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User: jameslore

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Comments · 94

  1. Re:Radicalization on Gaza's Only Power Plant Knocked Offline · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they stopped building settlements; stopped dissecting the West Bank for the settler's safety and actually acted like they were interested in a two state solution, that'd be pretty good.

    Few sane people are criticising Israel's right and necessity to defend its citizens (although the way they're going about it is certainly fair game) - where it appears most critics (including myself) have a problem is in that subset of Israelis who oppose peace and (especially through the settlements) do everything possible to obstruct it - and have been controlling the government in recent years. Hamas's behaviour is indefensible. But unprovoked it is not, and for the Israeli government to play the innocent in this is just taking the piss.

    TL;DR As history proves, violence without a political dimension only begets more violence.

  2. Re:Advertisers of the world unite on Google Accused of Bypassing Safari's Privacy Controls · · Score: 1

    You can indeed. It's on the Privacy tab in Safari preferences on the Mac, and the Privacy section of Safari preferences on iOS.

    Personally, I've no objection as long as I'm *asked* to opt-in. If I'm not, the default should be opt-out.

  3. Advertisers of the world unite on Google Accused of Bypassing Safari's Privacy Controls · · Score: 3, Insightful

    John Battelle's main thrust seems to be that Apple shouldn't be blocking advertisers from tracking users. Further, that he angry that Apple opted him out by default, rather than forcing him to opt-in to privacy.

    Regardless of your views on the evil of (Apple|Google|whoever) this seems an odd argument. Unless you're an advertiser, of course.

  4. Re:From the other side on British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market · · Score: 1

    On the employment law, there's nothing concrete I'm aware of. But there are two reasons we want to avoid the issue anyway - one is that we've had some great people before who don't do a lot outside of work, but are excellent here. And there's the cover-one's-arse thing ofc :-)

    I should add, mind, that this only relates to having such work as an entry gate. I'm definitely all in favour of candidates with such things on the side and love nothing more than to hear about them.

  5. Re:From the other side on British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market · · Score: 1

    I'm a bit confused here, so I'll labour the point as you may be right and our candidates may be also confused, which would indeed defeat the purpose. So I'll try explaining it in a similar manner to how to give it to candidates and if you still see it as a complex task then we may need to do some work on our framing.

    Bear in mind this is a similar question to the one we give, not the same. But we use a game board for the chosen game to demonstrate the rules, especially given many of our candidates aren't British.

    Given the rules of Battleships, implement fireAt(x: Int, y: Int): Boolean so that, when given board x, the method when called alternately by each player will return true if a hit was made and false if a miss was the result.

    Hence a game would go along the lines of:

    Player 1 - fireAt(3, 3) = false
    Player 2 - fireAt(4, 5) = true
    Player 1 - fireAt(2, 3) = false

    And so on.

    So this problem can really be solved with an array check + update. Plus it's nicely extendable - if people nail it immediately, you could work on a win condition for instance. And it really has nothing whatsoever to do with actually playing the game.

  6. Re:From the other side on British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market · · Score: 1

    Sorry, I obviously didn't state this clearly enough. We're interested in an impl for the method, not a client. We're not interested in a game-playing algorithm. We're aiming for something so simple it can be implemented using an array.

    There are two puzzles we actually use, and we chose them via brainstorming and then getting a few people here to try them themselves. We're very definitely not trying to solve something seen before - rather, we aim for a simple game because we can demonstrate the mechanics on a game board during the interview. As mentioned below, we timebox it and try to remove as much pressure as possible. This isn't a Google style logic puzzle, but array manipulation.

    As for filtering prior, we tried it. It didn't really work. Firstly, we had the fraud problem (only caught them once, but that was worrying enough). Secondly, there's the ownership problem - many employers aren't happy with their property being used in future interviews. And finally, if you ask for open-source or private projects theirs an entire kettle of fish with regards to discrimination (i.e. does this discriminate against those with family responsibilities etc.).

    Add to this that we're a very small team, with no HR support. It's often a better use of our time to spend 30-60m with someone than to spend time bouncing (often worthless) CVs around, liaising over tasks etc.

  7. Re:From the other side on British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market · · Score: 1

    Sorry, I perhaps didn't state clearly enough. We're interested in an implementation of the method, not a technique for playing the game. At it's simplest, it's an array storage and lookup problem.

    I should also note we timebox it to 40m, and we tell them that we don't mind if they sit and think for 35m before writing anything. We give them the option of ignoring us or using us as a pair. And we offer feedback during the process, e.g. if they look stuck or headed off on a tangent. Of course any problem feels an order of magnitude in an interview, so we try to minimise it.

  8. Re:The problem for UK IT graduates on British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market · · Score: 1

    If you're interested in work in London, you've got a reasonable grasp of Java and you love web development drop me a line ( j s h i e l l at yazino com). We're a small company so we can't currently manage people entirely sans experience, but a couple of years + passion may well do the trick and we're happy to train to fill in the gaps.

    And we're desperate for good, passionate web developers.

  9. Re:From the other side on British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market · · Score: 1

    Not a chance, as I hope some of my interviewees read Slashdot :-)

    However, similar problems would be something like the game of Battleships - I'd provide a simple interface for the game logic (e.g. fireAt(x: Int, y: Int): Boolean) and ask them to go about solving it. So no worrying on graphics or such niceties, just simple data structure manipulation. And as previously mentioned, most don't even run - we're much more interested in the approach than a working solution.

  10. Re:From the other side on British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market · · Score: 1

    Whoops, wasn't logged in. Abuse to this username, please.

  11. Re:Britain's first televised suicide. on Terry Pratchett Considers Assisted Suicide · · Score: 1

    You're not going to find out whether taboos exist for a good reason without discussing them.

  12. If your compensation rests purely on sales... on Ask Slashdot: Compensating Technical People For Contributing to Sales? · · Score: 1

    So your customers think salespeople are there only to sell them things they may not need, and your sales people live and die by commission?

    Surely there's your problem.

    If you're paying for sales, surely whoever makes the sale should make the money. And if you're paying people to sell, who then cannot sell because they have no neutrality, why not rethink your compensation structure?

  13. Re:I'm not sure about their policy... on EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    EVE is a ruthless game that encourages players to be ruthless; and apparently, exploiting bugs in the codebase, trying to crash servers etc. are considered acceptable tactics.

    EVE is a sandbox game that provides an environment and a permissive attitude as to what goes on within the sandbox. If people choose to be ruthless, great. If they choose to co-operate, great. But CCP have long been pretty clear that exploiting the game engine is out of bounds, despite all the Band of Developers history the old Goons like to rant about over the space-campfire.

    If someone can play the metagame and infiltrate Goonswarm and disband them, good luck to them! But when CVA was disbanded via an exploit recently, CCP rolled it back.

    I'm only a foot-solider, so don't take this as gospel, but my understanding is that the intention was not to exploit by crashing the server. It was acknowledged over TS however that a crash was a real possibility - they had a real large fleet, as did we. But admitting we were pushing the boundaries of the capacity and preparing for it is a very different kettle of fish to actively setting out to attack CCP's infrastructure.

    I still don't get your analogy, mind - I lost a group of pixels. It hurt me no more, nor anyone else on either side, than losing a pawn, or an evening of wiping in WoW. The only participant with a potentially broken nose is CCP, as they're the ones who'll suffer if people in 0.0 get bored with pre-emptive blobbing as a tactic and stop paying their monthly subscriptions.

  14. Re:EVE Online. on EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) · · Score: 1

    You can only reinforce a node at downtime. Hence, the problem here: no one knew there would be a fight until after downtime had passed.

  15. Re:I'm not sure about their policy... on EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because we didn't get lag, we got a failure of the game system. We stared at a black screen for 2 and a half hours. My killmail is dated 30 minutes after I logged off.

    Lag is expected in a fleet fight of any size. You expect to be able to see that someone is present though, even if you're not sure if they're shooting you or not.

    Whether you like the Goons or not, that's not a fun game to play for either side. Hell, when IT and the Goons agree things are broken and need fixing you know there's either a problem or it's the end times.

  16. Re:Why I chose Apple for my dev laptop on Best Developer's Laptop? · · Score: 1

    Used to be true. Not recently though.

    On Snow Leopard: 1.6.0_15
    Currently in testing: 1.6.0_17

    For my part, I've been using my Mac for enterprise development for about 18 months now. Slow as Apple used to be at providing JVM updates, they still move faster than most enterprise deployments (where tested stability > version number). Not that this is any defence of their previous abyssmal record at JVM updates.

  17. Re:These plaintiffs are being very reasonable on UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Did they obtain the images from a British server?

    Jurisdiction is a messy topic on the internet. If you want to play silly buggers with it then you can probably expect such websites to be restricted to UK IPs. Shame, but if good faith isn't shown they won't have much choice to protect their rights under local law.

  18. Re:Stay. on Emigrating To a Freer Country? · · Score: 1

    Vote with your feet.

    All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

    If you continually vote with your feet, eventually you'll run out of places to walk to.

  19. Re:Sorry but ... on Emigrating To a Freer Country? · · Score: 1

    I live in central London, and - IMHO - I have a better standard of life than when I lived in Wellington, NZ. The only thing I miss is the easy access to shore diving.

    Here I have better infrastructure, great access to arts & culture, easy access to all of Europe and I don't need to own a car. And despite the crippling cost of living in London, I'm pretty sure I still have more purchasing power than I did in NZ (although my Wellington flat was bigger).

    Each to their own.

  20. Re:Learn a language! on Emigrating To a Freer Country? · · Score: 1

    You have no idea how gutted I was when, as a child, I discovered that the Jelly involved was not what we call Jelly, but merely jam.

    Oh, the mental anguish...

  21. Re:Huh? on How Do IT Guys Get Respect and Not Become BOFHs? · · Score: 1

    Oddly enough, that's one of my interview questions. If they won't let me manage my workstation, I won't work there.

    Both IT and myself have better things to do than fight over why I need CygWin or the like.

  22. Re:fact: God hates liberals on Putting Anti-Evolution Candidates On the Spot · · Score: 1

    Fair enough - as long as you approach all things that cannot be disproved in the same manner.

    In particular - do you take an opinion on [traditional] sea serpents, Russell's teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the large invisible tortoise that lives in your toaster or someone under the age of 13 who spells the word 'you' using more than a single letter?

    Now technically, given none of these things can be entirely disproved, you should take no position on their existence. However, if you still use the toaster safe in the knowledge you won't be eaten by a tortoise then you're essentially saying you're pretty certain there's no invisible tortoise there.

    That's why Agnosticism is intellectually lazy - if you don't take the same approach to everything then you're inconsistent. And if you do 'take no position' then, unless you're planning for the contingency that God *may* exist, then you're acting under the assumption that he doesn't. So you should either be honest and concede the point, or give a good reason as to why God should be given a special treatment in this instance.

  23. Re:Ok, this is all well and good but.. on Palm to go Linux · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, Cobalt never saw the light of day.

    Palm split into PalmSource and PalmOne. PalmSource built Cobalt (6.0 and 6.1) but no vendors (including Palm) ever picked it up. Eventually PalmOne bought back the Palm name, PalmSource was bought by Access (who have their Access Linux Platform) and Palm[One] stuck with the long-in-the-tooth Garnet.

    As to why they never picked it up... well, there is no explaining Palm's management :-(

  24. Re:Well... on U.S. Classrooms Torn Between Science and Religion · · Score: 1

    Sorry to drag up an old argument but, on your solution:

    Let's talk about religion in class. But we must be fair and acknowledge all belief systems, even Scientology. Not to mention the FSM, elves in the cupboard and the dragon hiding in Oval tube. After all, they can't be either proved or disproved.

    Or we could be sensible and allow rational discussion. This allows people to say ' is wrong' without being intolerant. After all, the burden of proof lies on those who make the claims.

    On your cause, mind, I have no issue: those who make it personal should be slapped with wet trout. Make your argument, debate it passionately, but personal attacks have no place in civilised conversation. Ridicule on the institution, however, another matter entirely. Unless you're giving Hubbard's bunch the benefit of the doubt.

  25. Re:IntelliJ IDEA on Ultimate Software Developer Setup? · · Score: 1

    And don't forget JavaScript, HTML, XML and CSS support in version 5. Well worth the money (especially if you can get a personal licence).