You must have Asperger's syndrome? When normal human beings with ordinary cognitive capabilities say "light" about some indefinitely quantified material, they are in fact referring to density. For instance "air is lighter than water". Of course they don't mean that the entire Earth's atmosphere is lighter than a drop of water.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled rhythmical pounding of your back against the chair and whimpering.
What it also does is that it "weeds in" the puzzle solvers.
Essentially, the interview does a disservice to the good puzzle solvers too by creating a false expectation that the job consist of puzzle solving, rather than of Getting Shit Done (tm).
If you staff yourself with puzzle solvers, nobody will want to actually do any real work. Puzzle solvers won't want to do mundane stuff like taking some crufty old code and refactoring it for better error handling. They want to be hacking on their pet functional language, or adding paragraphs to their growing paper on holes in some type system.
Most software development is not puzzle solving, and even where there is puzzle solving, it's often not done by YOU. You just have to know how to do the research to borrow other people's puzzle solutions and adapt them.
Inventing the Fast Fourier Transform was a brilliant puzzle solve. Your job may be to understand it, and adapt someone's library to your needs. Less likely, you may be asked to implement it.
This is not to say that you don't want any puzzle solvers. Far from it. You need a couple, maybe in some architectural role. Puzzle solvers may be able to see more deeply into the implications of some architectural decision, and come up with good ideas.
People don't care what software runs their virtual machines. The very target market for this is people who don't want to commit to platforms.
VMWare doesn't do anything that is substantially proprietary.
If something comes along which does the same things as VMWare, and reads VMWare disks, but is better in some way than VMWare (for instance by being free for all the freetard masses), it's bye bye.
Once, the selling point of VMWare was "cool, you can virtualize a machine". That is a commodity now. The selling point now is the enterprise stuff. That's it.
What, wait a minute. You mean a HTTP server can parse the request and serve up different content based on who or what is calling?
*whistle*
Oh the implications!
Never mind Crapbook. Damn, you know, that gives me an AWESOME little idea. You could serve up slightly different code to, say, Explorer and Firefox, to get things to work right for different browsers!
Or here is something evil; bet nobody has thought of this one! We could present a normal looking page to regular users, but a one which is stuffed full of keywords to the Google search engine.
The real question is, why aren't more devices open so you can replace their shitty firmware.
Another question is, why don't the devices which can have custom firmware toot their horn about it more? I mean, you would think that a major advantage like that would deserve some real-estate on the box that the device comes in.
It's easy to see why those devices which CAN have custom firmware still come with shitty firmware. The nonproprietary firmware is more feature loaded and complicated. This means shipping a thicker user manual in the box, which costs more. Also it means testing all those features for regressions in between releases of the device.
100% agreed. The commercial alternative - MKS Toolkit - integrates seamlessly with Windows, and is both more complete and faster than Cygin. Yes, it costs money, and no, it is not open source - but if you need to do Unix-like stuff on Windows, it actually makes life tolerable.
But Unix-like stuff itself is not tolerable, which is why it has to be reimplemented with GNU, Linux, Cygwin and other free software.
For instance, how does the vi editor in MKS stack up to Vim? If the following link gives a more or less complete manual, it's freaking pitiful:
Have you ever actually tried to use Cygwin as a *nix-compatibility layer in a production environment. The word "kludge" doesn't seem to begin describe it.
This matters only if the same cannot be said for SUA.
Look at the picture! The device has source, drain, and a channel bridge which is presumably sensitive to the concentration of H+ ions in the surrounding solution.
How it probably works is that the resistance of the device varies with the concentration.
So you can build an amplifier stage (e.g. drain follower) which varies a voltage across a load in response to the signal encoded in the proton concentration.
Disclaimer: all of this is a wild guess. As always, the devil is in the details.
Is it to learn what it's like to work in an overseas sweatshop, stuffing components into a PCB? (But in the comfort of your home, and under no pressure?)
Stuffing requires no knowledge of electronics.
It takes less skill than, say, knitting (a much better hobby that all kit assemblers should seriously consider).
If you wanna do electronics, design something, build it and debug it.
From a 10,000 foot high level view, those IBM languages are the same thing as C: low level systems programming languages whose data types and storage abstractions closely mirror those of the hardware. I.e. slightly higher level assembly languages.
Lisp machines showed a quarter century ago that you can have an OS from the iron and up (process management, memory management, graphics, disk drivers, ethernet,...) in a managed, high level language.
The problem with this industry is its short memory.
If, say, civil engineering were like computing, the newbies would not know what the heck the Eiffel tower is, and marvel at someone's treehouse because it uses "space age" composites or titanium.:)
So, let me guess, since people do run reds, your own guard must currently be up! I take it you stop at every green and look both ways before proceeding.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also working on a text processing tool that deals with blocks of data is already here.
http://www.nongnu.org/txr
:)
What, more than "Carrie" from Europe's "Final Countdown" album?
No, that denser than uranium.
You must have Asperger's syndrome? When normal human beings with ordinary cognitive capabilities say "light" about some indefinitely quantified material, they are in fact referring to density. For instance "air is lighter than water". Of course they don't mean that the entire Earth's atmosphere is lighter than a drop of water.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled rhythmical pounding of your back against the chair and whimpering.
What it also does is that it "weeds in" the puzzle solvers.
Essentially, the interview does a disservice to the good puzzle solvers too by creating a false expectation that the job consist of puzzle solving, rather than of Getting Shit Done (tm).
If you staff yourself with puzzle solvers, nobody will want to actually do any real work. Puzzle solvers won't want to do mundane stuff like taking some crufty old code and refactoring it for better error handling. They want to be hacking on their pet functional language, or adding paragraphs to their growing paper on holes in some type system.
Most software development is not puzzle solving, and even where there is puzzle solving, it's often not done by YOU. You just have to know how to do the research to borrow other people's puzzle solutions and adapt them.
Inventing the Fast Fourier Transform was a brilliant puzzle solve. Your job may be to understand it, and adapt someone's library to your needs. Less likely, you may be asked to implement it.
This is not to say that you don't want any puzzle solvers. Far from it. You need a couple, maybe in some architectural role. Puzzle solvers may be able to see more deeply into the implications of some architectural decision, and come up with good ideas.
People don't care what software runs their virtual machines. The very target market for this is people who don't want to commit to platforms.
VMWare doesn't do anything that is substantially proprietary.
If something comes along which does the same things as VMWare, and reads VMWare disks, but is better in some way than VMWare (for instance by being free for all the freetard masses), it's bye bye.
Once, the selling point of VMWare was "cool, you can virtualize a machine". That is a commodity now. The selling point now is the enterprise stuff. That's it.
What, wait a minute. You mean a HTTP server can parse the request and serve up different content based on who or what is calling?
*whistle*
Oh the implications!
Never mind Crapbook. Damn, you know, that gives me an AWESOME little idea. You could serve up slightly different code to, say, Explorer and Firefox, to get things to work right for different browsers!
Or here is something evil; bet nobody has thought of this one! We could present a normal looking page to regular users, but a one which is stuffed full of keywords to the Google search engine.
which dynamically compiles x86 code into Excel macros.
*duck*
You mean URL's can be verified, and then later have the indecency to point to something else?
Say it isn't so!
Slow, but sure.
But what does a comment like this make YOU look like, hmm?
The real question is, why aren't more devices open so you can replace their shitty firmware.
Another question is, why don't the devices which can have custom firmware toot their horn about it more? I mean, you would think that a major advantage like that would deserve some real-estate on the box that the device comes in.
It's easy to see why those devices which CAN have custom firmware still come with shitty firmware. The nonproprietary firmware is more feature loaded and complicated. This means shipping a thicker user manual in the box, which costs more. Also it means testing all those features for regressions in between releases of the device.
"Mee Too"
After thorough research of the available options, I went with Tomato on my WRT54GL.
No discussion of custom firmwares is complete without ... mentioning all of them.
100% agreed. The commercial alternative - MKS Toolkit - integrates seamlessly with Windows, and is both more complete and faster than Cygin. Yes, it costs money, and no, it is not open source - but if you need to do Unix-like stuff on Windows, it actually makes life tolerable.
But Unix-like stuff itself is not tolerable, which is why it has to be reimplemented with GNU, Linux, Cygwin and other free software.
For instance, how does the vi editor in MKS stack up to Vim? If the following link gives a more or less complete manual, it's freaking pitiful:
http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/vi.1.asp
Why would I pay money for that stuff if I would end up compiling GNU coreutils, bash, and other packages?
Commercial customers that require production-quality platforms with enterprise-level support probably will avoid Cygwin.
It would be astonishing if most such customers would not also avoid SUA like the plague.
Have you ever actually tried to use Cygwin as a *nix-compatibility layer in a production environment. The word "kludge" doesn't seem to begin describe it.
This matters only if the same cannot be said for SUA.
Look at the picture! The device has source, drain, and a channel bridge which is presumably sensitive to the concentration of H+ ions in the surrounding solution.
How it probably works is that the resistance of the device varies with the concentration.
So you can build an amplifier stage (e.g. drain follower) which varies a voltage across a load in response to the signal encoded in the proton concentration.
Disclaimer: all of this is a wild guess. As always, the devil is in the details.
That's a funny story; thanks for sharing that.
Is it to learn what it's like to work in an overseas sweatshop, stuffing components into a PCB? (But in the comfort of your home, and under no pressure?)
Stuffing requires no knowledge of electronics.
It takes less skill than, say, knitting (a much better hobby that all kit assemblers should seriously consider).
If you wanna do electronics, design something, build it and debug it.
These things will generate some heat, no doubt.
From a 10,000 foot high level view, those IBM languages are the same thing as C: low level systems programming languages whose data types and storage abstractions closely mirror those of the hardware. I.e. slightly higher level assembly languages.
Lisp machines showed a quarter century ago that you can have an OS from the iron and up (process management, memory management, graphics, disk drivers, ethernet, ...) in a managed, high level language.
The problem with this industry is its short memory.
If, say, civil engineering were like computing, the newbies would not know what the heck the Eiffel tower is, and marvel at someone's treehouse because it uses "space age" composites or titanium. :)
Maybe old 1950's Gibsons, not the crap made under that brand now. :)
So, let me guess, since people do run reds, your own guard must currently be up! I take it you stop at every green and look both ways before proceeding.