What I want to know is why Apple isn't getting smacked down under this law, which already exists - or why the law isn't being struck down, if the people don't want it.
Because in general, Brits don't give a shit about laws like that, and they're more reasonable than Yanks over what they expect. I flicked through my Yellow pages today (got to buy an AC unit, it was 98 degrees in the house at 11:00 last night), and there is an entire section coloured orange for lawyers - it's about 10% of the thickness of the book - *way* larger than any other coloured section.
This is a reflection on attitude. In the UK, you push your luck with something, it fails, you say "oh well, I was pushing my luck". In the US, you sue because there wasn't an explicit statement that you couldn't do X with Y (whatever X and Y are). Depending on *just* how ridiculous your position is, you may well win.
And, yes, the poster-case is the stupid woman who put a cup of boiling water between her thighs in a moving vehicle. Irrespective of *any* overheating claims, it was a bloody stupid thing to do, and she shouldn't have won that case. I'd like to say that in the UK she'd have been thrown out of court, or no lawyer would have taken the case, but unfortunately we're beginning to suffer from the same disease as the US [sigh].
Sorry, guys, but it's a screwed-up system when lawyers make up 10% of your communities business...
It looks as though Apple is really going for the jugular in terms of wanting market share. The "old" Apple would have kept the price high and raked in the profits, the "new" Apple price hardware and software keenly (still with a slight premium if you don't want the h/w extras that come with a Mac), but still far cheaper than they used to be.
So Aperture got a price reduction, Shake has just dropped through the floor, and the machines are competitively priced... I was quoting "old" and "new" above because the guard hasn't really changed, but it seems the rules of engagement have been given a bit of a shake-up. I like the "new" Apple better, bodes well for things to come:-)
Looks terrible on the macintosh as well. You get some kind of unholy resonance with the built-in text antialiasing that just slaughters readability. It's just one big blur, like the page is all antialiasing and no text.
Sounds like something wrong with your Mac / display / graphics card. It looks gorgeous on my G5/23" cinema displays/Ati X800 setup...
I thought the current dual-socket motherboards (eg this board) could already accept dual-core Athlon (well, Opteron) chips (eg: the 270 series) to make a quad-core machine ?
Actually if this isn't the case, I'll be very grateful if someone could tell me, because I was thinking of ordering the above for a replacement webserver...
[sigh] Yet another vacuous "story" posted by someone just trying to drive hits to their ads. I'd like to see the day when the text on a page offered up more than a few paragraphs, surrounded by ads/other useless stuff.
Sure, Apple aren't perfect, but let's face it, who is ? Not that I'm at all religious, but I'm fairly sure there's some mention of "let him without fault throw the first stone" in some old book somewhere. Ok, so everyone has an opinion, hell there's no reason why you should listen to me - bitch if that's what floats your boat; but to do it purely to provide profit via another vector *does* annoy me. One more site to ignore from now on...
I'm sure pretty-much every company does their level best, within some budget, to give their customers the best experience - it's only good business sense. I think Apple actually do *better* at that than most. Shame the nay-sayers disagree...
Not to mention that the logic is... well "interesting"... Apparently a smaller company has *more* resources to devote to indirect profit activities such as QA. Apparently the larger you get, the harder it is to use that workforce. Seems... odd to me.
For what it's worth, I gave my sister a nano, she's an air stewardess, and it travels a lot, stuffed in a handbag along with loads of other luggage (tardis-like, in fact - another story...). Yes there are some (small) scratches on it, but no more than any of the other plastic items she carries - significantly less than her credit cards, for example. Yes, it's only one data-point, but the pictures of the unusable screens that were floating about the internet seem maliciously-driven to me - you'd have to take a scourer to the surface to get it that bad...
What I think is interesting in this forum is the general upbeat attitude - that's what will make this even a possibility at some indeterminate time in the future. The basic assumption is that "sure, we can't do it now, but maybe someday. And what about *this* as an idea". Until that optimism dies, there is always a chance we'll find a way.
Materials science is *not* fully known, or even nearly so. One of the most simple compounds on this planet (H2O) has all sorts of weird and wonderful properties - new discoveries about it made the cover of "New Scientist" in the UK a few months ago. This is *water* we're talking about! It's not even organic chemistry! Who knows what a molybdenum/aluminium/carbon alloy made at *this* pressure and temperature might do...
I say let the dreamers dream, let the scientists work, and the science-fiction writers come up with challenges for the scientists. To say "never" is hubris of the highest order...
I don't think there's any cast-iron guarantee, but in general, the loser pays the court costs (for *both* sides) in Europe, which tends to discourage lawsuits unless you think you have a good chance of winning...
As I understand it, typically the costs are paid by the relevant parties (ie: you're responsible for your own costs) in the USA - so there's less downside if you sue and lose...
The "do no harm" thing w.r.t a murder suspect would be "a bad thing" if the suspect was indeed the murderer, but the lawyer successfully argued his case and got him off, at least IMHO.
I think it'd be hard to argue that a lawyer oughtn't do his/her utmost to protect the client (in *any* circumstance), but if justice does not prevail, I'd consider that "harm" to society as a whole - it's not about having baby-eaters wandering the streets, after all. If you commit the crime, the idea is that you get caught. That was all I was trying to say... I took too few words:-)
... is to disbar the lawyers from ever practising again, *and* to make them liable for his fees. That's assuming he's telling the truth, but it sounds like he is.
Not only are they giving their profession an even worse name (who'da thought it possible!) but they are in effect forcing him to pay for their lawyers fees when he didn't want anything to do with it. It beggars belief!
Lawyers ought to have a hippocratic oath, just like doctors... "Do no harm". Not sure how that fits with defending a murder suspect, but it certainly seems wrong for them to (ab)use someone's name like this...
The deal here is that Apple is a company, not a bunch of (talented) hackers. They're here to make money, pay employees and execs, and (hopefully, 'cos I'm one) raise value for their shareholders. They're not a charity and they're not there to make the world a better place (well, Steve may disagree... let me rephrase: they're not there to make the world a better place for free).
The reason I'm replying to you is that you say "But they did grasp how to utilize open source to their advantage, but it was always in a way that was really not quite in the spirit of the open source community". I think that's unfair. Just because they don't want to lose control over *one* piece of s/w doesn't mean they don't get it - indeed they may "get it" all too well, if they're planning on releasing server-based machines in the near future... you don't really need much more than Darwin to have a server, so they probably would lose money to people self-building and self-installing "clone" machines...
Where they see there is an upside for them, I think they've been reasonably generous - Webkit (despite some initial negative feedback, they responded and made things better); there's a story about how to use Quicktime Streaming Server to get MythTV on your cellphone elsewhere on the main page; they put a lot of effort into gcc; etc. etc.
I don't think you can expect much more from a company - so it's not a 'sad day', they do indeed 'get it', and as you say - it's their right to do things as they see fit. I think they do more than most...
Did I mention that Safari has spell-checking built into the browser? And this checker integrates cleanly with everything else, so if you add an unusual word to TextEdit, Safari will know it's copacetic
... and so is the dictionary, so when some coward uses some weirdo word in their post, I can find out that it's of unknown origin...
Because now, if there are *any* new features in an update to a program, the company who created it *must* charge for that upgrade. This totally changes how software is developed and marketed...
Previously, if I had a program I wanted to release for profit, I would do the core features well, and add modules on around the side later, at extra cost. I might release interim patches for any bugs found in the field, and as a sweetener, upgrade some small functionality to get users affected by the bug back on "my side".
Now, I can't do that. The only time I can have a free interim release is to fix bugs - no new features are allowed. I'm no lawyer, but this is (expensive) legal opinion. So the dynamic changes - in order for me to have the most flexible release policy, I'm *far* better off releasing bug-ridden software that does *everything* - even if it only does it badly. Following this path, I get a choice of how to proceed later (I can add functionality *by* fixing "bugs" (ahem) by actually making a serious attempt to provide the functionality I promised in the first place). I can gauge the market and give it away free if that suits my needs at the time.
Now there's a downside to releasing bug-ridden software (and we're all aware of the arguments). The problem with this (responsible) attitude is that the collective consciousness of consumers today seems to not have a problem with buggy software - software crashes all the time, they're used to it, and it's a self-propogating meme of "what is normal". Responsibility don't pay.
So, when I release software (under the usual constraints of "good,cheap,fast - pick any two") I'm being pushed in the direction of "cheap and fast" because there's no real downside to me, and I get a lot more flexibility with dealing with the resulting debacle. I can balance my budget better ("cheap") and I get to market faster ("fast"). The fact that it doesn't work so well isn't really an issue.
That's what Sarbanes-Oxley has done for us.
For the record, I don't release software - please direct hate-mail to/dev/null. But if I were a software company, I sure-as-hell would be looking for an upside in the SO legislation, and I don't see any other "good" routes...
I've heard of several accounts where someone had lost all their music, phoned Apple in desperation, and been given the right to download what they had already purchased.
I think Apple just don't want the administrative overhead (for no extra value to them) and there may also be legal issues with promising that sort of thing - or maybe they just don't want to set the precedent...
Still, I've heard it 3 or 4 times now from different people, and though I hope I'll never need it, it's nice to think there's *some* backup for my music on Apple's databases. It doesn't protect my ripped CD music, but at least I could get what I'd paid for...
When you're doing an image-conversion from format 1 (RAW) to format 2 (RGB floating point - since I think Aperture uses core-image for all its manipulation, so 12 bytes/pixel), and handling the addition of (and independent manipulation of) different adjustments to that final image, you end up with multiple versions of the data in RAM - at least one version per "layer" that is composited together to get the final image. To do otherwise means you're dog-slow; cripplingly, unworkably, incredibly slow.
Aperture *stores* adjustments as metadata for a version, but internally it *must* be buffering different stages of the image, or it really would be unuseably slow for just about everything. For a single "layer", a 12byte/pixel image at 12 MPix (which I guess is typical these days) is 144 MBytes. Multiply that by a couple of layers per image, and start to import a few dozen of them, and see where the RAM disappears...
Just as a data-point, the largest camera I know of in terms of mega-pixellage is a 39 MPix Hasselblad (sp?), although I doubt the OP was using that:-)
It sounds like you had a nightmare interview - all I can say is that we try to make that "not typical". I think we all (well we're all told to, anyway) try to put the candidate at ease. I don't want to see you under the worst possible circumstances, because that's not a fair comparison to those without any problems on the day. I recall interviewing someone from Canada - we flew her down on the Friday, interviewed her on the Monday, and flew her back on the Wednesday. She was offered a position, which was accepted.
There's no golden arrow, there's no certain formula. You do your best in an uncertain world. The idea is to make the team the very best possible for the job in hand. We all buy into that, or we wouldn't have been hired in the first place...
Oh, just your basic brilliant software engineer or architect... [grin]
We're a fun bunch to work with. The projects tend to be fun too. We pay well ==> We have a lot of candidates for each position.
When we're on a hiring spree, it can take a significant amount of time from my week, but I think it's worth it to get the right people. I've worked at places where there was no sense of "team-spirit" [please forgive the cliché - I couldn't think of a better phrase] within the team I was in, and it was dismal. I'll not voluntarily go through that again.
When you come to interview with us, you'll get a day's worth of first-round interviews (between 5 and 8 in total) with a variety of different types of interviewer. Whereas I *can* ask the start-off-simple-and-drill-down technical questions, there are others whose job it is to ask that. Mine is normally to assess the character of the candidate - every interviewer has a particular role to play in our process.
I deliberately didn't give many examples of what I ask - and I tend to ask a lot of questions in an hour's interview - because as you say, there are those who prepare answers. Part of the course I went on was to help me come up with a set of my own questions that won't be typical outside my company, another part was how to deal with obviously-prepared candidates...
I personally think a candidate gets a fairly gruelling day, and if (s)he succeeds, there is the (harder) 2nd-round to look forward to, with fewer but far more in-depth interviews. All the interviewers compare notes at the end of the day for every candidate (on 1st and 2nd round interviews), and I think it would be hard for anyone to maintain a faux personality over that entire day, with different people asking similar but differently-focussed questions.
I'm not in HR, I have a senior technical role, but I give a fair number of interviews - I'm averaging 1 a week at the moment. I've been on the company course to understand what a good interview consists of, and it was worthwhile doing that course...
Two things:
1) "Behavioural questions" are supposed to be based on past experience, not made-up scenarios, eg: "Tell me about a time when you had to give negative feedback to your direct superior". Another example "Walk me through a time when you were working on a small team, and the team disagreed with your ideas". The idea is that there are several ways each of those questions can be taken (mainly because they're challenging situations), and the way in which the candidate chooses to perceive the question is just as much a guide to their character as the actions they claim to take. I always ask at least one question like the above, and the range of answers is quite remarkable...
2) There is no way on this good earth I will recommend anyone who I feel will be disruptive to the team I work within, unless they (a) walk on water, *and* (b) telecommute a lot. Ok, hyperbole aside, the morale of the team is one of the most crucial parts of software development - I want people who go the extra distance when needed (and only when needed, because to *need* that is indicative of a failure somewhere else, probably on my part...); I want smart, motivated, excellent-at-what-they-do engineers and QA. I take the time and effort to build a cohesive team with both a "we can do this" (backed up with some data...) and a "we *want* to do this" attitude, and I don't want Joe Random Nobody upsetting that.
In real life the devices have a vector of 40 secret numbers, he's using a vector of 4 to illustrate withour bogging down the reader.
The key is that with N variables (the number of different numbers in the vector), you need N equations to solve the set of equations for all of those variables - it's simple linear algebra.
When you purchase a licence, you get a bunch of 10000 keys for $16000, so S.O.Mebody could use this within an organisation to analyse the generation matrix, and actually produce 40 new keys and release them to the wild. No comeback.
You mean you *haven't* got gig-E around your home ?
So, the server/RAID lives (properly housed) in the garage because it's bloody noisy. The network is gig-E so I can pipe simultaneous HD streams to different parts of the house as well as for fast file transfers - the living room, bedrooms and office can all take an HD feed and play on plasma/LCD screens.
I'm working on getting the mini to control the cable box (via firewire) at the moment - as soon as I get that working, I'll have a lot more HD content... [sigh] another raid:-)
Sure, I'm not typical. But the "?!?!!?" demanded at least *one* response:-)
I wasn't trying to suggest everyone knows everything, what I meant was that there is/was such a culture of corporate secrecy at Apple, that pretty much all new development is secret. So anyone working on anything new is probably in the position of knowing something valuable to the rumour sites...
Witness this boot-camp thing: apparently it's the 10.4.6 update that gives the ability to repartition the drive non-destructively. So the developers working on that were key to Boot Camp being possible.
And by valuable, I mean "worth cash". They generate hits on pages (with adverts) effectively funded by Apple's not-so-diligent employees, after all... I've no problem with people speculating (I'll even applaud if they get it right!), but I'd be pissed off if I was in Apple's shoes, and some company/individual was making it its/his business to ruin mine. And even then, they're not trying to stop him, they're trying to stop the employee from doing it again (presumably by firing him/her).
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know is why Apple isn't getting smacked down under this law, which already exists - or why the law isn't being struck down, if the people don't want it.
Because in general, Brits don't give a shit about laws like that, and they're more reasonable than Yanks over what they expect. I flicked through my Yellow pages today (got to buy an AC unit, it was 98 degrees in the house at 11:00 last night), and there is an entire section coloured orange for lawyers - it's about 10% of the thickness of the book - *way* larger than any other coloured section.
This is a reflection on attitude. In the UK, you push your luck with something, it fails, you say "oh well, I was pushing my luck". In the US, you sue because there wasn't an explicit statement that you couldn't do X with Y (whatever X and Y are). Depending on *just* how ridiculous your position is, you may well win.
And, yes, the poster-case is the stupid woman who put a cup of boiling water between her thighs in a moving vehicle. Irrespective of *any* overheating claims, it was a bloody stupid thing to do, and she shouldn't have won that case. I'd like to say that in the UK she'd have been thrown out of court, or no lawyer would have taken the case, but unfortunately we're beginning to suffer from the same disease as the US [sigh].
Sorry, guys, but it's a screwed-up system when lawyers make up 10% of your communities business...
Simon.
It looks as though Apple is really going for the jugular in terms of wanting market share. The "old" Apple would have kept the price high and raked in the profits, the "new" Apple price hardware and software keenly (still with a slight premium if you don't want the h/w extras that come with a Mac), but still far cheaper than they used to be.
:-)
So Aperture got a price reduction, Shake has just dropped through the floor, and the machines are competitively priced... I was quoting "old" and "new" above because the guard hasn't really changed, but it seems the rules of engagement have been given a bit of a shake-up. I like the "new" Apple better, bodes well for things to come
Simon
Looks terrible on the macintosh as well. You get some kind of unholy resonance with the built-in text antialiasing that just slaughters readability. It's just one big blur, like the page is all antialiasing and no text.
...
Sounds like something wrong with your Mac / display / graphics card. It looks gorgeous on my G5/23" cinema displays/Ati X800 setup
Simon
I thought the current dual-socket motherboards (eg this board) could already accept dual-core Athlon (well, Opteron) chips (eg: the 270 series) to make a quad-core machine ?
Actually if this isn't the case, I'll be very grateful if someone could tell me, because I was thinking of ordering the above for a replacement webserver...
Simon
[sigh] Yet another vacuous "story" posted by someone just trying to drive hits to their ads. I'd like to see the day when the text on a page offered up more than a few paragraphs, surrounded by ads/other useless stuff.
... well "interesting"... Apparently a smaller company has *more* resources to devote to indirect profit activities such as QA. Apparently the larger you get, the harder it is to use that workforce. Seems ... odd to me.
Sure, Apple aren't perfect, but let's face it, who is ? Not that I'm at all religious, but I'm fairly sure there's some mention of "let him without fault throw the first stone" in some old book somewhere. Ok, so everyone has an opinion, hell there's no reason why you should listen to me - bitch if that's what floats your boat; but to do it purely to provide profit via another vector *does* annoy me. One more site to ignore from now on...
I'm sure pretty-much every company does their level best, within some budget, to give their customers the best experience - it's only good business sense. I think Apple actually do *better* at that than most. Shame the nay-sayers disagree...
Not to mention that the logic is
For what it's worth, I gave my sister a nano, she's an air stewardess, and it travels a lot, stuffed in a handbag along with loads of other luggage (tardis-like, in fact - another story...). Yes there are some (small) scratches on it, but no more than any of the other plastic items she carries - significantly less than her credit cards, for example. Yes, it's only one data-point, but the pictures of the unusable screens that were floating about the internet seem maliciously-driven to me - you'd have to take a scourer to the surface to get it that bad...
Simon
What I think is interesting in this forum is the general upbeat attitude - that's what will make this even a possibility at some indeterminate time in the future. The basic assumption is that "sure, we can't do it now, but maybe someday. And what about *this* as an idea". Until that optimism dies, there is always a chance we'll find a way.
Materials science is *not* fully known, or even nearly so. One of the most simple compounds on this planet (H2O) has all sorts of weird and wonderful properties - new discoveries about it made the cover of "New Scientist" in the UK a few months ago. This is *water* we're talking about! It's not even organic chemistry! Who knows what a molybdenum/aluminium/carbon alloy made at *this* pressure and temperature might do...
I say let the dreamers dream, let the scientists work, and the science-fiction writers come up with challenges for the scientists. To say "never" is hubris of the highest order...
Simon
I don't think there's any cast-iron guarantee, but in general, the loser pays the court costs (for *both* sides) in Europe, which tends to discourage lawsuits unless you think you have a good chance of winning...
As I understand it, typically the costs are paid by the relevant parties (ie: you're responsible for your own costs) in the USA - so there's less downside if you sue and lose...
Simon
The "do no harm" thing w.r.t a murder suspect would be "a bad thing" if the suspect was indeed the murderer, but the lawyer successfully argued his case and got him off, at least IMHO.
:-)
I think it'd be hard to argue that a lawyer oughtn't do his/her utmost to protect the client (in *any* circumstance), but if justice does not prevail, I'd consider that "harm" to society as a whole - it's not about having baby-eaters wandering the streets, after all. If you commit the crime, the idea is that you get caught. That was all I was trying to say... I took too few words
Simon
... is to disbar the lawyers from ever practising again, *and* to make them liable for his fees. That's assuming he's telling the truth, but it sounds like he is.
Not only are they giving their profession an even worse name (who'da thought it possible!) but they are in effect forcing him to pay for their lawyers fees when he didn't want anything to do with it. It beggars belief!
Lawyers ought to have a hippocratic oath, just like doctors... "Do no harm". Not sure how that fits with defending a murder suspect, but it certainly seems wrong for them to (ab)use someone's name like this...
Simon
The deal here is that Apple is a company, not a bunch of (talented) hackers. They're here to make money, pay employees and execs, and (hopefully, 'cos I'm one) raise value for their shareholders. They're not a charity and they're not there to make the world a better place (well, Steve may disagree... let me rephrase: they're not there to make the world a better place for free).
The reason I'm replying to you is that you say "But they did grasp how to utilize open source to their advantage, but it was always in a way that was really not quite in the spirit of the open source community". I think that's unfair. Just because they don't want to lose control over *one* piece of s/w doesn't mean they don't get it - indeed they may "get it" all too well, if they're planning on releasing server-based machines in the near future... you don't really need much more than Darwin to have a server, so they probably would lose money to people self-building and self-installing "clone" machines...
Where they see there is an upside for them, I think they've been reasonably generous - Webkit (despite some initial negative feedback, they responded and made things better); there's a story about how to use Quicktime Streaming Server to get MythTV on your cellphone elsewhere on the main page; they put a lot of effort into gcc; etc. etc.
I don't think you can expect much more from a company - so it's not a 'sad day', they do indeed 'get it', and as you say - it's their right to do things as they see fit. I think they do more than most...
Simon
Simon
Because now, if there are *any* new features in an update to a program, the company who created it *must* charge for that upgrade. This totally changes how software is developed and marketed...
/dev/null. But if I were a software company, I sure-as-hell would be looking for an upside in the SO legislation, and I don't see any other "good" routes...
Previously, if I had a program I wanted to release for profit, I would do the core features well, and add modules on around the side later, at extra cost. I might release interim patches for any bugs found in the field, and as a sweetener, upgrade some small functionality to get users affected by the bug back on "my side".
Now, I can't do that. The only time I can have a free interim release is to fix bugs - no new features are allowed. I'm no lawyer, but this is (expensive) legal opinion. So the dynamic changes - in order for me to have the most flexible release policy, I'm *far* better off releasing bug-ridden software that does *everything* - even if it only does it badly. Following this path, I get a choice of how to proceed later (I can add functionality *by* fixing "bugs" (ahem) by actually making a serious attempt to provide the functionality I promised in the first place). I can gauge the market and give it away free if that suits my needs at the time.
Now there's a downside to releasing bug-ridden software (and we're all aware of the arguments). The problem with this (responsible) attitude is that the collective consciousness of consumers today seems to not have a problem with buggy software - software crashes all the time, they're used to it, and it's a self-propogating meme of "what is normal". Responsibility don't pay.
So, when I release software (under the usual constraints of "good,cheap,fast - pick any two") I'm being pushed in the direction of "cheap and fast" because there's no real downside to me, and I get a lot more flexibility with dealing with the resulting debacle. I can balance my budget better ("cheap") and I get to market faster ("fast"). The fact that it doesn't work so well isn't really an issue.
That's what Sarbanes-Oxley has done for us.
For the record, I don't release software - please direct hate-mail to
Simon
I've heard of several accounts where someone had lost all their music, phoned Apple in desperation, and been given the right to download what they had already purchased.
I think Apple just don't want the administrative overhead (for no extra value to them) and there may also be legal issues with promising that sort of thing - or maybe they just don't want to set the precedent...
Still, I've heard it 3 or 4 times now from different people, and though I hope I'll never need it, it's nice to think there's *some* backup for my music on Apple's databases. It doesn't protect my ripped CD music, but at least I could get what I'd paid for...
Simon
Yes, I think you have.
:-)
When you're doing an image-conversion from format 1 (RAW) to format 2 (RGB floating point - since I think Aperture uses core-image for all its manipulation, so 12 bytes/pixel), and handling the addition of (and independent manipulation of) different adjustments to that final image, you end up with multiple versions of the data in RAM - at least one version per "layer" that is composited together to get the final image. To do otherwise means you're dog-slow; cripplingly, unworkably, incredibly slow.
Aperture *stores* adjustments as metadata for a version, but internally it *must* be buffering different stages of the image, or it really would be unuseably slow for just about everything. For a single "layer", a 12byte/pixel image at 12 MPix (which I guess is typical these days) is 144 MBytes. Multiply that by a couple of layers per image, and start to import a few dozen of them, and see where the RAM disappears...
Just as a data-point, the largest camera I know of in terms of mega-pixellage is a 39 MPix Hasselblad (sp?), although I doubt the OP was using that
Simon
It sounds like you had a nightmare interview - all I can say is that we try to make that "not typical". I think we all (well we're all told to, anyway) try to put the candidate at ease. I don't want to see you under the worst possible circumstances, because that's not a fair comparison to those without any problems on the day. I recall interviewing someone from Canada - we flew her down on the Friday, interviewed her on the Monday, and flew her back on the Wednesday. She was offered a position, which was accepted.
There's no golden arrow, there's no certain formula. You do your best in an uncertain world. The idea is to make the team the very best possible for the job in hand. We all buy into that, or we wouldn't have been hired in the first place...
Simon.
[grin] I've never been asked that...
I think the day is pretty much controlled - even lunch is an "interview" time, though not a formal affair.
Simon
Oh, just your basic brilliant software engineer or architect... [grin]
We're a fun bunch to work with. The projects tend to be fun too. We pay well ==> We have a lot of candidates for each position.
When we're on a hiring spree, it can take a significant amount of time from my week, but I think it's worth it to get the right people. I've worked at places where there was no sense of "team-spirit" [please forgive the cliché - I couldn't think of a better phrase] within the team I was in, and it was dismal. I'll not voluntarily go through that again.
Simon.
5-7 minutes to go 10 miles ???
I've heard the expression "put a rocket up your arse", but I've never seen it in practice!
5 minutes to go 1 mile means you're going 12 miles/hour. To go 10 miles he'd have to be averaging 120mph!
Simon.
anyone with a /. UID below 10,000/i.
Damn! So close... Oh well, back to doll queue....
Simon
When you come to interview with us, you'll get a day's worth of first-round interviews (between 5 and 8 in total) with a variety of different types of interviewer. Whereas I *can* ask the start-off-simple-and-drill-down technical questions, there are others whose job it is to ask that. Mine is normally to assess the character of the candidate - every interviewer has a particular role to play in our process.
I deliberately didn't give many examples of what I ask - and I tend to ask a lot of questions in an hour's interview - because as you say, there are those who prepare answers. Part of the course I went on was to help me come up with a set of my own questions that won't be typical outside my company, another part was how to deal with obviously-prepared candidates...
I personally think a candidate gets a fairly gruelling day, and if (s)he succeeds, there is the (harder) 2nd-round to look forward to, with fewer but far more in-depth interviews. All the interviewers compare notes at the end of the day for every candidate (on 1st and 2nd round interviews), and I think it would be hard for anyone to maintain a faux personality over that entire day, with different people asking similar but differently-focussed questions.
Simon.
I'm not in HR, I have a senior technical role, but I give a fair number of interviews - I'm averaging 1 a week at the moment. I've been on the company course to understand what a good interview consists of, and it was worthwhile doing that course...
Two things:
1) "Behavioural questions" are supposed to be based on past experience, not made-up scenarios, eg: "Tell me about a time when you had to give negative feedback to your direct superior". Another example "Walk me through a time when you were working on a small team, and the team disagreed with your ideas". The idea is that there are several ways each of those questions can be taken (mainly because they're challenging situations), and the way in which the candidate chooses to perceive the question is just as much a guide to their character as the actions they claim to take. I always ask at least one question like the above, and the range of answers is quite remarkable...
2) There is no way on this good earth I will recommend anyone who I feel will be disruptive to the team I work within, unless they (a) walk on water, *and* (b) telecommute a lot. Ok, hyperbole aside, the morale of the team is one of the most crucial parts of software development - I want people who go the extra distance when needed (and only when needed, because to *need* that is indicative of a failure somewhere else, probably on my part...); I want smart, motivated, excellent-at-what-they-do engineers and QA. I take the time and effort to build a cohesive team with both a "we can do this" (backed up with some data...) and a "we *want* to do this" attitude, and I don't want Joe Random Nobody upsetting that.
Simon.
In real life the devices have a vector of 40 secret numbers, he's using a vector of 4 to illustrate withour bogging down the reader.
The key is that with N variables (the number of different numbers in the vector), you need N equations to solve the set of equations for all of those variables - it's simple linear algebra.
When you purchase a licence, you get a bunch of 10000 keys for $16000, so S.O.Mebody could use this within an organisation to analyse the generation matrix, and actually produce 40 new keys and release them to the wild. No comeback.
Simon
Simon.
You mean you *haven't* got gig-E around your home ?
:-)
:-)
So, the server/RAID lives (properly housed) in the garage because it's bloody noisy. The network is gig-E so I can pipe simultaneous HD streams to different parts of the house as well as for fast file transfers - the living room, bedrooms and office can all take an HD feed and play on plasma/LCD screens.
I'm working on getting the mini to control the cable box (via firewire) at the moment - as soon as I get that working, I'll have a lot more HD content... [sigh] another raid
Sure, I'm not typical. But the "?!?!!?" demanded at least *one* response
Simon
I wasn't trying to suggest everyone knows everything, what I meant was that there is/was such a culture of corporate secrecy at Apple, that pretty much all new development is secret. So anyone working on anything new is probably in the position of knowing something valuable to the rumour sites...
Witness this boot-camp thing: apparently it's the 10.4.6 update that gives the ability to repartition the drive non-destructively. So the developers working on that were key to Boot Camp being possible.
And by valuable, I mean "worth cash". They generate hits on pages (with adverts) effectively funded by Apple's not-so-diligent employees, after all... I've no problem with people speculating (I'll even applaud if they get it right!), but I'd be pissed off if I was in Apple's shoes, and some company/individual was making it its/his business to ruin mine. And even then, they're not trying to stop him, they're trying to stop the employee from doing it again (presumably by firing him/her).
Simon