The G5 woops when it comes to floating point, and stays just behind in everything else.
Uh, that's not what I read:
The conclusion is that the Opteron has, by far, the best FPU, especially when more complex instructions such a FDIV (divisions) are used. When the code is using something close to the ideal 50% FADD/FSUB and 50% FMUL mix and is optimised for Altivec, the G5 can roll its muscles. The normal FPU is rather mediocre though.
That hardly sounds like the G5 is "whooping" when it comes to floating point...
If you distribute, license or sell a Licensed Implementation, this license is conditioned upon you requiring that the following notice be prominently displayed in all copies and derivative works of your source code and in copies of the documentation and licenses associated with your Licensed Implementation:
2. If you think Windows is "real" 64-bit, think again.
Even the latest 64-bit Windows isn't using a pure 64-bit model, even in 64-bit mode. DEC went with a full 64-bit model that matched the native Alpha 64-bit register set, and most of the other UNIX systems went with 64-bit longs and 64-bit pointers, but Windows uses 32-bit longs and 64-bit pointers...
The fact that 64-bit Windows compilers by default use a 32-bit long data type has nothing to do with whether Windows is a complete 64-bit platform. You can change that behavior with a simple compiler switch: whoila! 64-bit longs! Modern programmers don't leave the size of their critical integers up to chance, and use the int64 data type when required, precisely because you can't tell when coding what the executing platform will choose for the size of your ints.
...and you need a special "long long" data type to do pointer and offset arithmetic. So, using code that actually addresses more than 4G of RAM on Windows is going to remain tricky for a while.
Ugh! PLEASE don't tell me you are one of those programmers who writes code that assumes integers and pointers are interchangeable! That is a VERY BAD programming practice. It is not guaranteed that int and int* are the same length by the C or C++ standards. If you need to be able to cast between the two, then you need to make sure your integer type is the same length as pointers on the underlying platform. It's a very simple concept.
You know, I think you just solved your problem. You obviously don't want inexperienced employees. Your company isn't set up to deal with them for whatever reason. So why waste your time interviewing them?
I don't think it's that simple. There are certain basic concepts that you expect someone applying for a C++ development position to have, whether they are coming right out of school or whether they have been working in such a position for a few years. Not advanced concepts that only a practitioner would comprehend, but basic concepts that anyone who had ever coded anything substantive would understand implicitly.
For example, I expect a C/C++ programmer to understand C-style pointers inherently. I interview far too many candidates who think they are "magic" that return values via some kind of compiler trick. These people are completely unable to code up a simple function that allocates a string and returns the string via a pointer parameter. They inevitably write something like this:
which of course just leaks the allocated string and returns nothing back to the caller. Amazingly, I'd say about 2/3 of the college candidates I interview get this horribly wrong, and are completely unable to step through what happens when the pointer parameter is passed into the function to diagnose the problem. Some of them have actually argued with me, telling me that declaring a pointer parameter is all that is necessary here; the compiler "takes care of the rest." Failing this kind of very basic C interview question tanks any C programming candidate in my book.
Anyway, that is just one example in C. I have many more egregious examples of C++ errors made by "C++ expert" interview candidates that belie a complete lack of understanding of what is going on "behind the scenes" with C++ data types. If a candidate doesn't know what a vtable is and doesn't know what methods are generated for free by the compiler, that candidate is NOT a "C++ expert."
I seem to have overstated the need to excel in high school. I just looked up some statistics, and one source claims that over 70% of U.S. high school graduates go on to some form of college. So being "excellent" in high school is clearly not a requirement.
It doesn't matter what kind of high school you went to. That will not disturb any interviewer. We all know that it is more or less impossible to choose what kind of secondary education you happen to get.
What is much more damning to interviewers is that you gave up on formal education based on your (incomplete) high school experience. If you so desired, you could have obtained a G.E.D and escaped your high school's problems. I know several people who did this at age 16 and spent 2 years working for tuition and attending community college (taking all sorts of intro-level college classes) before going off to a 4-year school for a degree.
So it *is* possible for you to have gotten a degree. Telling yourself otherwise, or trying to convince people that it was impossible because of your personal background or your high school's incompetence, is disingenous. If I were interviewing you, I would be much more concerned about your series of excuses rather than your lack of a degree.
If you really don't think a degree is worthwhile, then just say so openly: "I don't value a college education enough to waste my time on it: I have better things to do with my time." That is at least an honest statement of your stance on the value of a degree and why you have not pursued one. But I don't think you will have much success converting established companies to your point of view, especially for engineering positions. (If a company could save money by hiring all of the non-degreed engineers out there, they certainly would.)
It is oft-cited that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard after 1 year. The huge differences between his situation and yours are that he was heavily supported by his relatively wealthy family, he was starting a business for himself and therefore did not need to impress others with credentials, and the state of the microcomputer industry at the time was such that credentials were essentially nonexistent anyway. And I bet that even Bill Gates, had he not succeeded in his business ventures, would have gone back to school to increase his chances in the corporate world.
You may be one of the brightest candidates in the world, despite your lack of a degree. And it is true that college degrees do not imply intelligence or even (sadly) competence anymore. But the system still values accredited degrees, and therefore I would recommend that you do too if you want to increase your chances in the market.
If you don't care about the job market, on the other hand, or just want to be self-employed, then more power to you.
I have no college degree, my folks weren't rich enough to send me, and I dropped out of high school because they wouldn't let me take any computer classes.
If you dropped out of high school, then you screwed yourself out of a degree. It had nothing to do with your socioeconomic background. Don't try to pull out that tired sob story.
I, like many thousands before me, went to a top-10 national college without my parents spending a dime. My roommate grew up in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, and he could barely afford the meal plan without work-study. Without grants, scholarships, and loans, neither of us would have been at that school. Sure, we've been paying back loans for 5 years now and will be for another 5 years more, but we both have a BSEE degrees and it's made all the difference in the world.
Going all the way through college and earning a degree is hard work, and takes discipline. First you have to excel in high school to get into college in the first place, no matter whether your high school offers computer classes or not. Then once you get in school you have to succeed not only in your major area of study but also in mandatory distribution areas that you wouldn't otherwise choose.
But that's the point! A degree represents the capability to learn and succeed even when faced with a challenge you don't necessarily want to face. Degrees imply perseverance and accomplishment in the face of adversity. Sure, it's *possible* to learn 90% of what you learn in college all by yourself if you're incredibly self-disciplined and well-motivated. But it's incredibly easy to miss very important lessons when you don't have experienced teachers (i.e. professors) guiding your learning experiences.
I have to agree a lot with the parent poster. I now interview candidates weekly, and I am completely underwhelmed with the quality of interview candidates we have been getting the last few years. The best candidates we seem to get are coming from other companies and already have experience; our college interviews (which are already dumbed down quite a bit) have gone so poorly lately that we're not hiring any young blood at all.
So who knows, maybe you're right after all. Maybe college is becoming a waste of time. It wasn't a waste of time for me, but for some of the college interview candidates I've gotten recently it certainly seems to have been...
First of all, let's recap. When Apple introduced the G5 two years ago, you may remember the ads which proclaimed "The World's First 64-bit Personal Computer." What they forgot to mention was a pretty fundamental flaw with their claim: their flagship OS X could not actually run any 64-bit applications!
It has taken two years and 2 OS releases for Apple to add limited support for 64-bit applications to OS-X. Even today, apps which utilize any graphical application framework libraries (i.e. any GUI application) cannot run in 64-bit mode. Apple actually expects software vendors to redesign their GUI apps to fork off 64-bit processes to perform any "compute-intensive" or "memory-intensive" work. Right! Nevertheless, I'm sure some vendors will do this work, no matter how silly.
Contrast this with 64-bit support in Windows. Microsoft released its first 64-bit version of Windows in q1 2002 (see PC World announcement from 2001). But few actually remember because it ran only on Itanium, on hardware which virtually no one except elite vendors could purchase. That version of Windows was quite limited, but even then not as limited as Apple's latest Tiger. Even in 2002, 64-bit Windows apps could run in full GUI mode and could utilize all system libraries except for multimedia decoding and DirectX libraries.
The point is this: for app vendors to port their apps to 64-bit Windows, very little work is required. In many cases, simply recompiling does the trick. In other cases, broken integer-pointer casts must be fixed, but little else. Certainly no redesign is required! To make this app transition so smooth required a large amount of work. Millions of lines of code making up the entire Windows codebase (not just the relatively small kernel) had to be made 64-bit clean. Additionally, it took lots of design thought to solve some of the tricky AppCompat issues to enable 32-bit and 64-bit apps to live side-by-side. You can read alot about how this works in Windows XP Pro x64 here.
Second of all, your claim that 64-bit Windows drivers are unavailable and unstable is complete balderdash. I would love to hear which currently-shipping 64-bit systems out there don't have available drivers (and I mean vendor-supplied systems here, not some homebrew with a random motherboard). I would also like to hear about ones that are buggy and unstable. MSN and several other top-tier internet sites have already switched to x64-based servers. From personal experience, I have 64-bit XP running on at least 4 different motherboard chipsets in 24/7 environments and I have yet to see a blue screen on any of them. All with inbox drivers: I didn't lift a finger.
Granted, vendor-supplied drivers for peripherals which don't work with class drivers is currently limited on Windows x64, as happens whenever a new version of Windows comes out that requires driver changes (remember Win2k?). But it's extremely ironic to hear Apple people use the term "limited" in reference to hardware support, even referring to Windows x64. I'd bet that inbox device support for x64 is greater than the totality of device support for OSX Tiger. And as for peripherals, most USB and Firewire devices will work fine, because they utilize class drivers which Microsoft owns and therefore ports itself.
Yes, you can bet that Apple is embarrassed by its lack of 64-bit application support even with its latest Tiger release. But Apple has done a masterful job of sweeping that lack of support under the carpet with fantastic marketing. I know many G5 owners who had no clue until I told them that their G5 actually could not run 64-bit applications because OS-X did not support it. I actually feel kind of bad for them: I'm sure they felt a bit miffed that their promised "World's First 64-bit Personal Computer" was not actually a useful 64-bit system. I know I would be.
Itanium may not be great, but at least it has been built from scratch to be a real 64-bit CPU, I'd get a real 64-bit CPU anytime. The shiny x86-64 still runs the 20-years-old 16-bit ms-dos, and it's not by chance. They are damn fast just because of internal changes, not because it really is a "real 64 bit CPU"
Actually, they're not "damn fast." And that is part of the problem. If they WERE "damn fast" and ready to ship, Microsoft's large-scale 64-bit server deployment would probably be using at least some of them.
Have you actually used any Itanium systems? I've been using prototypes, as well as new production Itanium2's, for more than two years now. They are only perf-competitive in a few areas, and that's certainly not enough to justify their lack of all backwards compatibility. The beauty of AMD64 is the ability to run 32-bit code natively in the same OS environment. It's great stuff, and it's what made the 16 to 32-bit transition so painless and such a huge success back in the Win95 days.
Never underestimate seamless backwards-compatibility.
Offhand, two apps I know cause problems are UT2004 and NAV 8 (haven't tried 9 yet). I'm not too thrilled that *programs* now (not just drivers) can bluescreen a current NT OS.
Norton Anti-Virus *is* a driver (a file-system filter driver, to be exact). It is absolutely a legitimate source of blue-screen (NT Bugcheck) crashes because if the filter driver misbehaves, it clobbers all of kernel memory. Bad. I have debugged several NAV Bugcheck crashes myself.
As far as crashing in UT2004 goes, what does the minidump tell you? I'm willing to bet that it's your display driver crashing after attempting to execute something on the stack in kernel mode. The "auto-triage" scripts run by the Microsoft Error Reporting tool should be able to pinpoint the offending driver.
XPSp2 is *designed* to BugCheck (crash with a blue screen) when pages marked with NX are attempted to execute in kernel mode. It's the only safe thing to do. In user mode, the apps are simply terminated.
Re:You want an honest review?
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, we're pissed, and yes, SCREW MICROSOFT.
Oh, that attitude will certainly help your reputation of having an unbiased viewpoint, and give you a leg up in your pursuit of "journalistic integrity" as your site puts it.
Perhaps you might consider venting your frustration as an independent game reviewer at "the industry" rather than at Microsoft? Scapegoating Microsoft on Slashdot might be popular, and might win you moderation points, but it is the industry at large which you should be protesting.
But the primary reason nuclear energy will not succeed in the US at any time in the near future rests entirely on the shoulders of anti-nuke activists, who are so successful at scaremongering that the millions of uninformed individuals in this country will never permit nuke power in their vicinity.
First we need to make the anti-nuke activists irrelevant. Then we can worry about getting politicians signed up.
Er. Its a mpeg audio group codec, and rather a frauenhofer product than a doulby one.
Err, no. AAC is a Dolby Audio codec, period. The fact that it was chosen as one of several different available audio codecs in the MPEG-4 standard is irrelevant in this context, because Apple is only using the audio codec here (it's not implementing a full MPEG-4 system).
Like many codecs chosen as interoperability standards by the MPEG-4 working group, the rights to AAC are owned by a private company, in this case Dolby Laboratories. Dolby has set up a subsidiary called "Via Licensing" to collect royalties for AAC. It charges a fee per encoder or decoder. You can read about it at their site.
In any case, Apple had nothing to do with writing the AAC codec. It licensed it from Via Licensing.
All Microsoft's DRM and Codec schemes have seemed to design to "embrace and extend" to further their Windows monopoly. Apple's have been designed to be the best they possibly can, with just enough DRM to satisfy their media partners. It's a big difference, and it shows up in everything they do.
This just shows how little you actually know about this subject. VC-1 is a compression standard only. It does not include DRM features, or any user-interaction features for that matter. This is very clear if you have been following this standardization process at all.
Oh, and by the way, what Apple codecs are you referring to that have been designed to be so superior to WMV9? Please tell. (And don't say "Quicktime" because that is a format, not a codec.)
Mods, you need to get a handle on yourselves. You are NOT supposed to mod a post down because you disagree with it!
The parent made a very legitimate point: that the Slashdot headline used some pretty ridiculous, biased terms in its description of th EETimes article, including things like "Redmond Beast" and "cheated and lied" which appear nowhere in the article itself. He was simply pointing out that the submitter was obviously trying to get a rise out of people.
If you are so insecure that you can't even allow others to share their opinions that you have to mod them down, you have other problems.
This means that if the user needs a driver or their OS needs saved...
WTF? This is complete balderdash! All "in-box" drivers (i.e., included on the Windows CD) are installed to the hard drive at setup time. You don't ever need to "insert the Windows CD" anymore. That's how all of the OEMs set up systems now.
Anyone telling these poor souls that they need to go buy a full retail version of Windows just to get an in-box driver installed doesn't know ANYTHING about administering windows...
Perhaps the last time such people used Windows was in the Win98 days? Perhaps they should re-examine their biased assumptions?
Secondly, "gearing up" a plane will not total it - even landing a plane and forgetting to put the wheels down.
You may be right about the parent's store, but this claim is just dead wrong. There are documented NTSB investigated crashes where landing gear has sheared off on landing due to crab angles that were too steep and the planes are badly damaged. The problem is, planes don't just skid to a gentle stop: the momentum, winds, uneven surfaces, etc combine to make one wing tip or the nose "clip" the ground, usually resulting in flipping the airplane entirely upside down. This virtually guarantees that larger jets will be totaled.
A FedEx Airbus A300 sheared its landing gear last year in Memphis. It did not flip over, but the ground impact (which obviously does heavy damage to the engines under the wings) triggered a jet fuel fire that burned most of the fuselage. The flight crew walked away (they actually climbed out the cockpit window on the rope ladder because of the fire). But the A300 was definitely a big insurance write-off.
To balance your decidedly un-funny characterization of republican supporters, here is my own summarization of Kerry supporters (or really, Bush Haters).
Nature Freaks: They hate SUVs and think trees are more precious than people, smoke more pot than Tommy Chong in 1971, and mysteriously drive ancient Volkswagens that pollute worse than any modern fuel-injected vehicle. Usually pacifist, but only because their chronic protein deficiency from lack of meat consumption makes them physically weak; not, as some think, because of a well-conceived ethical philosophy.
Earth Liberation Fronters: They're like nature freaks, but violent. They hate corporations as much as they hate genetically modified corn. Their scaremongering is usually relegated to city street corners where they attempt to get you to sign their petition, but they look utterly confused when you question how banning bumper crops of genetically modified produce could possibly help the millions starving annually in Africa due to famines.
Moral Equivocaters: These people blame the US for terrorism, and consider US responses to terrorism the moral equivalent of the 9/11 attacks. Usually (and quite conveniently) they never blame themselves, or their own political heroes: just Republicans. These people are plagued by guilt at living in a country that is a superpower, and feel compelled to side with the underdog at all times, even when the underdog murders innocent people intentionally.
Internet Revolutionaries: They know just enough about using a computer and a web browser to read (and believe) 99% of what they see on the Internet. They do not read print media (like newspapers), and think that they get a balanced perspective by only clicking on the stories they want to read. The groups they form online help them to feel like they're a part of something special, when in reality they are simply hiding from reality by clinging to cyberspace. They would never attempt to argue in person like they do online, because they actually aren't very knowledgeable: they rely entirely on Google to "back up" their pathological reasoning.
Social Libertines: Paranoid that their way of life will be prosecuted by John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act, they spread more FUD to derail legitimate law enforcement than actual terrorists themselves. This paranoia is most likely the result of illegal activity and the fear of being caught, e.g. closet pedophilia or habitual drug use/sales. They are convinced that John Ashcroft is more concerned about their silly little antics than about world terrorism. If the weed smoke were to ever settle down, they might see reality.
Militant atheists: The scientific equivalent of religious fundamentalists. Most atheists are fairly tolerant, but these folks cannot stand anyone who believes in anything other than science. They think Karl Marx's idea of banning religion is the greatest idea ever. Ironically, they can't stand people who put "blind faith" in religion. If you ask them why they put "blind faith" in science, they don't understand what you mean. As such, they are just as intolerant as religious fundamentalists, but they don't see it that way, because they know they are right. Sound familiar?
Christian-reactionaries: These people were so traumatized when they learned about the Crusades in history class that they have never been able to forgive Christians. Unlike the atheists, Reactionaries get along fine with new-age religions, or anything resembling "mystical spirituality". Eerily like the Equivocaters, Reactionaries feel guilty living in a society populated by Christians and feel compelled to fight against them because they're worried about what others world religions might think. Due to the missionary-style conversion tactics of many well-meaning Christian groups, Reactionaries have become paranoid, worried that the Christians
Because you're an expert on the patents both companies hold, right?
Give me a break.
If you think software patents are stupid, then just say that. Unless you've worked at both companies and know first-hand the differences between the types of patents involved, you do not have the foundation to make your claim.
That code is crap and is always crashing on me even in WinXP SP2. It locks just about every file it touches when you use the explorer.exe file manager requiring using task manager to kill and restart it. It is the biggest headache for me using WinXP at work.
The vast majority of Explorer.exe crashes are due to 3rd party plug-ins. Next time you hit a crash, debug into it and find out. You'll see what I mean.
As for open file handles, Explorer has been known to keep handles open longer than it should, but there aren't any known leaks to my knowledge. Contrast that with the handle leaks introduced by 3rd party plug-in DLLs, which are numerous.
Second, a lot of third-party apps break when you upgrade Windows. The version of Matlab the user has installed on Windows 2000 quits working on XP, and so they have to rev Matlab as well. Oops, the Matlab script they got from NASA doesn't work on the new Matlab; gotta get the new one of those. And so it goes. Scientific software is frequently not particularly robust over operating system changes. So an upgrade is a lot more pain for our users than it might be for a business user who does nothing but Word, Outlook, and IE.
I agree with almost all of your other points, but this statement is simply not correct. Windows backwards compatibility has always been excellent. Hell, it's one of the few systems where people expect to be able to run 20-year old 16-bit DOS binaries and scream and holler when they no longer work.
In fact, Windows backwards compatibility with x86 binaries is what most computer historians acknowledge as the vehicle for IBM-compatible PC dominance for the past decade. The fact that new versions of Windows would continue to run old binaries (without patches, without recompiles, etc) has probably done more than anything else to keep businesses buying Windows so that ancient, proprietary business software will keep running. This saves lots of money and hassle, believe it or not. I know businesses still running on 12-year old DOS software because it still works.
However, I think that today this legacy software is starting to see its demise in favor of web applications which are largely platform-agnostic. So Microsoft, IMHO, spends WAY too much time worrying about breaking old software.
I've heard it explained in many ways, but most people tell me that they're afraid of being sued. Real, for instance, sued Microsoft claiming that changes between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 "intentionally broke" their player. So now MS is paranoid.
XP, for instance, has this insane system loader that can actually PATCH broken apps before they are run. Just take a look under the registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\AppPatches". Every key listed there gets special treatment when it is executed on your system. There are even some binary blobs that are overlayed at specific memory addresses on-the-fly.
Microsoft has an entire division in Windows that works on Application Compatibility (AppCompat). If a bug is found in a Win32 API, and the fix ends up breaking ANY vendor's app, then either an app workaround is created or the fix is backed out. I think that's horrible (backing out fixes because it might break some old program), but it amounts to putting backwards compatibility ahead of fixing bugs.
Contrast this with Macintosh, where for years people EXPECTED to have to purchase new versions of Adobe Photoshop whenever a new OS or new hardware came out. This has allowed Apple to introduce dramatic changes over the years that broke tons of apps, but improved their systems' capabilities dramatically. Ditching the 68000 for PowerPC, for one. Switching to OSX was another radical change. In both cases they tried to have a "compatibility layer" for old programs, but lots of apps still broke. The win, however, was to take a gigantic leap forward in platform capability.
As far as I know ASP and SMB are not patent encumbered. MS didn't have a policy of patenting their software until several years ago (about the same time as the Halloween papers were written, IIRC).
Nope. MS has actively patented things for more than a decade.
A friend of mine at Microsoft worked on the implementation of long filenames on FAT16, and was awarded a patent for it (with a couple other people). He was proud of it, mainly because it involved several brilliant tricks to get the long filenames stored without altering the fat16 data structures, thereby maintaining complete backwards compatibility. To date, not a single bit of software or device has been broken by it.
But over the years, he became completely dismayed. Other companies reverse engineered and copied the exact Microsoft technique to write long filenames on Fat16; Microsoft knew about it and did nothing. Now companies everywhere make money selling devices that use this same method (i.e., flash devices like digital cameras). But his patent has never been enforced, whatsoever.
So now whenever he comes up with something that is probably patent-worthy, he just doesn't bother. After all, what's the point of protecting something you've worked hard on if that protection is never used against people who copy and steal?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, that's not what I read:
That hardly sounds like the G5 is "whooping" when it comes to floating point...
From the license:
If you distribute, license or sell a Licensed Implementation, this license is conditioned upon you requiring that the following notice be prominently displayed in all copies and derivative works of your source code and in copies of the documentation and licenses associated with your Licensed Implementation:Looks pretty straightforward to me.
The fact that 64-bit Windows compilers by default use a 32-bit long data type has nothing to do with whether Windows is a complete 64-bit platform. You can change that behavior with a simple compiler switch: whoila! 64-bit longs! Modern programmers don't leave the size of their critical integers up to chance, and use the int64 data type when required, precisely because you can't tell when coding what the executing platform will choose for the size of your ints.
Ugh! PLEASE don't tell me you are one of those programmers who writes code that assumes integers and pointers are interchangeable! That is a VERY BAD programming practice. It is not guaranteed that int and int* are the same length by the C or C++ standards. If you need to be able to cast between the two, then you need to make sure your integer type is the same length as pointers on the underlying platform. It's a very simple concept.
I don't think it's that simple. There are certain basic concepts that you expect someone applying for a C++ development position to have, whether they are coming right out of school or whether they have been working in such a position for a few years. Not advanced concepts that only a practitioner would comprehend, but basic concepts that anyone who had ever coded anything substantive would understand implicitly.
For example, I expect a C/C++ programmer to understand C-style pointers inherently. I interview far too many candidates who think they are "magic" that return values via some kind of compiler trick. These people are completely unable to code up a simple function that allocates a string and returns the string via a pointer parameter. They inevitably write something like this:
void allocIdString(int nThreeDigitId, char * pszId ) { }which of course just leaks the allocated string and returns nothing back to the caller. Amazingly, I'd say about 2/3 of the college candidates I interview get this horribly wrong, and are completely unable to step through what happens when the pointer parameter is passed into the function to diagnose the problem. Some of them have actually argued with me, telling me that declaring a pointer parameter is all that is necessary here; the compiler "takes care of the rest." Failing this kind of very basic C interview question tanks any C programming candidate in my book.
Anyway, that is just one example in C. I have many more egregious examples of C++ errors made by "C++ expert" interview candidates that belie a complete lack of understanding of what is going on "behind the scenes" with C++ data types. If a candidate doesn't know what a vtable is and doesn't know what methods are generated for free by the compiler, that candidate is NOT a "C++ expert."
I seem to have overstated the need to excel in high school. I just looked up some statistics, and one source claims that over 70% of U.S. high school graduates go on to some form of college. So being "excellent" in high school is clearly not a requirement.
It doesn't matter what kind of high school you went to. That will not disturb any interviewer. We all know that it is more or less impossible to choose what kind of secondary education you happen to get.
What is much more damning to interviewers is that you gave up on formal education based on your (incomplete) high school experience. If you so desired, you could have obtained a G.E.D and escaped your high school's problems. I know several people who did this at age 16 and spent 2 years working for tuition and attending community college (taking all sorts of intro-level college classes) before going off to a 4-year school for a degree.
So it *is* possible for you to have gotten a degree. Telling yourself otherwise, or trying to convince people that it was impossible because of your personal background or your high school's incompetence, is disingenous. If I were interviewing you, I would be much more concerned about your series of excuses rather than your lack of a degree.
If you really don't think a degree is worthwhile, then just say so openly: "I don't value a college education enough to waste my time on it: I have better things to do with my time." That is at least an honest statement of your stance on the value of a degree and why you have not pursued one. But I don't think you will have much success converting established companies to your point of view, especially for engineering positions. (If a company could save money by hiring all of the non-degreed engineers out there, they certainly would.)
It is oft-cited that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard after 1 year. The huge differences between his situation and yours are that he was heavily supported by his relatively wealthy family, he was starting a business for himself and therefore did not need to impress others with credentials, and the state of the microcomputer industry at the time was such that credentials were essentially nonexistent anyway. And I bet that even Bill Gates, had he not succeeded in his business ventures, would have gone back to school to increase his chances in the corporate world.
You may be one of the brightest candidates in the world, despite your lack of a degree. And it is true that college degrees do not imply intelligence or even (sadly) competence anymore. But the system still values accredited degrees, and therefore I would recommend that you do too if you want to increase your chances in the market.
If you don't care about the job market, on the other hand, or just want to be self-employed, then more power to you.
If you dropped out of high school, then you screwed yourself out of a degree. It had nothing to do with your socioeconomic background. Don't try to pull out that tired sob story.
I, like many thousands before me, went to a top-10 national college without my parents spending a dime. My roommate grew up in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, and he could barely afford the meal plan without work-study. Without grants, scholarships, and loans, neither of us would have been at that school. Sure, we've been paying back loans for 5 years now and will be for another 5 years more, but we both have a BSEE degrees and it's made all the difference in the world.
Going all the way through college and earning a degree is hard work, and takes discipline. First you have to excel in high school to get into college in the first place, no matter whether your high school offers computer classes or not. Then once you get in school you have to succeed not only in your major area of study but also in mandatory distribution areas that you wouldn't otherwise choose.
But that's the point! A degree represents the capability to learn and succeed even when faced with a challenge you don't necessarily want to face. Degrees imply perseverance and accomplishment in the face of adversity. Sure, it's *possible* to learn 90% of what you learn in college all by yourself if you're incredibly self-disciplined and well-motivated. But it's incredibly easy to miss very important lessons when you don't have experienced teachers (i.e. professors) guiding your learning experiences.
I have to agree a lot with the parent poster. I now interview candidates weekly, and I am completely underwhelmed with the quality of interview candidates we have been getting the last few years. The best candidates we seem to get are coming from other companies and already have experience; our college interviews (which are already dumbed down quite a bit) have gone so poorly lately that we're not hiring any young blood at all.
So who knows, maybe you're right after all. Maybe college is becoming a waste of time. It wasn't a waste of time for me, but for some of the college interview candidates I've gotten recently it certainly seems to have been...
First of all, let's recap. When Apple introduced the G5 two years ago, you may remember the ads which proclaimed "The World's First 64-bit Personal Computer." What they forgot to mention was a pretty fundamental flaw with their claim: their flagship OS X could not actually run any 64-bit applications!
It has taken two years and 2 OS releases for Apple to add limited support for 64-bit applications to OS-X. Even today, apps which utilize any graphical application framework libraries (i.e. any GUI application) cannot run in 64-bit mode. Apple actually expects software vendors to redesign their GUI apps to fork off 64-bit processes to perform any "compute-intensive" or "memory-intensive" work. Right! Nevertheless, I'm sure some vendors will do this work, no matter how silly.
Contrast this with 64-bit support in Windows. Microsoft released its first 64-bit version of Windows in q1 2002 (see PC World announcement from 2001). But few actually remember because it ran only on Itanium, on hardware which virtually no one except elite vendors could purchase. That version of Windows was quite limited, but even then not as limited as Apple's latest Tiger. Even in 2002, 64-bit Windows apps could run in full GUI mode and could utilize all system libraries except for multimedia decoding and DirectX libraries.
The point is this: for app vendors to port their apps to 64-bit Windows, very little work is required. In many cases, simply recompiling does the trick. In other cases, broken integer-pointer casts must be fixed, but little else. Certainly no redesign is required! To make this app transition so smooth required a large amount of work. Millions of lines of code making up the entire Windows codebase (not just the relatively small kernel) had to be made 64-bit clean. Additionally, it took lots of design thought to solve some of the tricky AppCompat issues to enable 32-bit and 64-bit apps to live side-by-side. You can read alot about how this works in Windows XP Pro x64 here.
Second of all, your claim that 64-bit Windows drivers are unavailable and unstable is complete balderdash. I would love to hear which currently-shipping 64-bit systems out there don't have available drivers (and I mean vendor-supplied systems here, not some homebrew with a random motherboard). I would also like to hear about ones that are buggy and unstable. MSN and several other top-tier internet sites have already switched to x64-based servers. From personal experience, I have 64-bit XP running on at least 4 different motherboard chipsets in 24/7 environments and I have yet to see a blue screen on any of them. All with inbox drivers: I didn't lift a finger.
Granted, vendor-supplied drivers for peripherals which don't work with class drivers is currently limited on Windows x64, as happens whenever a new version of Windows comes out that requires driver changes (remember Win2k?). But it's extremely ironic to hear Apple people use the term "limited" in reference to hardware support, even referring to Windows x64. I'd bet that inbox device support for x64 is greater than the totality of device support for OSX Tiger. And as for peripherals, most USB and Firewire devices will work fine, because they utilize class drivers which Microsoft owns and therefore ports itself.
Yes, you can bet that Apple is embarrassed by its lack of 64-bit application support even with its latest Tiger release. But Apple has done a masterful job of sweeping that lack of support under the carpet with fantastic marketing. I know many G5 owners who had no clue until I told them that their G5 actually could not run 64-bit applications because OS-X did not support it. I actually feel kind of bad for them: I'm sure they felt a bit miffed that their promised "World's First 64-bit Personal Computer" was not actually a useful 64-bit system. I know I would be.
Actually, they're not "damn fast." And that is part of the problem. If they WERE "damn fast" and ready to ship, Microsoft's large-scale 64-bit server deployment would probably be using at least some of them.
Have you actually used any Itanium systems? I've been using prototypes, as well as new production Itanium2's, for more than two years now. They are only perf-competitive in a few areas, and that's certainly not enough to justify their lack of all backwards compatibility. The beauty of AMD64 is the ability to run 32-bit code natively in the same OS environment. It's great stuff, and it's what made the 16 to 32-bit transition so painless and such a huge success back in the Win95 days.
Never underestimate seamless backwards-compatibility.
No, it doesn't. Macs run fine in a 100% Windows infrastructure environment.
100% Windows in the IT department doesn't mean Microsoft the company only runs Windows.
Also in Seattle (or at least in neighboring Redmond)... ... a large software company has LOTS of positions open, and is absolutely hiring.
You must be qualified, and you must swear allegiance to Bill and Steve. (kidding...about the allegiance part...)
Norton Anti-Virus *is* a driver (a file-system filter driver, to be exact). It is absolutely a legitimate source of blue-screen (NT Bugcheck) crashes because if the filter driver misbehaves, it clobbers all of kernel memory. Bad. I have debugged several NAV Bugcheck crashes myself.
As far as crashing in UT2004 goes, what does the minidump tell you? I'm willing to bet that it's your display driver crashing after attempting to execute something on the stack in kernel mode. The "auto-triage" scripts run by the Microsoft Error Reporting tool should be able to pinpoint the offending driver.
XPSp2 is *designed* to BugCheck (crash with a blue screen) when pages marked with NX are attempted to execute in kernel mode. It's the only safe thing to do. In user mode, the apps are simply terminated.
Oh, that attitude will certainly help your reputation of having an unbiased viewpoint, and give you a leg up in your pursuit of "journalistic integrity" as your site puts it.
Perhaps you might consider venting your frustration as an independent game reviewer at "the industry" rather than at Microsoft? Scapegoating Microsoft on Slashdot might be popular, and might win you moderation points, but it is the industry at large which you should be protesting.
Blame Bush all you want.
But the primary reason nuclear energy will not succeed in the US at any time in the near future rests entirely on the shoulders of anti-nuke activists, who are so successful at scaremongering that the millions of uninformed individuals in this country will never permit nuke power in their vicinity.
First we need to make the anti-nuke activists irrelevant. Then we can worry about getting politicians signed up.
Err, no. AAC is a Dolby Audio codec, period. The fact that it was chosen as one of several different available audio codecs in the MPEG-4 standard is irrelevant in this context, because Apple is only using the audio codec here (it's not implementing a full MPEG-4 system).
Like many codecs chosen as interoperability standards by the MPEG-4 working group, the rights to AAC are owned by a private company, in this case Dolby Laboratories. Dolby has set up a subsidiary called "Via Licensing" to collect royalties for AAC. It charges a fee per encoder or decoder. You can read about it at their site.
In any case, Apple had nothing to do with writing the AAC codec. It licensed it from Via Licensing.
Heh. AAC isn't even an Apple codec. It's a Dolby Laboratories codec, licensed by Apple.
Regardless, it's offtopic because we're discussing video codecs...
This just shows how little you actually know about this subject. VC-1 is a compression standard only. It does not include DRM features, or any user-interaction features for that matter. This is very clear if you have been following this standardization process at all.
Oh, and by the way, what Apple codecs are you referring to that have been designed to be so superior to WMV9? Please tell. (And don't say "Quicktime" because that is a format, not a codec.)
Mods, you need to get a handle on yourselves. You are NOT supposed to mod a post down because you disagree with it!
The parent made a very legitimate point: that the Slashdot headline used some pretty ridiculous, biased terms in its description of th EETimes article, including things like "Redmond Beast" and "cheated and lied" which appear nowhere in the article itself. He was simply pointing out that the submitter was obviously trying to get a rise out of people.
If you are so insecure that you can't even allow others to share their opinions that you have to mod them down, you have other problems.
WTF? This is complete balderdash! All "in-box" drivers (i.e., included on the Windows CD) are installed to the hard drive at setup time. You don't ever need to "insert the Windows CD" anymore. That's how all of the OEMs set up systems now.
Anyone telling these poor souls that they need to go buy a full retail version of Windows just to get an in-box driver installed doesn't know ANYTHING about administering windows...
Perhaps the last time such people used Windows was in the Win98 days? Perhaps they should re-examine their biased assumptions?
You may be right about the parent's store, but this claim is just dead wrong. There are documented NTSB investigated crashes where landing gear has sheared off on landing due to crab angles that were too steep and the planes are badly damaged. The problem is, planes don't just skid to a gentle stop: the momentum, winds, uneven surfaces, etc combine to make one wing tip or the nose "clip" the ground, usually resulting in flipping the airplane entirely upside down. This virtually guarantees that larger jets will be totaled.
A FedEx Airbus A300 sheared its landing gear last year in Memphis. It did not flip over, but the ground impact (which obviously does heavy damage to the engines under the wings) triggered a jet fuel fire that burned most of the fuselage. The flight crew walked away (they actually climbed out the cockpit window on the rope ladder because of the fire). But the A300 was definitely a big insurance write-off.
To balance your decidedly un-funny characterization of republican supporters, here is my own summarization of Kerry supporters (or really, Bush Haters).
Because you're an expert on the patents both companies hold, right?
Give me a break.
If you think software patents are stupid, then just say that. Unless you've worked at both companies and know first-hand the differences between the types of patents involved, you do not have the foundation to make your claim.
The vast majority of Explorer.exe crashes are due to 3rd party plug-ins. Next time you hit a crash, debug into it and find out. You'll see what I mean.
As for open file handles, Explorer has been known to keep handles open longer than it should, but there aren't any known leaks to my knowledge. Contrast that with the handle leaks introduced by 3rd party plug-in DLLs, which are numerous.
I agree with almost all of your other points, but this statement is simply not correct. Windows backwards compatibility has always been excellent. Hell, it's one of the few systems where people expect to be able to run 20-year old 16-bit DOS binaries and scream and holler when they no longer work.
In fact, Windows backwards compatibility with x86 binaries is what most computer historians acknowledge as the vehicle for IBM-compatible PC dominance for the past decade. The fact that new versions of Windows would continue to run old binaries (without patches, without recompiles, etc) has probably done more than anything else to keep businesses buying Windows so that ancient, proprietary business software will keep running. This saves lots of money and hassle, believe it or not. I know businesses still running on 12-year old DOS software because it still works.
However, I think that today this legacy software is starting to see its demise in favor of web applications which are largely platform-agnostic. So Microsoft, IMHO, spends WAY too much time worrying about breaking old software.
I've heard it explained in many ways, but most people tell me that they're afraid of being sued. Real, for instance, sued Microsoft claiming that changes between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 "intentionally broke" their player. So now MS is paranoid.
XP, for instance, has this insane system loader that can actually PATCH broken apps before they are run. Just take a look under the registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager\AppPatches". Every key listed there gets special treatment when it is executed on your system. There are even some binary blobs that are overlayed at specific memory addresses on-the-fly.
Microsoft has an entire division in Windows that works on Application Compatibility (AppCompat). If a bug is found in a Win32 API, and the fix ends up breaking ANY vendor's app, then either an app workaround is created or the fix is backed out. I think that's horrible (backing out fixes because it might break some old program), but it amounts to putting backwards compatibility ahead of fixing bugs.
Contrast this with Macintosh, where for years people EXPECTED to have to purchase new versions of Adobe Photoshop whenever a new OS or new hardware came out. This has allowed Apple to introduce dramatic changes over the years that broke tons of apps, but improved their systems' capabilities dramatically. Ditching the 68000 for PowerPC, for one. Switching to OSX was another radical change. In both cases they tried to have a "compatibility layer" for old programs, but lots of apps still broke. The win, however, was to take a gigantic leap forward in platform capability.
Nope. MS has actively patented things for more than a decade.
A friend of mine at Microsoft worked on the implementation of long filenames on FAT16, and was awarded a patent for it (with a couple other people). He was proud of it, mainly because it involved several brilliant tricks to get the long filenames stored without altering the fat16 data structures, thereby maintaining complete backwards compatibility. To date, not a single bit of software or device has been broken by it.
But over the years, he became completely dismayed. Other companies reverse engineered and copied the exact Microsoft technique to write long filenames on Fat16; Microsoft knew about it and did nothing. Now companies everywhere make money selling devices that use this same method (i.e., flash devices like digital cameras). But his patent has never been enforced, whatsoever.
So now whenever he comes up with something that is probably patent-worthy, he just doesn't bother. After all, what's the point of protecting something you've worked hard on if that protection is never used against people who copy and steal?