades at initial purchase instead of a year or two later when you need them (and when they are cheaper). These aren't low-end price-sensitive computers, they are "Pro" computers, you don't need to save five bucks by leaving out DIMM or SSD sockets. Also, a "Pro" laptop doesn't need to be so thin you can cut yourself.
And they really should have made a macPad, it's embarrassing that they didn't come out with a Surface Pro equivalent before Microsoft. (Honestly, I think a vertical touch-screen is bullshit, but in a pad it makes a lot of sense.)
They manufacture lifestyle accessories that just happen to have a Unix-like OS buried somewhere inside them.
To add insult to injury, in Europe and in my country, you end up paying around 300-400 dollars more for an iPhone, and 600 hundred more for a Macbook than the equivalent models in the US."
It's called Value Added Tax, and being a simple Murrican, I don't pretend to understand what it means other than Shit Costs A Lot More. Not that we don't have sales tax here, it still adds 100-200 dollars to the price of a laptop, but we don't try to hide it in the price of the product.
This motherfucker right here. Fuck, yeah.
That and the very design changes in TFA were literally the first thing I thought of when I heard about the fiasco. (I had to hear about it, because I can't be arsed to care about the crap that comes out of Hollywood these days, so I was watching something else.)
Seriously, they put the thing that would have just been read before opening the envelope ("Best Actress") at the bottom of the card in mice type? If it were at the top, the error would have been instantly obvious.
It's also a little bit too warm for sous vide.
Seriously, what do you expect from anyone his age? Back then AOL pretty much was the internet for average people, unless you had access to the real internet through a university or (sometimes) your place of work.
These batteries last for more than a week, so no. (For those who don't remember, only carbon-zinc batteries were eligible for the BotM club.)
If all you can think of asking a candidate about is algorithms
Did you even read my comment? It's not about the fucking algorithm, it's how they write the code, especially under the pressure of half a dozen people (the potential future co-workers) watching them. (which is why you're having them do it on a whiteboard, so everyone can watch) Bubble sort is trivial enough that even if you don't remember it, you should be able to stumble on it with hints, which the interviewer should be giving.
A much bette rscenario would be to get them to talk about a project they know well from their background
And yet you still wouldn't know if they could code their way out of a wet paper bag. Having been involved in a few of these interviews as one of the "future co-workers", it is scary how pathetic some of these people are at coding.
Seriously? Aside from the two basic problems (not everyone knows what sudoku is, and asking for C code in an interview for a Perl job), the biggest one is, what the fuck, I've spent much time trying to make a sudoku solver and it's not something you can do in the time of an interview, or the space of a handwritten page, unless, I suppose, they expect you to do the lame exhaustive search version because they don't care about inefficient code -- and people here are complaining about bubble sort? (I was trying to do the pattern recognition style, which can get really involved.)
And if you are still deluded enough to think that you can hear that difference, there's always pono. Because some people are delusional enough to think that we need 24/192 audio everywhere, not just in mixing where you need the extra precision because you're altering the original data with lossy transformations.
Have you been in on a whiteboard interview with recent CS grads? That's "grads" as in they already received their degree. I did a few times a dozen or so years ago, and it was scary. "Reverse a linked list" was particularly fun to watch, because Data Structures is a fundamental class in a CS degree. The ones that tried to write in Java were probably the worst, because they had no concept of pointers. The EE grads consistently knew more than the CS grads.
Except that the point isn't to sort some data as fast as possible, or even to be coded perfectly, it's to watch you write some code for half an hour.
Bubble sort is four operations: two loops, a compare, and a swap. It's not just simple, it's idiomatic. And it demonstrates that you understand the basics of how sorting works, rather than as some magic black box that takes one lump of data and returns another sorted lump of data with who knows how much dependence on heap usage. Did you know you can use bubble sort on a singly-linked list? If you have data in a small linked list (not uncommon in the embedded world), this (combined with linked-list-fu) will let you sort something that isn't in a tidy little array. And for small data sets, bubble sort isn't that much worse, and the code will be easier to understand. If it isn't fast enough, you can always replace it with something better.
It's better to be right and a little slower (especially with the speeds of modern jellybean CPUs), rather than implementing your own version of a "faster" sort and getting it wrong. It's hard to get four operations wrong. In embedded, you don't want subtly wrong code lying around in your product. I had one case where a subtle bug caused a relay to sometimes not change state. Four (!) years later we figured out it wasn't just the relays not getting enough coil current. Ripping out the interrupt-based code and replacing it with foreground-only code not only got rid of the bug (interrupt synchronization errors can be truly evil), but the code was a couple hundred bytes smaller, too. (the device had 4K of flash)
Diversity? Yes, you need more Omega Mu questions in that interview.
I had whiteboard interviews where the interviewer had no clue about coding, so every question regarding clarification to the task where unanswered and the interviewer even got a bad impression of my skills.
The interview isn't just for them to decide if they want you. I wouldn't want to work for a company where the interviewer in a whiteboard interview was clearly clueless, because he probably isn't the only one. And I have had an interview where it was clear that they didn't understand what they were really asking.
As to the "implement a bubblesort on the whiteboard" I have had these kinds of interviews and have always passed them with: "I'll do it if you want, but I'll certainly make at least one error.
The point of that is to see you implement a relatively simple algorithm, not for you to make something perfect. The one I got was "reverse a linked list" (along with "copy a file", which I already knew backwards and upside-down). The first thing I did was immediately assume that it wasn't too hard, and the second thing was to remember all the linked list stuff from Data Structures class in my second year of college. Later, when we finally got enough budget for me to be on the other side of the table, I was shocked at how many then recent CS grads (early 2Ks) failed at both. The EE grads did much better.
Oh, and not only can I do a bubble sort from memory, but I know it's less inefficient if the inner loop goes downward, and once in a programming contest, I even coded a bubble sort for a singly-linked list. Ask for any more complicated short (shell sort, quick sort, etc.) and yeah, that's "look it up" time. Bubble sort is good for an interview because it's simple enough to do from memory, just two loops, a compare, and a swap, and it shows that you understand the basic concepts of sorting.
And yeah, "estimate the number of foo" questions are super retarded. If I was asked to do one, I would say "Seriously?" and give them The Look. Because they never weren't stupid, at least for hiring developers. Riddles (like crossing a bridge that only supports so much weight) are another matter, because there's a specific answer that can be determined by elimination if you have the necessary patience.
I have a 1st-gen iPod Nano set to shuffle play for driving music. If I don't want to hear a particular song that day, I just hit skip.
These days radio exposes people to corporate music that has been chosen by suits. The only music stations around here that I care to listen to at all are an oldies station that a few years ago changed their format from '50s and '60s to '70s and '80s (no new music there), and (rarely) a rock station that dates back to the '80s (mostly for the novelty of them having lasted so long). I get my new music via the internets.
IMHO, western music has sucked since the 90s. Try Asia. Most of my new music in the past fifteen+ years has come from Japan, except for a bit of industrial metal from Germany. Also, there's quite a bit of fresh coming from the soundclouds these days.
If only someone would make a magnetic charger adapter for USB-C...
But what we really want to know is if are they delicious tears.
Actually, it's not quite that easy. Do it wrong and you bounce out into space, at least for long enough that your oxygen runs out. And as I recall, Apollo had to brake more than once on re-entry.
There is a setting in System Preferences -> Security & Privacy that controls this. The default is "Mac App Store and identified developers". The other two options are "Mac App Store" and "Anywhere". The latter gives you an "are you really sure?" prompt and then shuts the fuck up. There is also protection of the OS directories (even root can't fuck with them), starting in 10.10 (or is it 10.11?), unless you perform the proper magickal ceremony to disable it, which includes starting a command-line shell after a reboot into recovery mode. And once you've done it, it also shuts the fuck up about it.
So if you know what you're doing, you can go back to more or less normal Unix hacking, but you won't have to worry about grandma getting pwned.
This isn't a "cable/telco" merger because TWC hasn't been part of TW since 2009 and is not involved.