I like questions like "What is your greatest weakness." They are a chance to find out what the employer is looking for.
I am incredibly honest when asked this question. I say "my greatest weakness is estimating time, because I never feel that software is 'done,' like an egg is done. It's more done like an essay is done, in that it does what it has to in the overview, has no grammatical errors, and has as many details as you can fit. Therefore, I generally pick an arbitrary date, and make sure things are 'done enough' by that date." You can tell right away who you are talking to by this answer. An engineering-oriented manager will nod his head knowingly. A sales-oriented manager will cringe like you just punched him in the breadbasket. Good thing, you don't want to work under him anyway;).
As for "why do I have to fill out an application"...many states force all employers to keep "applications" on file for a period of time in case they get sued for discrimination. The information varies from state to state and employer to employer. I have actually filled out applications after I'd already GOTTEN the job, when I had applied directly through the employment manager or through Monster, etc.
High School, college are included on the off chance that you lied about being a graduate, so they have a paper trail to can you with cause. They don't usually check them, but they have to take the information anyway.
Re:Another day, another batch of applications
on
Joel Rants About Resumes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe life is telling you that it does not want you to do what you thought you were training for. I could train my whole life to be a prima ballerina, and still couldn't be one -- I don't have the skill. Furthermore, I could train my whole life to be a salesman and couldn't be one, because I don't care.
College is not a guarantee of employment nor is it proof to employers that you know what you're doing. I spent 4 years of college learning how to communicate and process information (we called it a literature and rhetoric program) and now I write software. Not because I was trained for it, but because I was good at it and had a passion for it (and thus was willing to start at a lower salary). At the same time, most of the cats I hung out with were majoring in CS, and spent most of their time talking about all the money they were going to make in CS.
Guess what? Most of the guys who wanted to get rich didn't (at least not in software). Most of the guys who actually wanted to write software are doing so (some are rich).
Moral of the story is this: if you are sending our resumes, hoping for some hring angel to heed your prayers and install you at IBM like a fax machine, you'll go wanting. But if you're going to get out there and work with computers, whether you're getting paid or not, you'll find yourself getting money for it. Just like anything else, it's about PASSION, not education. The parent article is TRYING to tell people to treat their job applications like something they expect to get, and not like a chance in a million -- and if you do this, you have a chance that is orders of magnitude higher than if you act like a sycophantic salaryman. Hell, I've got a friend who after only a year on the scene is working as a journalist. Nobody is or was hiring -- hell, freelancers are fighting for their lives and newsroom staff are getting cut left and right -- but the Powers Tha' Be realized that he was a passionate writer. He got courted by two competing national newspaper groups and an independent.
Actually, they're trying to preserve the right to make money maintaining accurate databases of information. The idea here is that, while information is free, the collection of it is something which takes a lot of time and resources, and that should be protected. Otherwise, people have less incentive to open their databases to the public and less incentive to maintain good information -- or to digitize materials that are currently offline.
I'm not saying this is a great law, or anything. But I've worked for a number of organizations who resisted putting their best data onto the web, because it was so hard to prevent people from stealing it and reselling it to the public AND there was no legal mechanism to prevent it. To assemble paper and put it into a database takes money. Why shouldn't companies want to protect their investments?
After all, nothing stops you from making the same investment and opening it to the public (freedb, anyone?). This just stops you from riding the coattails of somebody else's hard work without their permission.
I had one friend on Friendster...he's a real kind of savvy guy who's totally well adjusted. Joining via him added a bunch of new contacts, some of whom I got on very well with.
So, I join friendster with one friend, and suddenly I have ten more. I introduced a few others to my wife, who used to complain about not being able to meet people.
Friendster is just another way to meet people you might like. It's like a digital party, only you don't have to clean vomit off your couch.
Invite Only allows them to more easily police the network and allows for a mechanism to prevent spamming. Find a spammer? Remove him...then remove any users that joined due to his invitation. Oh, and remove the guy who INVITED him.
It's not "poor optimization," Word for Mac is an entirely different fucking program. Programmed by different people using a different codebase with a markedly different interface, and some differing features. Therefore, it's as useful to do any sort of test comparing them as it is compare Word to OpenOffice.
And for what it's worth, nobody gives a shit about Word "performance." I used Office X on my 300 MHz G3 with no problems, no lag, no nothing. The G5 is definitely faster by a factor of at least 10. Therefore, any "benchmarks" are measuring imperceptable differences in usability. If you have fewer imperceptable slowdowns than I do, why should I care?
AMD also made quad clock multiplier (aka DX4) 486 chips. They went faster than 120 MHz in some cases...granted, they didn't have the FPU performance nor the memory bandwidth nor the 32 bit performance of the pentiums, but when it came to REALLY WORKING in a Dos based environemnt, a 486 DX4/120 was a smokin' chip. I got most of my freshmen level CS work done on one of those (then graduated to a K6 233...in fact, I've only owned one Intel based system, a dual Celeron 366 oc'd to 550).
Uh, Intel is facing pretty extreme pressure from AMD, IBM, Via and in some sectors from Motorola and even Transmeta.
That's NOT a monopoly.
Just because they have a large share of the marketplace doesn't make them a monopolistic entity. And just because they put more money into advertising than into R&D doesn't make them an anti-trust suit waiting to happen. Nike's been doing this for years, and they've yet to be sued for unfair marketting practices by Reebok, Adidas and New Balance (nothing else will TOUCH my duck feet).
Intel has made very few great decisions in the past ten years, and all of them were related to marketting. Great marketting and cunning FUD have made them the market leader. And when AMD gets around to spinning some of their own...watch the fuck out.
Your machine would not "jerk" or "lag" because of poor performance on the chip. Even if the machine were taking twice as long to process data than your Athlon, the time in between cycles is so infinitesimally small that there is NO WAY this is causing your slow downs.
More likely, your work machine has a) a slow hard drive b) a lot of network traffic, which is tying up your system bus c) poorly setup virtual memory. Try setting it manually to a minimum AND maximum of twice your ram, or 2048 meg. this will prevent it from ever resizing your virtual mem, also allowing you to defragment the paging file and move it closer to the inner rim of your hard disk. Just doing this doubled the speed of my compilations.
I'd like to see cross-platform performance benchmarks in crunching audio, making MPEG-2 video (and not using some hacked codec, but an actual fucking product from a company that produces reference quality video. I don't want to hear about how much better DivX 5.0.1.2.1 encodes Simpsons episodes than the Sorenson codec). Or how well they render scenes in Blender. Or how many files, web pages, or streaming media packets they can serve per decade. Or anything that, you know, mattered.
Honestly, MS Word performance? Macintosh word is so different from the PC version it's ridiculous. And I've never heard about anybody requiring a high end workstation to run Photoshop filters slightly faster...shit, I was editing a 4'x8' 300 dpi banner on my damn g3 600 today...it was slow, but not $3000 worth of slow.
Anyway...can you see why a magazine called PCWorld, who sells its subscriptions to the type of xenophobic consultants who still think that the vesa local bus was a pretty neat idea, would publish benchmarks that created an artifical boost for x86 performance? I knew you could.
The reason Java GUIs are pokey for the most part is that people have been SPOILED by OOP. If you create a New window everytime, then yet, it'll be slow, because Java has to basically learn how to make the window in the given OS, lay it out, and populate it, all before it can display it (as opposed to VB/.NET, which apply very sneaky, often exasperating hints on how to make windows).
Really, the New window should be made once, the optimizations saved in the assembly cache, and the same window used to subsequent calls. Some of the faster, non-Sun VMs do this kind of thing whether you tell them to or not.
Whoa there, kid. Aside from the DVD player, all of those devices are stereo devices. Meaning they have a 2 channel signal (though some of the VHS tapes might have 4 channel Dolby Surround encoded into them). Splitting a stereo signal into 5 channels, plus a further omnidirectional channel for bass, will never make it sound its best. It will only make it sound louder, or introduce positional elements which are not in the original recording. Combine this with the fact that most 5.1 receivers handle stereo by downmixing certain wavelengths of audio into a mono center channel, and handle the rear speakers by adding a bit of nonadjustable delay (or worse, some artificial "environmental" DSP which always sounds like acoustical tinfoil), and your father has one of the worst possible systems for listening to to his high-class analog audio.
5.1 is a gimmick designed to hide the fact that most people can't get a true positional stereo soundstage for the price they're willing to pay. Remember: at the end of the day, you only have 2 ears. All the positional audio you THINK you hear in a 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 system is a result of you turning your head too much. Exceptions made, of course, for really big rooms with multiple viewing locations, in which multiple channels help create the illusion of a soundstage (but really, they end up creating distractions, as you're always way closer to one of the channels and everything's balanced for the guy in the center, anyway).
Anyhow, his setup isn't even really that impressive. Talk back to us when he gets the reel to reel, Super 8, laserdisc (which is actually an analog RF signal) and DAT hooked up.
This guy has been trolling this entry SINCE 1997. Word for word. Do a search, you'll see what I mean. I bit once, posted a good rebuttal, then kicked myself. You can search on that too.
Word. I bought the Dlink DFL-300 for $310, installed it in two days, and then put my former firewall Linux box behind it.
Why? Because if the DFL-300 gets spanked, I don't have to spend hours fixing it. I just replace it with the same box, update the firmware, and upload my config. We ran a fire drill (firewall drill?) and it took only ten minutes of downtime, most of which was spent moving the equipment and waiting for it to reboot.
It also allows me to worry a bit less about the Linux box. Getting into the firewall doesn't give you access to the same box as the ftp, webserver and the spamfilter. And getting into the Linux box doesn't bring down the rest of the network...or allow the user to open bizarre ports.
Dude, Apple hasn't made those "cube cases" in nearly 3 years. Cobalt hasn't made computers in a while, either.
I'm sorry, but have you been asleep in a cave? Or maybe just unemployed? The X-Serve has been one of the most powerful, cost effective 1U rack mounted solutions since it came out and the new dual G5 is currently the fastest I'm aware of.
I find it hard to take the advice of anybody in IT who doesn't take the time to keep abreast of solutions that are YEARS old.
Except the problem is this: oil usage is increasing at a rate that far outpaces our ability to efficiently obtain it. Eventually, it will take more energy to get the oil than is gained by retreiving it, but we'll have to retreive it anyway in order to power devices (from tanks to trucks to power plants) that run on it. The end result is a period of extremely expensive oil combined with a drastic drop in profitability of industry, with subsequent inflation, etc. This point of low returns is what my professor is talking about when he said that oil will "run out" in 2040.
Whichever country controls oil at this point will have a significant advantage over the others. And a country which has back-ups (including coal) will be far better off than the others. We'll be trading energy for goods, and that will insure our perspicacity.
Of course I do. But you assume that understanding the energy crisis implies you want to stop it. It doesn't.
See, if there's going to be a crimp in energy, you can either ask the world to use less energy (and hope they do so), or you can profit from their use of it by controlling the source. Which solution you prefer is really based on your worldview. Do you worry about the human race years after your death -- or about having and maintaining power within your lifetime?
The president is, if nothing else, a selfish profiteer. This fact permeates his every decision. But hey, at least you know where he stands.
Seriously, say what you will about him, the President is a man who understands the approaching energy crisis. If it's true that the fossil-based economy will expire by 2040 (the number quoted by my college professor), then we're looking at a very violent game of hot potato over the remaining fuel. Controlling the next generation energy supply could be important if fossil fuels remain the most efficient way to get to space.
Of course, I'd much rather see renewable Earth sources of fuel (like solar, geothermal, corn oil, etc)...but then, nobody CONTROLS the sun. So there's no economic or political incentive like there is with an exclusive source like oil or nuclear.
Slashdot Mirror
I like questions like "What is your greatest weakness." They are a chance to find out what the employer is looking for.
;).
I am incredibly honest when asked this question. I say "my greatest weakness is estimating time, because I never feel that software is 'done,' like an egg is done. It's more done like an essay is done, in that it does what it has to in the overview, has no grammatical errors, and has as many details as you can fit. Therefore, I generally pick an arbitrary date, and make sure things are 'done enough' by that date." You can tell right away who you are talking to by this answer. An engineering-oriented manager will nod his head knowingly. A sales-oriented manager will cringe like you just punched him in the breadbasket. Good thing, you don't want to work under him anyway
As for "why do I have to fill out an application"...many states force all employers to keep "applications" on file for a period of time in case they get sued for discrimination. The information varies from state to state and employer to employer. I have actually filled out applications after I'd already GOTTEN the job, when I had applied directly through the employment manager or through Monster, etc.
High School, college are included on the off chance that you lied about being a graduate, so they have a paper trail to can you with cause. They don't usually check them, but they have to take the information anyway.
Maybe life is telling you that it does not want you to do what you thought you were training for. I could train my whole life to be a prima ballerina, and still couldn't be one -- I don't have the skill. Furthermore, I could train my whole life to be a salesman and couldn't be one, because I don't care.
College is not a guarantee of employment nor is it proof to employers that you know what you're doing. I spent 4 years of college learning how to communicate and process information (we called it a literature and rhetoric program) and now I write software. Not because I was trained for it, but because I was good at it and had a passion for it (and thus was willing to start at a lower salary). At the same time, most of the cats I hung out with were majoring in CS, and spent most of their time talking about all the money they were going to make in CS.
Guess what? Most of the guys who wanted to get rich didn't (at least not in software). Most of the guys who actually wanted to write software are doing so (some are rich).
Moral of the story is this: if you are sending our resumes, hoping for some hring angel to heed your prayers and install you at IBM like a fax machine, you'll go wanting. But if you're going to get out there and work with computers, whether you're getting paid or not, you'll find yourself getting money for it. Just like anything else, it's about PASSION, not education. The parent article is TRYING to tell people to treat their job applications like something they expect to get, and not like a chance in a million -- and if you do this, you have a chance that is orders of magnitude higher than if you act like a sycophantic salaryman. Hell, I've got a friend who after only a year on the scene is working as a journalist. Nobody is or was hiring -- hell, freelancers are fighting for their lives and newsroom staff are getting cut left and right -- but the Powers Tha' Be realized that he was a passionate writer. He got courted by two competing national newspaper groups and an independent.
http://www.friendster.com/join.jsp?invite=4899861
Hey, any friend of slashdot's is a friend of mine, right?
It just was. Weren't you paying attention?
Actually, they're trying to preserve the right to make money maintaining accurate databases of information. The idea here is that, while information is free, the collection of it is something which takes a lot of time and resources, and that should be protected. Otherwise, people have less incentive to open their databases to the public and less incentive to maintain good information -- or to digitize materials that are currently offline.
I'm not saying this is a great law, or anything. But I've worked for a number of organizations who resisted putting their best data onto the web, because it was so hard to prevent people from stealing it and reselling it to the public AND there was no legal mechanism to prevent it. To assemble paper and put it into a database takes money. Why shouldn't companies want to protect their investments?
After all, nothing stops you from making the same investment and opening it to the public (freedb, anyone?). This just stops you from riding the coattails of somebody else's hard work without their permission.
Don't worry, man, you'll be living there tomorrow.
Not true.
I had one friend on Friendster...he's a real kind of savvy guy who's totally well adjusted. Joining via him added a bunch of new contacts, some of whom I got on very well with.
So, I join friendster with one friend, and suddenly I have ten more. I introduced a few others to my wife, who used to complain about not being able to meet people.
Friendster is just another way to meet people you might like. It's like a digital party, only you don't have to clean vomit off your couch.
Invite Only allows them to more easily police the network and allows for a mechanism to prevent spamming. Find a spammer? Remove him...then remove any users that joined due to his invitation. Oh, and remove the guy who INVITED him.
Yeah. We call them "buddies" now.
It's not "poor optimization," Word for Mac is an entirely different fucking program. Programmed by different people using a different codebase with a markedly different interface, and some differing features. Therefore, it's as useful to do any sort of test comparing them as it is compare Word to OpenOffice.
And for what it's worth, nobody gives a shit about Word "performance." I used Office X on my 300 MHz G3 with no problems, no lag, no nothing. The G5 is definitely faster by a factor of at least 10. Therefore, any "benchmarks" are measuring imperceptable differences in usability. If you have fewer imperceptable slowdowns than I do, why should I care?
AMD also made quad clock multiplier (aka DX4) 486 chips. They went faster than 120 MHz in some cases...granted, they didn't have the FPU performance nor the memory bandwidth nor the 32 bit performance of the pentiums, but when it came to REALLY WORKING in a Dos based environemnt, a 486 DX4/120 was a smokin' chip. I got most of my freshmen level CS work done on one of those (then graduated to a K6 233...in fact, I've only owned one Intel based system, a dual Celeron 366 oc'd to 550).
go back to writing the best OS there is.
Slashdot people wrote the Amiga Workbench?!?!
I never knew!
Uh, Intel is facing pretty extreme pressure from AMD, IBM, Via and in some sectors from Motorola and even Transmeta.
That's NOT a monopoly.
Just because they have a large share of the marketplace doesn't make them a monopolistic entity. And just because they put more money into advertising than into R&D doesn't make them an anti-trust suit waiting to happen. Nike's been doing this for years, and they've yet to be sued for unfair marketting practices by Reebok, Adidas and New Balance (nothing else will TOUCH my duck feet).
Intel has made very few great decisions in the past ten years, and all of them were related to marketting. Great marketting and cunning FUD have made them the market leader. And when AMD gets around to spinning some of their own...watch the fuck out.
Your machine would not "jerk" or "lag" because of poor performance on the chip. Even if the machine were taking twice as long to process data than your Athlon, the time in between cycles is so infinitesimally small that there is NO WAY this is causing your slow downs.
More likely, your work machine has a) a slow hard drive b) a lot of network traffic, which is tying up your system bus c) poorly setup virtual memory. Try setting it manually to a minimum AND maximum of twice your ram, or 2048 meg. this will prevent it from ever resizing your virtual mem, also allowing you to defragment the paging file and move it closer to the inner rim of your hard disk. Just doing this doubled the speed of my compilations.
I'd like to see cross-platform performance benchmarks in crunching audio, making MPEG-2 video (and not using some hacked codec, but an actual fucking product from a company that produces reference quality video. I don't want to hear about how much better DivX 5.0.1.2.1 encodes Simpsons episodes than the Sorenson codec). Or how well they render scenes in Blender. Or how many files, web pages, or streaming media packets they can serve per decade. Or anything that, you know, mattered.
Honestly, MS Word performance? Macintosh word is so different from the PC version it's ridiculous. And I've never heard about anybody requiring a high end workstation to run Photoshop filters slightly faster...shit, I was editing a 4'x8' 300 dpi banner on my damn g3 600 today...it was slow, but not $3000 worth of slow.
Anyway...can you see why a magazine called PCWorld, who sells its subscriptions to the type of xenophobic consultants who still think that the vesa local bus was a pretty neat idea, would publish benchmarks that created an artifical boost for x86 performance? I knew you could.
The reason Java GUIs are pokey for the most part is that people have been SPOILED by OOP. If you create a New window everytime, then yet, it'll be slow, because Java has to basically learn how to make the window in the given OS, lay it out, and populate it, all before it can display it (as opposed to VB/.NET, which apply very sneaky, often exasperating hints on how to make windows).
Really, the New window should be made once, the optimizations saved in the assembly cache, and the same window used to subsequent calls. Some of the faster, non-Sun VMs do this kind of thing whether you tell them to or not.
Whoa there, kid. Aside from the DVD player, all of those devices are stereo devices. Meaning they have a 2 channel signal (though some of the VHS tapes might have 4 channel Dolby Surround encoded into them). Splitting a stereo signal into 5 channels, plus a further omnidirectional channel for bass, will never make it sound its best. It will only make it sound louder, or introduce positional elements which are not in the original recording. Combine this with the fact that most 5.1 receivers handle stereo by downmixing certain wavelengths of audio into a mono center channel, and handle the rear speakers by adding a bit of nonadjustable delay (or worse, some artificial "environmental" DSP which always sounds like acoustical tinfoil), and your father has one of the worst possible systems for listening to to his high-class analog audio.
5.1 is a gimmick designed to hide the fact that most people can't get a true positional stereo soundstage for the price they're willing to pay. Remember: at the end of the day, you only have 2 ears. All the positional audio you THINK you hear in a 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 system is a result of you turning your head too much. Exceptions made, of course, for really big rooms with multiple viewing locations, in which multiple channels help create the illusion of a soundstage (but really, they end up creating distractions, as you're always way closer to one of the channels and everything's balanced for the guy in the center, anyway).
Anyhow, his setup isn't even really that impressive. Talk back to us when he gets the reel to reel, Super 8, laserdisc (which is actually an analog RF signal) and DAT hooked up.
Or maybe there's one really paranoid engineer who complains about everything and, coincidentally, was right this one time.
This guy has been trolling this entry SINCE 1997. Word for word. Do a search, you'll see what I mean. I bit once, posted a good rebuttal, then kicked myself. You can search on that too.
Word. I bought the Dlink DFL-300 for $310, installed it in two days, and then put my former firewall Linux box behind it.
Why? Because if the DFL-300 gets spanked, I don't have to spend hours fixing it. I just replace it with the same box, update the firmware, and upload my config. We ran a fire drill (firewall drill?) and it took only ten minutes of downtime, most of which was spent moving the equipment and waiting for it to reboot.
It also allows me to worry a bit less about the Linux box. Getting into the firewall doesn't give you access to the same box as the ftp, webserver and the spamfilter. And getting into the Linux box doesn't bring down the rest of the network...or allow the user to open bizarre ports.
Dude, Apple hasn't made those "cube cases" in nearly 3 years. Cobalt hasn't made computers in a while, either.
I'm sorry, but have you been asleep in a cave? Or maybe just unemployed? The X-Serve has been one of the most powerful, cost effective 1U rack mounted solutions since it came out and the new dual G5 is currently the fastest I'm aware of.
I find it hard to take the advice of anybody in IT who doesn't take the time to keep abreast of solutions that are YEARS old.
Except the problem is this: oil usage is increasing at a rate that far outpaces our ability to efficiently obtain it. Eventually, it will take more energy to get the oil than is gained by retreiving it, but we'll have to retreive it anyway in order to power devices (from tanks to trucks to power plants) that run on it. The end result is a period of extremely expensive oil combined with a drastic drop in profitability of industry, with subsequent inflation, etc. This point of low returns is what my professor is talking about when he said that oil will "run out" in 2040.
Whichever country controls oil at this point will have a significant advantage over the others. And a country which has back-ups (including coal) will be far better off than the others. We'll be trading energy for goods, and that will insure our perspicacity.
Of course I do. But you assume that understanding the energy crisis implies you want to stop it. It doesn't.
See, if there's going to be a crimp in energy, you can either ask the world to use less energy (and hope they do so), or you can profit from their use of it by controlling the source. Which solution you prefer is really based on your worldview. Do you worry about the human race years after your death -- or about having and maintaining power within your lifetime?
The president is, if nothing else, a selfish profiteer. This fact permeates his every decision. But hey, at least you know where he stands.
No wonder Bush wants to build a moon base!
Seriously, say what you will about him, the President is a man who understands the approaching energy crisis. If it's true that the fossil-based economy will expire by 2040 (the number quoted by my college professor), then we're looking at a very violent game of hot potato over the remaining fuel. Controlling the next generation energy supply could be important if fossil fuels remain the most efficient way to get to space.
Of course, I'd much rather see renewable Earth sources of fuel (like solar, geothermal, corn oil, etc)...but then, nobody CONTROLS the sun. So there's no economic or political incentive like there is with an exclusive source like oil or nuclear.
Trust me, kid. We were dirty, smelly, tired, and horny...but we wouldn't have gone anywhere NEAR those girls. God.