Regular programmers probably couldn't solve them (bug-free) at all, let alone solve them quickly.
Agreed - thanks for the correction. TopCoder only differentiates among those with enough skill to solve hard problems based on speed, and does not take maintainability or extensability into account.
I would hasten to add that being fast and writing shakey code isn't a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I think a well balanced team should have a mix of speed coders and quality coders. I'm simply saying that speed is not the only factor for measuring "best."
Only four of the 48 best computer programmers in the world... TopCoder
TopCoder tests only one thing; speed. I work with a person who won a prestigious TopCoder competition at a conference. He is fast, no question about it. When it comes time to add features or fix bugs, however, his code is scary. That doesn't mean the US has more than 4/48 of the best programmers in the world, but results from TopCoder mean nothing in terms of long term profit creation potential in a real enterprise environment.
Since we're talking about writing, I gotta say this: I don't read posts on slashdot which don't use the paragraph tag ( it's easy: [p] -just replace the brackets with greater-than less-than... it's right there under the text box). Even when I have mod points I skip right over them.
I'm not sure I follow; some posts make sense as prose - but do they all?
It seems that IM, email, text messaging, and discussion boards are a sufficiently novel medium that they may lead to new writing styles. Discussion boards in particular seem to lend themselves to burst-of-thought. Is it most efficient to forego the perspectives of those who see this as a modern equivalent of the slam book?
Or is there something else to using paragraph tags, like the application of the stylesheet, that I'm missing?
Strunk and White's and On Writing by Stephen King. Those two books have had more influence on my writing than any other two sources. Strunk and White's is an obvious winner. As for On Writing; it may seem counterintuitive to put Stephen King together with quality writing, but it is both approachable and informative. It has interesting narrative that holds the reader's attention while conveying many key aspects of successful writing. And while one may debate the depth of his writing, it is hard to contest his ability to captivate an audience (poor film translations notwithstanding).
Show your support for 'M' rated titles. Buy a copy!
My generation grew up on video games, starting with Space Invaders and the 2600. We're adults now, and, simply said, kid-safe content isn't as captivating for some genres as content that would get an R or NC-17 rating at the theaters. Show your support, buy a copy of this title.
If GPL'd software isn't complex then how will you make money off it?
Hmmm, idunno, let's start with corporate sponsorship, personal sponsorship, and public sponsorship. Public works have been funded for thousands of years. A hundred or two years ago someone came up with copyright - the somewhat workable but extremely narrowly focused practice for using fiat monopoly to promote funding of what would otherwise be a public work. It works OK in some arenas, but generally is about as efficient as a late 1800's steam engine (actually, I think that is being overly generous).
How does this rattle-trap idea of copyrights, sputtering and spitting as it sucks our legal system and courts into it's ravenous maw, suddenly invalidate the thousands of years of successful funding of public works? I know there are ideas that appear and are so revolutionary that they wipe out all ideas that have gone before, but copyright is no Model T. It's barely a Stanley Steemer.
Me: "Yea, so go in and edit your/etc/fstab" them: "What do you mean edit?" Me: "Open Gedit, and modify the file" them: "So how do I open Gedit?" Me: (sigh) "I quit"
Shenanigans.
You do not talk your end users through altering their local disk moint points in Windows any more than you would in Linux. Your end users (Windows or Linux) shouldn't even have privileges to edit their local disk mount points.
If you're talking network mount points, there are graphical editors included with all the desktop-oriented Linux distros.
What does my personality have to do with my ability to perform in a job?
Realistically, a lot. In theory your ability to get along with coworkers is a significant factor in almost any job. But that is, in the end, irrelevant to your present question.
Have any of you had to take a personality test to get a job?
Yes. At the very least everyone has had to meet the boss, which is at least an informal personality test.
Should I do it, or just keep looking?
Yes. And give them the answers they are looking for. Management has a great deal of respect (judging by whom they promote) for people who can lie convincingly, and people who can figure out the answer the boss wants to hear. That is (deep down, on an unconscious level) what they are looking for. It's mildly asinine, but easy. And, given that they believe this is a valid criteria, you can assume that you will be able to advance more easily with less effort at this company than at a company that actually judges you by the real content of your character and ability to contribute.
It's a game, and it's not hard to win. We're smarter than they are.
MSFT is the biggest kid on the block, so of course they're going to catch flak from a certain segment - that goes with the territory.
Yes, and there are some people in the US who genuinely do not support our troops. But it is a polemic (or perhaps simply idiotic) simplification to imply that that disdain for success is the predominant reason for criticism of Microsoft.
They get flack because they're an abusive monopoly. It's not a problem that they are big. Oracle is big, but they're not evil (IMO - and depending on what they do with InnoDB I may have to adjust my opinion, but at the moment I am giving them the benefit of the doubt - but I digress). MS is powerful and abusive.
Why is that so hard for you polemecists to understand? You sound like the jackoffs on teevee saying, "I support our troops." No shit. Most everyone supports the troops. Most everyone supports big successful companies. Many of us just don't like big successful companies that use their position to damage the free market.
I write a fair shitload of multithreaded and single threaded code. Most code cannot be magically parallelized. Parallel execution of code that has not been made thread-safe would cause teaming masses of race conditions. Null pointers everywhere. Division by zero would be the norm, not an exception.
Now, if they're talking about allowing separate processes to run separately without specific SMP code in the kernel, fine. But that's not 2x performance.
Why not just use Debian, which is the base for Ubuntu?
I was going to say the same thing. But I reread the blurb and I think them mean, "as an acquisition target", not, "as another platform for which to release a packaged version of Oracle." They want the developers and maintainers. I think it would be very hard to buy the Debian crew, and I think that is a good thing.
Agreed, though, that if it was just about having a solid server-oriented distro for deploying Oracle, Debian would be (in my never even remotely humble opinion) the best choice.
I like much of Paul Graham's work. I like a lot of this piece - lots of insight. There are a few pieces I disagree with that have already been touched on. One I would like to add is that I think he is judging the landscape a bit too early:
A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee.
That is the majority of what has happened in the past 10 years because the rampant proliferation of overbroad software patents has just begun. The market is a Darwinian environment. It selects for those who take advantage of flaws in the system and it takes time to optimize. A giant, gaping, cash-gushing flaw in the system right now is the granting of overbroad patents, and in software it is a relatively new flaw (though the flaw itself has a long and ugly history - Bell wasn't the only guy to invent the telephone - he was just the first to the USPTO). Graham makes this point to an extent saying that the USPTO hasn't adapted to software patents yet.
But he misses the correlary: Businesses have just begun evolving to take advantage of the software patent flaw. What has happened so far is only a twinkle of what is to come. Sure, Amazon got stung in the reputation department. But the patent trolls of the world have no reputation to sting. Is Eolas going to lose a bunch of customers over the active browser patent? I'm not saying Eolas is wrong, just that they won't be moderated by the environmental influence that Graham mentions regarding Amazon. The patent trolls are just starting to evolve, and they have natural defenses against the moderating influences that have kept the patent law departements of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle in check.
And it's not going to be limited to a few fringe companies with a few fringe patents. More and more the executroids are defending companies that buy patents because they create liquidity in the IP market - enabling research heavy corps to capitalize their patents without having to bring products to market. IE: they are saying it is a good thing for the patent trolls to buy patents - regardless of whether they have any intention of taking the embodiment to market.
Paul is judging the system based on what has happened so far. But the market is just beginning to evolve. As broken as it is, the current state is very far from the invention wasteland, strewn with the bodies of a million inventors and ruled by packs of lawyers, that is coming.
Their software partner is RedHat. I have much respect for RedHat - they have done amazing things for enterprise grade support of our beloved Penguin. But they are not lightweight. RedHat hasn't ever been about lightweight. That's not a condemnation, it's just not their area of expertise. I don't know if it's possible to break that tie to RedHat, or to get RedHat to agree to base the distro on something other than RedHat, but as long as square one is RedHat/Fedora, it is not going to work.
We've had all these reports in congress about how unprepared the nation is for cyberwar. This seems like one pretty good market based approach to increasing our preparedness (though others may be necessary). If companies have greater risk exposure for insecure data, they have a greater fiduciary responsibility to secure it. A simple solution that Adam Smith could be proud of.
In the situation he was in? Ummm, yes. On production equipment.
He was in a situation where he had equipment that he knew, or strongly suspected, had not been tested. The only equipment he had was the production equipment. His only options were to test the production equipment, or go without testing. Going without testing is something only a sucker or an idiot would do.
However, it should be a disinterested third party, not an advocacy group. No matter how well meaning and ethical the people in the group are, they can nonetheless be painted as enemies of the vendor.
You are confusing vulnerability testing with scientific analysis. Scientific analysis should be done by disinterested parties. Vulnterability testing should be done by your worst enemy. The best person to test a system is someone who is highly motivated to break the system. The people that will be trying to rig the election will not be disinterested third parties. That's why OS developers routinely put test rigs out on the Internet and invite the black hats to do their worst.
If MS doesn't join the alliance, they're seen as factious and self-serving. If MS joins the alliance, they're seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.
I know! It's sooo unfair. I mean, seriously. The worst they've ever been found guilty of was abusing their monopoly position. And that has only happened in several countries. The other dozens of allegations, like those relating to their interference with past standards such as OpenGL and Kerberos, have never even been tried in a courtroom. These assumptions of ill intent are based on nothing more than Microsoft's chronic and well-documented behavior over the past ten or fifteen years. It's soooo unfair.
Sony? In a group of economic environmentalists(*)? With IBM, Philips, Red Hat, and Novell? I'm so confused. I can't remember who the bad guys are anymore. Don't tell me there's no good guys and no bad guys, I need my black and white universe.
* Not sure if I'm coining a phrase, but let's call economic environmentalists those who promote free market competition over short-run corporatism, even when it may conflict with the financial interests of one or more of their divisions, or risk the enmity of a buddy corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - very pretty. Agreed needs to test in FFox. Also showing a horizontal scroll bar in FF regardles of window width.
</redundant>
Regular programmers probably couldn't solve them (bug-free) at all, let alone solve them quickly.
Agreed - thanks for the correction. TopCoder only differentiates among those with enough skill to solve hard problems based on speed, and does not take maintainability or extensability into account.
I would hasten to add that being fast and writing shakey code isn't a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I think a well balanced team should have a mix of speed coders and quality coders. I'm simply saying that speed is not the only factor for measuring "best."
Only four of the 48 best computer programmers in the world... TopCoder
TopCoder tests only one thing; speed. I work with a person who won a prestigious TopCoder competition at a conference. He is fast, no question about it. When it comes time to add features or fix bugs, however, his code is scary. That doesn't mean the US has more than 4/48 of the best programmers in the world, but results from TopCoder mean nothing in terms of long term profit creation potential in a real enterprise environment.
Mod Parent Up - I have no mod points, but was going to suggest the same thing.
Since we're talking about writing, I gotta say this: I don't read posts on slashdot which don't use the paragraph tag ( it's easy: [p] -just replace the brackets with greater-than less-than... it's right there under the text box). Even when I have mod points I skip right over them.
I'm not sure I follow; some posts make sense as prose - but do they all?
It seems that IM, email, text messaging, and discussion boards are a sufficiently novel medium that they may lead to new writing styles. Discussion boards in particular seem to lend themselves to burst-of-thought. Is it most efficient to forego the perspectives of those who see this as a modern equivalent of the slam book?
Or is there something else to using paragraph tags, like the application of the stylesheet, that I'm missing?
Strunk and White's and On Writing by Stephen King. Those two books have had more influence on my writing than any other two sources. Strunk and White's is an obvious winner. As for On Writing; it may seem counterintuitive to put Stephen King together with quality writing, but it is both approachable and informative. It has interesting narrative that holds the reader's attention while conveying many key aspects of successful writing. And while one may debate the depth of his writing, it is hard to contest his ability to captivate an audience (poor film translations notwithstanding).
Can we please have a 6 month moratorium on NOT posting Dvorak's trolls on the front page of slashdot?
I would say, "seconded", but I would guess it's more like 7426th'd.
Show your support for 'M' rated titles. Buy a copy!
My generation grew up on video games, starting with Space Invaders and the 2600. We're adults now, and, simply said, kid-safe content isn't as captivating for some genres as content that would get an R or NC-17 rating at the theaters.
Show your support, buy a copy of this title.
If GPL'd software isn't complex then how will you make money off it?
Hmmm, idunno, let's start with corporate sponsorship, personal sponsorship, and public sponsorship. Public works have been funded for thousands of years. A hundred or two years ago someone came up with copyright - the somewhat workable but extremely narrowly focused practice for using fiat monopoly to promote funding of what would otherwise be a public work. It works OK in some arenas, but generally is about as efficient as a late 1800's steam engine (actually, I think that is being overly generous).
How does this rattle-trap idea of copyrights, sputtering and spitting as it sucks our legal system and courts into it's ravenous maw, suddenly invalidate the thousands of years of successful funding of public works? I know there are ideas that appear and are so revolutionary that they wipe out all ideas that have gone before, but copyright is no Model T. It's barely a Stanley Steemer.
I can only imagine the call:
/etc/fstab"
Me: "Yea, so go in and edit your
them: "What do you mean edit?"
Me: "Open Gedit, and modify the file"
them: "So how do I open Gedit?"
Me: (sigh) "I quit"
Shenanigans.
You do not talk your end users through altering their local disk moint points in Windows any more than you would in Linux. Your end users (Windows or Linux) shouldn't even have privileges to edit their local disk mount points.
If you're talking network mount points, there are graphical editors included with all the desktop-oriented Linux distros.
No worries - the RIAA just needs to buy a law stating that, "Any activities by any RIAA affilliate shall not be considered in violation of any law."
What does my personality have to do with my ability to perform in a job?
Realistically, a lot. In theory your ability to get along with coworkers is a significant factor in almost any job. But that is, in the end, irrelevant to your present question.
Have any of you had to take a personality test to get a job?
Yes. At the very least everyone has had to meet the boss, which is at least an informal personality test.
Should I do it, or just keep looking?
Yes. And give them the answers they are looking for. Management has a great deal of respect (judging by whom they promote) for people who can lie convincingly, and people who can figure out the answer the boss wants to hear. That is (deep down, on an unconscious level) what they are looking for. It's mildly asinine, but easy. And, given that they believe this is a valid criteria, you can assume that you will be able to advance more easily with less effort at this company than at a company that actually judges you by the real content of your character and ability to contribute.
It's a game, and it's not hard to win. We're smarter than they are.
Intellectually, I'm curious what that makes the rest of them.
vi users
MSFT is the biggest kid on the block, so of course they're going to catch flak from a certain segment - that goes with the territory.
Yes, and there are some people in the US who genuinely do not support our troops. But it is a polemic (or perhaps simply idiotic) simplification to imply that that disdain for success is the predominant reason for criticism of Microsoft.
They get flack because they're an abusive monopoly. It's not a problem that they are big. Oracle is big, but they're not evil (IMO - and depending on what they do with InnoDB I may have to adjust my opinion, but at the moment I am giving them the benefit of the doubt - but I digress). MS is powerful and abusive.
Why is that so hard for you polemecists to understand? You sound like the jackoffs on teevee saying, "I support our troops." No shit. Most everyone supports the troops. Most everyone supports big successful companies. Many of us just don't like big successful companies that use their position to damage the free market.
I write a fair shitload of multithreaded and single threaded code. Most code cannot be magically parallelized. Parallel execution of code that has not been made thread-safe would cause teaming masses of race conditions. Null pointers everywhere. Division by zero would be the norm, not an exception.
Now, if they're talking about allowing separate processes to run separately without specific SMP code in the kernel, fine. But that's not 2x performance.
Why not just use Debian, which is the base for Ubuntu?
I was going to say the same thing. But I reread the blurb and I think them mean, "as an acquisition target", not, "as another platform for which to release a packaged version of Oracle." They want the developers and maintainers. I think it would be very hard to buy the Debian crew, and I think that is a good thing.
Agreed, though, that if it was just about having a solid server-oriented distro for deploying Oracle, Debian would be (in my never even remotely humble opinion) the best choice.
I like much of Paul Graham's work. I like a lot of this piece - lots of insight. There are a few pieces I disagree with that have already been touched on. One I would like to add is that I think he is judging the landscape a bit too early:
A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee.
That is the majority of what has happened in the past 10 years because the rampant proliferation of overbroad software patents has just begun. The market is a Darwinian environment. It selects for those who take advantage of flaws in the system and it takes time to optimize. A giant, gaping, cash-gushing flaw in the system right now is the granting of overbroad patents, and in software it is a relatively new flaw (though the flaw itself has a long and ugly history - Bell wasn't the only guy to invent the telephone - he was just the first to the USPTO). Graham makes this point to an extent saying that the USPTO hasn't adapted to software patents yet.
But he misses the correlary: Businesses have just begun evolving to take advantage of the software patent flaw. What has happened so far is only a twinkle of what is to come. Sure, Amazon got stung in the reputation department. But the patent trolls of the world have no reputation to sting. Is Eolas going to lose a bunch of customers over the active browser patent? I'm not saying Eolas is wrong, just that they won't be moderated by the environmental influence that Graham mentions regarding Amazon. The patent trolls are just starting to evolve, and they have natural defenses against the moderating influences that have kept the patent law departements of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle in check.
And it's not going to be limited to a few fringe companies with a few fringe patents. More and more the executroids are defending companies that buy patents because they create liquidity in the IP market - enabling research heavy corps to capitalize their patents without having to bring products to market. IE: they are saying it is a good thing for the patent trolls to buy patents - regardless of whether they have any intention of taking the embodiment to market.
Paul is judging the system based on what has happened so far. But the market is just beginning to evolve. As broken as it is, the current state is very far from the invention wasteland, strewn with the bodies of a million inventors and ruled by packs of lawyers, that is coming.
Here's the problem:
T he_software
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#
Their software partner is RedHat. I have much respect for RedHat - they have done amazing things for enterprise grade support of our beloved Penguin. But they are not lightweight. RedHat hasn't ever been about lightweight. That's not a condemnation, it's just not their area of expertise. I don't know if it's possible to break that tie to RedHat, or to get RedHat to agree to base the distro on something other than RedHat, but as long as square one is RedHat/Fedora, it is not going to work.
We've had all these reports in congress about how unprepared the nation is for cyberwar. This seems like one pretty good market based approach to increasing our preparedness (though others may be necessary). If companies have greater risk exposure for insecure data, they have a greater fiduciary responsibility to secure it. A simple solution that Adam Smith could be proud of.
How long until the solution to all of the problems is "Reboot the computer"?
:)
RTFA - it says it's vendor neutral, not MS only.
Not on production equipment.
In the situation he was in? Ummm, yes. On production equipment.
He was in a situation where he had equipment that he knew, or strongly suspected, had not been tested. The only equipment he had was the production equipment. His only options were to test the production equipment, or go without testing. Going without testing is something only a sucker or an idiot would do.
Yes, a third party should examine the machines.
However, it should be a disinterested third party, not an advocacy group. No matter how well meaning and ethical the people in the group are, they can nonetheless be painted as enemies of the vendor.
You are confusing vulnerability testing with scientific analysis. Scientific analysis should be done by disinterested parties. Vulnterability testing should be done by your worst enemy. The best person to test a system is someone who is highly motivated to break the system. The people that will be trying to rig the election will not be disinterested third parties. That's why OS developers routinely put test rigs out on the Internet and invite the black hats to do their worst.
If MS doesn't join the alliance, they're seen as factious and self-serving.
If MS joins the alliance, they're seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.
I know! It's sooo unfair. I mean, seriously. The worst they've ever been found guilty of was abusing their monopoly position. And that has only happened in several countries. The other dozens of allegations, like those relating to their interference with past standards such as OpenGL and Kerberos, have never even been tried in a courtroom. These assumptions of ill intent are based on nothing more than Microsoft's chronic and well-documented behavior over the past ten or fifteen years. It's soooo unfair.
Sony? In a group of economic environmentalists(*)? With IBM, Philips, Red Hat, and Novell? I'm so confused. I can't remember who the bad guys are anymore. Don't tell me there's no good guys and no bad guys, I need my black and white universe.
* Not sure if I'm coining a phrase, but let's call economic environmentalists those who promote free market competition over short-run corporatism, even when it may conflict with the financial interests of one or more of their divisions, or risk the enmity of a buddy corporation.