The requirements are to display a list of users with add, edit, and delete capabilities. The test takes an hour and it doesn't have to compile or be complete. I'm just looking for how people approach it. I've had people actually complete the application in an hour using XML as a data store, others may get a few classes written, some people produce nothing or cut and paste something from the internet that makes no sense.
I do not understand how it's possible that someone could have a CS degree and have trouble with such a test. That sounds like an assignment I had in a one-unit class on shell scripting, that assumed no prior programming experience.
I've been sweating bricks because I've spent the last year and a half working towards the sort of certificate that people here apparently despise. I'd originally planned to get a CS degree, but I just couldn't get through Calculus II. So I've been worried that I won't have the computer science background expected for entry level system administration. And yet, I keep reading accounts of people with degrees I don't think I'm capable of attaining, being unable to complete assignments that are easier than things I was assigned in introductory courses.
And to be honest, that also matches my past experience in the workplace -- people would have great qualifications, qualifications that I didn't think I could ever attain, and yet didn't seem to actually know much, or even express any interest in their field.
It's easy enough to bluff your way to a humanities degree -- I was an English major, and I saw plenty of that -- but how are people bluffing their way through advanced mathematics and computer science?
That sounds very much like a bit in Hemingway's short story, "Big Two-Hearted River," where he describes a backpacker cooking a similar meal from two cans of food over a stove.
Speaking of Epicurus, my understanding is that while he argued that a good life was a life of pleasure, his attitude seemed to be that pleasure followed from avoiding pain, which basically calls for moderation: e.g., the pain that results from gluttony overpowers the pleasure of it, so you're happier if you don't indulge in gluttony.
Part of my attitude, I suppose, is that on the one hand, I've never known anyone who died, or really suffered much, because they danced too much, listened to too much music, wore too many different outfits, watched too many movies, read too many books, had too many conversations, played too many computer games, went hiking too many times, visited too many museums, or grew too many flowers.
On the other hand, I've known people who died, and several more who nearly died, because they wouldn't stop eating food that was unhealthy for them.
I'm a little unusual in my attitude towards food, and I've been exaggerating that attitude, in this discussion, to be contrarian.
But my underlying point is that fundamentally, food is about health. Given the choice of two foods of equal nutritional value, sure, choose the one that tastes better. But it seems to me to be fundamentally perverse to place the taste, texture, and appearance of food above its material function.
It's not so much food puritanism, on my part, anyway. It's that I think food is intrinsically uninteresting, and I'd rather we got cooking and eating done quickly so we can talk about or do things that are actually interesting. There are simple, nutritious foods that taste good; spending more time on preparing food to trick it up into something more elaborate seems to me to be a waste of time.
To be honest, I keep flirting with taking a contrarian position, and insisting that people should stop worrying about whether food tastes good, much less whether it looks good. There seem to be so many problems with people eating unhealthy food, or eating too much food, and wasting food, and so on, that I sometimes wish people would just take a utilitarian attitude towards food.
In fairness, the article cited a particular dish, called "Hot Potato-Cold Potato," for which the temperature was critical.
However, I can't imagine this being an issue at any restaurant that I've ever eaten. The perfect temperature? Customers taking twenty photos of their meal? Who are these people, and what is wrong with them?
No, I am disputing the poster's point. I think that someone who owns a gun and attempts suicide is more likely to die in the attempt than someone who doesn't own a gun and attempts suicide.
I am not an expert, and I don't have numbers to back this up. I'm just speculating.
I'm not sure why you're objecting to my usage of "suicidal." I think it's a pretty standard usage. My point was that people don't know in advance they're going to become suicidal -- and in that case, I'm basing that on personal experiences.
However, if my number "X" includes suicides, well, then how much of a statement about the relative danger of owning a gun am I making? How about if I can find no link between owning a gun and committing suicide?
Clearly the statement is correct, "shot, in their home, with their own gun" but, even so, its misleading if you then use the numbers wrong.
I don't think I disagree with your overall point, but I do have a quibble with this. I think there's reason to believe that owning a gun makes it more likely that you will commit suicide. Suicidal thoughts are not unusual, and suicide attempts usually fail. Becoming suicidal is often in part a response to a sudden crisis. People usually don't plan to lose their jobs, or get dumped by their romantic partners, or so on, but sooner or later, something as upsetting as those things happens to anyone. If you're horribly upset, and decide to drive out to the bridge to jump off it, you've got more time to change your mind, then if you decide to shoot yourself with the pistol in the safe in the living room.
The short answer: in EVE, when you die, most of the stuff you were carrying is destroyed, and if you were killed by another player, that player usually takes whatever stuff you were carrying that wasn't destroyed.
The most expensive gear represents hundreds, even thousands of hours of in-game labor -- and can be destroyed in seconds. There's nothing like looking away from the screen for a moment, only to look back, and find a gang of (player) pirates is destroying your ship. Basically, most wealth produced within EVE ends up spent on ammunition (which is consumed in combat) and ships (which are frequently destroyed).
Come to think of it, this resembles a staple of Marxist theory, that booms and busts are inherently part of the economy. In a boom, too much capital has been invested in too much productive capacity for further investment to be profitable; further profits aren't possible until a whole bunch of capital has been destroyed in a bust. There are other ways to destroy capital: dropping bombs on factories is one. There's an addendum to Marxist theory called "The Permanent Arms Economy," which explains the "long boom" from the end of WWII to the mid-seventies, by the massive destruction of WWII being extended by the global arms race, in which war-time proportions of wealth spent on arms production continued into peace time.
Indeed. I have a hard time believing any generation is okay with, "We will publish your personal information, even if you ask us not to, and lie to you about it."
And the entire game "economy" is based on mining. Which means, those huge battles, in which there are a few minutes of explosions, are based upon thousand of hours of players sitting at screens watching lasers hit rocks.
What kept me in EVE was that the other players in the roleplaying "corporation" were really great, interesting people. Unfortunately, my playing time rarely overlapped theirs. And, I found that the game actually interfered with interacting with the players.
Yes, CONCORD is the "police". They're basically NPC "town guards".
As for heroes: it's worse than that. Any player character is, pretty much by definition, a mass murderer. According to the published setting, even the small ships have large crews, so any time you destroy another ship, you're supposed to be killing several thousand people. Almost anytime you do destroy another ship, it's for purely mercenary reasons. Some of the published setting material explores the significance of it, but generally makes it clear: pod pilots are unfeeling killers who have lost touch with their humanity.
It's pretty tough to roleplay that, so few roleplayers really engage with that, and very few EVE players roleplay at all.
1) It takes hours of time to accomplish even simple tasks.
2) There was a body of dedicated roleplayers who were carefully organizing in-game events and ongoing plot-lines in accordance with the published and frequently updated back-story. The developers made it clear, however, that they didn't care about anyone but the gigantic "alliances" that ignored roleplaying entirely and concentrated on their massive pyramid schemes that allowed a handful of players the opportunity to control thousands of other players.
3) The short fiction they published to establish the setting and backstory, which had been edgy, complex, and interesting, suddenly shifted towards badly written, insipid good-versus-evil plots, which was compatible neither with what the roleplayers were doing nor with what the powergamers were doing (although the latter group, of course, didn't care.)
As I've often found with MMORPGs, at some point I realized I had more freedom, agency, and opportunity for excitement and adventure in real life than I did in slogging through an MMORPG. Eve Online is a game whose gameplay foundation is players sitting around watching the animation of lasers striking asteroids for hours on end.
It was quite public when they opened up the new business school, at about the same time they almost completely eliminated the art department.
The students aren't very liberal, either. I knew political activists who organized among college students in the Bay Area, and would get excellent responses at San Francisco State, the community colleges, CSU Hayward, and when going farther afield, would get good responses at USSC and even sometimes Stanford. But Berkeley was utterly hopeless.
It'd tick me off whenever, during a wave of protests, such as those against the war in Iraq, journalists would highlight the dismal turn-outs at UC Berkeley, and ignore the massive demonstrations at SFSU. But even in the 60s, there was more student activism at SFSU than at UC Berkeley.
One of the things that's remarkable about US history is that the US ruling class has been incredibly consistent and unified on foreign policy. One of the motivations for the American Revolution was that merchants wanted access to Asian markets without having to go through Britain. Empire building, particularly in the form of dominance of global trade, and especially controlling trade with Asia, has been the central concern of the US ruling class for over two centuries.
The current anti-Chinese paranoia has a couple of elements. Portraying Asians as if they were all unindividualized parts of some sort of menacing hive mind has been a staple of American racism for a long time (and it shows up in science fiction frequently -- take the computer game Alpha Centauri for instance). It also picks up some rehashed "Red Scare" paranoia (see Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck), and there's some stuff that looks a lot like 19th century anti-Catholic bigotry.
In the IT field, which used to employ white men almost exclusively, there are a lot of people who have immigrated to the US from China, India, and other places. Some of us regard this as a good thing, some respond with racist anxiety.
There's a Chinese restaurant in the midwest somewhere that, shockingly, serves Chinese food.
Graduate students from China have been observed speaking Chinese on the telephone, and at least sometimes, they were speaking to the Chinese consulate -- which is suspicious, since consulates provide services to a nation's citizens living abroad.
Therefore, there is a massive Chinese campaign of computer espionage, which is so effective that we can't actually detect anything happening.
I read the article, expecting at least some cursory information about system cracking techniques that have been detected. Instead, there's just this vapid paranoia that Chinese people may be up to something. It smacks of racism.
Slashdot Mirror
The requirements are to display a list of users with add, edit, and delete capabilities. The test takes an hour and it doesn't have to compile or be complete. I'm just looking for how people approach it. I've had people actually complete the application in an hour using XML as a data store, others may get a few classes written, some people produce nothing or cut and paste something from the internet that makes no sense.
I do not understand how it's possible that someone could have a CS degree and have trouble with such a test. That sounds like an assignment I had in a one-unit class on shell scripting, that assumed no prior programming experience.
I've been sweating bricks because I've spent the last year and a half working towards the sort of certificate that people here apparently despise. I'd originally planned to get a CS degree, but I just couldn't get through Calculus II. So I've been worried that I won't have the computer science background expected for entry level system administration. And yet, I keep reading accounts of people with degrees I don't think I'm capable of attaining, being unable to complete assignments that are easier than things I was assigned in introductory courses.
And to be honest, that also matches my past experience in the workplace -- people would have great qualifications, qualifications that I didn't think I could ever attain, and yet didn't seem to actually know much, or even express any interest in their field.
It's easy enough to bluff your way to a humanities degree -- I was an English major, and I saw plenty of that -- but how are people bluffing their way through advanced mathematics and computer science?
That sounds very much like a bit in Hemingway's short story, "Big Two-Hearted River," where he describes a backpacker cooking a similar meal from two cans of food over a stove.
Speaking of Epicurus, my understanding is that while he argued that a good life was a life of pleasure, his attitude seemed to be that pleasure followed from avoiding pain, which basically calls for moderation: e.g., the pain that results from gluttony overpowers the pleasure of it, so you're happier if you don't indulge in gluttony.
Part of my attitude, I suppose, is that on the one hand, I've never known anyone who died, or really suffered much, because they danced too much, listened to too much music, wore too many different outfits, watched too many movies, read too many books, had too many conversations, played too many computer games, went hiking too many times, visited too many museums, or grew too many flowers.
On the other hand, I've known people who died, and several more who nearly died, because they wouldn't stop eating food that was unhealthy for them.
I'm a little unusual in my attitude towards food, and I've been exaggerating that attitude, in this discussion, to be contrarian.
But my underlying point is that fundamentally, food is about health. Given the choice of two foods of equal nutritional value, sure, choose the one that tastes better. But it seems to me to be fundamentally perverse to place the taste, texture, and appearance of food above its material function.
It's not so much food puritanism, on my part, anyway. It's that I think food is intrinsically uninteresting, and I'd rather we got cooking and eating done quickly so we can talk about or do things that are actually interesting. There are simple, nutritious foods that taste good; spending more time on preparing food to trick it up into something more elaborate seems to me to be a waste of time.
Now there's a comment that belongs on Slashdot.
To be honest, I keep flirting with taking a contrarian position, and insisting that people should stop worrying about whether food tastes good, much less whether it looks good. There seem to be so many problems with people eating unhealthy food, or eating too much food, and wasting food, and so on, that I sometimes wish people would just take a utilitarian attitude towards food.
In fairness, the article cited a particular dish, called "Hot Potato-Cold Potato," for which the temperature was critical.
However, I can't imagine this being an issue at any restaurant that I've ever eaten. The perfect temperature? Customers taking twenty photos of their meal? Who are these people, and what is wrong with them?
No, the point of food is to maintain health and strength. Whether you enjoy eating it is secondary to that.
I think it's just a proposal -- a symbolic protest at that, as California is one of the few parts of the US that doesn't use Texas textbooks.
There's also Sage Math. You could use the Sage Notebook to try it out. The programming interface is based on Python.
No, I am disputing the poster's point. I think that someone who owns a gun and attempts suicide is more likely to die in the attempt than someone who doesn't own a gun and attempts suicide.
I am not an expert, and I don't have numbers to back this up. I'm just speculating.
I'm not sure why you're objecting to my usage of "suicidal." I think it's a pretty standard usage. My point was that people don't know in advance they're going to become suicidal -- and in that case, I'm basing that on personal experiences.
However, if my number "X" includes suicides, well, then how much of a statement about the relative danger of owning a gun am I making? How about if I can find no link between owning a gun and committing suicide?
Clearly the statement is correct, "shot, in their home, with their own gun" but, even so, its misleading if you then use the numbers wrong.
I don't think I disagree with your overall point, but I do have a quibble with this. I think there's reason to believe that owning a gun makes it more likely that you will commit suicide. Suicidal thoughts are not unusual, and suicide attempts usually fail. Becoming suicidal is often in part a response to a sudden crisis. People usually don't plan to lose their jobs, or get dumped by their romantic partners, or so on, but sooner or later, something as upsetting as those things happens to anyone. If you're horribly upset, and decide to drive out to the bridge to jump off it, you've got more time to change your mind, then if you decide to shoot yourself with the pistol in the safe in the living room.
The short answer: in EVE, when you die, most of the stuff you were carrying is destroyed, and if you were killed by another player, that player usually takes whatever stuff you were carrying that wasn't destroyed.
The most expensive gear represents hundreds, even thousands of hours of in-game labor -- and can be destroyed in seconds. There's nothing like looking away from the screen for a moment, only to look back, and find a gang of (player) pirates is destroying your ship. Basically, most wealth produced within EVE ends up spent on ammunition (which is consumed in combat) and ships (which are frequently destroyed).
Come to think of it, this resembles a staple of Marxist theory, that booms and busts are inherently part of the economy. In a boom, too much capital has been invested in too much productive capacity for further investment to be profitable; further profits aren't possible until a whole bunch of capital has been destroyed in a bust. There are other ways to destroy capital: dropping bombs on factories is one. There's an addendum to Marxist theory called "The Permanent Arms Economy," which explains the "long boom" from the end of WWII to the mid-seventies, by the massive destruction of WWII being extended by the global arms race, in which war-time proportions of wealth spent on arms production continued into peace time.
Indeed. I have a hard time believing any generation is okay with, "We will publish your personal information, even if you ask us not to, and lie to you about it."
And the entire game "economy" is based on mining. Which means, those huge battles, in which there are a few minutes of explosions, are based upon thousand of hours of players sitting at screens watching lasers hit rocks.
That sounds a lot like my experience.
What kept me in EVE was that the other players in the roleplaying "corporation" were really great, interesting people. Unfortunately, my playing time rarely overlapped theirs. And, I found that the game actually interfered with interacting with the players.
Yes, CONCORD is the "police". They're basically NPC "town guards".
As for heroes: it's worse than that. Any player character is, pretty much by definition, a mass murderer. According to the published setting, even the small ships have large crews, so any time you destroy another ship, you're supposed to be killing several thousand people. Almost anytime you do destroy another ship, it's for purely mercenary reasons. Some of the published setting material explores the significance of it, but generally makes it clear: pod pilots are unfeeling killers who have lost touch with their humanity.
It's pretty tough to roleplay that, so few roleplayers really engage with that, and very few EVE players roleplay at all.
I gave up playing Eve Online for two reasons:
1) It takes hours of time to accomplish even simple tasks.
2) There was a body of dedicated roleplayers who were carefully organizing in-game events and ongoing plot-lines in accordance with the published and frequently updated back-story. The developers made it clear, however, that they didn't care about anyone but the gigantic "alliances" that ignored roleplaying entirely and concentrated on their massive pyramid schemes that allowed a handful of players the opportunity to control thousands of other players.
3) The short fiction they published to establish the setting and backstory, which had been edgy, complex, and interesting, suddenly shifted towards badly written, insipid good-versus-evil plots, which was compatible neither with what the roleplayers were doing nor with what the powergamers were doing (although the latter group, of course, didn't care.)
As I've often found with MMORPGs, at some point I realized I had more freedom, agency, and opportunity for excitement and adventure in real life than I did in slogging through an MMORPG. Eve Online is a game whose gameplay foundation is players sitting around watching the animation of lasers striking asteroids for hours on end.
The summary left out part of a sentence:
It's important to note that the top 10 licenses cover 93% of all projects and the top 20 almost 97%.
Oops... USSC was supposed to be UCSC, i.e., UC Santa Cruz.
It was quite public when they opened up the new business school, at about the same time they almost completely eliminated the art department.
The students aren't very liberal, either. I knew political activists who organized among college students in the Bay Area, and would get excellent responses at San Francisco State, the community colleges, CSU Hayward, and when going farther afield, would get good responses at USSC and even sometimes Stanford. But Berkeley was utterly hopeless.
It'd tick me off whenever, during a wave of protests, such as those against the war in Iraq, journalists would highlight the dismal turn-outs at UC Berkeley, and ignore the massive demonstrations at SFSU. But even in the 60s, there was more student activism at SFSU than at UC Berkeley.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/13/72E53/index.xml?section=newsreleases
I saw a claim somewhere (I think it was Stephen Jay Gould) that the majority of biomass was subterranean. I can't find a substantiating link, though.
One of the things that's remarkable about US history is that the US ruling class has been incredibly consistent and unified on foreign policy. One of the motivations for the American Revolution was that merchants wanted access to Asian markets without having to go through Britain. Empire building, particularly in the form of dominance of global trade, and especially controlling trade with Asia, has been the central concern of the US ruling class for over two centuries.
The current anti-Chinese paranoia has a couple of elements. Portraying Asians as if they were all unindividualized parts of some sort of menacing hive mind has been a staple of American racism for a long time (and it shows up in science fiction frequently -- take the computer game Alpha Centauri for instance). It also picks up some rehashed "Red Scare" paranoia (see Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck), and there's some stuff that looks a lot like 19th century anti-Catholic bigotry.
In the IT field, which used to employ white men almost exclusively, there are a lot of people who have immigrated to the US from China, India, and other places. Some of us regard this as a good thing, some respond with racist anxiety.
Wouldn't it make more sense to assume that the point of having a superb restaurant that lures in techies, is to have a successful restaurant?
The article basically lays out this argument:
I read the article, expecting at least some cursory information about system cracking techniques that have been detected. Instead, there's just this vapid paranoia that Chinese people may be up to something. It smacks of racism.