* "How do you work in a team situation when all the other team members are fools and idiots?"
* "How well do you program under the influence of hard drugs?"
* "Have you ever beaten or killed a co-worker?"
* "Give me a rough estimate of the maximum dollar amount that you've stolen from each of your previous employers."
* "Do you object to bullwhips in the workplace?"
* "Emacs or vi?"
* "You have a large network of Suns being used by secretaries for word processing in FrameMaker. Which GNU packages would you install for your own entertainment, and how would you justify them later?"
* "You see a wounded puppy bleeding and whimpering on the side of the road while you're running to work to fix a downed computer that tens of users are waiting for. Do you let the puppy die?" "Why not?"
* "How much of your workday would you waste by reading news?"
* "Recite the GNU Manifesto."
* "How many clients (30% diskless, 60% dataless, 10%/var/spool/mail only) can a Sun 600MP server serve simultaneously, and what relation does this have to angels and pinheads?"
and you want to put these folks into the air? over your house?
Actually, I don't even want them driving around in my neighborhood. As far as I'm concerned, everyone who wants to drive over 25MPH should be bonded, with permanent revocation upon three strikes for driving unsafely, or any single at-fault "accident".
Drivers kill 40,000 Americans a year. With friends like this, who needs terrorists?
Penetration tester is a pretty tight niche (no pun intended). There are very few companies out there that care enough about security to even know what penetration testing is, so I suspect that there are not a lot of positions. And even if you find a gig, you might get tired of it pretty fast.
My advice to you is to try to acquire a broad array of skills. At this stage of your career, I'd devour every manual that passes in front of you that looks even remotely interesting. Also, read Dilbert--the best and most entertaining way to learn about the corporate world.
I recall as an undergrad having a lecturer mention that out in the real world we'd be lucky to manage an hour per day of real programming, the rest of our time being taken up by meetings, paperwork, etc. I was probably averaging eight per day as an undergrad, and found this jaw-dropping. Damned if he wasn't right, though. It's not necessarily going to be like you thought it would.
I doubt that BitKeeper is as good as git technically, but it's irrelevant. I remember the BitKeeper debacle and I read a lot of posts by its author. Based on that, I'd use Visual Source Safe first, and I imagine a lot of others feel the same way.
Beyond that, if you look at the git lists and pace of development, it's clearly vibrant. Without looking at the website, I'm not even sure whether BK is still in business. Your post is the first time in years I've ever heard anyone say that they're using it.
I like Lisp a lot, and I certainly prefer its syntax to Java or C (or--god help us all--C++), but I still think that it is clearly less readable than Python.
If there's a serious argument against this, it must be Lisp's macro capabilities...
If a crazy law is passed, then the problem is the crazy law, not whether something only tangentially related makes it easier to enforce.
Maybe in the ideal world, but here in the real world, often it is only the amount of effort involved that determines the difference between whether an attack on our liberties will or will not take place. Every technological advance potentially makes new attacks viable.
In recent years, it has become feasible for the GOP (or the Dems, I suppose) to do sophisticated analyses to determine on a precinct by precinct basis whether it would or would not pay off, for example, to cage or challenge voters, or otherwise take actions that would make it difficult for everyone in that precinct to vote. Since it appears that these attacks are even-handed, they tend not to draw much interest, but in fact they may well be decisive.
gcc is absolutely the best compiler in existence, for a pretty broad set of requirements. Or, putting it the other way around, you'd have to be working in a pretty specific niche for any C/C++ compiler to be better than gcc.
Likewise emacs.
Beyond that, if your project requirements are significantly affected by the ability to view, modify, and redistribute a program's source code, Free Software (and often OSS) "win" pretty much by definition.
I heard Stallman address this topic and I though he was very realistic about it. Someone from the audience asked him something like "How can I develop Free Software and have a house?" and his response was something like that it was not always easy to do the right thing and that you have to make choices.
I found his response quite sobering. You can agree or disagree with this stance, but I don't think you can say that he's trying to sell anyone a bill of goods.
Sure, I didn't mean that to exclude other factors. In my opinion, all software used to produce mathematical or scientific results needs to be Open Source (and really ought to be Free Software).
Well, actually I learned most of what I know about GUIs from having a Mac Plus for five years and reading the Apple user interface guidelines. The original Mac was so good it was practically orgasmic (although obviously the non-modern internals weren't much fun). I don't know what they've been smoking since...
As for the mouse, just give us 1984 mice, which worked great, with two buttons. How hard is that?
Why multiple invocations of the same program? Fault isolation, debugging, ability to recover memory, and most importantly so that I can rotate through all of the PDFs I'm looking at with Alt-TAB. Grrr...
Slashdot Mirror
They are delivered by electronic tokens or even by SMS to your mobile.
Right. I forgot to add
Step 1a: Add a new line-item in your budget for replacing those password keyfobs.
Step 1b: Add more 24x7 staff to man the phones when SMS and or your SecureId setup drops out.
and also
Step 4: Remind management that hard-drive encryption is virtually useless against targeted attacks (outside of a military environment).
...because everyone's going to end up writing their passwords on them and sticking them on the relevant hardware.
Step 2: Submit this to Scott Adams--he'll probably have fun with it.
Step 3: Investigate performance of various solutions. I hear good things about this ROT13...
This is actually reasonably clever...
Sounds really cool (heh heh), but I hope you tested for radon gas...
As someone incisively said:
On the contrary, given that they're going bankrupt, getting rid of their sales people seems like a brilliant decision!
Sounds like you have your priorities in order... ;-)
I first saw this in the early 90's or so. Text included, to avoid melting the server (which I don't believe is canonical anyway)
http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/Hacker/interview.php
* "How do you work in a team situation when all the other team members are fools and idiots?" /var/spool/mail only) can a Sun 600MP server serve simultaneously, and what relation does this have to angels and pinheads?"
* "How well do you program under the influence of hard drugs?"
* "Have you ever beaten or killed a co-worker?"
* "Give me a rough estimate of the maximum dollar amount that you've stolen from each of your previous employers."
* "Do you object to bullwhips in the workplace?"
* "Emacs or vi?"
* "You have a large network of Suns being used by secretaries for word processing in FrameMaker. Which GNU packages would you install for your own entertainment, and how would you justify them later?"
* "You see a wounded puppy bleeding and whimpering on the side of the road while you're running to work to fix a downed computer that tens of users are waiting for. Do you let the puppy die?" "Why not?"
* "How much of your workday would you waste by reading news?"
* "Recite the GNU Manifesto."
* "How many clients (30% diskless, 60% dataless, 10%
and you want to put these folks into the air? over your house?
Actually, I don't even want them driving around in my neighborhood. As far as I'm concerned, everyone who wants to drive over 25MPH should be bonded, with permanent revocation upon three strikes for driving unsafely, or any single at-fault "accident".
Drivers kill 40,000 Americans a year. With friends like this, who needs terrorists?
Penetration tester is a pretty tight niche (no pun intended). There are very few companies out there that care enough about security to even know what penetration testing is, so I suspect that there are not a lot of positions. And even if you find a gig, you might get tired of it pretty fast.
My advice to you is to try to acquire a broad array of skills. At this stage of your career, I'd devour every manual that passes in front of you that looks even remotely interesting. Also, read Dilbert--the best and most entertaining way to learn about the corporate world.
I recall as an undergrad having a lecturer mention that out in the real world we'd be lucky to manage an hour per day of real programming, the rest of our time being taken up by meetings, paperwork, etc. I was probably averaging eight per day as an undergrad, and found this jaw-dropping. Damned if he wasn't right, though. It's not necessarily going to be like you thought it would.
I doubt that BitKeeper is as good as git technically, but it's irrelevant. I remember the BitKeeper debacle and I read a lot of posts by its author. Based on that, I'd use Visual Source Safe first, and I imagine a lot of others feel the same way.
Beyond that, if you look at the git lists and pace of development, it's clearly vibrant. Without looking at the website, I'm not even sure whether BK is still in business. Your post is the first time in years I've ever heard anyone say that they're using it.
...if you lack the imagination to see.
I like Lisp a lot, and I certainly prefer its syntax to Java or C (or--god help us all--C++), but I still think that it is clearly less readable than Python.
If there's a serious argument against this, it must be Lisp's macro capabilities...
If a crazy law is passed, then the problem is the crazy law, not whether something only tangentially related makes it easier to enforce.
Maybe in the ideal world, but here in the real world, often it is only the amount of effort involved that determines the difference between whether an attack on our liberties will or will not take place. Every technological advance potentially makes new attacks viable.
In recent years, it has become feasible for the GOP (or the Dems, I suppose) to do sophisticated analyses to determine on a precinct by precinct basis whether it would or would not pay off, for example, to cage or challenge voters, or otherwise take actions that would make it difficult for everyone in that precinct to vote. Since it appears that these attacks are even-handed, they tend not to draw much interest, but in fact they may well be decisive.
It's not "perfect", but compared to the 40+ other languages I've used, it seems to be at or near the top, in terms of human readability.
(Lisp has obvious advantages for machine readability, but it's quite rare that this is useful.)
Good grief! That has to be the most unreadable blob of code I've ever seen...
Here's a taste of a relatively readable part:
Cell[CellGroupData[{
Cell["\<\ :=
KnightTour[rows_Integer, columns_Integer, start_List, end_List:{}, \
HidePaths_Integer:0]
Module[{sR = rows+1, sC = columns+1, i = 0, j = 0, path, endMoves, tree = \
{0}, SNew, KnightMoves, FeasibleMoves, area},
path = If[IntegerQ[start[[1]]], {start}, start]; := KnightMoves[lis] = Complement[
\t
\tendMoves = If[end != {}, If[IntegerQ[end[[1]]],{end},end], {}];
\t
\t area = (rows*columns) - Length[endMoves];
\t
KnightMoves[lis_List]
Cases[ Map[ lis +#&, \
{{1,2},{1,-2},{-1,2},{-1,-2},{2,1},{2,-1},{-2,1},{-2,-1}}], {x_/;0<x<sR, \
y_/;0<y<sC}], endMoves];
Yawn.
A good language needs to occasionally shed unneeded features, or it will ossify into an unusable mess. (This is why Perl is dying.)
seriously... :-(
gcc is absolutely the best compiler in existence, for a pretty broad set of requirements. Or, putting it the other way around, you'd have to be working in a pretty specific niche for any C/C++ compiler to be better than gcc.
Likewise emacs.
Beyond that, if your project requirements are significantly affected by the ability to view, modify, and redistribute a program's source code, Free Software (and often OSS) "win" pretty much by definition.
I heard Stallman address this topic and I though he was very realistic about it. Someone from the audience asked him something like "How can I develop Free Software and have a house?" and his response was something like that it was not always easy to do the right thing and that you have to make choices.
I found his response quite sobering. You can agree or disagree with this stance, but I don't think you can say that he's trying to sell anyone a bill of goods.
Just because your software is open source doesn't mean that you get to sit on your duff and collect money off your paid extensions in perpituity.
True--that's a privilege reserved for Disney and the recording industry.
It's actually $2495 for a full professional license. (oops)
Sure, I didn't mean that to exclude other factors. In my opinion, all software used to produce mathematical or scientific results needs to be Open Source (and really ought to be Free Software).
does it matter that it's open source or not?
It does if you don't have $2400 to spend on a copy of Mathematica.
Well, actually I learned most of what I know about GUIs from having a Mac Plus for five years and reading the Apple user interface guidelines. The original Mac was so good it was practically orgasmic (although obviously the non-modern internals weren't much fun). I don't know what they've been smoking since...
As for the mouse, just give us 1984 mice, which worked great, with two buttons. How hard is that?
Why multiple invocations of the same program? Fault isolation, debugging, ability to recover memory, and most importantly so that I can rotate through all of the PDFs I'm looking at with Alt-TAB. Grrr...