Re:I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago
on
Want To Work At Google?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They told you the correct answers! How very nice of them.
After 3 such phone calls, and a plane trip to one of their offices so they could grill me with such questions for 6+ hours all the more I got was 'we've decided to halt the interview process.' When I attempted to ask them why (really honstely so I could improve whatever skilset they felt I didn't have) I got no response.
I mean...as long as we're making a massive investment in (re)building a nuclear generation infrastructure, and the facilities to scrub out all the CO2 we've made over the last while, why not invest a bit more over with NASA to build a safe/cheap method to get all the nasty by-products off planet.
Seriously, once you stop thinking of nuclear reactor as the stupid kind the russians built (I mean, really, the control rods had to have power to be *inserted* and stop the reaction, vs our similar reactors where the electricity is used to *prevent* the insertion of the reaction stopping control rods) and instead think methods like pebble bed reactors. Combine that with a bit of waste recycling so that you can reuse your fuel a few more times and eventually get it down to a smaller amount of waste product per unit of energy generated. Then, send NASA and a few other scientists off to figure out how to build a tether that can safely deliver all kinds of things (including nuclear waste) into orbit and beyond. All the sudden storing the waste at a place like Yukka mountain looks like a much more reasonable short term staging area until we get the tether built.
Really people, even the founder of Greenpeace eventually came around to the realization that nuclear energy is the best large scale energy source we've got and today advocates its use.
The plugin you describe sounds a lot like the service a friend of mine runs called gibeo. Except in this case all of the annotations are done with a special HTTP proxy, so no plugins are required to be installed on your machine to make it work. And there is even a method to get it to work with without reconfiguring your browser, just point your browser to slashdot.org.gibeo.net. Last I checked it was a subscription service, tho to be honest I'm only marginally aware of it's present status. Still, seemed pretty cool when it was demoed to me last.
I know to some of you this will sound like a stupid question...but when are we going to start being able to get music in more then just plain stereo (5.1, etc)? I've heard a few mentions of things like Audio DVD, but I've seen very little. I know that most set top boxes have only two speakers, but many households now have 5.1 sound systems connected to their TV for DVDs. And cars usually have at least 4 speakers. Right now I have a 600 watt receiver attached to my computer playing MP3s. Course all its surround sound happiness goes unused because my MPs are just stereo. Just wondering when the music/audio industry will start trying to leverage all these speakers to do something more.
Perhaps there is somebody who is in or near the music industry that can give some clues as to when or if this will happen.
This a great but true story you mac addicts can pass around.
I got into Mac's when the first OS X boxes started rolling (before then I avoided them like the plague, and had quit running windows in favor of linux all the way back in 1997). Work is kind and flexible enough to provide me with a G4 workstation and a PowerBook for me to drag to and from from work.
But that's not the story. This story is this: one day I come across an old Mac G3 (something like 200MHz, don't remember for sure) that was in the trash. I'd been trying to convince my parents to replace their 500MHz PC with a Mac for some time, but a combination of lack of funds and unwilling to switch platforms prevented them. I saw this old G3 as the perfect opportunity to give them the OS X experience. True it's slow, but it would work at the same time.
Anyway, within a few days my Mom and completely switched to the little G3 Mac for all her web browsing, email, documents, accounting. It's significantly slower then their PC, but my mom put it best: 'It takes the mac a little longer, but it always gets there.' Last time I was home, the PC had been unplugged to save desk space.
I really hope the parents get a new G4 iMac soon...perhaps their oldest son will just have to give them a nice christmas present:)
The press with which I have experience largely works in college books and things like law books (ie, nonfiction). All publishers devote a signifigant amount of resources to sending people out to schools to get prospective sales...
Ever wonder what happened to the college profs that would use their own experience and knowledge to pull information from many sources and create a their own college class?
After all there is so much evidence that the current system of creating prepared classwork and text books is creating a well educated society.
Just wondering about the need for such a business model.
And yes, I work at a company involved in producing text books for just such a market.
People don't buy Sun because it's cheap. People buy Sun because it WORKS.
I work in a Sun based datacenter. Just yesterday I got in a Ultra 10 that would not boot because they had the jumpers configured wrong on the HD's (two internal IDE's). A few months ago we purchased a E250 that arrived with a dead motherboard. We also have had a A5200 disk enclusure that the sun hardware reps had to totally tear down and replace every board in it to make it work, and it sill only works if you remove the A interface board (which means we don't have the redundent IO paths).
I could go on and on with the hardware failures that we've had at our small datacenter (we only have about 30 machines). Surfice it to say, Sun's hardware sucks these days.
Well...no. I'll have to admit that I have not. Not for lack of trying, however. Recently at work I attempted to setup Windows 2000 inside VMWare, the setup program refused to work. So I decided to upgrade VMWare and grabbed the most recent VMWare 2.x...still no luck. Ok, so I threw the emulation idea out the window and got my hands on an old 300MHz computer and the setup program locked on the first boot disk.
Now please don't assume that I can't install an OS. With a good network connection I can have a debian net install up and running in a few hours. In the past I have installed both redhat and slackware. I've even installed Solaris on brand new bare Sun boxes (still trying to convince the boss to let me install linux on one of them, just to do it). And yes, I have installed windows before.
I know that many of you are yelling at your computer right now saying "but you need to check the hardware compatibility list," the simple fact is windows needs seriuos work. I don't doubt that it's getting better, but it has lots of problems. The biggest problem being that they will not admit their software has problems (at least not untill the next newer version needs to be marketed and they need to convince the existing install base to upgrade).
So for now I'll continue doing all my everyday things in Linux (yes, Linux. I made the switch to using Linux everyday 3 years ago) and only using windows to check my email at work. BTW: any exchange admins care to help me convince my exchange admins to turn on the IMAP stuff? I'm sure there is one little checkbox that, if checked, would allow me to perminatally power down my email box at work.
We have, uh I forget - is it 2^16?, more ports to choose from.
Here is a crazy idea (unfortunatally one I am not smart enough to figure out), could we do something like spread spectrum?
The idea behind that is you use multiple radio frequencies to transmit your data. So could we use multiple UDP ports to transmit your data (automatically skipping the ports the system finds blocked)?
Unfortunatally this would require both links be aware of which UDP port the next set of packets should go to next, but I think this could be really interesting for stuff like VPN's (still using encryption) as it could totally confuse firewalls. (of course, if written incorrectly, blocking any one of the ports could bring the whole thing down).
I agree! KDE is much simpler to install if you are doing a manual install.
However, if you are using a distribution like debian (with/etc/apt/sources.list pointing to all the correct places) the package manager system finds/downloads/installs everything for you.
For example, I am getting this application by doing "apt-get install evolution" (and it automatically figured out that 9 packages needed to be upgraded and 11 new ones needed to be installed. I don't run much GNOME stuff).
And, a week from now I can run apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade and EVERYTHING that needs updating will be downloaded and upgraded.
X offers configurability. Not generally very easy, but it is there. Don't like the fact that your window manager binds CTRL-F4 to "Window Close?" Change the parameters and restart your window manager. How easy is that on Windows?
There is a very very very good reason why this is so hard to change on Windows and MacOS, this makes sure the interface is consistent.
One thing I have learned is that an interface does not have to be "simple" in terms of "the user sits down and just gets it", but it had better not keep changing the rules on them.
In windows world, when a user finally figures out that alt-F4 closes a window they KNOW that no matter what box they sit down at alt-F4 will still close a window.
Ok, so maybe this was not the best article Katz wrote, but does he really deserve the critizism that he is getting? (When I browsed at +3 all I got was flame)
Really people, if you don't like what he writes, then click here and turn him off! Please try to be a bit kinder, I know I would not keep coming back to a crowd that heckled me every time I said something.
The Mars trilogy started off very well, the just got weird.
I stopped reading about 3/4 of the way through the thrid book when they were running around on the serface (of Mars) chasing wild animals and eating them. For some odd reason I just lost interst.
So I went and read Hobbit and Lord of the Rings again.
I hope more of the BeOS gets open sourced -- Be shouldn't let it die like NeXT did.
There is what appears to be a almost BeOS open source clone called AtheOS under development as we speak (atheos.funcom.com). Their docs say they even have the 64bit journaled file system.
Unfortunately, I have not yet had a change to try it.
The biggest draw back is that they are very new right now (version 0.1.2) and need lots of help. (I don't think they even have a boot loader yet, outside of some DOS program). I intend to try and install it on my home PC this weekend.
But I have not tried it yet, it may turn out to really suck.
WHen I'm done, I close the window (how did a document become a window? Is that intuitive?) and it goes right back where it belongs, I don't have to root around for the right place to put it back. That's not something somebody unfamiliar with computers would expect.
This reminds me of when I was in grade school we did our word processing on Apple II's. The funny thing is that if somebody just loaded up the program to print the document most people thought they had to save it again after printing or the document would be gone.
First of all, no war need be fought for a global government to happen.
Second of all, the current governments will not disappear under the one world government.
So to figure out what will make a world government happen we must first outline what a government is. Economy--Every government is messing with their economy, even if they claim that they are not.
Control of an economy is very critical to being a government. If a country's economy fails the people leave and the government looses funding. There have also been many people who theorize that future war will rarely be fought with bombs, but with threats to close up shop and move all our business out (you can see some of this happening now). What is an army other then something to go in a kill people and destroy infrastructure. Would you not rather those people come to your country and make money that you can tax to run your government with?
Ok, so now that I put down that control of the economy is the foremost thing that defines a government let me explain how a one world government can happen without a war. Globalization. As companies spread out over the world they will demand that the local terrifies and other import/export regulations be dropped, eventually the governments will have to agree. Also, these companies are going to get into trouble sometimes so international courts will be setup to solve these problems....
See where I am going with this? A one world government will not happen some day when China, USA, or other major power starts marching across the globe quashing the local governments in its path. Instead the present governments will be gradually giving up power to international bodies (because their citizens demand it). Take a look at the European Union, see the future there.
And there will eventually come a day when people start realizing one by one that we have a one world government where the present governments are really more like provinces or states.
I graduated from High School just last year. When I started going to High School they did not have a web site, I convinced them that not only should they have one but that they should host it locally. Guess who got to setup the server.
I think that part of the key for having a school like this is the school's system admin. My last year of High School the district hired a system admin and he proceeded to lock everything down and generally make things a pain.
Luckily the web site is still controlled by the Tech Assistants, both the content and the server. But the biggest problem that they have now is that the system admin will not let them do anything (such as host community pages or any other pages for like the elementary school).
So, if you are a school tech admin please take this advice: step back a little and let these people do their thing. You will find that they often do things in a way that you were told not to do in college, but point it out to them nicely. Don't yell at them and threaten to shut down the program. Don't worry about security issues, after you get these people onto your side 99.9% of them will develop a loyalty to you and will never crack, break, DoS or do anything else to make you look bad.
In fact, a functioning program like this can only make you look good. Many times the school boards do not believe that a student can do half the things they do, so when good things start coming out of the program you will get 75% of the credit for everything they do (after all they can't do these things on their own, somebody had to help them).
My grandmother always said running watter was the best thing that ever happened. (When the watter came to you instead of you having to go get it. Think how much time that saved).
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They told you the correct answers! How very nice of them.
After 3 such phone calls, and a plane trip to one of their offices so they could grill me with such questions for 6+ hours all the more I got was 'we've decided to halt the interview process.' When I attempted to ask them why (really honstely so I could improve whatever skilset they felt I didn't have) I got no response.
Found it to be a bit on the rude side.
So, let's just build a space elevator instead.
I mean...as long as we're making a massive investment in (re)building a nuclear generation infrastructure, and the facilities to scrub out all the CO2 we've made over the last while, why not invest a bit more over with NASA to build a safe/cheap method to get all the nasty by-products off planet.
Seriously, once you stop thinking of nuclear reactor as the stupid kind the russians built (I mean, really, the control rods had to have power to be *inserted* and stop the reaction, vs our similar reactors where the electricity is used to *prevent* the insertion of the reaction stopping control rods) and instead think methods like pebble bed reactors. Combine that with a bit of waste recycling so that you can reuse your fuel a few more times and eventually get it down to a smaller amount of waste product per unit of energy generated. Then, send NASA and a few other scientists off to figure out how to build a tether that can safely deliver all kinds of things (including nuclear waste) into orbit and beyond. All the sudden storing the waste at a place like Yukka mountain looks like a much more reasonable short term staging area until we get the tether built.
Really people, even the founder of Greenpeace eventually came around to the realization that nuclear energy is the best large scale energy source we've got and today advocates its use.
The plugin you describe sounds a lot like the service a friend of mine runs called gibeo. Except in this case all of the annotations are done with a special HTTP proxy, so no plugins are required to be installed on your machine to make it work. And there is even a method to get it to work with without reconfiguring your browser, just point your browser to slashdot.org.gibeo.net. Last I checked it was a subscription service, tho to be honest I'm only marginally aware of it's present status. Still, seemed pretty cool when it was demoed to me last.
Check it out http://gibeo.net.
I know to some of you this will sound like a stupid question...but when are we going to start being able to get music in more then just plain stereo (5.1, etc)? I've heard a few mentions of things like Audio DVD, but I've seen very little. I know that most set top boxes have only two speakers, but many households now have 5.1 sound systems connected to their TV for DVDs. And cars usually have at least 4 speakers. Right now I have a 600 watt receiver attached to my computer playing MP3s. Course all its surround sound happiness goes unused because my MPs are just stereo. Just wondering when the music/audio industry will start trying to leverage all these speakers to do something more.
Perhaps there is somebody who is in or near the music industry that can give some clues as to when or if this will happen.
This a great but true story you mac addicts can pass around.
:)
I got into Mac's when the first OS X boxes started rolling (before then I avoided them like the plague, and had quit running windows in favor of linux all the way back in 1997). Work is kind and flexible enough to provide me with a G4 workstation and a PowerBook for me to drag to and from from work.
But that's not the story. This story is this: one day I come across an old Mac G3 (something like 200MHz, don't remember for sure) that was in the trash. I'd been trying to convince my parents to replace their 500MHz PC with a Mac for some time, but a combination of lack of funds and unwilling to switch platforms prevented them. I saw this old G3 as the perfect opportunity to give them the OS X experience. True it's slow, but it would work at the same time.
Anyway, within a few days my Mom and completely switched to the little G3 Mac for all her web browsing, email, documents, accounting. It's significantly slower then their PC, but my mom put it best: 'It takes the mac a little longer, but it always gets there.' Last time I was home, the PC had been unplugged to save desk space.
I really hope the parents get a new G4 iMac soon...perhaps their oldest son will just have to give them a nice christmas present
The press with which I have experience largely works in college books and things like law books (ie, nonfiction). All publishers devote a signifigant amount of resources to sending people out to schools to get prospective sales...
Ever wonder what happened to the college profs that would use their own experience and knowledge to pull information from many sources and create a their own college class?
After all there is so much evidence that the current system of creating prepared classwork and text books is creating a well educated society.
Just wondering about the need for such a business model.
And yes, I work at a company involved in producing text books for just such a market.
People don't buy Sun because it's cheap. People buy Sun because it WORKS.
I work in a Sun based datacenter. Just yesterday I got in a Ultra 10 that would not boot because they had the jumpers configured wrong on the HD's (two internal IDE's). A few months ago we purchased a E250 that arrived with a dead motherboard. We also have had a A5200 disk enclusure that the sun hardware reps had to totally tear down and replace every board in it to make it work, and it sill only works if you remove the A interface board (which means we don't have the redundent IO paths).
I could go on and on with the hardware failures that we've had at our small datacenter (we only have about 30 machines). Surfice it to say, Sun's hardware sucks these days.
> Have you even RUN Windows 2000?
Well...no. I'll have to admit that I have not. Not for lack of trying, however. Recently at work I attempted to setup Windows 2000 inside VMWare, the setup program refused to work. So I decided to upgrade VMWare and grabbed the most recent VMWare 2.x...still no luck. Ok, so I threw the emulation idea out the window and got my hands on an old 300MHz computer and the setup program locked on the first boot disk.
Now please don't assume that I can't install an OS. With a good network connection I can have a debian net install up and running in a few hours. In the past I have installed both redhat and slackware. I've even installed Solaris on brand new bare Sun boxes (still trying to convince the boss to let me install linux on one of them, just to do it). And yes, I have installed windows before.
I know that many of you are yelling at your computer right now saying "but you need to check the hardware compatibility list," the simple fact is windows needs seriuos work. I don't doubt that it's getting better, but it has lots of problems. The biggest problem being that they will not admit their software has problems (at least not untill the next newer version needs to be marketed and they need to convince the existing install base to upgrade).
So for now I'll continue doing all my everyday things in Linux (yes, Linux. I made the switch to using Linux everyday 3 years ago) and only using windows to check my email at work. BTW: any exchange admins care to help me convince my exchange admins to turn on the IMAP stuff? I'm sure there is one little checkbox that, if checked, would allow me to perminatally power down my email box at work.
Did we not all just read here that carbon nanotubes make a good heat sink?
I think we should pour all of our enviromental protection funds into NASA so they can build this global heat sink.
We have, uh I forget - is it 2^16?, more ports to choose from.
Here is a crazy idea (unfortunatally one I am not smart enough to figure out), could we do something like spread spectrum?
The idea behind that is you use multiple radio frequencies to transmit your data. So could we use multiple UDP ports to transmit your data (automatically skipping the ports the system finds blocked)?
Unfortunatally this would require both links be aware of which UDP port the next set of packets should go to next, but I think this could be really interesting for stuff like VPN's (still using encryption) as it could totally confuse firewalls. (of course, if written incorrectly, blocking any one of the ports could bring the whole thing down).
I should take the time to look this up myself, but were can I get .deb files for XFree86 4.0.1?
./'ers do not believe in copyright laws that allow large companies, that add nothing to the author's work, to make profit from it.
Perhaps a good use for Carnivore?
I agree! KDE is much simpler to install if you are doing a manual install.
/etc/apt/sources.list pointing to all the correct places) the package manager system finds/downloads/installs everything for you.
However, if you are using a distribution like debian (with
For example, I am getting this application by doing "apt-get install evolution" (and it automatically figured out that 9 packages needed to be upgraded and 11 new ones needed to be installed. I don't run much GNOME stuff).
And, a week from now I can run apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade and EVERYTHING that needs updating will be downloaded and upgraded.
Now if only my connection was faster then 56K...
I do!
Of course I live on a farm.
And there is no DSL or cable out here either!
Oh well, at least I can go dig some holes while I wait three hours for files to download.
(BTW: I'm 6'4")
X offers configurability. Not generally very easy, but it is there. Don't like the fact that your window manager binds CTRL-F4 to "Window Close?" Change the parameters and restart your window manager. How easy is that on Windows?
There is a very very very good reason why this is so hard to change on Windows and MacOS, this makes sure the interface is consistent.
One thing I have learned is that an interface does not have to be "simple" in terms of "the user sits down and just gets it", but it had better not keep changing the rules on them.
In windows world, when a user finally figures out that alt-F4 closes a window they KNOW that no matter what box they sit down at alt-F4 will still close a window.
And don't even get me started on skinning...
Ok, so maybe this was not the best article Katz wrote, but does he really deserve the critizism that he is getting? (When I browsed at +3 all I got was flame)
Really people, if you don't like what he writes, then click here and turn him off! Please try to be a bit kinder, I know I would not keep coming back to a crowd that heckled me every time I said something.
Geez...
(Score -1, defended Katz)
I'll help write the pretty screen saver to bring in the windoze users.
Hummm...yes. It is aginst the law to call someone and fool (present day: idiot).
However, you can say someone is acting like a fool (or an idiot).
Loopholes...
The Mars trilogy started off very well, the just got weird.
I stopped reading about 3/4 of the way through the thrid book when they were running around on the serface (of Mars) chasing wild animals and eating them. For some odd reason I just lost interst.
So I went and read Hobbit and Lord of the Rings again.
I hope more of the BeOS gets open sourced -- Be shouldn't let it die like NeXT did.
There is what appears to be a almost BeOS open source clone called AtheOS under development as we speak (atheos.funcom.com). Their docs say they even have the 64bit journaled file system.
Unfortunately, I have not yet had a change to try it.
The biggest draw back is that they are very new right now (version 0.1.2) and need lots of help. (I don't think they even have a boot loader yet, outside of some DOS program). I intend to try and install it on my home PC this weekend.
But I have not tried it yet, it may turn out to really suck.
WHen I'm done, I close the window (how did a document become a window? Is that intuitive?) and it goes right back where it belongs, I don't have to root around for the right place to put it back. That's not something somebody unfamiliar with computers would expect.
This reminds me of when I was in grade school we did our word processing on Apple II's. The funny thing is that if somebody just loaded up the program to print the document most people thought they had to save it again after printing or the document would be gone.
First of all, no war need be fought for a global government to happen.
Second of all, the current governments will not disappear under the one world government.
So to figure out what will make a world government happen we must first outline what a government is.
Economy--Every government is messing with their economy, even if they claim that they are not.
Control of an economy is very critical to being a government. If a country's economy fails the people leave and the government looses funding. There have also been many people who theorize that future war will rarely be fought with bombs, but with threats to close up shop and move all our business out (you can see some of this happening now). What is an army other then something to go in a kill people and destroy infrastructure. Would you not rather those people come to your country and make money that you can tax to run your government with?
Ok, so now that I put down that control of the economy is the foremost thing that defines a government let me explain how a one world government can happen without a war. Globalization. As companies spread out over the world they will demand that the local terrifies and other import/export regulations be dropped, eventually the governments will have to agree. Also, these companies are going to get into trouble sometimes so international courts will be setup to solve these problems....
See where I am going with this? A one world government will not happen some day when China, USA, or other major power starts marching across the globe quashing the local governments in its path. Instead the present governments will be gradually giving up power to international bodies (because their citizens demand it). Take a look at the European Union, see the future there.
And there will eventually come a day when people start realizing one by one that we have a one world government where the present governments are really more like provinces or states.
I graduated from High School just last year. When I started going to High School they did not have a web site, I convinced them that not only should they have one but that they should host it locally. Guess who got to setup the server.
I think that part of the key for having a school like this is the school's system admin. My last year of High School the district hired a system admin and he proceeded to lock everything down and generally make things a pain.
Luckily the web site is still controlled by the Tech Assistants, both the content and the server. But the biggest problem that they have now is that the system admin will not let them do anything (such as host community pages or any other pages for like the elementary school).
So, if you are a school tech admin please take this advice: step back a little and let these people do their thing. You will find that they often do things in a way that you were told not to do in college, but point it out to them nicely. Don't yell at them and threaten to shut down the program. Don't worry about security issues, after you get these people onto your side 99.9% of them will develop a loyalty to you and will never crack, break, DoS or do anything else to make you look bad.
In fact, a functioning program like this can only make you look good. Many times the school boards do not believe that a student can do half the things they do, so when good things start coming out of the program you will get 75% of the credit for everything they do (after all they can't do these things on their own, somebody had to help them).
My grandmother always said running watter was the best thing that ever happened. (When the watter came to you instead of you having to go get it. Think how much time that saved).