In my experience, if it's not on StackOverflow, it's not something I can resolve in a 30-minute interview.
StackOverflow has a sufficiently large inventory these days, that most problems that it can't resolve are going to take me at least 2 days of serious work.
The downside of that is that there are a lot of people who get by by blindly copy-pasting StackOverflow code without understanding what it means, but I have other resources where I can get background and theory.
Hey, if people actually give you something for your work, you're one up. I have people who owe me enough money to do major property improvements and I'm not holding my breath. I'm supposed to be Wal-Mart or something, except that even at Wal-Mart everyone expects Lower Prices, not flat-out free work.
The fact that you don't actually need or want the Pi Zero W bad enough undercuts the force of your complaints. I work with stuff like this, and shipping is just part of the cost of doing business for me. Although the first one I get will probably end up driving a $25 Pi camera as a wireless security monitor.
Then again, I could buy this device including S&H from just one of my quarterly dividend checks. The joys of being a Capitalist! grunt, grunt, oink!
Something like this would have gone for thousands of dollars 20 years ago.
Something like this would have gone for millions of dollars 50 years ago.
Seriously. You can emulate an IBM System/370 on a Pi at speeds equal to or greater than the original hardware ran.
It's not 20 years ago. It's today. We're here, please try to catch up.
There are many products where the price of the materials and labor are the smallest part of the price, It's why so much food is so much cheaper per ounce/gram/milliliter/cubix-something in "family packs" than in individual-sized servings.
Be properly awed that computers are now among this assembly.
And seriously, we're talking shipping costs. Buy 10 of them. If the shipping is $7.50 for one, it's probably not going to be a whole lot more than that for a shipment of 10, considering size/weight. Just another "family pack". If you don't ever expect to need 10 and don't have enough friends to chip in on an order, buy one, suck up the shipping costs and don't complain. Even for $12, surely by now enough wealth has trickled down to you that you can afford that.
An awful lot of people are simply political automata. Press the right button and they'll literally DuckSpeak a response with no actual thought involved.
Trump does tend to trigger a lot more buttons, but in large part it's because he's a natural button-pusher.
The Internet has done 2 things. It has pretty much levelled our sources of information. One link is as easy to click on as another, so we tend to follow the links that gratify us,
The second thing it has done is made it easier to ignore inconvenient truths. A TV news program will typically present a number of articles, and if you don't like/disagree with one of them, you're still obliged to wait until it's over to get to the ones you do want. So at least alternatives have an opportunity to make a case, even if we reject them. Likewise, print publications may have headlines we choose to ignore, but nevertheless we see the headlines and headlines often draw at least cursory scan of what immediately follow. And often print publications are in shared areas where people can see them whether they'd actually buy the publication or not.
In contrast, we can skip "offensive" links and never know what was behind them and web pages don't lie randomly around houses or offices for the unsuspecting to be corrupted by them.
What we end up with isn't just echo chambers, but blinkered views of the world. We can manage without much effort to be totally ignorant of important information simply because it wasn't directed straight down our personal pipelines.
The human brain is wired for pessimism. It's a survival reflex. We want to read about bad news so as to be better prepared in case something like that comes our way.
Perhaps the original "fake news", in fact, came from our religious leaders. They tell us that sacrificing a hecatomb to Zeus or chanting a magic spell such as "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet" or "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour" will ward off evil. Bad news reminds us that reality is different. That prayer and a positive attitude stop short of being able to halt the anvil falling from above, that mountains have more faith that they won't cast themselves into the sea than we do otherwise (and that TNT has more faith than either us or mountains). That it truly does rain upon both the Just and the un-Just, although the un-Just can generally afford umbrellas.
A steady diet of bad news isn't healthy either, though. Which is why we like our news sources salted with tales of baby ducks being rescued from storm drains.
It isn't just ad-blocking, though. Tat-heavy ads mess with your bandwidth, but a lot of the ping-ponging comes from not pre-allocating space for legitimate things to come. If you simply put an image tag on a page, an initial space may be computed, but if the actual image isn't the exact same size, then the page layout has to be updated once the true image pixel occupancy is known. Simply putting the image tag in a fixed-size DIV can mitigate this. So can putting WIDTH/HEIGHT attributes on image tags, although I've personally seen bad matchups where the browser burned a lot of resources re-scaling to a different final size.
Clicks are often bogus thanks to incompetent web designers who don't pre-allocate real estate, thus causing pages - and clickpoints - to bounce up and down madly as content arrives. And, incidentally, making it harder to read the primary content.
Auto-playing audio/video metrics are even worse. I'll often close a page immediately if something starts making unsolicited noises and in many cases will never return to the site again, much less the article in question. But chances are that the offending content has already logged as "seen" thanks to buffering. I didn't see, if, I fled from it, and the fact that it was delivered to me unwanted doesn't make me a biuyer.
GNU is important. But a lot of its importance comes in providing Unix utility programs and functions to non-Linux OS's, which is only slightly above Peter Norton's taking a mess of Ward Christensen utilities and calling them "Norton Utilities". It's a valuable service, but let's remember that everyone deserves credit.
Would I keep quiet over an "Oracle/Emacs"?
To continue, CUPS is from Apple. Shall we call it Apple/gnu/Linux?
I ran quite a few gnu utilities on CP/M, long before Linux, but I didn't call it gnu/CPM.
Most Linux distros come with countless programs, and while many of the core OS utilities are gnu apps, many Linux apps are not gnu apps. The Bluetooth manager isn't gnu, I don't think any of the databases are gnu, and systemd certainly isn't gnu. And on and on and on.
I appreciate the works of Stallman and friends, but I think he claims a bit too much.
Do you know how much CO2 went into generating you? Not being overly facetious, but without hard numbers, I'm not going to assume I know within any orders of magnitude how much any given solution costs environmentally or monetarily (which are often not the same thing).
Concrete is at least a way of sequestering combustion products, although as far as I'm concerned, whether you scoop out a leakage-lined storage facility from the earth using hydrocarbon-burning earth movers or build a storage facility out of stacked-up artificial rocks created by hydrocarbon-burning grinding and mixing equipment is more or less moot. Either solution is just a parking space and eventually, it would be more profitable to find something productive to do with the assets stored there.
Locally, you can legally put a monitor out by the roadside trash - one monitor per household. The city or its designated collection service (varies depending on where in town you are) hauls it away and presumably it ends up in the city toxic waste recycling facility. I trust that they are going to do something responsible with it, although I've never investigated in detail. We mostly allocate our civic corruption to other endeavours so it's mainly a question of how thorough they are and how responsible the downstream processors are.
For more than one such device or for less benign waste, they have annual neighbourhood recycling events where you can haul your old paint cans, used motor oil and dead electronics in and they'll load them into trucks that go to that self-same facility, Or, if you'd rather not wait, you can always take it to them yourself.
Because not more than 100 miles from where I sit, authorities discovered a creek full of old lead-acid auto batteries where they'd been dumped. Suppose you lived in an area where the groundwater sourced your drinking-water reservoirs.
A warehouse full of dead monitors will not just sit there "forever".
Alas, no. Eventually someone would come into the warehouse, see all those dusty old monitors taking up space and a truck would roll up in the middle of the night, carrying them off to be dumped somewhere in the countryside.
This is just another scam sold by Dogbert to the Pointy-Haired Boss.
Time spent in chair doesn't equal productivity. I could put an inflatable Bozo doll in my chair and be just as productive.
Time spent typing doesn't equal productivity. I'm not a typist, my product is software, not letters in a document.
Lines of code certainly don't equal productivity, since I consider many of my most productive days to be those when I end up with fewer lines of code than I started with.
You cannot measure people with Procrustean standards and fixed metrics. All those are is a lazy managerial excuse. You can use them as a club to threaten to fire people. You can make an idol of them and worship it instead of actually spending time walking the trenches to see what's really going on.
If you reward people for digging up red jelly beans and punish them for digging up blue ones, you can rest assured that there will be cans of red paint everywhere and people will spend a lot of time that could have been employed digging up jelly beans painting them instead.
Conversely, if I had been paid really well - assuming I'd been well-treated - and a new project came up later, I'd be a lot more likely to sign back on again.
But that sounds too much like Free Market Economics. Spending money for value - and for goodwill.
As opposed to the popular paradigm where you hire gobs of people, work them until their effective salary is 50 cents an hour. then toss them on the street, uncaring if they despise you so much that the only reason they'd ever come back was if the alternative was starvation.
One more press release about a laboratory demonstration with an undefined time to market. Just about zero technical details, why did I click on it? Haven't we had enough of this stuff, Slashdot?
No, I find it fascinating to be ahead of the curve on learning about this and other "maybe" technologies. I remember hearing about DVDs years before they hit the market and thinking "oh cool". The thing is, you have to accept a low % of these cool techs ever make it.
The other thing is, that a lot of other cool tech comes eventually from the failures.
I really get annoyed with all the whining from people who expect every advance to be finished in time for next quarter's corporate sales bonuses. Or worse yet, nay-say entire technologies because they're not yet perfect (solar, anyone?) We live in an era where progress happens at a dizzying rate and people nevertheless grump that discoveries don't all have instant commercial application and that they're being lied to or even robbed by people "wasting" time and effort on R&D instead of immediately producing practical products.
The laser was long touted as a "solution in search of a problem". Great in theory, but almost useless in practice. Then one day lasers were everywhere. Quick! without going around and counting, how many lasers are in your house?
He is a little high but not much. 150-160F is very likely in texas or about 65C. I've seen local news "bake" things inside cars to demonstrate just how dangerous leaving a child in a car is in texas.
And Florida.
I used to have a car with a thermometer stuck to the dash. In the dead of Winter, it would be pegged (140 F or more). I used to leave frozen dinners on the dash when I went into the office in the morning and they'd be hot in time for lunch.
That was back when it actually got cold outside in the winter, too.
I used to sneer at the filtered-water crowd and the mere idea of buying water - in plastic bottles no less - at a cost per gallon higher than gasoline repels me.
But I got a filter pitcher once as part of my emergency preparedness kit and was amazed to discover that my heartburn rate went way down.
The chlorine in my tap water was doing it to me.
So even just drinking lots of water isn't totally risk-free.
No solution is totally safe, and some acid neutralizers themselves have had warnings - for example, Rolaids was using an aluminum-based ingredient that came under fire during the Great Aluminum Alzheimer's Scare. I'm not even sure what simple calcium carbonate can do to you if you overdo it.
Also, in many cases, you have to chain-pop antacids, especially in cases where it's not a single acid hit but an ongoing self-renewing onslaught. PPIs are often 1 pill for 12-to-24 hour relief and that can make a big difference when you are trying to sleep - a time when acid reflux is especially likely (as you noted). Waking up every few hours to an acid burp is no fun.
My gut doesn't have much of an opinion on the matter, but my stomach knows.
In any event, I understand that a lot of digestion is enzymatic, rather than brute-force acid. In any event, even major acid neutralization/suppression doesn't have a noticeable effect on digestion for me. At least in the short term.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, if it's not on StackOverflow, it's not something I can resolve in a 30-minute interview.
StackOverflow has a sufficiently large inventory these days, that most problems that it can't resolve are going to take me at least 2 days of serious work.
The downside of that is that there are a lot of people who get by by blindly copy-pasting StackOverflow code without understanding what it means, but I have other resources where I can get background and theory.
Hey, if people actually give you something for your work, you're one up. I have people who owe me enough money to do major property improvements and I'm not holding my breath. I'm supposed to be Wal-Mart or something, except that even at Wal-Mart everyone expects Lower Prices, not flat-out free work.
The fact that you don't actually need or want the Pi Zero W bad enough undercuts the force of your complaints. I work with stuff like this, and shipping is just part of the cost of doing business for me. Although the first one I get will probably end up driving a $25 Pi camera as a wireless security monitor.
Then again, I could buy this device including S&H from just one of my quarterly dividend checks. The joys of being a Capitalist! grunt, grunt, oink!
Something like this would have gone for thousands of dollars 20 years ago.
Something like this would have gone for millions of dollars 50 years ago.
Seriously. You can emulate an IBM System/370 on a Pi at speeds equal to or greater than the original hardware ran.
It's not 20 years ago. It's today. We're here, please try to catch up.
There are many products where the price of the materials and labor are the smallest part of the price, It's why so much food is so much cheaper per ounce/gram/milliliter/cubix-something in "family packs" than in individual-sized servings.
Be properly awed that computers are now among this assembly.
And seriously, we're talking shipping costs. Buy 10 of them. If the shipping is $7.50 for one, it's probably not going to be a whole lot more than that for a shipment of 10, considering size/weight. Just another "family pack". If you don't ever expect to need 10 and don't have enough friends to chip in on an order, buy one, suck up the shipping costs and don't complain. Even for $12, surely by now enough wealth has trickled down to you that you can afford that.
An awful lot of people are simply political automata. Press the right button and they'll literally DuckSpeak a response with no actual thought involved.
Trump does tend to trigger a lot more buttons, but in large part it's because he's a natural button-pusher.
The Internet has done 2 things. It has pretty much levelled our sources of information. One link is as easy to click on as another, so we tend to follow the links that gratify us,
The second thing it has done is made it easier to ignore inconvenient truths. A TV news program will typically present a number of articles, and if you don't like/disagree with one of them, you're still obliged to wait until it's over to get to the ones you do want. So at least alternatives have an opportunity to make a case, even if we reject them. Likewise, print publications may have headlines we choose to ignore, but nevertheless we see the headlines and headlines often draw at least cursory scan of what immediately follow. And often print publications are in shared areas where people can see them whether they'd actually buy the publication or not.
In contrast, we can skip "offensive" links and never know what was behind them and web pages don't lie randomly around houses or offices for the unsuspecting to be corrupted by them.
What we end up with isn't just echo chambers, but blinkered views of the world. We can manage without much effort to be totally ignorant of important information simply because it wasn't directed straight down our personal pipelines.
The human brain is wired for pessimism. It's a survival reflex. We want to read about bad news so as to be better prepared in case something like that comes our way.
Perhaps the original "fake news", in fact, came from our religious leaders. They tell us that sacrificing a hecatomb to Zeus or chanting a magic spell such as "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet" or "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour" will ward off evil. Bad news reminds us that reality is different. That prayer and a positive attitude stop short of being able to halt the anvil falling from above, that mountains have more faith that they won't cast themselves into the sea than we do otherwise (and that TNT has more faith than either us or mountains). That it truly does rain upon both the Just and the un-Just, although the un-Just can generally afford umbrellas.
A steady diet of bad news isn't healthy either, though. Which is why we like our news sources salted with tales of baby ducks being rescued from storm drains.
It isn't just ad-blocking, though. Tat-heavy ads mess with your bandwidth, but a lot of the ping-ponging comes from not pre-allocating space for legitimate things to come. If you simply put an image tag on a page, an initial space may be computed, but if the actual image isn't the exact same size, then the page layout has to be updated once the true image pixel occupancy is known. Simply putting the image tag in a fixed-size DIV can mitigate this. So can putting WIDTH/HEIGHT attributes on image tags, although I've personally seen bad matchups where the browser burned a lot of resources re-scaling to a different final size.
Clicks are often bogus thanks to incompetent web designers who don't pre-allocate real estate, thus causing pages - and clickpoints - to bounce up and down madly as content arrives. And, incidentally, making it harder to read the primary content.
Auto-playing audio/video metrics are even worse. I'll often close a page immediately if something starts making unsolicited noises and in many cases will never return to the site again, much less the article in question. But chances are that the offending content has already logged as "seen" thanks to buffering. I didn't see, if, I fled from it, and the fact that it was delivered to me unwanted doesn't make me a biuyer.
GNU is important. But a lot of its importance comes in providing Unix utility programs and functions to non-Linux OS's, which is only slightly above Peter Norton's taking a mess of Ward Christensen utilities and calling them "Norton Utilities". It's a valuable service, but let's remember that everyone deserves credit.
Would I keep quiet over an "Oracle/Emacs"?
To continue, CUPS is from Apple. Shall we call it Apple/gnu/Linux?
The term gnu/Linux is just as inaccurate.
I ran quite a few gnu utilities on CP/M, long before Linux, but I didn't call it gnu/CPM.
Most Linux distros come with countless programs, and while many of the core OS utilities are gnu apps, many Linux apps are not gnu apps. The Bluetooth manager isn't gnu, I don't think any of the databases are gnu, and systemd certainly isn't gnu. And on and on and on.
I appreciate the works of Stallman and friends, but I think he claims a bit too much.
Do you know how much CO2 went into generating you? Not being overly facetious, but without hard numbers, I'm not going to assume I know within any orders of magnitude how much any given solution costs environmentally or monetarily (which are often not the same thing).
Concrete is at least a way of sequestering combustion products, although as far as I'm concerned, whether you scoop out a leakage-lined storage facility from the earth using hydrocarbon-burning earth movers or build a storage facility out of stacked-up artificial rocks created by hydrocarbon-burning grinding and mixing equipment is more or less moot. Either solution is just a parking space and eventually, it would be more profitable to find something productive to do with the assets stored there.
Locally, you can legally put a monitor out by the roadside trash - one monitor per household. The city or its designated collection service (varies depending on where in town you are) hauls it away and presumably it ends up in the city toxic waste recycling facility. I trust that they are going to do something responsible with it, although I've never investigated in detail. We mostly allocate our civic corruption to other endeavours so it's mainly a question of how thorough they are and how responsible the downstream processors are.
For more than one such device or for less benign waste, they have annual neighbourhood recycling events where you can haul your old paint cans, used motor oil and dead electronics in and they'll load them into trucks that go to that self-same facility, Or, if you'd rather not wait, you can always take it to them yourself.
Why should I care?
Because not more than 100 miles from where I sit, authorities discovered a creek full of old lead-acid auto batteries where they'd been dumped. Suppose you lived in an area where the groundwater sourced your drinking-water reservoirs.
A warehouse full of dead monitors will not just sit there "forever".
Alas, no. Eventually someone would come into the warehouse, see all those dusty old monitors taking up space and a truck would roll up in the middle of the night, carrying them off to be dumped somewhere in the countryside.
Protectionism is a race to see who can build the highest wall.
Globalism is the race to the bottom.
Choose your preferred evil.
Where have you been lately?
The Microsoft Mayor of Munich hired Accenture to "prove" that the Great Linux Experiment was a failure and to offer Microsoft "solutions".
This is just another scam sold by Dogbert to the Pointy-Haired Boss.
Time spent in chair doesn't equal productivity. I could put an inflatable Bozo doll in my chair and be just as productive.
Time spent typing doesn't equal productivity. I'm not a typist, my product is software, not letters in a document.
Lines of code certainly don't equal productivity, since I consider many of my most productive days to be those when I end up with fewer lines of code than I started with.
You cannot measure people with Procrustean standards and fixed metrics. All those are is a lazy managerial excuse. You can use them as a club to threaten to fire people. You can make an idol of them and worship it instead of actually spending time walking the trenches to see what's really going on.
If you reward people for digging up red jelly beans and punish them for digging up blue ones, you can rest assured that there will be cans of red paint everywhere and people will spend a lot of time that could have been employed digging up jelly beans painting them instead.
According to Rick Santorum (R, Accuweather), publicly-funded weather services should only be "switched on" when there's an emergency.
Conversely, if I had been paid really well - assuming I'd been well-treated - and a new project came up later, I'd be a lot more likely to sign back on again.
But that sounds too much like Free Market Economics. Spending money for value - and for goodwill.
As opposed to the popular paradigm where you hire gobs of people, work them until their effective salary is 50 cents an hour. then toss them on the street, uncaring if they despise you so much that the only reason they'd ever come back was if the alternative was starvation.
One more press release about a laboratory demonstration with an undefined time to market.
Just about zero technical details, why did I click on it?
Haven't we had enough of this stuff, Slashdot?
No, I find it fascinating to be ahead of the curve on learning about this and other "maybe" technologies. I remember hearing about DVDs years before they hit the market and thinking "oh cool". The thing is, you have to accept a low % of these cool techs ever make it.
The other thing is, that a lot of other cool tech comes eventually from the failures.
I really get annoyed with all the whining from people who expect every advance to be finished in time for next quarter's corporate sales bonuses. Or worse yet, nay-say entire technologies because they're not yet perfect (solar, anyone?) We live in an era where progress happens at a dizzying rate and people nevertheless grump that discoveries don't all have instant commercial application and that they're being lied to or even robbed by people "wasting" time and effort on R&D instead of immediately producing practical products.
The laser was long touted as a "solution in search of a problem". Great in theory, but almost useless in practice. Then one day lasers were everywhere. Quick! without going around and counting, how many lasers are in your house?
He is a little high but not much. 150-160F is very likely in texas or about 65C. I've seen local news "bake" things inside cars to demonstrate just how dangerous leaving a child in a car is in texas.
And Florida.
I used to have a car with a thermometer stuck to the dash. In the dead of Winter, it would be pegged (140 F or more). I used to leave frozen dinners on the dash when I went into the office in the morning and they'd be hot in time for lunch.
That was back when it actually got cold outside in the winter, too.
"All" we have is 100GB quad-layer Blu-rays.
I bet they were once something in a lab, too.
I used to sneer at the filtered-water crowd and the mere idea of buying water - in plastic bottles no less - at a cost per gallon higher than gasoline repels me.
But I got a filter pitcher once as part of my emergency preparedness kit and was amazed to discover that my heartburn rate went way down.
The chlorine in my tap water was doing it to me.
So even just drinking lots of water isn't totally risk-free.
Or, better yet, find out what's actually causing your stomach to produce excess acid and eliminate it from your diet.
Tomatoes, wheat, cheese. Yep, but sometimes I just gotta have a pizza or pasta.
Or swap for acidic fruit juice and you have a Continental Breakfast as supplied by most hotels and conferences.
Only a masochist or an idiot would consume this sort of stuff daily, but on days that I do, I bless Big Brother Pharma.
Though I wouldn't have downvoted you on your use of that term.
No solution is totally safe, and some acid neutralizers themselves have had warnings - for example, Rolaids was using an aluminum-based ingredient that came under fire during the Great Aluminum Alzheimer's Scare. I'm not even sure what simple calcium carbonate can do to you if you overdo it.
Also, in many cases, you have to chain-pop antacids, especially in cases where it's not a single acid hit but an ongoing self-renewing onslaught. PPIs are often 1 pill for 12-to-24 hour relief and that can make a big difference when you are trying to sleep - a time when acid reflux is especially likely (as you noted). Waking up every few hours to an acid burp is no fun.
My gut doesn't have much of an opinion on the matter, but my stomach knows.
In any event, I understand that a lot of digestion is enzymatic, rather than brute-force acid. In any event, even major acid neutralization/suppression doesn't have a noticeable effect on digestion for me. At least in the short term.