Like anything else it's a cost/benefit question. You can spend a lot of time researching a company but what you find won't necessarily help you get an interview. There's a difference between a company's public face and the individual reading your resume.
I agree with most of your advice except the hobbies section. The reader of your resume is just as likely to hate your hobby as love it and many business people believe a hobby section is inappropriate and may use it as an excuse to eliminate you.
Re:Redifference between uppercase and lowercase
on
Verbing Weirds Google
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· Score: 1
Xerox makes an effort to discourage the use of "xerox" as a verb by placing ads in Writer's Digest etc. It's important that they do this to protect their trademark. On the other hand, I don't think they've tried to sue anyone for placing it in a dictionary.
What might have not been clear from your post was that bank switching was game vendor specific and not part of the 2600 itself.
As you said, some cartridges had RAM but accessing it was strictly based on addresssing since the R/W line from the processor was not brought out to the cartridge interface. So you'd have an address space for reading from RAM and a different address space for writing to it.
I recall I once had a bug on an indexed read (the index was incorrect) that ended up reading from the wrong location. It turned out the location it read from was in the RAM write address space. So I read an incorrect value and at the same time wrote an incorrect value all in one instruction.
The fact that more people have the option to view source code doesn't mean that they will. Even if they do, it doesn't mean they can understand it or have the ability or motivation to find flaws in it.
So open source doesn't automatically lead to more code review and bug fixes than closed source. It all depends who is doing the looking and what their skills and motivations are.
What I meant about open vs. closed is that you can't really manage them the same way. In closed source development I've found that having someone assigned as the primary owner of a file has worked fairly well. In open source you can't handle it the same way because you're usually dealing with volunteers and you can't really tell them what to do (I'm speculating here since I haven't done any open source development).
In general, I agree, but the philosophy of CVS is that locking files is a bad idea. So it promotes an approach that carries with it more danger (but I admit a lot of people here don't agree).
"...or if you happen to have a high level of code reuse;"
One would hope that reused code would be fully developed and debugged before it was shared. Sure new bugs will turn up, but the thought of people tweaking reused code at will sounds pretty dangerous to me. I've seen plenty of cases where unilateral changes to reused code by one group has brought another to a grinding halt. Shared code should be carefully mangaged and should not be altered without prior coordination with all its users.
Allowing multiple developers to edit the same file at the same time is inherently more dangerous than a more conservative approach. Open Source has it's own special needs, but for closed source development you should rarely need to edit the same file unless your team is poorly organized or system poorly designed.
"Even people running old flavors of Microsoft's own operating systems can testify to the many little voices that tell them they have to upgrade to XP (or whatever it happens to be at the time)."
Well, if those little voices are talking to people running Win9x, the little voices are right.
Re:"They shouldn�t be forced "
on
The Faded Sun
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· Score: 1
"One of the factors you are neglecting is that MS didn't simply license the *right* to include Java, they had undertaken a contractual *obligation* to include Java."
The current contract MS has with Sun *does not* include an obligation to include Java. If it did it would be a slam-dunk for Sun to sue MS for violating the contract. Since Sun has no such contract under their belt they had to resort to the current antitrust suit to get what they want.
If the guy is so influencial why didn't MS follow his advice before he left? I can understand how you might want to give some parting advice to your employer, but releasing it to the world suggests his motive is really publicity for himself rather than any real concern about the future of MS. Looks like he's positioning himself for Guruism.
Despite what many posters have said, no, you don't need an OS for a cell phone. Any software or firmware application can be created without an OS. In complex applications, however, it's usually more cost-effective to use one.
The story you're posting about is "Even Sun Can't Use Java" It's not about litigation.
Please explain to me how an accounting system that runs only on Unix and not on Windows or the Mac helps MS's monopoly? I never suggested that programs should be written to run on Windows only. I said that internal cross-platform programs don't provide any value.
"My large corporation uses data-entry DB frontends written in Java. We can only run them on Microsoft Windows, though."
Well, it sounds like your corporation decided to create a Windows-only front-end in Java. If they had implemented it a few years earlier they probably would have created a Windows-only solution in C or C++. I seriously doubt that they thought it was going to run on multiple OS's at the time they created it. The fact that they haven't ported the front-end to other OS's indicates that they don't think it's a problem. I'll bet there are a lot of non-technical folks at your company that don't know anything about Unix that use this application too.
As far a what kind of case MS recently "lost" (the case hasn't even gone to trial yet), I suggest you read your own link:
"Sun Microsystems (Quote, Company Info) won a key victory in its ANTITRUSTSUIT against rival Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) Monday, when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that requires the Redmond, Wash.-based software titan to include a Java Virtual Machine, or JVM (define), in its Windows XP operating system."
I'm not going to argue further about facts that are in the public record.
Well, now that you know that MS is not guilty of any crime (at least not by "the rule of law and precise legalese terminology") would it not be unethical and immoral for you to claim that they are without explaining that you don't mean it in the legal sense? Or is truth just a technicality as well?
Well, you seem for the most part to have shifted from a technical argument to a legal one. More about the legal stuff later.
I'm not sure what you mean about J.Random programmer. I believe that anyone capable of writing Java code, is capable of understanding what the implications are of using non-standard features.
Although a lot of lip service is made to cross-platform development, very few such programs are actually developed. Internal cross-platform programs are rarer still since the company has typically already decided on the platform its going to run the application on. There's really no benifit to the company if their accounting program runs on Unix, Windows, and the Mac. If Java is selected for in-house development it is either because someone in authority is idealistic or more likely, just thinks it's a better language.
As for the legal issue, you're simply incorrect. The current case is a private antitrust suit and has nothing to do with contract law. The Java contract dispute between Sun and MS has already been settled out of court.
If this were a simple contract matter, the court could force MS to live up to the terms of the contract and/or pay Sun damages, but there's no way the court could order MS to distribute Sun's Java because that was never part of the contract.
So Sun's doing this in the context of antitrust law where (as many Slashdotters love to point out) the rules are different (although not as different as they think).
They use Linux instead of Solaris because the platform is cheaper, thus increasing their profits. Their parent company is opposed to the DVD aspects of Linux because they believe it will reduce their profits. There's no irony there, just a consistent focus on making money.
If you look closely you'll find that no major company supports GPL'd software out of principle, they all do it to make more money.
You are confusing Sun's goals for Java with that of a product developer. If you're using specific extentions in your product that are not cross-platform, then you've already made the decision that cross-platform functionality is not a design goal.
"The dispute was not about whether MS shipped or didn't ship a JVM, it was that the JVM Microsoft shipped was intentionally broken. The hooks into MFC that Microsoft put into the JVM were quite simply not part of the Java specification"
There's a big difference between being broken and adding extra functionality. By the way, MS's JVM has nothing to do with MFC. MFC is strictly a C++ framework.
From Sun's website: "Please note: A new, community-based Solaris[tm] 9 x86 hardware compatibility list (HCL) is under development. Please check back here later for more details."
They could have at least listed the X86 hardware they tested on. Unless...
I disagree with your #2. I think the Old Boys network is inevitable with this "peer" review. This isn't a job interview and it's not a club. Create objective criteria and measure people against it. Otherwise, it's just a popularity contest.
Slashdot Mirror
Like anything else it's a cost/benefit question. You can spend a lot of time researching a company but what you find won't necessarily help you get an interview. There's a difference between a company's public face and the individual reading your resume.
I agree with most of your advice except the hobbies section. The reader of your resume is just as likely to hate your hobby as love it and many business people believe a hobby section is inappropriate and may use it as an excuse to eliminate you.
Xerox makes an effort to discourage the use of "xerox" as a verb by placing ads in Writer's Digest etc. It's important that they do this to protect their trademark. On the other hand, I don't think they've tried to sue anyone for placing it in a dictionary.
What might have not been clear from your post was that bank switching was game vendor specific and not part of the 2600 itself.
As you said, some cartridges had RAM but accessing it was strictly based on addresssing since the R/W line from the processor was not brought out to the cartridge interface. So you'd have an address space for reading from RAM and a different address space for writing to it.
I recall I once had a bug on an indexed read (the index was incorrect) that ended up reading from the wrong location. It turned out the location it read from was in the RAM write address space. So I read an incorrect value and at the same time wrote an incorrect value all in one instruction.
You mean first-posters have to do it?
The fact that more people have the option to view source code doesn't mean that they will. Even if they do, it doesn't mean they can understand it or have the ability or motivation to find flaws in it.
So open source doesn't automatically lead to more code review and bug fixes than closed source. It all depends who is doing the looking and what their skills and motivations are.
What I meant about open vs. closed is that you can't really manage them the same way. In closed source development I've found that having someone assigned as the primary owner of a file has worked fairly well. In open source you can't handle it the same way because you're usually dealing with volunteers and you can't really tell them what to do (I'm speculating here since I haven't done any open source development).
In general, I agree, but the philosophy of CVS is that locking files is a bad idea. So it promotes an approach that carries with it more danger (but I admit a lot of people here don't agree).
"...or if you happen to have a high level of code reuse;"
One would hope that reused code would be fully developed and debugged before it was shared. Sure new bugs will turn up, but the thought of people tweaking reused code at will sounds pretty dangerous to me. I've seen plenty of cases where unilateral changes to reused code by one group has brought another to a grinding halt. Shared code should be carefully mangaged and should not be altered without prior coordination with all its users.
Allowing multiple developers to edit the same file at the same time is inherently more dangerous than a more conservative approach. Open Source has it's own special needs, but for closed source development you should rarely need to edit the same file unless your team is poorly organized or system poorly designed.
"Even people running old flavors of Microsoft's own operating systems can testify to the many little voices that tell them they have to upgrade to XP (or whatever it happens to be at the time)."
Well, if those little voices are talking to people running Win9x, the little voices are right.
So you agree the guy's not influential, right?
"One of the factors you are neglecting is that MS didn't simply license the *right* to include Java, they had undertaken a contractual *obligation* to include Java."
The current contract MS has with Sun *does not* include an obligation to include Java. If it did it would be a slam-dunk for Sun to sue MS for violating the contract. Since Sun has no such contract under their belt they had to resort to the current antitrust suit to get what they want.
"Dave Stutz, an influencial guy at Microsoft"
If the guy is so influencial why didn't MS follow his advice before he left? I can understand how you might want to give some parting advice to your employer, but releasing it to the world suggests his motive is really publicity for himself rather than any real concern about the future of MS. Looks like he's positioning himself for Guruism.
No, he was right. The laserdisk had a long seek time so the screen would go blank if the next scene was too far away on the disk.
Despite what many posters have said, no, you don't need an OS for a cell phone. Any software or firmware application can be created without an OS. In complex applications, however, it's usually more cost-effective to use one.
I don't think the brain has a lot to do with it.
"This is a litigation thread"
The story you're posting about is "Even Sun Can't Use Java" It's not about litigation.
Please explain to me how an accounting system that runs only on Unix and not on Windows or the Mac helps MS's monopoly? I never suggested that programs should be written to run on Windows only. I said that internal cross-platform programs don't provide any value.
"My large corporation uses data-entry DB frontends written in Java. We can only run them on Microsoft Windows, though."
Well, it sounds like your corporation decided to create a Windows-only front-end in Java. If they had implemented it a few years earlier they probably would have created a Windows-only solution in C or C++. I seriously doubt that they thought it was going to run on multiple OS's at the time they created it. The fact that they haven't ported the front-end to other OS's indicates that they don't think it's a problem. I'll bet there are a lot of non-technical folks at your company that don't know anything about Unix that use this application too.
As far a what kind of case MS recently "lost" (the case hasn't even gone to trial yet), I suggest you read your own link:
"Sun Microsystems (Quote, Company Info) won a key victory in its ANTITRUSTSUIT against rival Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) Monday, when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that requires the Redmond, Wash.-based software titan to include a Java Virtual Machine, or JVM (define), in its Windows XP operating system."
I'm not going to argue further about facts that are in the public record.
Well, now that you know that MS is not guilty of any crime (at least not by "the rule of law and precise legalese terminology") would it not be unethical and immoral for you to claim that they are without explaining that you don't mean it in the legal sense? Or is truth just a technicality as well?
Well, you seem for the most part to have shifted from a technical argument to a legal one. More about the legal stuff later.
I'm not sure what you mean about J.Random programmer. I believe that anyone capable of writing Java code, is capable of understanding what the implications are of using non-standard features.
Although a lot of lip service is made to cross-platform development, very few such programs are actually developed. Internal cross-platform programs are rarer still since the company has typically already decided on the platform its going to run the application on. There's really no benifit to the company if their accounting program runs on Unix, Windows, and the Mac. If Java is selected for in-house development it is either because someone in authority is idealistic or more likely, just thinks it's a better language.
As for the legal issue, you're simply incorrect. The current case is a private antitrust suit and has nothing to do with contract law. The Java contract dispute between Sun and MS has already been settled out of court.
If this were a simple contract matter, the court could force MS to live up to the terms of the contract and/or pay Sun damages, but there's no way the court could order MS to distribute Sun's Java because that was never part of the contract.
So Sun's doing this in the context of antitrust law where (as many Slashdotters love to point out) the rules are different (although not as different as they think).
They use Linux instead of Solaris because the platform is cheaper, thus increasing their profits. Their parent company is opposed to the DVD aspects of Linux because they believe it will reduce their profits. There's no irony there, just a consistent focus on making money.
If you look closely you'll find that no major company supports GPL'd software out of principle, they all do it to make more money.
You are confusing Sun's goals for Java with that of a product developer. If you're using specific extentions in your product that are not cross-platform, then you've already made the decision that cross-platform functionality is not a design goal.
"The dispute was not about whether MS shipped or didn't ship a JVM, it was that the JVM Microsoft shipped was intentionally broken. The hooks into MFC that Microsoft put into the JVM were quite simply not part of the Java specification"
There's a big difference between being broken and adding extra functionality. By the way, MS's JVM has nothing to do with MFC. MFC is strictly a C++ framework.
From Sun's website: "Please note: A new, community-based Solaris[tm] 9 x86 hardware compatibility list (HCL) is under development. Please check back here later for more details."
...
They could have at least listed the X86 hardware they tested on. Unless
I disagree with your #2. I think the Old Boys network is inevitable with this "peer" review. This isn't a job interview and it's not a club. Create objective criteria and measure people against it. Otherwise, it's just a popularity contest.