Depends on the job. I typically give candidates a problem a few days before to see how they work without much pressure, but part of my job is to go into the field to conduct integration testing. I will often need to find, analyse and fix a problem under a ticking clock while customers and partners look over my shoulder. If you can't code in an interview you probably can't handle that part of the job.
As an aside I once had a candidate offer to show me some code he had written previously and proceeded to bring up the code he had written while working for several previous employers. Not exactly the way to give me confidence that our code would remain in the company.
The computer is fast enough and powerful enough to do what you want it to do
Which computer is fast enough? What do you want it to do?
We aren't all developing desktop widgets and web apps. Some of us are producing washing machines, anti-lock braking systems or medical implants. We have microcontrollers with a few kb of memory and we really, really care what the hardware is doing.
The point is that we need different tools for different jobs. Personally I think that learning with these languages gives you a better understanding of what is going on. Teaching them in schools certainly saves us from teaching new hires from scratch and hoping that they can get they get their heads around the concepts.
I've got an HTC Hero which is connected through Optus. The phone wasn't available in Australia when I bought it so I imported it. I think it was originally intended for Malaysia. It doesn't have Android Market installed on it and as far as I can tell, Google won't provide access to it.
Optus is may be trying to direct app sales to their own marketplace by not selling phones with Android Marketplace installed but the real problem seems to lie with Google for coming up with the "Google Experience" concept and HTC for trying to get exclusive deals with telcos (and offering phones without Android market as part of those deals.)
If Google wasn't trying to restrict access to the Market this wouldn't be an issue. Optus could block traffic or do whatever they want but if Google wasn't blocking access to the Market I could access it over wi-fi and Optus wouldn't know the difference.
The Milky Way Galaxy is just 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars. The Virgo Super Cluster is 200 million light years across and contains thousands of galaxies. The nearest exoplanet that we have detected is about 10 light years away.
Meanwhile animals and land plants are believed to have started showing up around 500 million years ago on a presumably "life sustaining Earth".
The universe is big but there are a lot of places nearby from which you could observe using only light that Earth has an interesting chemical and physical makeup.
The idea is to increase the average price per unit of software without exceeding the ability of the little guy to buy the software. The assumption is that someone running a piece of software on an 8 CPU system is more likely to be able to swallow an increased price and should be generating more revenue from the software than someone running a single CPU.
You could achieve the same thing by charging per transaction or by MIPS but those sorts of metrics get complicated for the user and the vendor to administer.
A number of posters have commented that similar concerns were raised when Walkmans were introduced.
What I would be interested in knowing is if users have a tendency to listen to different portable audio sources at different volumes?
Louder music generally sounds better (to a point) so do the different characteristics of formats mean that listeners have a different baseline for volume? Do we play MP3s quieter than cassettes but louder than CDs?
There probably isn't enough of a difference to affect hearing loss, especially since most of the reason for dangerously high volumes is to drown out other noise, but it would be interesting to know.
I'm not sure, but I think pherris was saying that Palm should release a Tungsten E with a Universal Connector.
I see a lot of people complaining about a lack of a "universal connector" on the Tungsten E. I have a Tungsten E and I love the fact that it uses a standard mini-USB port. I can charge off any PC using a standard cable used by several of my gadgets.
Now I admit that I don't have any legacy add-ons but I think the answer is to use the standard USB interface for all Palm models, release new add-ons that use the USB and release a cheap conversion widget so that users can still use their old add-ons.
The real question is why the hell can't I plug my Tungsten E into any computer and have that computer mount the Palm storage as a removable drive, without installing drivers? You could add security by making the user enter a password on the Palm to unlock the filesystem.
You're using a once in a million years event (albeit one that may last for a thousand years) to claim that compasses aren't reliable?
I suspect that if I go hiking tomorrow there is more chance of my GPS unit screwing up than the earth's magnetic field suddenly vanishing.
The real point of the post you are replying to is: if you are going to stake your life on a piece of equipment, make sure you have a backup. Preferably something that has different failure modes.
What you say is correct but you kind of missed the point.
While these researchers have only completed that 1% of inspiration, they have proved that anyone with adequate smarts and access to previous research can modify a virus to have different properties.
The obvious thing that most people are thinking of is bio-weapons development. What I would be more worried about is that some African or Eastern-European nation that is facing a crippling epidemic might decide to develop a transmissible "cure" and release it with minimal testing. Heck even with extensive testing, issues might not be detected until it is released in the general public.
Re:Previous attempt to avoid contamination
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
Not quite true, as the article mentions, there is Lake Vostok.
Lake Vostok is a large, deep lake 4km underneath the ice sheet in Antartica that may be staying liquid due to a geothermic heat source.
Of course the chances of anything living in there getting onto a Europa-bound probe unintentionally are pretty slim.
Any probe designs intended for Europa will more than likely be tested on Lake Vostok first.
You're right, the economics of mining the moon have very little to do with Moore's Law.
Bringing fuel back from the moon also doesn't have that much to do with the cost of launching things into space. Once you have the infrastructure up there, it becomes pretty cheap to get the stuff back to earth. Assuming that is where you want to send it.
As you are sending material down the gravity well, the transport is very cheap. Heck if you can get a space elevator working you could even transfer some of the fuel's potential energy due to gravity to loads going up.
Admittedly the infrastructure is extraordinarily expensive.
Do you have a source for that? I have a cousin that is an engineer working for a large international airline and he has gone so far as to say that: "Whenever you have a particularly smooth landing, it is probably the auto-pilot"
You know, you can buy a similar piece of plastic for around 25c. Oh wait... it doesn't come with any music on it.
I agree that CDs and music in general is overpriced at the moment but saying that the music on the CDs has no cost to produce and no value is clearly ridiculous. If it had no value, we wouldn't be trying to aquire it.
I also fail to see how an attempt by a recording company to respond to consumers' complaints about price by dropping their prices is in any way similar to Microsoft responding to complaints about their monopoly and unfair trade practices by trying to unfairly extend their monopoly. The only possible way you could make this comparison is if you claimed that the primary complaint against record companies was that the artists weren't getting enough money and then the prices were dropped in response (hence reducing the money received by artists).
Yep, because we need more people who think it is a good idea to squeeze in between two adjacent lanes of traffic at a set of lights.
I've no doubt that a large percentage of motorcycle accidents are caused by the carelessness of some drivers in larger vehicles. I would also suggest that a significant number of accidents arise out of the sheer recklessness of some motorcycle/bicycle riders.
I agree, my low-end Clie is the same height and thickness of my reasonably small phone and fits nicely into a pocket. If I could ditch the phone and just keep the PDA with its full size screen, I'd be very happy.
As for the headset, it should certainly be available as an option but when the flip-top for my PDA is folded out the whole thing is pretty much the same size as a standard land-line handset. Put a mike down the bottom, a flat-panel speaker and maybe a keypad in the lid, add some GSM support and Bob's your uncle.
I think you may be forgetting about the Stealth 64 range (I had a Diamond Stealth 64) in the mid 90's. When they first came out they were about the best you could get in price/performance for a consumer card.
IIRC the Matrox Millennium came out at either the same time or slightly later and whupped them in terms of performance but it was over twice the price.
Yeah money is an abstraction. It is an abstraction designed to simplify the trade of goods and services. Also makes it a hell of a lot easier to redistribute wealth through taxation.
What exactly were you planning on replacing money with? Direct trade? Communal resources?
Are you really upset with money? Or is it greed? Beaurocracy?
The show actually explained this in the first season. They were questioning why people were acting as if nothing happened after everyone had obviously seen vampires. The explanation was that people tend to rationalise what they can and do their best to forget what they can't.
I'm not saying it makes sense in the real world but the show recognises that the people should be freaking out.
BTW how many people go missing? http://www.bielek.com/pdf/missing_children2.pdf claims 110,000 reported missing in California in 1999 of which 100,000 reports were resolved in some manner. On top of this there were 39,000 adults reported missing of which 36,000 were resolved. So 13,000 missing in one year?
Because on a small scale you aren't going to get enough water out of the dirt to do anything more than survive. (Plus they obviously don't want idiots wandering about the desert with nothing but a sheet of plastic and a cup)
Imagine for a moment that you have ready access to salty/brackish water. Now spend some time scaling up the system, spend a lot more improving on the efficiency. Now make sure that your small crops are also in this greenhouse...
It is relatively cheap. Is it enough to support small villages / towns? Stuffed if I know.
IIRC Moore's Law was originally predicting that the number of transistors would double every 18 months (2 years originally, right?)
To repeat your calculation, replacing GHz with transistors:
42 x 2 = 84 in 18 months, 84 x 2 = 168 in 3yrs... = 672 million transistors in 6 yrs.
The article is stating that Intel will have 1 billion transistors within 6 years.
The actual performance of the chip will be dramatically influenced by how they use all those transistors. Whilst I imagine most of them would go towards on chip caches, it would still be possible for them to come up with some nifty new instructions (SSE V?) etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the job. I typically give candidates a problem a few days before to see how they work without much pressure, but part of my job is to go into the field to conduct integration testing. I will often need to find, analyse and fix a problem under a ticking clock while customers and partners look over my shoulder. If you can't code in an interview you probably can't handle that part of the job.
As an aside I once had a candidate offer to show me some code he had written previously and proceeded to bring up the code he had written while working for several previous employers. Not exactly the way to give me confidence that our code would remain in the company.
The computer is fast enough and powerful enough to do what you want it to do
Which computer is fast enough? What do you want it to do?
We aren't all developing desktop widgets and web apps. Some of us are producing washing machines, anti-lock braking systems or medical implants. We have microcontrollers with a few kb of memory and we really, really care what the hardware is doing.
The point is that we need different tools for different jobs. Personally I think that learning with these languages gives you a better understanding of what is going on. Teaching them in schools certainly saves us from teaching new hires from scratch and hoping that they can get they get their heads around the concepts.
I've got an HTC Hero which is connected through Optus. The phone wasn't available in Australia when I bought it so I imported it. I think it was originally intended for Malaysia. It doesn't have Android Market installed on it and as far as I can tell, Google won't provide access to it.
Optus is may be trying to direct app sales to their own marketplace by not selling phones with Android Marketplace installed but the real problem seems to lie with Google for coming up with the "Google Experience" concept and HTC for trying to get exclusive deals with telcos (and offering phones without Android market as part of those deals.)
If Google wasn't trying to restrict access to the Market this wouldn't be an issue. Optus could block traffic or do whatever they want but if Google wasn't blocking access to the Market I could access it over wi-fi and Optus wouldn't know the difference.
The Milky Way Galaxy is just 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars. The Virgo Super Cluster is 200 million light years across and contains thousands of galaxies. The nearest exoplanet that we have detected is about 10 light years away.
Meanwhile animals and land plants are believed to have started showing up around 500 million years ago on a presumably "life sustaining Earth".
The universe is big but there are a lot of places nearby from which you could observe using only light that Earth has an interesting chemical and physical makeup.
The idea is to increase the average price per unit of software without exceeding the ability of the little guy to buy the software. The assumption is that someone running a piece of software on an 8 CPU system is more likely to be able to swallow an increased price and should be generating more revenue from the software than someone running a single CPU.
You could achieve the same thing by charging per transaction or by MIPS but those sorts of metrics get complicated for the user and the vendor to administer.
A number of posters have commented that similar concerns were raised when Walkmans were introduced.
What I would be interested in knowing is if users have a tendency to listen to different portable audio sources at different volumes?
Louder music generally sounds better (to a point) so do the different characteristics of formats mean that listeners have a different baseline for volume? Do we play MP3s quieter than cassettes but louder than CDs?
There probably isn't enough of a difference to affect hearing loss, especially since most of the reason for dangerously high volumes is to drown out other noise, but it would be interesting to know.
I'm not sure, but I think pherris was saying that Palm should release a Tungsten E with a Universal Connector.
I see a lot of people complaining about a lack of a "universal connector" on the Tungsten E. I have a Tungsten E and I love the fact that it uses a standard mini-USB port. I can charge off any PC using a standard cable used by several of my gadgets.
Now I admit that I don't have any legacy add-ons but I think the answer is to use the standard USB interface for all Palm models, release new add-ons that use the USB and release a cheap conversion widget so that users can still use their old add-ons.
The real question is why the hell can't I plug my Tungsten E into any computer and have that computer mount the Palm storage as a removable drive, without installing drivers? You could add security by making the user enter a password on the Palm to unlock the filesystem.
You're using a once in a million years event (albeit one that may last for a thousand years) to claim that compasses aren't reliable?
I suspect that if I go hiking tomorrow there is more chance of my GPS unit screwing up than the earth's magnetic field suddenly vanishing.
The real point of the post you are replying to is: if you are going to stake your life on a piece of equipment, make sure you have a backup. Preferably something that has different failure modes.
What you say is correct but you kind of missed the point.
While these researchers have only completed that 1% of inspiration, they have proved that anyone with adequate smarts and access to previous research can modify a virus to have different properties.
The obvious thing that most people are thinking of is bio-weapons development. What I would be more worried about is that some African or Eastern-European nation that is facing a crippling epidemic might decide to develop a transmissible "cure" and release it with minimal testing. Heck even with extensive testing, issues might not be detected until it is released in the general public.
Not quite true, as the article mentions, there is Lake Vostok.
Lake Vostok is a large, deep lake 4km underneath the ice sheet in Antartica that may be staying liquid due to a geothermic heat source.
Of course the chances of anything living in there getting onto a Europa-bound probe unintentionally are pretty slim.
Any probe designs intended for Europa will more than likely be tested on Lake Vostok first.
You're right, the economics of mining the moon have very little to do with Moore's Law.
Bringing fuel back from the moon also doesn't have that much to do with the cost of launching things into space. Once you have the infrastructure up there, it becomes pretty cheap to get the stuff back to earth. Assuming that is where you want to send it.
As you are sending material down the gravity well, the transport is very cheap. Heck if you can get a space elevator working you could even transfer some of the fuel's potential energy due to gravity to loads going up.
Admittedly the infrastructure is extraordinarily expensive.
Do you have a source for that? I have a cousin that is an engineer working for a large international airline and he has gone so far as to say that:
"Whenever you have a particularly smooth landing, it is probably the auto-pilot"
You know, you can buy a similar piece of plastic for around 25c. Oh wait... it doesn't come with any music on it.
I agree that CDs and music in general is overpriced at the moment but saying that the music on the CDs has no cost to produce and no value is clearly ridiculous. If it had no value, we wouldn't be trying to aquire it.
I also fail to see how an attempt by a recording company to respond to consumers' complaints about price by dropping their prices is in any way similar to Microsoft responding to complaints about their monopoly and unfair trade practices by trying to unfairly extend their monopoly. The only possible way you could make this comparison is if you claimed that the primary complaint against record companies was that the artists weren't getting enough money and then the prices were dropped in response (hence reducing the money received by artists).
Yep, because we need more people who think it is a good idea to squeeze in between two adjacent lanes of traffic at a set of lights.
I've no doubt that a large percentage of motorcycle accidents are caused by the carelessness of some drivers in larger vehicles. I would also suggest that a significant number of accidents arise out of the sheer recklessness of some motorcycle/bicycle riders.
I agree, my low-end Clie is the same height and thickness of my reasonably small phone and fits nicely into a pocket. If I could ditch the phone and just keep the PDA with its full size screen, I'd be very happy.
As for the headset, it should certainly be available as an option but when the flip-top for my PDA is folded out the whole thing is pretty much the same size as a standard land-line handset. Put a mike down the bottom, a flat-panel speaker and maybe a keypad in the lid, add some GSM support and Bob's your uncle.
Sounded high to me too but a quick Google turns up the following:
l
"every year malaria kills more than two million people and infects and debilitates around 500 million."
http://www.wehi.edu.au/news/press/19mar2003.htm
There are a few other sources coming up with similar figures... 300 - 500 million infected and 1 - 3 million dying per annum.
I think you may be forgetting about the Stealth 64 range (I had a Diamond Stealth 64) in the mid 90's. When they first came out they were about the best you could get in price/performance for a consumer card.
IIRC the Matrox Millennium came out at either the same time or slightly later and whupped them in terms of performance but it was over twice the price.
Yeah money is an abstraction. It is an abstraction designed to simplify the trade of goods and services. Also makes it a hell of a lot easier to redistribute wealth through taxation.
What exactly were you planning on replacing money with? Direct trade? Communal resources?
Are you really upset with money? Or is it greed? Beaurocracy?
The show actually explained this in the first season. They were questioning why people were acting as if nothing happened after everyone had obviously seen vampires. The explanation was that people tend to rationalise what they can and do their best to forget what they can't.
I'm not saying it makes sense in the real world but the show recognises that the people should be freaking out.
BTW how many people go missing? http://www.bielek.com/pdf/missing_children2.pdf claims 110,000 reported missing in California in 1999 of which 100,000 reports were resolved in some manner. On top of this there were 39,000 adults reported missing of which 36,000 were resolved. So 13,000 missing in one year?
Isn't this pretty much how radar detector detectors work? On moving vehicles.
Because on a small scale you aren't going to get enough water out of the dirt to do anything more than survive. (Plus they obviously don't want idiots wandering about the desert with nothing but a sheet of plastic and a cup)
Imagine for a moment that you have ready access to salty/brackish water. Now spend some time scaling up the system, spend a lot more improving on the efficiency. Now make sure that your small crops are also in this greenhouse...
It is relatively cheap. Is it enough to support small villages / towns? Stuffed if I know.
Australia signed an agreement with Russia to launch Russian rockets from Christmas Island last year. Christmas Island is at 10.5 degrees south.
AFAIK they are still constructing the launch facility and the maiden launch will be in late 2003.
I assume you meant the Boer War...
;-)
AFAIK we have been impressively unsuccessful in eliminating the menace of feral pigs
I'll give you one reason.
The moon is pretty special to most humans. I don't particularly want to look up at it with a telescope one night and see a bloody great open-pit mine.
You can mine all the asteroids you want.
IIRC Moore's Law was originally predicting that the number of transistors would double every 18 months (2 years originally, right?)
... = 672 million transistors in 6 yrs.
To repeat your calculation, replacing GHz with transistors:
42 x 2 = 84 in 18 months, 84 x 2 = 168 in 3yrs
The article is stating that Intel will have 1 billion transistors within 6 years.
The actual performance of the chip will be dramatically influenced by how they use all those transistors. Whilst I imagine most of them would go towards on chip caches, it would still be possible for them to come up with some nifty new instructions (SSE V?) etc.