"'[Tricia Prickett] took fifteen seconds of videotape showing the applicant as he or she knocks on the door, comes in, shakes the hand of the interviewer, sits down, and the interviewer welcomes the person,' Bernieri explained. Then, like Ambady, Prickett got a series of strangers to rate the applicants based on the handshake clip, using the same criteria that the interviewers had used. Once more, against all expectations, the ratings were very similar to those of the interviewers. 'On nine out of the eleven traits the applicants were being judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the interview,' Bernieri says. 'The strength of the correlations was extraordinary.' "...
"For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date. We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair. "
I think you hit it on the head with your comment, "Hiring people is still a black art. Once you've eliminated the obviously unqualified, you might as well use some random criteria. Is there any alternative? Yes -- hire people who are already somewhat known to you."
I can't believe that it isn't being discussed more in this forum! Everyone is answering the brain teasers without commenting on the fact that EVERY interview technique has been shown to be fairly meaningless, since the interviewer makes up her mind in the first 15 seconds.
The other relevant statistic is that less than 15% of jobs are gotten from cold-call, off-the-street resume drops. You have to know someone in the company. A local company here in Vancouver, Crystal Decisions, admits that openly. You don't stand a chance if you don't have an internal reference.
You also mentioned another thing in the article. "They also help make sure that the person being hired is at least somewhat like the people doing the hiring." This spooks me. I was in a seminar that showed how this "hire-people-like-me" mentality (which is what people decide in that fifteen seconds) tends to skew a company badly, so that when they go wrong, they can REALLY go wrong, because there's no one left who disagrees with the general consensus. Yes, even intelligent people can be wrong, and they can all be wrong at the same time. Microsoft has made a couple of stupid decisions, right?
One more thing -- if you are mainly hiring for experience, then you are hiring someone to do what they've already done. It seems to me that technology is about doing new things. You should be looking for clear, intelligent thinkers and people who are willing to learn all the time.
You won't really get these intelligent people by asking the kind of questions for which the interviewee either has heard the answer ("cheaters" and "memorizers") or will need (realistically) several days to hammer out an answer.
I tend to score highly on IQ tests, but I'm not convinced that these scores are relevant for hiring.... And these questions only capture a corner of a person's intellect - or maybe it is more their intuition?
You wrote: > I refuse to accept mediocrity. Is OO the QWERTY or New-COBOL of software development?
It's even worse. It's the HTML of software development. Not necessarily superior, and inferior in many ways, but it is the standard nevertheless...
Just visited your oop.ismad website. Now I understand why you reacted so strongly to the OO aspect of dBase. I don't want to get into an argument with someone who feels so passionately about something, especially since I don't much care in this area.
One comment about the popularity of OO, however. I wonder if it was the event-driven nature of the GUI interfaces (button clicks, independant windows, etc) that made OO popular, rather than the graphics? OO is a very convenient way to implement an event-driven architecture; no "main" procedure infinitely looping, waiting for interrupts. And yes, before you argue, I know it can be done other ways, like widget tables etc. It just seemed like a good way to do it at the time, I suppose, and then enough people had gone through the learning curve (and thus, not wanting to do it differently -- change is EXPENSIVE) that it became the de facto standard.
I agree that the "widget tables" approach is a good one. However, I think you answered your own question. OO is very "band wagon" -- another way of saying the de facto standard.
I don't think object orientation is necessarily the best approach, but I think it's important for an application development system to stay in step with the dominant way of thinking in terms of programming models. I think dBase has been doing this, while maintaining an amazing amount of backward-compatibility. Sure, @...SAY commands don't work anymore (not really practical in a Windows environment), but just about everything else does.
Borland, as far as I know, is still holding onto the source code for the DOS dBase (and all those other Unix builds). They sold the Visual dBase source to a new little company called dBase Inc.
Fortunately (for performance and unfortunately for compatibility), the dBase Plus code is all 32-bit Windows, which means it is built on a completely new and different codebase.
But does it run under Wine? The question, I guess, is can you get the Borland Database Engine to run?
dBase Plus is NOT your father's Ashton-Tate dBase III+...
Please visit the dBase Inc. website for more information. It is entirely Object Oriented, graphical, 32-bit, SQL-compliant, and it uses Borland's BDE as a database engine. It is fast, it runs web sites well, and you don't have to deal with Microsoft's stupid EULA.
I hope someone meta-moderates that stupid "Funny" moderation.
Hey anyone know if you can run dBase Plus (the latest visual-OOP-BDE version of the even more ancient and venerable dBase line) on Linux thru Wine?
I can guarantee that if you can get dBase running, dBase Inc. will shake your hand, not slap your wrist. They've been promising a Linux version for ages, and if they could find the time, they would have released one by now...
Please see my (huge) reply to Hast. To do what you're describing, I'd just buy a $60 DVD player, but that's not what the article was about. It was about booting Linux on an XBox.
Your "2.5 times" is too high, even for the comparison we're making.
An used, unmodified, M$-restricted XBox vs. a brand-new, under-warranty computer?
Sure, I'll buy your argument if all I wanted to do was play some music, watch some disks, and play some games. But I can buy a $60 DVD player that plays MP3s, DVDs, VCDs, and will even do slideshows of JPEGs, all with digital audio and component video. So an used XBox, for 2 times that price, will let me play some games as well. w00t.
But we're not talking about that. We're talking about turning an XBox into a computer by hacking it to boot Linux. That means you're voiding any warranty that you might have had, and if you're buying used, there probably isn't much left anyway (and who knows what shape it's in? It is used, after all! That "nice" remote might have been chewed on by someone's dog)...
If you really want to go the financial argument route (siighh), let's compare apples to apples (not Apples, silly, that's another argument! ). A new XBox, according to Amazon, is going to cost you $200, plus a DVD-playback kit, which will cost you another $30. Ok, so we're talking $230 already, and you haven't even modded it yet. That's going to cost you another $50, and you're probably going to have to solder some wires. That will also make it impossible to use the Live service, so if you wanted to play games online, oh well...
So! Aren't you CLEVER! You've created a fairly inferior computer (8 GB HD?? 64 MB RAM??) that will run a fairly new and shaky version of Linux. That's cool! You've saved yourself at least $30 by doing the soldering yourself!
The $305 machine I described will even be cooler if you throw another $70 at it and get a wireless keyboard and mouse. Then you can stick the box anywhere out of sight (and hearing) and be able to *additionally* play DivX movies and streaming Internet radio (which I'm listening to through my stereo right now) chat with friends all over the world, browse the 'net, manipulate photos, check your e-mail, and all the other cool things real computers can do, using a tried and tested, feature-packed, easy-to-install Linux distro.
Again, I think it's a very cool thing to do as a hobby project. But please, don't try to tell me it's an economically sound thing to do! An XBox is not, in your words, "suited for the job" of being a good Linux computer...
I just went to the website of a computer store just down the street from me. I could go out and buy a full system (except monitor & OS) with an AMD XP1700, 256 MB of RAM, 32MB video card, 10/100 LAN card, and CD for CAD$415, which is $285 of "your" dollars. That's brand new, and that's a way better system than an unmodded XBox. The same system with a 16x DVD player and USB 2.0 will cost $305 USD. Then you have to get a TV-out card for another $40 US, but the system you end up with is hugely superior to the XBox, both in upgradeability and flexibility.
Of course, I can't argue with the "interesting weekend project" aspect. I like doing that stuff too. But don't try to use the financial argument with me...
The XBox is a game machine, not a PC, and it is designed to run 3D graphics applications really well. I can only conclude that the "run Linux on XBox" thing is a "proof-of-concept" (or as someone else put it, "stick-a-finger-in-M$-eye" thing or a "wow-your-fellow-geeks" thing)
By the way, I consider soldering to be modding.
PCs are cheap and plentiful. There are many FREE Linux distros that can be run on them. And, HEY! you DO NOT NEED A MOD CHIP nor do you need to solder ANYTHING to run Linux on them!!
Not so long after this article about Minotaur came out on Slashdot, along with a bunch of comments talking about how cool it would be if Mozilla were to move away from the monolithic-bloat model towards the lean-mean-module approach, the Mozilla team says "hey, let's do that!"
They must read Slashdot! Well, of course they do, but they must actually take it/us seriously.;)
Hey, I haven't seen anyone mentioning that there are two kinds of cheating. The Quake-style cheats that involve looking through walls or whatever are relatively harmless, mainly because most people can play Quake online for free, and unless someone is wagering on your performance, there's no cash rewards.
On-line game cheating in role-playing, especially subscription games is FAR more serious, because in some games, the currency or objects of power or weapons are worth real cash and can even be sold on e-bay (see the post with the e-bay link above) and it suddenly matters very much that some people are cheating.
I find it interesting that science fiction suggests some new technologies long, long before they are possible, but completely misses others.
As people have mentioned, Dick Tracy had a wrist-phone, but none of the "golden era" (30's-60's) science fiction that I read ever predicted the cell phone as a commonplace, walking-down-the-street, standing-in-line-at-starbucks, chatting-with-your-friend devices that every student would have.
Also, whatever happened to the videophone? We've had the technology for a while, but the SF authors got it wrong again, I guess. Nobody wants to be on the viewscreen while talking...
Oh, and you can't blow your computer up by convincing it that it's illogical.
If projects like Phoenix, which are mainly about reducing bloat by making Mozilla smaller and faster, are supposed to grow out of Mozilla, doesn't it seem logical that the Mozilla team should be doing it themselves?
Why can't they set up the installer to have a custom / advanced mode that lets the user pick and choose how many features to add, so that Mozilla can either be a tiny, Phoenix-like browser or a bloated IE-like browser, depending on what the user wants?
I really like Mozilla, but I have to agree with the Phoenix guys that it is time for a diet...
So, can anyone comment on this?
If this is true ("uses more power (and pollutes more) than you can yield from it") for combustible fuel purposes, as aNiceGuy and Pimental claim it is, does that mean the whole ethanol thing is a red herring for fuel cells?
Unfortunately, keyboards are still the best form of user input right now, especially for people like me who write very slowly and type very quickly. Voice input and graffiti / handwriting recognition are not really solutions for folks like me. I think we need word recognition / completion; it should start guessing your words as you start to type / write.
Example: you input the letter "T" and it throws up a list of the 10 most recent "T" words you have used, and if you input "R" it will show the best 10 guesses for "TR". Now that's useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Who wouldn't buy this?
.
I mean, come ON! The article says that it has support for Java, OS/2, Windows 3.1 and DOS applications
I've been looking for something that could run my Windows 3.1 apps for ages!
Scary! Do the questions even matter??
...
From the article mentioned in the review:
"'[Tricia Prickett] took fifteen seconds of videotape showing the applicant as he or she knocks on the door, comes in, shakes the hand of the interviewer, sits down, and the interviewer welcomes the person,' Bernieri explained. Then, like Ambady, Prickett got a series of strangers to rate the applicants based on the handshake clip, using the same criteria that the interviewers had used. Once more, against all expectations, the ratings were very similar to those of the interviewers. 'On nine out of the eleven traits the applicants were being judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the interview,' Bernieri says. 'The strength of the correlations was extraordinary.' "
"For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date.
We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair. "
I think you hit it on the head with your comment, "Hiring people is still a black art. Once you've eliminated the obviously unqualified, you might as well use some random criteria. Is there any alternative? Yes -- hire people who are already somewhat known to you."
.
I can't believe that it isn't being discussed more in this forum! Everyone is answering the brain teasers without commenting on the fact that EVERY interview technique has been shown to be fairly meaningless, since the interviewer makes up her mind in the first 15 seconds
The other relevant statistic is that less than 15% of jobs are gotten from cold-call, off-the-street resume drops. You have to know someone in the company. A local company here in Vancouver, Crystal Decisions, admits that openly. You don't stand a chance if you don't have an internal reference.
You also mentioned another thing in the article. "They also help make sure that the person being hired is at least somewhat like the people doing the hiring." This spooks me. I was in a seminar that showed how this "hire-people-like-me" mentality (which is what people decide in that fifteen seconds) tends to skew a company badly, so that when they go wrong, they can REALLY go wrong, because there's no one left who disagrees with the general consensus. Yes, even intelligent people can be wrong, and they can all be wrong at the same time. Microsoft has made a couple of stupid decisions, right?
One more thing -- if you are mainly hiring for experience, then you are hiring someone to do what they've already done. It seems to me that technology is about doing new things. You should be looking for clear, intelligent thinkers and people who are willing to learn all the time.
You won't really get these intelligent people by asking the kind of questions for which the interviewee either has heard the answer ("cheaters" and "memorizers") or will need (realistically) several days to hammer out an answer.
I tend to score highly on IQ tests, but I'm not convinced that these scores are relevant for hiring.... And these questions only capture a corner of a person's intellect - or maybe it is more their intuition?
You wrote:
> I refuse to accept mediocrity. Is OO the QWERTY or New-COBOL of software development?
It's even worse. It's the HTML of software development. Not necessarily superior, and inferior in many ways, but it is the standard nevertheless...
Just visited your oop.ismad website. Now I understand why you reacted so strongly to the OO aspect of dBase. I don't want to get into an argument with someone who feels so passionately about something, especially since I don't much care in this area.
One comment about the popularity of OO, however. I wonder if it was the event-driven nature of the GUI interfaces (button clicks, independant windows, etc) that made OO popular, rather than the graphics? OO is a very convenient way to implement an event-driven architecture; no "main" procedure infinitely looping, waiting for interrupts. And yes, before you argue, I know it can be done other ways, like widget tables etc. It just seemed like a good way to do it at the time, I suppose, and then enough people had gone through the learning curve (and thus, not wanting to do it differently -- change is EXPENSIVE) that it became the de facto standard.
Tablizer,
I agree that the "widget tables" approach is a good one. However, I think you answered your own question. OO is very "band wagon" -- another way of saying the de facto standard.
I don't think object orientation is necessarily the best approach, but I think it's important for an application development system to stay in step with the dominant way of thinking in terms of programming models. I think dBase has been doing this, while maintaining an amazing amount of backward-compatibility. Sure, @...SAY commands don't work anymore (not really practical in a Windows environment), but just about everything else does.
Borland, as far as I know, is still holding onto the source code for the DOS dBase (and all those other Unix builds). They sold the Visual dBase source to a new little company called dBase Inc.
Fortunately (for performance and unfortunately for compatibility), the dBase Plus code is all 32-bit Windows, which means it is built on a completely new and different codebase.
But does it run under Wine? The question, I guess, is can you get the Borland Database Engine to run?
Not sure why I was moderated "funny"...
dBase Plus is NOT your father's Ashton-Tate dBase III+...
Please visit the dBase Inc. website for more information. It is entirely Object Oriented, graphical, 32-bit, SQL-compliant, and it uses Borland's BDE as a database engine. It is fast, it runs web sites well, and you don't have to deal with Microsoft's stupid EULA.
I hope someone meta-moderates that stupid "Funny" moderation.
Hey anyone know if you can run dBase Plus (the latest visual-OOP-BDE version of the even more ancient and venerable dBase line) on Linux thru Wine?
I can guarantee that if you can get dBase running, dBase Inc. will shake your hand, not slap your wrist. They've been promising a Linux version for ages, and if they could find the time, they would have released one by now...
Hi DarkZero,
Please see my (huge) reply to Hast. To do what you're describing, I'd just buy a $60 DVD player, but that's not what the article was about. It was about booting Linux on an XBox.
Sigh,
Your "2.5 times" is too high, even for the comparison we're making. An used, unmodified, M$-restricted XBox vs. a brand-new, under-warranty computer?
Sure, I'll buy your argument if all I wanted to do was play some music, watch some disks, and play some games. But I can buy a $60 DVD player that plays MP3s, DVDs, VCDs, and will even do slideshows of JPEGs, all with digital audio and component video. So an used XBox, for 2 times that price, will let me play some games as well. w00t.
But we're not talking about that. We're talking about turning an XBox into a computer by hacking it to boot Linux. That means you're voiding any warranty that you might have had, and if you're buying used, there probably isn't much left anyway (and who knows what shape it's in? It is used, after all! That "nice" remote might have been chewed on by someone's dog)...
If you really want to go the financial argument route (siighh), let's compare apples to apples (not Apples, silly, that's another argument! ). A new XBox, according to Amazon, is going to cost you $200, plus a DVD-playback kit, which will cost you another $30. Ok, so we're talking $230 already, and you haven't even modded it yet. That's going to cost you another $50, and you're probably going to have to solder some wires. That will also make it impossible to use the Live service, so if you wanted to play games online, oh well...
So! Aren't you CLEVER! You've created a fairly inferior computer (8 GB HD?? 64 MB RAM??) that will run a fairly new and shaky version of Linux. That's cool! You've saved yourself at least $30 by doing the soldering yourself!
The $305 machine I described will even be cooler if you throw another $70 at it and get a wireless keyboard and mouse. Then you can stick the box anywhere out of sight (and hearing) and be able to *additionally* play DivX movies and streaming Internet radio (which I'm listening to through my stereo right now) chat with friends all over the world, browse the 'net, manipulate photos, check your e-mail, and all the other cool things real computers can do, using a tried and tested, feature-packed, easy-to-install Linux distro.
Again, I think it's a very cool thing to do as a hobby project. But please, don't try to tell me it's an economically sound thing to do! An XBox is not, in your words, "suited for the job" of being a good Linux computer...
I just went to the website of a computer store just down the street from me. I could go out and buy a full system (except monitor & OS) with an AMD XP1700, 256 MB of RAM, 32MB video card, 10/100 LAN card, and CD for CAD$415, which is $285 of "your" dollars. That's brand new, and that's a way better system than an unmodded XBox. The same system with a 16x DVD player and USB 2.0 will cost $305 USD. Then you have to get a TV-out card for another $40 US, but the system you end up with is hugely superior to the XBox, both in upgradeability and flexibility.
Of course, I can't argue with the "interesting weekend project" aspect. I like doing that stuff too. But don't try to use the financial argument with me...
I have to scratch my head at this too.
The XBox is a game machine, not a PC, and it is designed to run 3D graphics applications really well. I can only conclude that the "run Linux on XBox" thing is a "proof-of-concept" (or as someone else put it, "stick-a-finger-in-M$-eye" thing or a "wow-your-fellow-geeks" thing)
By the way, I consider soldering to be modding.
PCs are cheap and plentiful. There are many FREE Linux distros that can be run on them. And, HEY! you DO NOT NEED A MOD CHIP nor do you need to solder ANYTHING to run Linux on them!!
ya ya... -1 redundant.
There's a certain irony in the fact that one of the major headlines on Google News is this "Yahoo retooling" story.
.
Here's Google News's list of news sources on this story. WOW. Yahoo as a search engine, even for news, is so -- toast
Google News is magnificent. It even tells you how long ago each story was posted. Best way to keep up on the war.
Interesting.
;)
Not so long after this article about Minotaur came out on Slashdot, along with a bunch of comments talking about how cool it would be if Mozilla were to move away from the monolithic-bloat model towards the lean-mean-module approach, the Mozilla team says "hey, let's do that!"
They must read Slashdot! Well, of course they do, but they must actually take it/us seriously.
hey, anyone wanna hire me?
I don't think it's exactly anyone's "biggest concern" but when there's real money involved, things always matter more.
Hey, I haven't seen anyone mentioning that there are two kinds of cheating. The Quake-style cheats that involve looking through walls or whatever are relatively harmless, mainly because most people can play Quake online for free, and unless someone is wagering on your performance, there's no cash rewards.
On-line game cheating in role-playing, especially subscription games is FAR more serious, because in some games, the currency or objects of power or weapons are worth real cash and can even be sold on e-bay (see the post with the e-bay link above) and it suddenly matters very much that some people are cheating.
I find it interesting that science fiction suggests some new technologies long, long before they are possible, but completely misses others.
As people have mentioned, Dick Tracy had a wrist-phone, but none of the "golden era" (30's-60's) science fiction that I read ever predicted the cell phone as a commonplace, walking-down-the-street, standing-in-line-at-starbucks, chatting-with-your-friend devices that every student would have.
Also, whatever happened to the videophone? We've had the technology for a while, but the SF authors got it wrong again, I guess. Nobody wants to be on the viewscreen while talking...
Oh, and you can't blow your computer up by convincing it that it's illogical.
If projects like Phoenix, which are mainly about reducing bloat by making Mozilla smaller and faster, are supposed to grow out of Mozilla, doesn't it seem logical that the Mozilla team should be doing it themselves?
Why can't they set up the installer to have a custom / advanced mode that lets the user pick and choose how many features to add, so that Mozilla can either be a tiny, Phoenix-like browser or a bloated IE-like browser, depending on what the user wants?
I really like Mozilla, but I have to agree with the Phoenix guys that it is time for a diet...
I hope people don't try Bud Lite in their laptop batteries. They'll only get 2 minutes of power per bottle.
So, can anyone comment on this? If this is true ("uses more power (and pollutes more) than you can yield from it") for combustible fuel purposes, as aNiceGuy and Pimental claim it is, does that mean the whole ethanol thing is a red herring for fuel cells?
Unfortunately, keyboards are still the best form of user input right now, especially for people like me who write very slowly and type very quickly. Voice input and graffiti / handwriting recognition are not really solutions for folks like me. I think we need word recognition / completion; it should start guessing your words as you start to type / write.
Example: you input the letter "T" and it throws up a list of the 10 most recent "T" words you have used, and if you input "R" it will show the best 10 guesses for "TR". Now that's useful.