at what point do you take responsibility for your own bad leaders and stop blaming everyone else?
That is a good point. The Arab world has been hampered by their own poor leadership. One of Al Qaeda's points, though, is that the incompetent, corrupt leaders have been put in place and supported by the West. This is not the whole story, of course, but they have a point. The West often supports poor leaders who seem willing to work with them. It becomes difficult for a competent leader to get a foothold when the local government is supported by wealth foreign powers. This is the whole basis for Al Qaeda's fight against the West. They feel that without foreign backing they could overthrow the corrupt leadership and install good leadership.
It is easy to see how this argument can win a lot of hearts and minds in the Muslim world. I think it is obvious to most of us that the oppressive religious culture that Al Qaeda wants is even worse than a corrupt, modern dictator, but that is not how religious zealots see things. You see similar rhetoric from the religious conservatives in the US.
What blows my mind is the complete lack of teaching any sort of version control software in most CS programs, which is usually going to be the first thing you'll have to use when working with software at your first job.
I agree that every CS student should learn how to use version control systems, but I don't necessarily agree that the professors should teach them. Version control is just a tool and there is nothing CS specific about it. What is wrong with CS students taking the initiative and learning professional level tools to make their lives easier? In my grad studies, I always used version control, automated builds, and automated test suites. These tools exist for a reason; they make your life easier, so students have a vested interest in learning them. I would be completely annoyed by a professor that taught me this, because it is a waste of my time.
Having said that, most students don't bother to learn this stuff. That is fine by me, because I just won't hire them at work. It makes for a great interview question. Any student who can talk intelligently about version control systems has spent time learning useful stuff outside of class. That is the kind of people I want to work with. If a student can't learn something on their own, then what good are they?
actualy a big passenger jets engine pods are designed to detach on catastrophic failures and missiles are going to home on the engines so a big jet might survive a single hit.
From a terrorism perspective, it doesn't really matter whether the plane survives or not. People are going to be scared if planes occasionally get hit by missiles, regardless of the number of survivors. Even failed terrorist attacks are strategically successful. Attempts at shoe bombs and liquid bombs were unsuccessful, but still garnered significant press coverage and instigated changes in security procedures. No one was injured, but it still scared people which is the entire point of terrorism.
Then I pondered on exactly how knowing which plane is which is at all helpful.
Terrorism just needs to scare people so one plane is just as good as another. And the target does not have to be a plane of course. Elementary schools, grocery stores, church picnics, etc would be just as effective. There is no end of public targets with little or no security.
It's not like finding a plane to attack is a difficult task. The routes are not secret. The times are not secret. If you stake out an airport, you will have an endless supply of slow moving targets at low altitude with known flight paths. Having "an app for that" is now just a distraction.
The only use I see for this app is if you want to target specific planes at busy airports. Airports like DFW have so many planes going through them that targeting the correct one can be difficult. But if attackers are going after a specific plane, then they are probably not terrorists. That becomes closer to assassination. To connect this to terrorism, the government needs to explain to my why a terrorist group would want to target a specific plane versus a random one.
With a success rate of 10% it must be certainly worth it.
Actually, the success rate is much higher than 10%. They win 10% of what goes to trial. But for every suit that goes to trial, there are many more that are settled much earlier on. That is actually where the big money comes from. Patent trolls don't actually want to go to trial; they want a settlement. They end up having to go to trial because someone decides that they think they can win in court and refuse to be extorted for money. And as soon as they win at trial, they know that anyone else that was thinking about challenging that patent will be forced to settle because that defense is a proven loser.
You tell them you just visited your cousin Jim, who had an old hard drive he didn't want anymore, and you needed a spare so he gave it to you, but not before he ran "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1" because he didn't want you having his old tax documents.
And now you have just fallen victim to a classic interrogation technique. They have just gotten you to tell a story that then can investigate and determine its credibility. They will talk to your cousin Jim; they will look for signs of an OS installation at the date and time you said. They then ask more follow up questions (for which they already know the true answer) to get you to dig a bigger grave for yourself. Then they show you that they know you are lying and inform you of the penalty for that crime and offer you a "deal" to tell the truth.
The fact is that when you are dealing with good interrogators, you cannot lie your way out of it. If you have a huge file full of random data, that is suspicious and there is nothing you can say to change that. The whole point of steganography is to hide the data in something innocent so that no one ever asks you anything. The goal is to blend in and give them no reason to give you a second though.
You won't find any of it at Google or Amazon, for example, even though they are quite large.
Have no illusions, though. The Google and Amazon solutions are neither cheap nor easy to implement. They rely on top-notch engineers being able to build an intelligent storage layer on top of a bunch of dumb commodity disks. Their needs are specialized enough (and they have enough cash) that this makes some sense. But most businesses do not have that kind of talent or that kind of cash.
Like everything in engineering, this comes down to looking at your business requirements and finding a solution that meets them for the best price. When you need what NetApp and competitors do, there is no cheaper alternative than buying their product. If you think you can cheaply build something with equivalent functionality, then you do not understand what these products are really doing.
Instead of working full-bore on The Next Great FS, it would be really nice to have compression, encryption, deduplication, shadow copies, and idle optimization running in EXT4.
To do all these things, you have to change how data is stored on the disk and what information is present. When you do this, you necessarily create a new file system. These aren't simple features that you can just tack onto an existing file system.
I suspect that one of these days we will be running the ext10 file system that has most of these features and evolved from ext3 in a methodical way, but it will in no way actually resemble ext3. There will always be other systems being developed to try out new ideas but getting things both reliable and fast is hard enough that the new systems never cross over the experimental hurdle at which point their innovations will migrate into ext\d.
AFAIK this is pretty much how every compression algorithm works. No need to give it a fancy name.
The reason it has a different name is to distinguish this from a compressed file system. The blocks of data are not compressed in these systems. Imagine that you have a file system that stores lots of vmware images. In this system, there are lots of files that store the same information because the underlying data is OS system files and applications. Even if you compress each image, you will still have lots of blocks that have duplicate values.
Deduplication says that the file system recognizes and eliminates duplicate blocks across the entire file system. If a given block has redundant data within it, that redundancy is not removed because the blocks themselves are not actually compressed. This is the difference between a compressed file system and a deduplicated file system. In fact, there is no reason that you could not combine both of these methods into a single system.
This is life; you are forced to gamble either way. You are taking on risks whether you take the vaccine or not. Scientific evidence suggests that the risk is greater if you do not vaccinate. The state is forcing you take take the gamble with the lowest risk. It must do this because vaccines are ineffective if a significant portion of people do not get them.
People have gotten so used to children not regularly dying of these diseases that they have taken it for granted. They have forgotten that this is not natural and that we have created this situation with our vaccination programs.
That is all you really care about? You don't care about the quality of the outcomes? If a significant portion of the tech's patients suffer a prolonged recovery due to infections, then you don't want the tech. Volume is no indicator of quality because the tech might be doing the procedure incorrectly. In fact, a cheaper tech may depend so much on volume for profitability that they may cut corners to squeeze in a few extra procedures per day.
When it comes to medical procedures, I want the highest probability of a successful outcome that I can afford. Cost is a secondary consideration.
Personally, I'm OK with having to reboot my Linux machine when I change kernels, mostly because it's the only time Linux DOES ask me to reboot.
This isn't exactly true, though. Suppose there is an update in glibc. Just updating the library files has not helped any of your running processes. New processes will use the new library, but all the old processes will still be running the old library. If the update is for security reasons, then you have to restart every single running process. This can be done, of course, (except for init), but it is not exactly easy so you may as well reboot. You are certainly going to incur downtime no matter how you slice it.
Distributions hide this from you by applying the updates and not telling you to reboot, but you really should reboot after many updates to make sure you are actually running the updated code and not the older code. It was never as bad as Windows, of course, which might make you reboot 5 times to apply 5 updates instead of getting it all done with one reboot, but to say that only kernel updates require a reboot is a bit of an exaggeration.
That's great, if you get to see every resume. The problem is with the HR filter.
I don't deny that the recruiter filter is a problem. The fact that HR folks are bad at distinguishing good and bad engineers is an unfixable problem. If HR had the engineering skills to do that, they would be in the R&D department and not recruiting. If you want to get the best engineers then you have to have the engineers sifting through a lot of the resumes. If companies are making hiring decisions based on the 3-4 resumes that HR presents, then there is no way they are getting the best and brightest.
But I won't let this bait me into padding my resume to pass the filter and then hoping I can explain things away in an interview. I want to work with the best and the brightest. The interview process works both ways. I don't want to work for loser companies, so I'm okay with companies with poor practices passing me over.
nd you are part of the problem. He stated a skill that he had. He didn't say he was an expert. You assumed it.
It all depends on how you list it on the resume. You can make it clear that you took a class, but have never really used it and that would set my expectations to the right level. But there are a lot of resumes that say, "Skills: Python, Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Ruby". Well, if you are going to put that, you had better know them.
I interviewed someone once that listed SONET as a skill. We were excited by that because we developed SONET telecomm equipment. He could not answer the most trivial question about it. His actual experience was that he had logged into a box one time that had a SONET interface. At that point, it doesn't matter how smart he is. The interview is blown.
Personally, I list skills as, "Implemented a tool to automate testing of product with language X" so the interviewer knows what to expect.
That is absurd. And not realistic.
That is not true. My resume is exactly that. The things I put on my resume are things that highlight the value I bring to an employer. It is the stuff I want to talk about in an interview. It is the stuff that shows what I can really get done. I've played around with Java, Python, and Ruby on Rails, but I would not put them on a resume because my expertise lies elsewhere. Anyone who thinks that they need a "Java Programmer" will be disappointed with me in an interview. I could do the job, of course, but that isn't the point.
When someone brings you in for an interview, it is because they like the skill set that the resume represents. The interview needs to reinforce that and not disappoint.
If you want specific skills with specific levels of ability they need to be stated very clearly.
I almost never look for specific skill sets. When smart people have a solid knowledge of the field as a whole, they can pick up anything quickly. I use their resume as a starting point of judging this because they wrote the thing. This is their chance to market themselves to me.
For example, I list Python under my skills even though my knowledge of it is pretty much limited to one course I took.
I have interviewed lots of people and this kind of thing would get you dumped in my book. I look for three major things in an interview. 1) Personality - can you work with the team and culture. 2) Intelligence - Can you think on your feet and give me some evidence that you use your brain. 3) Do you know what your resume claims.
It is number 3 that would end up getting you. When someone knows they know product X, I expect them to really know it. So I pick something on the resume and start asking questions and digging deeper and deeper. If I spend 15 minutes asking questions about a topic that you really know, I should not be able to stump you, especially if it is in a field I know little about. This is probably the most common reason for rejecting someone.
For example, I know very little about Java as none of my jobs has required much use of it. But since I keep up with technology in general I know a bit about it. So if someone's resume presents them as a Java expert, I feel like I can ask as many questions about Java as I want for as long as I want and they should be able to dazzle me with their knowledge since I am clearly not an expert. Time and again, people bomb out on this. They think Java programs cannot leak memory; they claim Java automatically makes programs secure; they never heard of JIT compilation. The list goes on and on.
If you can become an expert on Java (or anything else), then I feel like you can become an expert on the technology my company actually uses. I rarely ask technical questions based on what the company uses. That stuff changes over time and employees are always learning new things. I want to see that people are experts on what they have worked on. So if you put something on the resume, I expect you to know it inside and out.
This is my sentiment exactly. The hard part, if you are not part of the academic community, is to know if there are any nearby professors who are expert in your area. Professors always want to get their names on papers so they are more than happy to assist you. Even if you talk to someone whose research interest isn't what you are working on, they likely know who the right people to talk to are.
Another advantage to dealing with a professor is that they may have additional resources that can be brought to bear on the problem. They have grad students they are looking to give interesting problems to and access to computing resources that you don't have.
Keep in mind that the review committee for all conferences and journals are made up of academics. You will definitely want the help of a professor to figure out just how to present your results in a way that is likely to get your paper accepted. The last thing that you want is to spend a lot of time on a paper that gets rejected because you didn't present what they want or because you were unfamiliar with the existing literature on the topic.
ree speech doesn't just mean you can speak out against real injustice, it means you should be intentionally abusive of other people's cultures and religions!
So I guess you don't consider pointing out the intolerance and violence that is central to many muslims' religious beliefs a valid usage of free speech. Many activists are using Islam to justify the killing of anyone that they don't like. This includes the killing of barbers in Afghanistan who think it is okay to shave someone's beard. There are lots of ways to express disapproval of this type of conduct and they should be protected as free speech. Some people will be offended. So what? If people want to wrap violence in a religious veneer, then I don't care if they are offended by my criticism. It's not like muslims have a reputation for being tolerant and open minded.
What say I go to Alabama, defecate on a bible, wrap it in the US flag and burn the bundle.
I'd get lynched, and rightly so.
I don't think you know as much about the US south as you think you do. I've lived there my whole life. You would not be lynched, though you would certainly make a lot of people mad. The legal apparatus would not turn a blind eye to a lynching as that is illegal even in the south.
It seems really strange to me that you think it is okay that violence should be inflicted on people who offend others. It is not. Part of being in an open, diverse civilization is that you hear a lot of ideas and some of them challenge your views in fundamental ways. Some of those ideas can even be considered offensive. People need to grow up and accept this and not demand that the entire world make an effort to not step on their toes.
A database record is not a file, though. A database record is a small part of a much larger file that contains the database. And even that is not completely true, because a database often consists of additional files like indexes.
There is no question that files are an extremely useful abstraction. They have served us well for a very long time and I don't think they will be going anywhere anytime soon. However, that does not mean that it is the only abstraction worth considering. Many non-technical users get confused by the file concept so why not look for a way to store information in a way that works well for more people.
The Webb telescope is estimated to cost around $4.5 billion and have a life span of 5-10 years. The ISS will cost over $100 billion over 30 years and we will have spent $174 billion in almost 30 years of shuttle service when it retires.
If we built several space telescopes instead of 1 every 20-30 years, we would have less money for shuttle and ISS missions. That would mean that we would not answer such burning questions as:
- Do mice get osteoporosis in space? (link) - Do LANs work in space? (link) - How do people deal with the vibrations of a space launch? (link) - The genetic changes in yeast in space. ()
When you are up against such ground breaking breakthroughs as these, you can see how it is tough to scrape together the cash to study trivial things like the origin of the universe and whether there are other inhabitable planets in the galaxy.
All sarcasm aside, you are right to point that manned missions do not give you more bang for the buck from a science perspective. We would know alot more about the universe if we had half a dozen space telescopes in orbit and more rovers on various planets and moons.
I'm pretty sure that is the worst argument against patents that I have ever heard. It is arguments like that that make it hard to convince normal people that patent reform is important.
How about changing the law so that punitive damages could be awarded against blatant patent trolls such as Acacia?
The problem is that it is hard to argue to a court that Acacia deserves punitive damages. The courts start with the assumption that all patents are legitimate. They do not rank patents based on quality. They have all been reviewed by impartial technical experts and been blessed by the USPTO. It is extremely difficult to argue (and win) to a court that the patent office screwed up.
I think blaming people like Acacia misses the point, because this isn't about punishing people. The real problem is that too many non-innovative things are becoming patented. The problem isn't the patent trolls; the problem is the patent system. The trolls only exist because the system is broken. Punishing trolls does nothing to fix the underlying system.
I hate to defend these guys because what they do is pretty sleazy, but "patent trolls" do serve a purpose. They create a market of selling IP. For those who believe that IP encourages innovation (I'm not one of them), then the existence of patent trolls means someone can invent something and have a buyer for the rights to that invention even if no one wants to market the product.
For example, say I invent a highly efficient electric car. This upsets a lot of existing businesses so it may be very hard for me to productize it. I may know that my invention will eventually win out, but I can't afford to wait that long. Well, I can sell this to someone who is willing to wait and profit from this.
The stories that generally show up on Slashdot are generally shake down schemes that take vague, poorly done patents and apply them to unwarranted things to make a quick buck. But that doesn't mean that everyone who is trying to profit from the patent system is a con artist.
It all depends on the definition of frivolous. The US courts set a pretty high bar for calling a legal action frivolous so it rarely happens. I don't really see this as a problem, though. "Loser pays" systems sound good on the surface, but it also means that small parties would almost never sue big parties unless there is no chance of losing because the bigger party could mount an enormous legal bill. A loser pays system would allow people with big pockets to be even more abusive than they are in the current system.
I worked on a system that required at least one "special character" in a password. A special character was defined as being non-numeric and non-alphabetic. This sounds fine except that there were only 4 special characters to choose from. (#!%?, I think). So you have to figure that most users will use the smallest password possible (8 characters) with the last one being one of those characters. My guess is that most passwords end up looking like <dictionary word><number><special character>. This is only marginally harder to guess than the dictionary word alone.
This product is deployed today and operational carrying large amounts of internet and voice traffic. The worst part is that these stupid requirements came not from lazy developers but at the direct request from a very large customer.
When you by software in a store, it comes with a license agreement that lays out what you're getting and what you're not.
In what other business do people get to take your money and then tell you what you are getting? For licensing to make any sense, you need to know the terms of the license at the time of purchase. If you don't know the license terms at that time, how can you know if the price is fair? EULAs are only made available after you have shelled out money and opened the package. They often have terms that say the vendor can modify the agreement whenever they want. That cannot possibly be considered a fair business practice.
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at what point do you take responsibility for your own bad leaders and stop blaming everyone else?
That is a good point. The Arab world has been hampered by their own poor leadership. One of Al Qaeda's points, though, is that the incompetent, corrupt leaders have been put in place and supported by the West. This is not the whole story, of course, but they have a point. The West often supports poor leaders who seem willing to work with them. It becomes difficult for a competent leader to get a foothold when the local government is supported by wealth foreign powers. This is the whole basis for Al Qaeda's fight against the West. They feel that without foreign backing they could overthrow the corrupt leadership and install good leadership.
It is easy to see how this argument can win a lot of hearts and minds in the Muslim world. I think it is obvious to most of us that the oppressive religious culture that Al Qaeda wants is even worse than a corrupt, modern dictator, but that is not how religious zealots see things. You see similar rhetoric from the religious conservatives in the US.
What blows my mind is the complete lack of teaching any sort of version control software in most CS programs, which is usually going to be the first thing you'll have to use when working with software at your first job.
I agree that every CS student should learn how to use version control systems, but I don't necessarily agree that the professors should teach them. Version control is just a tool and there is nothing CS specific about it. What is wrong with CS students taking the initiative and learning professional level tools to make their lives easier? In my grad studies, I always used version control, automated builds, and automated test suites. These tools exist for a reason; they make your life easier, so students have a vested interest in learning them. I would be completely annoyed by a professor that taught me this, because it is a waste of my time.
Having said that, most students don't bother to learn this stuff. That is fine by me, because I just won't hire them at work. It makes for a great interview question. Any student who can talk intelligently about version control systems has spent time learning useful stuff outside of class. That is the kind of people I want to work with. If a student can't learn something on their own, then what good are they?
actualy a big passenger jets engine pods are designed to detach on catastrophic failures and missiles are going to home on the engines so a big jet might survive a single hit.
From a terrorism perspective, it doesn't really matter whether the plane survives or not. People are going to be scared if planes occasionally get hit by missiles, regardless of the number of survivors. Even failed terrorist attacks are strategically successful. Attempts at shoe bombs and liquid bombs were unsuccessful, but still garnered significant press coverage and instigated changes in security procedures. No one was injured, but it still scared people which is the entire point of terrorism.
Then I pondered on exactly how knowing which plane is which is at all helpful.
Terrorism just needs to scare people so one plane is just as good as another. And the target does not have to be a plane of course. Elementary schools, grocery stores, church picnics, etc would be just as effective. There is no end of public targets with little or no security.
It's not like finding a plane to attack is a difficult task. The routes are not secret. The times are not secret. If you stake out an airport, you will have an endless supply of slow moving targets at low altitude with known flight paths. Having "an app for that" is now just a distraction.
The only use I see for this app is if you want to target specific planes at busy airports. Airports like DFW have so many planes going through them that targeting the correct one can be difficult. But if attackers are going after a specific plane, then they are probably not terrorists. That becomes closer to assassination. To connect this to terrorism, the government needs to explain to my why a terrorist group would want to target a specific plane versus a random one.
With a success rate of 10% it must be certainly worth it.
Actually, the success rate is much higher than 10%. They win 10% of what goes to trial. But for every suit that goes to trial, there are many more that are settled much earlier on. That is actually where the big money comes from. Patent trolls don't actually want to go to trial; they want a settlement. They end up having to go to trial because someone decides that they think they can win in court and refuse to be extorted for money. And as soon as they win at trial, they know that anyone else that was thinking about challenging that patent will be forced to settle because that defense is a proven loser.
You tell them you just visited your cousin Jim, who had an old hard drive he didn't want anymore, and you needed a spare so he gave it to you, but not before he ran "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1" because he didn't want you having his old tax documents.
And now you have just fallen victim to a classic interrogation technique. They have just gotten you to tell a story that then can investigate and determine its credibility. They will talk to your cousin Jim; they will look for signs of an OS installation at the date and time you said. They then ask more follow up questions (for which they already know the true answer) to get you to dig a bigger grave for yourself. Then they show you that they know you are lying and inform you of the penalty for that crime and offer you a "deal" to tell the truth.
The fact is that when you are dealing with good interrogators, you cannot lie your way out of it. If you have a huge file full of random data, that is suspicious and there is nothing you can say to change that. The whole point of steganography is to hide the data in something innocent so that no one ever asks you anything. The goal is to blend in and give them no reason to give you a second though.
You won't find any of it at Google or Amazon, for example, even though they are quite large.
Have no illusions, though. The Google and Amazon solutions are neither cheap nor easy to implement. They rely on top-notch engineers being able to build an intelligent storage layer on top of a bunch of dumb commodity disks. Their needs are specialized enough (and they have enough cash) that this makes some sense. But most businesses do not have that kind of talent or that kind of cash.
Like everything in engineering, this comes down to looking at your business requirements and finding a solution that meets them for the best price. When you need what NetApp and competitors do, there is no cheaper alternative than buying their product. If you think you can cheaply build something with equivalent functionality, then you do not understand what these products are really doing.
Instead of working full-bore on The Next Great FS, it would be really nice to have compression, encryption, deduplication, shadow copies, and idle optimization running in EXT4.
To do all these things, you have to change how data is stored on the disk and what information is present. When you do this, you necessarily create a new file system. These aren't simple features that you can just tack onto an existing file system.
I suspect that one of these days we will be running the ext10 file system that has most of these features and evolved from ext3 in a methodical way, but it will in no way actually resemble ext3. There will always be other systems being developed to try out new ideas but getting things both reliable and fast is hard enough that the new systems never cross over the experimental hurdle at which point their innovations will migrate into ext\d.
AFAIK this is pretty much how every compression algorithm works. No need to give it a fancy name.
The reason it has a different name is to distinguish this from a compressed file system. The blocks of data are not compressed in these systems. Imagine that you have a file system that stores lots of vmware images. In this system, there are lots of files that store the same information because the underlying data is OS system files and applications. Even if you compress each image, you will still have lots of blocks that have duplicate values.
Deduplication says that the file system recognizes and eliminates duplicate blocks across the entire file system. If a given block has redundant data within it, that redundancy is not removed because the blocks themselves are not actually compressed. This is the difference between a compressed file system and a deduplicated file system. In fact, there is no reason that you could not combine both of these methods into a single system.
However, unlike gambling, you are forced to play.
This is life; you are forced to gamble either way. You are taking on risks whether you take the vaccine or not. Scientific evidence suggests that the risk is greater if you do not vaccinate. The state is forcing you take take the gamble with the lowest risk. It must do this because vaccines are ineffective if a significant portion of people do not get them.
People have gotten so used to children not regularly dying of these diseases that they have taken it for granted. They have forgotten that this is not natural and that we have created this situation with our vaccination programs.
The person who has done more.
That is all you really care about? You don't care about the quality of the outcomes? If a significant portion of the tech's patients suffer a prolonged recovery due to infections, then you don't want the tech. Volume is no indicator of quality because the tech might be doing the procedure incorrectly. In fact, a cheaper tech may depend so much on volume for profitability that they may cut corners to squeeze in a few extra procedures per day.
When it comes to medical procedures, I want the highest probability of a successful outcome that I can afford. Cost is a secondary consideration.
Personally, I'm OK with having to reboot my Linux machine when I change kernels, mostly because it's the only time Linux DOES ask me to reboot.
This isn't exactly true, though. Suppose there is an update in glibc. Just updating the library files has not helped any of your running processes. New processes will use the new library, but all the old processes will still be running the old library. If the update is for security reasons, then you have to restart every single running process. This can be done, of course, (except for init), but it is not exactly easy so you may as well reboot. You are certainly going to incur downtime no matter how you slice it.
Distributions hide this from you by applying the updates and not telling you to reboot, but you really should reboot after many updates to make sure you are actually running the updated code and not the older code. It was never as bad as Windows, of course, which might make you reboot 5 times to apply 5 updates instead of getting it all done with one reboot, but to say that only kernel updates require a reboot is a bit of an exaggeration.
That's great, if you get to see every resume. The problem is with the HR filter.
I don't deny that the recruiter filter is a problem. The fact that HR folks are bad at distinguishing good and bad engineers is an unfixable problem. If HR had the engineering skills to do that, they would be in the R&D department and not recruiting. If you want to get the best engineers then you have to have the engineers sifting through a lot of the resumes. If companies are making hiring decisions based on the 3-4 resumes that HR presents, then there is no way they are getting the best and brightest.
But I won't let this bait me into padding my resume to pass the filter and then hoping I can explain things away in an interview. I want to work with the best and the brightest. The interview process works both ways. I don't want to work for loser companies, so I'm okay with companies with poor practices passing me over.
nd you are part of the problem. He stated a skill that he had. He didn't say he was an expert. You assumed it.
It all depends on how you list it on the resume. You can make it clear that you took a class, but have never really used it and that would set my expectations to the right level. But there are a lot of resumes that say, "Skills: Python, Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Ruby". Well, if you are going to put that, you had better know them.
I interviewed someone once that listed SONET as a skill. We were excited by that because we developed SONET telecomm equipment. He could not answer the most trivial question about it. His actual experience was that he had logged into a box one time that had a SONET interface. At that point, it doesn't matter how smart he is. The interview is blown.
Personally, I list skills as, "Implemented a tool to automate testing of product with language X" so the interviewer knows what to expect.
That is absurd. And not realistic.
That is not true. My resume is exactly that. The things I put on my resume are things that highlight the value I bring to an employer. It is the stuff I want to talk about in an interview. It is the stuff that shows what I can really get done. I've played around with Java, Python, and Ruby on Rails, but I would not put them on a resume because my expertise lies elsewhere. Anyone who thinks that they need a "Java Programmer" will be disappointed with me in an interview. I could do the job, of course, but that isn't the point.
When someone brings you in for an interview, it is because they like the skill set that the resume represents. The interview needs to reinforce that and not disappoint.
If you want specific skills with specific levels of ability they need to be stated very clearly.
I almost never look for specific skill sets. When smart people have a solid knowledge of the field as a whole, they can pick up anything quickly. I use their resume as a starting point of judging this because they wrote the thing. This is their chance to market themselves to me.
For example, I list Python under my skills even though my knowledge of it is pretty much limited to one course I took.
I have interviewed lots of people and this kind of thing would get you dumped in my book. I look for three major things in an interview. 1) Personality - can you work with the team and culture. 2) Intelligence - Can you think on your feet and give me some evidence that you use your brain. 3) Do you know what your resume claims.
It is number 3 that would end up getting you. When someone knows they know product X, I expect them to really know it. So I pick something on the resume and start asking questions and digging deeper and deeper. If I spend 15 minutes asking questions about a topic that you really know, I should not be able to stump you, especially if it is in a field I know little about. This is probably the most common reason for rejecting someone.
For example, I know very little about Java as none of my jobs has required much use of it. But since I keep up with technology in general I know a bit about it. So if someone's resume presents them as a Java expert, I feel like I can ask as many questions about Java as I want for as long as I want and they should be able to dazzle me with their knowledge since I am clearly not an expert. Time and again, people bomb out on this. They think Java programs cannot leak memory; they claim Java automatically makes programs secure; they never heard of JIT compilation. The list goes on and on.
If you can become an expert on Java (or anything else), then I feel like you can become an expert on the technology my company actually uses. I rarely ask technical questions based on what the company uses. That stuff changes over time and employees are always learning new things. I want to see that people are experts on what they have worked on. So if you put something on the resume, I expect you to know it inside and out.
This is my sentiment exactly. The hard part, if you are not part of the academic community, is to know if there are any nearby professors who are expert in your area. Professors always want to get their names on papers so they are more than happy to assist you. Even if you talk to someone whose research interest isn't what you are working on, they likely know who the right people to talk to are.
Another advantage to dealing with a professor is that they may have additional resources that can be brought to bear on the problem. They have grad students they are looking to give interesting problems to and access to computing resources that you don't have.
Keep in mind that the review committee for all conferences and journals are made up of academics. You will definitely want the help of a professor to figure out just how to present your results in a way that is likely to get your paper accepted. The last thing that you want is to spend a lot of time on a paper that gets rejected because you didn't present what they want or because you were unfamiliar with the existing literature on the topic.
ree speech doesn't just mean you can speak out against real injustice, it means you should be intentionally abusive of other people's cultures and religions!
So I guess you don't consider pointing out the intolerance and violence that is central to many muslims' religious beliefs a valid usage of free speech. Many activists are using Islam to justify the killing of anyone that they don't like. This includes the killing of barbers in Afghanistan who think it is okay to shave someone's beard. There are lots of ways to express disapproval of this type of conduct and they should be protected as free speech. Some people will be offended. So what? If people want to wrap violence in a religious veneer, then I don't care if they are offended by my criticism. It's not like muslims have a reputation for being tolerant and open minded.
What say I go to Alabama, defecate on a bible, wrap it in the US flag and burn the bundle.
I'd get lynched, and rightly so.
I don't think you know as much about the US south as you think you do. I've lived there my whole life. You would not be lynched, though you would certainly make a lot of people mad. The legal apparatus would not turn a blind eye to a lynching as that is illegal even in the south.
It seems really strange to me that you think it is okay that violence should be inflicted on people who offend others. It is not. Part of being in an open, diverse civilization is that you hear a lot of ideas and some of them challenge your views in fundamental ways. Some of those ideas can even be considered offensive. People need to grow up and accept this and not demand that the entire world make an effort to not step on their toes.
A database record is not a file, though. A database record is a small part of a much larger file that contains the database. And even that is not completely true, because a database often consists of additional files like indexes.
There is no question that files are an extremely useful abstraction. They have served us well for a very long time and I don't think they will be going anywhere anytime soon. However, that does not mean that it is the only abstraction worth considering. Many non-technical users get confused by the file concept so why not look for a way to store information in a way that works well for more people.
The Webb telescope is estimated to cost around $4.5 billion and have a life span of 5-10 years. The ISS will cost over $100 billion over 30 years and we will have spent $174 billion in almost 30 years of shuttle service when it retires.
If we built several space telescopes instead of 1 every 20-30 years, we would have less money for shuttle and ISS missions. That would mean that we would not answer such burning questions as:
- Do mice get osteoporosis in space? (link)
- Do LANs work in space? (link)
- How do people deal with the vibrations of a space launch? (link)
- The genetic changes in yeast in space. ()
When you are up against such ground breaking breakthroughs as these, you can see how it is tough to scrape together the cash to study trivial things like the origin of the universe and whether there are other inhabitable planets in the galaxy.
All sarcasm aside, you are right to point that manned missions do not give you more bang for the buck from a science perspective. We would know alot more about the universe if we had half a dozen space telescopes in orbit and more rovers on various planets and moons.
I'm pretty sure that is the worst argument against patents that I have ever heard. It is arguments like that that make it hard to convince normal people that patent reform is important.
How about changing the law so that punitive damages could be awarded against blatant patent trolls such as Acacia?
The problem is that it is hard to argue to a court that Acacia deserves punitive damages. The courts start with the assumption that all patents are legitimate. They do not rank patents based on quality. They have all been reviewed by impartial technical experts and been blessed by the USPTO. It is extremely difficult to argue (and win) to a court that the patent office screwed up.
I think blaming people like Acacia misses the point, because this isn't about punishing people. The real problem is that too many non-innovative things are becoming patented. The problem isn't the patent trolls; the problem is the patent system. The trolls only exist because the system is broken. Punishing trolls does nothing to fix the underlying system.
I hate to defend these guys because what they do is pretty sleazy, but "patent trolls" do serve a purpose. They create a market of selling IP. For those who believe that IP encourages innovation (I'm not one of them), then the existence of patent trolls means someone can invent something and have a buyer for the rights to that invention even if no one wants to market the product.
For example, say I invent a highly efficient electric car. This upsets a lot of existing businesses so it may be very hard for me to productize it. I may know that my invention will eventually win out, but I can't afford to wait that long. Well, I can sell this to someone who is willing to wait and profit from this.
The stories that generally show up on Slashdot are generally shake down schemes that take vague, poorly done patents and apply them to unwarranted things to make a quick buck. But that doesn't mean that everyone who is trying to profit from the patent system is a con artist.
It all depends on the definition of frivolous. The US courts set a pretty high bar for calling a legal action frivolous so it rarely happens. I don't really see this as a problem, though. "Loser pays" systems sound good on the surface, but it also means that small parties would almost never sue big parties unless there is no chance of losing because the bigger party could mount an enormous legal bill. A loser pays system would allow people with big pockets to be even more abusive than they are in the current system.
I worked on a system that required at least one "special character" in a password. A special character was defined as being non-numeric and non-alphabetic. This sounds fine except that there were only 4 special characters to choose from. (#!%?, I think). So you have to figure that most users will use the smallest password possible (8 characters) with the last one being one of those characters. My guess is that most passwords end up looking like <dictionary word><number><special character>. This is only marginally harder to guess than the dictionary word alone.
This product is deployed today and operational carrying large amounts of internet and voice traffic. The worst part is that these stupid requirements came not from lazy developers but at the direct request from a very large customer.
When you by software in a store, it comes with a license agreement that lays out what you're getting and what you're not.
In what other business do people get to take your money and then tell you what you are getting? For licensing to make any sense, you need to know the terms of the license at the time of purchase. If you don't know the license terms at that time, how can you know if the price is fair? EULAs are only made available after you have shelled out money and opened the package. They often have terms that say the vendor can modify the agreement whenever they want. That cannot possibly be considered a fair business practice.