All I can say is that you don't seem to have bought a computer in the last 10 years. Every OEM computer i've bought in the last 10 years has come with a recovery partition, as well as a utility to burn a recovery CD/DVD. Most of your arguments only apply if you built it yourself, in which case you have all the skills necessary to solve the problem (unless you just want to complain.. waaaahh.. look how difficult windows is)
You're a complete moron if you have to buy a new copy of windows. That's all there is to it.
Linux has it's issues as well, and backup files often go in other places than home./var,/opt,/usr/local.. stuff can be scattered all over the place.
And your last argument is that Linux is better because it doesn't have commercial software? That's because it just doesn't exist. You can't get Photoshop for Linux, or Dreamweaver, or whatever.. you have to put up with crappy, inferior software that just doesn't do what you need it to do, or pray to god it works under wine.
Microsoft has been making tablets for more than 10 years. They're not "missing out" on them. If you specifically mean "tablet style, touch based mobile devices" then that's a different story.
Your timeline is a bit skewed as well. IE8 was released in 2009, IE7 in 2007. The iPad was released in April of 2010. Nearly a year after IE8 was released.
Hell, the first version of chrome to support any HTML5 was nearly 6 months AFTER IE8 was released.
So please, spare us the "Microsoft was scared of HTML5 and the ipad when they were developing IE8" crap, because the iPad didn't exist, and HTML5, though the first draft was published in 2008 didn't really gain any momentum until late 2009, early 2010.
Silverlight isn't going anywhere. It might be renamed, but the technology is basically just a subset of WPF (not a true subset, there is some stuff that's silverlight only). It makes little sense to ditch silverlight and keep wpf, since 90% of silverlight comes from WPF.
Obvious? How so? Metro is only a subsystem of Windows 8, and it won't make much sense for desktop scenarios. It's great for tablets.
Personally, I don't expect Metro to take off any more than WPF or Silverlight has. They are not throwing anyone under a bus, since standard windows apps continue to work just fine.
#6 doesn't sound legal to me. Your salary is based on either hourly, or salaried pay. You work your hours, you get your pay, regardless of how well they think you did your job.
Your salaries sound bizarrely low as well. I live in the midwest, with low cost of living, and a guy straight out of college (if he can find work) gets at least 45k, and senior guys get 75-100k. I can't imagine salaries are that low there, especially so close to LA.
If your bank account is in the US, you're a US Citizen, and you have a US Residence, then there are no pay issues, even if you're living in another country.
And it is actually cheaper (and faster) to fly from Costa Rica to Miami than from LA to Miami, So depending on where the job is, and where you are, that's not necessarily an issue.
No. In fact, there are still a lot of pissed off people because Sun said they were going to standardize it.. they created working groups and lots of people invested a ton of time into it.. then at the last minute Sun pulled out and changed their mind. They did the same thing with the ISO as well.
While certainly, there are a large number of questions that could easily be solved by googling, many questions are more subtle or deal with issues that are not well documented.
Particularly in technologies that change quickly, there is a huge need for this kind of site. One problem with googling information that changes quickly (for example, Linux) is that information that's out there quickly gets out of date, and people spend hours trying to solve their problems with inaccurate how-to's and man pages. Asking a question gets you more up-to-date information from people that know what they're doing, and it becomes a self-documenting system.
StackOverflow has become the primary location to go to search for programming issues you're dealing with, because unlike google, it doesn't contain extraneous results, spam, and things non-programming related.
That assumes that the TIOBE index is accurate, and I have no strong belief that it is. I know that in my area, there are not 3x as many Java jobs as there are C# jobs. In fact, Java has been losing a lot of ground since the Oracle takeover.
What's more, there's a lot of difference between an Enterprise Java developer, and a mobile Java developer. It'a almost completely different skill sets.
And certainly, C has lost a lot of popularity in the workplace. It's primarily only used in Unix and Embedded environments these days.
Do some searches on Dice. If you search for C (it includes C++ in the results) you get roughly the same results as Java, but most of the results say C/C++, so it's hard to know just how much C is actually used.
However, the biggest disparity is that JavaScript is used by a lot of novices with very little programming background. ie, they are not professional programmers.
Then ask them to demonstrate. Don't give them a problem and not tell them what you're looking for, and then mark it against them if they don't give you what you want.
Basically, you're doing the same thing as a customer that doesn't give a programmer their real requirements. It's unfair, and it makes you a deuche.
You have to realize that people come from very different backgrounds. And what they've been working on for the last few years colors how they will implement given solutions. Even if they know what recursion is, if they haven't need to use recursion in a long time it may not be their first thought.
You're letting the fact that you deal with certain problems all the time color your judgement and assume that they should have been dealing with those problems all the time as well.
See, that's the problem right there. Instead of *ASKING* the guy what recursion is, and why and where you might use it... Instead, you give him a cryptic problem that might be solved using recursion, then judging him if he doesn't use it.
That's the most retarded and downright sadistic way of finding out if someone knows something. Just farking ask them.
Ask them about concepts that only a seasoned developer would know much about. Ask them about problems they might encounter with a specific approach. Don't make up puzzles and then look down on them when they don't produce the answer you were looking for.
I think the person that doesn't get something here is you. You don't understand that interviewing requres a different mindset from problem solving. When someone goes to an interview, they've prepared themselves to be interviewed. They're prepared to talk about their history, how they can contribute to the company, why they should be hired.
Many, if not most coders require time to get their head in problem solving mode, and the stress of an on the spot, randomly selected problem does nothing to help with that.
Yes, you will certainly find some people that can do it. But you guys are the ones that complain that out of 100 candidates you only find 3 or 4 potentials.
How hard is it for you to understand that an interview is *NOT* an environment that is conducive to problem solving?
I would agree that being able to do what you suggest is a valuable skill. But it is not a skill that defines a competant programmer. Lots of people can have that skill and be terrible programmers (i've seen them, they typically give great presentations on a given technology, but they can't ship a real product to save their lives).
You are prizing a communication skill, and somehow thinking it translates to competancy as a developer. Certainly, communication skills are very important. But to me, I can live with a guy that can't do a whiteboard test if he delivers quality code on time.
Apparently, you would rather have sloppy developers that never make a deadline, so long as they can work through a problem on a whiteboard.
I would count myself blessed to fail one of your interviews.
I said nothing about having an IDE in front of you. Where exactly did you jump to that conclusion from?
I said that lots of people simply shut down when put on the spot like that. I consider myself a pretty good public speaker, when i've had preperation on the topic and the ability to consult my notes. But having a random puzzle thrown at me, then told to figure it out on a white board in front of people that are doing nothing but judging your every move still makes me lock up. In one such interview, I couldn't even remeber the name of my high school when asked.
So please don't act like this should be a breeze for anyone that knows what they're doing. You're being ridiculous.
I think it would be more than occasionally. I'd hazard that as many as 50% of compentant candidates would fail a whiteboard test. That's entirely based on my experience with other developers and no way an empiracal fact, but I think it's a lot higher than you might realize... I mean, by definition, if they fail your test, you won't ever know how good or bad they really are.
You really underestimate how poorly people do when put in a spotlight. Critical thinking stops. Ability to remember evaporates. Things you can otherwise do without even thinking become a challenge. And Lots and Lots and Lots of brilliant people are like that.
Not really. People perform differently under different conditions. Some people get stage fright, and have trouble remember things when put on the spot like that.
Whiteboard tests do absolutely nothing to help you know if someone will be a good hire. All it does is test for good whiteboard skills.
I don't really think MS is doing that much anymore. The reason? Most attempts to convert to Linux have failed, some quite spectacularly. And some, such as Munich are so far over budget and late that it's tempting to call them failures, even if they succeed.
The fact is, "switching to linux" is not typically a cost savings in the short term, and if you have no money to do the conversion then it's going to be a failure.
There's no profit in curing cancer. It's much more profitable to treat the symptoms. Does that mean we shouldn't invest tax dollars to research a cure?
Remember that the space program also fueld the technology boom of the 60's and 70's. Who's to say if we would have invented the electronic computer in the 50's if we didn't need missles. Would the microchip have been invented? Even aircraft technology had to be advanced to help with the space program.
And of course think of the Bra's. Playtex was a major vendor of space suit technology, that eventually lead to new materials that now make boobies much more enticing.
OOXML and ODF have differnt purposes. OOXML codifies the existing microsoft office formats in an XML container. This is largely for legacy purposes as there's basically a 1:1 mapping of existing documents to OOXML.
ODF is an attempt to create an ideal document format.
To put it simply, converting.doc to.docx requires reformatting. Converting.doc to ODF requires translation, and no translation is ever 1:1
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is that you don't seem to have bought a computer in the last 10 years. Every OEM computer i've bought in the last 10 years has come with a recovery partition, as well as a utility to burn a recovery CD/DVD. Most of your arguments only apply if you built it yourself, in which case you have all the skills necessary to solve the problem (unless you just want to complain.. waaaahh.. look how difficult windows is)
You're a complete moron if you have to buy a new copy of windows. That's all there is to it.
Linux has it's issues as well, and backup files often go in other places than home. /var, /opt, /usr/local.. stuff can be scattered all over the place.
And your last argument is that Linux is better because it doesn't have commercial software? That's because it just doesn't exist. You can't get Photoshop for Linux, or Dreamweaver, or whatever.. you have to put up with crappy, inferior software that just doesn't do what you need it to do, or pray to god it works under wine.
Microsoft has been making tablets for more than 10 years. They're not "missing out" on them. If you specifically mean "tablet style, touch based mobile devices" then that's a different story.
Your timeline is a bit skewed as well. IE8 was released in 2009, IE7 in 2007. The iPad was released in April of 2010. Nearly a year after IE8 was released.
Hell, the first version of chrome to support any HTML5 was nearly 6 months AFTER IE8 was released.
So please, spare us the "Microsoft was scared of HTML5 and the ipad when they were developing IE8" crap, because the iPad didn't exist, and HTML5, though the first draft was published in 2008 didn't really gain any momentum until late 2009, early 2010.
Silverlight isn't going anywhere. It might be renamed, but the technology is basically just a subset of WPF (not a true subset, there is some stuff that's silverlight only). It makes little sense to ditch silverlight and keep wpf, since 90% of silverlight comes from WPF.
Silverlight is dead, long live Silverlight.
Obvious? How so? Metro is only a subsystem of Windows 8, and it won't make much sense for desktop scenarios. It's great for tablets.
Personally, I don't expect Metro to take off any more than WPF or Silverlight has. They are not throwing anyone under a bus, since standard windows apps continue to work just fine.
#6 doesn't sound legal to me. Your salary is based on either hourly, or salaried pay. You work your hours, you get your pay, regardless of how well they think you did your job.
Your salaries sound bizarrely low as well. I live in the midwest, with low cost of living, and a guy straight out of college (if he can find work) gets at least 45k, and senior guys get 75-100k. I can't imagine salaries are that low there, especially so close to LA.
If your bank account is in the US, you're a US Citizen, and you have a US Residence, then there are no pay issues, even if you're living in another country.
And it is actually cheaper (and faster) to fly from Costa Rica to Miami than from LA to Miami, So depending on where the job is, and where you are, that's not necessarily an issue.
No. In fact, there are still a lot of pissed off people because Sun said they were going to standardize it.. they created working groups and lots of people invested a ton of time into it.. then at the last minute Sun pulled out and changed their mind. They did the same thing with the ISO as well.
While certainly, there are a large number of questions that could easily be solved by googling, many questions are more subtle or deal with issues that are not well documented.
Particularly in technologies that change quickly, there is a huge need for this kind of site. One problem with googling information that changes quickly (for example, Linux) is that information that's out there quickly gets out of date, and people spend hours trying to solve their problems with inaccurate how-to's and man pages. Asking a question gets you more up-to-date information from people that know what they're doing, and it becomes a self-documenting system.
StackOverflow has become the primary location to go to search for programming issues you're dealing with, because unlike google, it doesn't contain extraneous results, spam, and things non-programming related.
That assumes that the TIOBE index is accurate, and I have no strong belief that it is. I know that in my area, there are not 3x as many Java jobs as there are C# jobs. In fact, Java has been losing a lot of ground since the Oracle takeover.
What's more, there's a lot of difference between an Enterprise Java developer, and a mobile Java developer. It'a almost completely different skill sets.
And certainly, C has lost a lot of popularity in the workplace. It's primarily only used in Unix and Embedded environments these days.
Do some searches on Dice. If you search for C (it includes C++ in the results) you get roughly the same results as Java, but most of the results say C/C++, so it's hard to know just how much C is actually used.
However, the biggest disparity is that JavaScript is used by a lot of novices with very little programming background. ie, they are not professional programmers.
Yeah, all 3 of them? ;)
(yes, I know arduino is relatively popular, but it's popular in a relatively unpopular sub-culture)
Great logic. Except that wasn't my post. That was someone else.
Then ask them to demonstrate. Don't give them a problem and not tell them what you're looking for, and then mark it against them if they don't give you what you want.
Basically, you're doing the same thing as a customer that doesn't give a programmer their real requirements. It's unfair, and it makes you a deuche.
You have to realize that people come from very different backgrounds. And what they've been working on for the last few years colors how they will implement given solutions. Even if they know what recursion is, if they haven't need to use recursion in a long time it may not be their first thought.
You're letting the fact that you deal with certain problems all the time color your judgement and assume that they should have been dealing with those problems all the time as well.
See, that's the problem right there. Instead of *ASKING* the guy what recursion is, and why and where you might use it... Instead, you give him a cryptic problem that might be solved using recursion, then judging him if he doesn't use it.
That's the most retarded and downright sadistic way of finding out if someone knows something. Just farking ask them.
Ask them about concepts that only a seasoned developer would know much about. Ask them about problems they might encounter with a specific approach. Don't make up puzzles and then look down on them when they don't produce the answer you were looking for.
I think the person that doesn't get something here is you. You don't understand that interviewing requres a different mindset from problem solving. When someone goes to an interview, they've prepared themselves to be interviewed. They're prepared to talk about their history, how they can contribute to the company, why they should be hired.
Many, if not most coders require time to get their head in problem solving mode, and the stress of an on the spot, randomly selected problem does nothing to help with that.
Yes, you will certainly find some people that can do it. But you guys are the ones that complain that out of 100 candidates you only find 3 or 4 potentials.
How hard is it for you to understand that an interview is *NOT* an environment that is conducive to problem solving?
I would agree that being able to do what you suggest is a valuable skill. But it is not a skill that defines a competant programmer. Lots of people can have that skill and be terrible programmers (i've seen them, they typically give great presentations on a given technology, but they can't ship a real product to save their lives).
You are prizing a communication skill, and somehow thinking it translates to competancy as a developer. Certainly, communication skills are very important. But to me, I can live with a guy that can't do a whiteboard test if he delivers quality code on time.
Apparently, you would rather have sloppy developers that never make a deadline, so long as they can work through a problem on a whiteboard.
I would count myself blessed to fail one of your interviews.
I said nothing about having an IDE in front of you. Where exactly did you jump to that conclusion from?
I said that lots of people simply shut down when put on the spot like that. I consider myself a pretty good public speaker, when i've had preperation on the topic and the ability to consult my notes. But having a random puzzle thrown at me, then told to figure it out on a white board in front of people that are doing nothing but judging your every move still makes me lock up. In one such interview, I couldn't even remeber the name of my high school when asked.
So please don't act like this should be a breeze for anyone that knows what they're doing. You're being ridiculous.
I think it would be more than occasionally. I'd hazard that as many as 50% of compentant candidates would fail a whiteboard test. That's entirely based on my experience with other developers and no way an empiracal fact, but I think it's a lot higher than you might realize... I mean, by definition, if they fail your test, you won't ever know how good or bad they really are.
You really underestimate how poorly people do when put in a spotlight. Critical thinking stops. Ability to remember evaporates. Things you can otherwise do without even thinking become a challenge. And Lots and Lots and Lots of brilliant people are like that.
Not really. People perform differently under different conditions. Some people get stage fright, and have trouble remember things when put on the spot like that.
Whiteboard tests do absolutely nothing to help you know if someone will be a good hire. All it does is test for good whiteboard skills.
I don't really think MS is doing that much anymore. The reason? Most attempts to convert to Linux have failed, some quite spectacularly. And some, such as Munich are so far over budget and late that it's tempting to call them failures, even if they succeed.
The fact is, "switching to linux" is not typically a cost savings in the short term, and if you have no money to do the conversion then it's going to be a failure.
There's no profit in curing cancer. It's much more profitable to treat the symptoms. Does that mean we shouldn't invest tax dollars to research a cure?
There's nothing the private sector can't do... Unless there's no profit in it. Then it's amazing what they can't do.
Remember that the space program also fueld the technology boom of the 60's and 70's. Who's to say if we would have invented the electronic computer in the 50's if we didn't need missles. Would the microchip have been invented? Even aircraft technology had to be advanced to help with the space program.
And of course think of the Bra's. Playtex was a major vendor of space suit technology, that eventually lead to new materials that now make boobies much more enticing.
The address bar *DOES* belong to the page. Switch tabs, and you see that the location in the address bar changes.
The address bar contains, for example, the certificate information for the current page, so you can be sure it's not a phishing site.
Also, in chrome, the tab *IS* the titlebar for the page, so it's not "above the tab". Chrome has no titlebar for the app itself.
I doubt Woz is a billionaire. I think he's donated a lot of his money to charity.
OOXML and ODF have differnt purposes. OOXML codifies the existing microsoft office formats in an XML container. This is largely for legacy purposes as there's basically a 1:1 mapping of existing documents to OOXML.
ODF is an attempt to create an ideal document format.
To put it simply, converting .doc to .docx requires reformatting. Converting .doc to ODF requires translation, and no translation is ever 1:1