Perhaps a better example would be stream processing. Replacing CR+LF with LF is about the simplest useful application I've ever written, but does actually use a common required technique. Perhaps that would be a better test.
The Scrapheap Challenge (i.e. junkyard wars) spin off did a human powered drag race.
There was a very nice device that used a rowing action. Seems like a clever idea. Allowed the whole body to be used for powering it rather than just the legs.
Smarter software could detect "heads" automatically without any additional hardware.
Excellent comment. Just want to mention on this point that face tracking technology is progressing, and there are already some decent demos of exactly that sort of system Here's an example. Current gen consoles certainly have the horsepower to do this.
You lose the colour of the original picture anyway, so you might as well just put a red or green filter on the projector. Red/green filters are a terrible technology that dates back to the 1920's anyway. Polarized are much better, and you can use the same technique; just apply a polarized filter.
The screen is too small to really give the immersive effect that you'd need, and it fails to take into account head movement, and really only works for fairly short distances. The brain uses other tricks to estimate distance after this amount. And it doesn't look real. It looks 3D, but it looks like folded cardboard. There's simply no gameplay improvement to be had.
Yes, but you should be able to assume that anyone with experience will either know how to do most of those or will be able to learn in a few days.
Ask them a few questions about security and shell scripting certainly, but I'd assume that anyone who knows that sort of thing doesn't need to be tested on basic configuration work.
Firstly, nobody would ever write a line of code like that. Secondly, it's just a bit of C trivia. Knowing when the ++ operator pre and post increments is rarely going to matter. If it does cause a problem then a decent programmer will grab a debugger and find out why his value isn't what he was expecting.
If you want to hire a C programmer, you presumably either want to know that they can handle efficiency or algorithms. You ask them to explain how typical things can be optimised or about the type of algorithm that you're interested in.
Do you think a shorter battery life and an extra 380g to carry is a comparable problem to having to always have a working internet connection, having to spend an hour on the phone when things go wrong, and to lose any resale value? Seems the latter is a bigger problem.
But really - damaged media has always been a reason to have to buy another copy. It's just one of those things. Even applies to books with ripped pages. The wear and tear on a disc should be fine for several years worth of use. They're read by light.
Well, there's the point. If I need to install it 101 times, why should they stop me? There shouldn't be a limit. I can get hold of a pirated copy really quite easily. What this does do is prevent resale. I can get a copy of C&C3 quite easily off ebay. EA aren't going to make a penny from this sale. This is the point. This reduces the value to the customer. It removes the customer's ownership.
Having to have a CD in the drive is a minor inconvenience. Easily solved (put the CD in the drive. any legitimate user will have one).
Having to call EA to persuade them to let you install the game a sixth time is a potential inconvenience. EA may not exist in a year or two. I might still want to play the game if EA doesn't exist! We're still leasing. Just because we're leasing on more generous terms doesn't mean we're getting a better deal. They've clobbered any potential resale value.
If piracy is low, EA will assume this works and use this scheme every time.
Printer breaks (why, we don't know; it may not even be broken for all we know) and customer comes back and expects store to fix his printer, knowing full well that this is not going to happen because, as I said earlier, he chose to not buy the extended warranty. If it's only 5 months then the manufacturer warranty should still stand and that is his only recourse. It is the customer's fault.
Assuming it is actually is broken, it isn't the customer's fault. It's the shop's fault for selling him something faulty. The shop may not have known it was faulty but they are aware now, so should fix it. The customer didn't break it. If the manufacturer is to blame then it's up to the shop to deal with the manufacturer. Not the customer. If the problem is with one of the parts from the manufacturer's supplier, then it's up to the manufacturer to deal with their supplier, and so on up the chain. The shop represented a product they sold as reasonable quality (this should be implicit).
Then, to top it off, the customer insults his sales rep, and from what OP's post entails, he didn't even have anything to do with the original sale! This customer deserves to be flat out banned from the store. He knew, or at the very least should have known, exactly what situation he was putting himself in by choosing not to buy a warranty, and yet he comes back and is unbelievably rude to an employee that he has never even met before.
He was rude to the employee after the employee tried to make money from him rather than solve the problem. His printer is broken. Fix the problem! Once the problem is fixed, then you can try to sell him something.
Do you really expect an expensive item to fail after 5 months?
I don't know if you live in some fantasy world where everything has perfect justice or something, and scarcity of resources is just not a problem so that any store can just replace $500 printers on a whim, but that's not the world I live in, or the rest of the planet.
They shift hundreds of these printers. Each one nests them a tidy profit. If a few of them are going to go wrong and they need to replace them then they should take that into account when setting the price. If too many of them go wrong, then perhaps they should consider whether to stock that item.
Although I will say I'm actually rather confused about the whole situation. The customer bought something from a shop, and took it back to a completely different shop when it broke. That doesn't really make sense.
No, I'm going to bitch at the company that made the decision to screw me over based on a perceived problem caused by someone else.
Nobody forced them to use this method. They had a choice. They could have used a less invasive means, mpore consumer friendly means of copy protection.
If it's illegal for towns to lay their own fibre and big telcos are unwilling, then surely there's a business opportunity here.
I'm sure lots of private investors would be happy to stump up the initial cost with an agreement to quality of service and permitted prices to recoup their investment. The ROI and startup costs should be pretty predictable by now. Slightly more expensive for the town but at least they get their network without legal hassles.
The store sold him a faulty product! Seriouly - anything so flimsy that it only lasts 5 months clearly had something wrong with it when it was made. I'd expect a representative for the store that sold it to fix this problem. Then it's up to them to take it up with the manufacturer.
So someone bought a piece of equipment, and expected it to last more than 5 months. You tell him that if he wants a printer to have such an epic lifetime he needs to stump up some extra cash, and use the weaselly "just doing my job" defence to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions.
Superstition: I did X and Y happens. Therefore X causes Y. If Y is bad, I should avoid X. If Y is good try X every time.
Science: I did X and Y happens. Let's try X as many times as possible. Let's try not doing X as many times as possible. See how many times Y happens.
Sometimes superstition works. Statistically it will give better than average odds since it will include such superstitions as "last time I ate cheese I was ill so I'd better avoid it". Even evolution can be said to be superstitious. If I'm a mutant with an extra kidney I could still get hit by a bus tomorrow and that gene is removed from the gene pool even though it most likely had nothing to do with my death.
Still, science as dogmatic superstition is wrong. It's a way of testing superstition.
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Perhaps a better example would be stream processing. Replacing CR+LF with LF is about the simplest useful application I've ever written, but does actually use a common required technique. Perhaps that would be a better test.
I wasn't talking about McCain. I was talking about Obama.
A lack of content from his main rival doesn't actually increase the amount of content from him.
I've always been impressed by Obama's ability to give a speech, and not actually say anything.
It makes him very popular. It's all vaguely positive. There's very little for anyone to actually disagree with.
The Scrapheap Challenge (i.e. junkyard wars) spin off did a human powered drag race.
There was a very nice device that used a rowing action. Seems like a clever idea. Allowed the whole body to be used for powering it rather than just the legs.
Smarter software could detect "heads" automatically without any additional hardware.
Excellent comment. Just want to mention on this point that face tracking technology is progressing, and there are already some decent demos of exactly that sort of system Here's an example. Current gen consoles certainly have the horsepower to do this.
You lose the colour of the original picture anyway, so you might as well just put a red or green filter on the projector. Red/green filters are a terrible technology that dates back to the 1920's anyway. Polarized are much better, and you can use the same technique; just apply a polarized filter.
The screen is too small to really give the immersive effect that you'd need, and it fails to take into account head movement, and really only works for fairly short distances. The brain uses other tricks to estimate distance after this amount. And it doesn't look real. It looks 3D, but it looks like folded cardboard. There's simply no gameplay improvement to be had.
True. I agree that in isolation it only really makes a difference to C++, and even then the difference is trivial.
Not true. There are cases where it will matter.
while(--i){/*dostuff*/} is different from while(i--){/*dostuff*/}. The latter will process the loop for i = 0.
Yes, but you should be able to assume that anyone with experience will either know how to do most of those or will be able to learn in a few days.
Ask them a few questions about security and shell scripting certainly, but I'd assume that anyone who knows that sort of thing doesn't need to be tested on basic configuration work.
That's the sort of question I hate.
Firstly, nobody would ever write a line of code like that. Secondly, it's just a bit of C trivia. Knowing when the ++ operator pre and post increments is rarely going to matter. If it does cause a problem then a decent programmer will grab a debugger and find out why his value isn't what he was expecting.
If you want to hire a C programmer, you presumably either want to know that they can handle efficiency or algorithms. You ask them to explain how typical things can be optimised or about the type of algorithm that you're interested in.
Do you think a shorter battery life and an extra 380g to carry is a comparable problem to having to always have a working internet connection, having to spend an hour on the phone when things go wrong, and to lose any resale value? Seems the latter is a bigger problem.
Try a little thing called a "CD folder". CD's don't take up a lot of space.
What are you doing to your discs!?
But really - damaged media has always been a reason to have to buy another copy. It's just one of those things. Even applies to books with ripped pages. The wear and tear on a disc should be fine for several years worth of use. They're read by light.
what's the right number? 100?
Well, there's the point. If I need to install it 101 times, why should they stop me? There shouldn't be a limit. I can get hold of a pirated copy really quite easily. What this does do is prevent resale. I can get a copy of C&C3 quite easily off ebay. EA aren't going to make a penny from this sale. This is the point. This reduces the value to the customer. It removes the customer's ownership.
Having to have a CD in the drive is a minor inconvenience. Easily solved (put the CD in the drive. any legitimate user will have one).
Having to call EA to persuade them to let you install the game a sixth time is a potential inconvenience. EA may not exist in a year or two. I might still want to play the game if EA doesn't exist! We're still leasing. Just because we're leasing on more generous terms doesn't mean we're getting a better deal. They've clobbered any potential resale value.
If piracy is low, EA will assume this works and use this scheme every time.
Pirate this as well!
You don't need to become a software genius. You need to understand the subdomain of the field relevant to the project. Much less work.
This project would be a good way to learn.
It doesn't actually take that long to learn if you understand the fundamentals (i.e. loops, conditions, arrays, and possibly classes).
Printer breaks (why, we don't know; it may not even be broken for all we know) and customer comes back and expects store to fix his printer, knowing full well that this is not going to happen because, as I said earlier, he chose to not buy the extended warranty. If it's only 5 months then the manufacturer warranty should still stand and that is his only recourse. It is the customer's fault.
Assuming it is actually is broken, it isn't the customer's fault. It's the shop's fault for selling him something faulty. The shop may not have known it was faulty but they are aware now, so should fix it. The customer didn't break it. If the manufacturer is to blame then it's up to the shop to deal with the manufacturer. Not the customer. If the problem is with one of the parts from the manufacturer's supplier, then it's up to the manufacturer to deal with their supplier, and so on up the chain. The shop represented a product they sold as reasonable quality (this should be implicit).
Then, to top it off, the customer insults his sales rep, and from what OP's post entails, he didn't even have anything to do with the original sale! This customer deserves to be flat out banned from the store. He knew, or at the very least should have known, exactly what situation he was putting himself in by choosing not to buy a warranty, and yet he comes back and is unbelievably rude to an employee that he has never even met before.
He was rude to the employee after the employee tried to make money from him rather than solve the problem. His printer is broken. Fix the problem! Once the problem is fixed, then you can try to sell him something. Do you really expect an expensive item to fail after 5 months?
I don't know if you live in some fantasy world where everything has perfect justice or something, and scarcity of resources is just not a problem so that any store can just replace $500 printers on a whim, but that's not the world I live in, or the rest of the planet.
They shift hundreds of these printers. Each one nests them a tidy profit. If a few of them are going to go wrong and they need to replace them then they should take that into account when setting the price. If too many of them go wrong, then perhaps they should consider whether to stock that item.
Although I will say I'm actually rather confused about the whole situation. The customer bought something from a shop, and took it back to a completely different shop when it broke. That doesn't really make sense.
No, I'm going to bitch at the company that made the decision to screw me over based on a perceived problem caused by someone else.
Nobody forced them to use this method. They had a choice. They could have used a less invasive means, mpore consumer friendly means of copy protection.
If it's illegal for towns to lay their own fibre and big telcos are unwilling, then surely there's a business opportunity here.
I'm sure lots of private investors would be happy to stump up the initial cost with an agreement to quality of service and permitted prices to recoup their investment. The ROI and startup costs should be pretty predictable by now. Slightly more expensive for the town but at least they get their network without legal hassles.
The store sold him a faulty product! Seriouly - anything so flimsy that it only lasts 5 months clearly had something wrong with it when it was made. I'd expect a representative for the store that sold it to fix this problem. Then it's up to them to take it up with the manufacturer.
He gets to be an ass when the sales guy doesn't offer to fix it and instead tries to use it as a marketing opportunity.
So someone bought a piece of equipment, and expected it to last more than 5 months. You tell him that if he wants a printer to have such an epic lifetime he needs to stump up some extra cash, and use the weaselly "just doing my job" defence to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions.
I can see why he was upset.
Superstition: I did X and Y happens. Therefore X causes Y. If Y is bad, I should avoid X. If Y is good try X every time.
Science: I did X and Y happens. Let's try X as many times as possible. Let's try not doing X as many times as possible. See how many times Y happens.
Sometimes superstition works. Statistically it will give better than average odds since it will include such superstitions as "last time I ate cheese I was ill so I'd better avoid it". Even evolution can be said to be superstitious. If I'm a mutant with an extra kidney I could still get hit by a bus tomorrow and that gene is removed from the gene pool even though it most likely had nothing to do with my death.
Still, science as dogmatic superstition is wrong. It's a way of testing superstition.