I will say this though: some of the folks that came through were clearly very smart, but just lacked the experience we were looking for. We needed somebody that could step in and contribute right away, and we didn't have any budget for hiring junior level people and grooming them.
I see this short-sightedness so much in the industry it drives me nuts: YOU ARE NOT HIRING A SKILLSET, YOU ARE HIRING A PERSON, if your candidate is very smart, personable and obviously would be a good fit, well, what are you waiting for? Hire them at a senior salary level and give them a few months to pick up whatever it is that you are doing.
We developers are not little interchangeable cogs in the machine (as much as people in finance, sales and sometimes management seem to think), you can't find a candidate with exactly the skills you need, the experience you want AND out of a job too!
After somebody has been developing for 5-10 years, if they are smart and sharp it's fairly straightforward to pick up a new programming language or paradigm: I am glad that not all companies are like yours, but it does sadden me that the vast majority are, where somebody pulls out a wishlist from the sky and unless a candidate can put a checkmark in every box they won't be given the time of day.
I seem to vaguely recall my prof mentioning theoretical limits (quantum tunnelling maybe? I seem to recall it was some sort of quantum effect, apologize for the vagueness, it's been 15 years and I've been in software since then) that would prevent things from working if the gate length became too short. I have been looking on wikipedia but I haven't been able to find anything specific.
does anybody really think that Google didn't spend a lot of time/money/lawyers figuring this stuff out BEFORE shelling out over a billion dollars for youtube? Just because the armchair QBs kept going on about the legal trouble(s) google was going to end up in, it doesn't necessarily make it true.
when I took microelectronics courses in university about 15 years ago the lower limit for our process was around 2um (if I remember correctly) and my professor several times seemed to strongly believe that the lower limit for gate length was around 0.6-0.7um for various reasons. Nowadays we're way smaller than that, and it's getting even smaller as time goes on: is there a website somewhere that details exactly which theoretical advances have been made during the past 10-15 years to enable processes to continue getting smaller?
what do you think of YYZ on expert? I heard it's not that hard (also considering they "fixed" hammer-ons and pull-offs) and considering it's the last one in the next-to-last tier I'm wondering about the difficulty of GH2 vs GH1
oblivion just came out and although it looks pretty it's nowhere near any of the other entries in terms of gameplay or greatness (not to mention the ridiculous level scaling and object scaling system, that changes the loot and everything depending on your level, basically destroying any sense of immersion you might have in the game world).
for me the issue is not really my hypothetical son being honest about what they visit, is that they wouldn't be exposed to certain images (plenty of really bad sites on the net) that might upset them greatly: what is seen cannot be un-seen, especially if it's gruesome or shocking. I couldn't care less if they saw nudity, hey, we're all born that way, I'd be a lot more worried about the content above and viruses/malware.
and how exactly are you going to block that without a whitelisting proxy? From rogue pop-ups, to links sent by friends as a joke, to mislabeled links on message boards, ending up with that kind of content (or worse) on your screen is just way too easy... I personally would be a lot more worried by shock sites than by sex-related sites btw.
I also disagree on the net being as friendly now as it was 10 years ago, I have been on the net since about 1993 and you can't compare how easy it is nowadays to end up with a zombified computer or really bad stuff on your screen as it was back then... if you are looking for things it's probably about the same (sites now, usenet+irc back then), but if you want to avoid things it's a lot harder now than it used to be IMHO.
so if your kid does relatively well in school you'd allow them to watch any movie at any age? read any book? smoke? drink? do you also think that movie ratings are 'criminal'?
As much as I'd trust a kid like that, the net these days is not exactly a friendly place, what with all the malware going on and 'shock' sites: I'd try to explain that the filtering is as much for their protection as anything else.
so I take you let your kids watch any movie regardless of ratings, read any book, drink, smoke, etc. etc. regardless of their age?
Sorry, but if you are a parent your job is to be a PARENT, not a friend/buddy, and enable them to grow up and become responsible adults, and in order to do that more often than not you have to be able to filter life's harsh realities in an age/maturity appropriate way. Exposure to things that are 'funny' as an adult can be very disconcerting and frightening for a child.
Letting your kid do whatever they feel like might the PC thing to do in North America these days, but it sure isn't the best way to help them grow up to be responsible and well adjusted adults.
anything that is on a PC can be subverted given enough incentive.
If I had kids I'd configure my linux firewall/router to block any traffic to/from their PC on any port but a non-standard one, and have a squid proxy listening on another computer in my network with a whitelist: any URL not in the whitelist would be logged and I could deny/allow access. I probably would also look into some kind of IM proxy that allows usage only at specified times and, most important, that disallowed any sort of file upload/download. Same thing with email, with automatic stripping of attachments and so on.
And for people who think this is too much: by definition children are not responsible adults, so I really don't see why they should have complete access to everything, also considering all the malware going around these days.
Although Google does not plan to enter the personal computer market, the company is a large purchaser of microprocessors and has evolved a highly energy-efficient power supply system for its data centers.
I assume Google is employing some smart electrical engineers, which are more than qualified to make this kind of recommendations I would think...
as things stand now the only songs I bought on iTunes were songs I needed to practice for my (cover) band, there is no way I would ever buy anything for myself: amazon.com is just as convenient as iTunes, sometimes comparable in price, and in general not that much more expensive, it has a MUCH larger selection (esp. in classical) and I can actually get uncompressed songs.
Unless iTunes moves to apple lossless (for the same price) across the board (not to mention increase a lot their catalog size) I'll continue buying real CDs, thank you very much.
and I really love it, however there are two annoyances I can't figure out how to get rid of
1) It's not possible anymore when replying to have the original text indented with > and write your reply inline, gmail is better since if you scroll in the original text and press enter it allows you to separate the vertical bar and write
2) There is a right-click menu with a lot of functionality and shortcuts, but this is unusable in firefox as firefox's right click menu comes up on top (I assume they have a workaround for IE)
in any case I have to say it's a very well done and slick piece of programming and I'm glad that everybody can now use it.
If A company makes a book, and I buy it from them, and then latter it turns out they didn't have permission to do that, I still can not be sued.
are you really sure? If you work at company B and company A repackaged say, photoshop, and called it 'photostore' and sold it to you for $5, I doubt you'd be in the clear from a legal standpoint...
it finally worked from here, although I really don't agree with his color scheme
In my implementation I chose four colors to represent text of varying degrees of maturity. Most high-tech cultures on earth employ automobiles and have fairly consistent standards for traffic light coloring, so I employed these colors to indicate the age of text. The newest text in an article is colored red, indicating that users should employ caution in relying on it. Slightly older text is colored yellow. Text that is nearing maturity is colored green. Mature text is colored black.
this will make pages really difficult to read, because a) yellow on white and sometimes green on white are hard to see b) there are quite a few people that have trouble distinguishing red from green.
There is also another issue, which is vandalizing of wiki links, where it would be trivial to leave the original link name (highlighted by wikipedia in a different color) and change its destination to vandal-friendly sites.
I think I would like to amend my original thought with having the color change be in the =background= of the text: having only one color but different saturation levels (from, say, pure medium slate blue, to light slate blue, to white) which should be distinguishable by everybody and make the reading of the article still reasonably easy, while presenting the age information as well as without interfering with link/visited color choices.
Still, I wish I had been able to read the article before my original post, since I thought it discussed only reputation.
It's an interesting idea, to be certain, but how would this be helpful?
when reading a controversial article, or in general any article one wants to be reasonably sure about, one could use this view and take into account mostly only the 'black/oldest' text. As much as it's easy to figure out obvious vandalism, it's not as easy, especially if one doesn't have domain knowledge, to identify subtle changes.
This would also be helpful for articles on my watchlist when I don't look at them for a while, since edits would stand out fairly easily without having to go through the diff page.
The site is/.-ed, but this got me thinking: what about having an additional page view that uses color to highlight text age? Oldest text would be black, newest would be something else (red? blue?), intermediate 'ages' in intermediate shades. This would make it quite obvious which parts of the article haven't been modified in a long time.
In games with tough leveling curves, it discourages you from starting over.
the levelling curve in WoW is very steep once you hit 60, after you are, say, 5/8 T2 and exalted with the BGs the impact of rerolling is HUGE, not to mention that very likely you'll be stuck in 'alt city' with your guild (having to pass on gear etc.) and have to always use your main whenever possible.
I can see somebody just hitting 60 with a mix of greens and blues thinking 'hey, that was fun, let me redo it on another character', but the situation is a lot different for the raiding crowd: yeah, it takes a couple of weeks going to 60 (esp. with friends helping you PL and so on), but it takes many many months progressing further, getting your profession's recipes, getting reputation, getting raid gear, getting PvP ranks, etc. etc. etc.
just allow everybody to register (no captchas) and put people on a 'probationary' status, their first 2-3 posts won't appear right away but will have to be approved by the moderator: once a user passes 'probation' things will start working as usual. I bet this would reduce spam to 0, as no spambot (human or otherwise) will be able/take the time to create 2-3 on topic posts.
Of course you can set things that if any user posts more than 10 posts before being approved all of them will be deleted and the account banned (to combat flood), auto-expiration of probationary accounts, etc. etc.
This would be a lot harder to do for email accounts etc., but for msg boards/blogs/... I think the above would be pretty much cutting the spam to 0.
The new players won't display their full resolution unless they detect the new secure screens.
not only that, the tv must support 1080p over HDMI, where unfortunately nowadays most TVs support only 1080i (and yes, HDMI 1.0 supports 1080p/60 over HDMI, it's just that since there was basically no demand most manufacturers chose to implement only 1080i/720p)
I am really glad that 4 years ago when I had to get a new TV I decided to stay with a nice SDTV until the dust settled, otherwise I'd have been bitten by the first generation plasma blues (or lack of) and burnin, then by hdmi, then by first generation DLPs rainbows, then by 1080p-friendly hdmi and by the current cablecard changes. I guess another couple of years and then finally it will be reasonably safe to buy an HDTV tv finally, my sincere thanks to you early adopters!
We all wanted to invite her out with us after work, not because we were trying to score with her, but because we wanted her to be part of the team. We never invited her, because we were all worried about sexual harrassment.
why would you invite her 1-on-1? Send out a mass email to the team (her included) along the lines of "we're meeting tonight after work at establishment xyz, if you feel like unwinding with us look for us playing pool/chilling/playing darts/...", if she wants to partecipate she will, if not she won't, in any case no skin off your nose: not to mention that you're not putting her on the spot via peer pressure, which is the nice thing to do anyways, whether your coworker is male or female.
Singling out people where there is potential for misunderstanding (which is a lot more common than you might think, read your company's harassment policy for more info) is just asking for trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
I see this short-sightedness so much in the industry it drives me nuts: YOU ARE NOT HIRING A SKILLSET, YOU ARE HIRING A PERSON, if your candidate is very smart, personable and obviously would be a good fit, well, what are you waiting for? Hire them at a senior salary level and give them a few months to pick up whatever it is that you are doing.
We developers are not little interchangeable cogs in the machine (as much as people in finance, sales and sometimes management seem to think), you can't find a candidate with exactly the skills you need, the experience you want AND out of a job too!
After somebody has been developing for 5-10 years, if they are smart and sharp it's fairly straightforward to pick up a new programming language or paradigm: I am glad that not all companies are like yours, but it does sadden me that the vast majority are, where somebody pulls out a wishlist from the sky and unless a candidate can put a checkmark in every box they won't be given the time of day.
maybe because guitar freaks had j-pop and guitar hero has barking at the moon, smoke on the water, more than a feeling, ...
I seem to vaguely recall my prof mentioning theoretical limits (quantum tunnelling maybe? I seem to recall it was some sort of quantum effect, apologize for the vagueness, it's been 15 years and I've been in software since then) that would prevent things from working if the gate length became too short. I have been looking on wikipedia but I haven't been able to find anything specific.
does anybody really think that Google didn't spend a lot of time/money/lawyers figuring this stuff out BEFORE shelling out over a billion dollars for youtube? Just because the armchair QBs kept going on about the legal trouble(s) google was going to end up in, it doesn't necessarily make it true.
when I took microelectronics courses in university about 15 years ago the lower limit for our process was around 2um (if I remember correctly) and my professor several times seemed to strongly believe that the lower limit for gate length was around 0.6-0.7um for various reasons. Nowadays we're way smaller than that, and it's getting even smaller as time goes on: is there a website somewhere that details exactly which theoretical advances have been made during the past 10-15 years to enable processes to continue getting smaller?
what do you think of YYZ on expert? I heard it's not that hard (also considering they "fixed" hammer-ons and pull-offs) and considering it's the last one in the next-to-last tier I'm wondering about the difficulty of GH2 vs GH1
oblivion just came out and although it looks pretty it's nowhere near any of the other entries in terms of gameplay or greatness (not to mention the ridiculous level scaling and object scaling system, that changes the loot and everything depending on your level, basically destroying any sense of immersion you might have in the game world).
for me the issue is not really my hypothetical son being honest about what they visit, is that they wouldn't be exposed to certain images (plenty of really bad sites on the net) that might upset them greatly: what is seen cannot be un-seen, especially if it's gruesome or shocking. I couldn't care less if they saw nudity, hey, we're all born that way, I'd be a lot more worried about the content above and viruses/malware.
and how exactly are you going to block that without a whitelisting proxy? From rogue pop-ups, to links sent by friends as a joke, to mislabeled links on message boards, ending up with that kind of content (or worse) on your screen is just way too easy... I personally would be a lot more worried by shock sites than by sex-related sites btw.
I also disagree on the net being as friendly now as it was 10 years ago, I have been on the net since about 1993 and you can't compare how easy it is nowadays to end up with a zombified computer or really bad stuff on your screen as it was back then... if you are looking for things it's probably about the same (sites now, usenet+irc back then), but if you want to avoid things it's a lot harder now than it used to be IMHO.
so if your kid does relatively well in school you'd allow them to watch any movie at any age? read any book? smoke? drink? do you also think that movie ratings are 'criminal'?
As much as I'd trust a kid like that, the net these days is not exactly a friendly place, what with all the malware going on and 'shock' sites: I'd try to explain that the filtering is as much for their protection as anything else.
so I take you let your kids watch any movie regardless of ratings, read any book, drink, smoke, etc. etc. regardless of their age?
Sorry, but if you are a parent your job is to be a PARENT, not a friend/buddy, and enable them to grow up and become responsible adults, and in order to do that more often than not you have to be able to filter life's harsh realities in an age/maturity appropriate way. Exposure to things that are 'funny' as an adult can be very disconcerting and frightening for a child.
Letting your kid do whatever they feel like might the PC thing to do in North America these days, but it sure isn't the best way to help them grow up to be responsible and well adjusted adults.
anything that is on a PC can be subverted given enough incentive.
If I had kids I'd configure my linux firewall/router to block any traffic to/from their PC on any port but a non-standard one, and have a squid proxy listening on another computer in my network with a whitelist: any URL not in the whitelist would be logged and I could deny/allow access. I probably would also look into some kind of IM proxy that allows usage only at specified times and, most important, that disallowed any sort of file upload/download. Same thing with email, with automatic stripping of attachments and so on.
And for people who think this is too much: by definition children are not responsible adults, so I really don't see why they should have complete access to everything, also considering all the malware going around these days.
also look at
t oDevelopers.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuide
basically most developers would be a lot happier with a private office (with a door!) than in the typical cube farm arrangement.
I assume Google is employing some smart electrical engineers, which are more than qualified to make this kind of recommendations I would think...
as things stand now the only songs I bought on iTunes were songs I needed to practice for my (cover) band, there is no way I would ever buy anything for myself: amazon.com is just as convenient as iTunes, sometimes comparable in price, and in general not that much more expensive, it has a MUCH larger selection (esp. in classical) and I can actually get uncompressed songs.
Unless iTunes moves to apple lossless (for the same price) across the board (not to mention increase a lot their catalog size) I'll continue buying real CDs, thank you very much.
and I really love it, however there are two annoyances I can't figure out how to get rid of
1) It's not possible anymore when replying to have the original text indented with > and write your reply inline, gmail is better since if you scroll in the original text and press enter it allows you to separate the vertical bar and write
2) There is a right-click menu with a lot of functionality and shortcuts, but this is unusable in firefox as firefox's right click menu comes up on top (I assume they have a workaround for IE)
in any case I have to say it's a very well done and slick piece of programming and I'm glad that everybody can now use it.
are you really sure? If you work at company B and company A repackaged say, photoshop, and called it 'photostore' and sold it to you for $5, I doubt you'd be in the clear from a legal standpoint...
this will make pages really difficult to read, because a) yellow on white and sometimes green on white are hard to see b) there are quite a few people that have trouble distinguishing red from green.
There is also another issue, which is vandalizing of wiki links, where it would be trivial to leave the original link name (highlighted by wikipedia in a different color) and change its destination to vandal-friendly sites.
I think I would like to amend my original thought with having the color change be in the =background= of the text: having only one color but different saturation levels (from, say, pure medium slate blue, to light slate blue, to white) which should be distinguishable by everybody and make the reading of the article still reasonably easy, while presenting the age information as well as without interfering with link/visited color choices.
Still, I wish I had been able to read the article before my original post, since I thought it discussed only reputation.
when reading a controversial article, or in general any article one wants to be reasonably sure about, one could use this view and take into account mostly only the 'black/oldest' text. As much as it's easy to figure out obvious vandalism, it's not as easy, especially if one doesn't have domain knowledge, to identify subtle changes.
This would also be helpful for articles on my watchlist when I don't look at them for a while, since edits would stand out fairly easily without having to go through the diff page.
The site is /.-ed, but this got me thinking: what about having an additional page view that uses color to highlight text age? Oldest text would be black, newest would be something else (red? blue?), intermediate 'ages' in intermediate shades. This would make it quite obvious which parts of the article haven't been modified in a long time.
so? does it work? can you do gapless on the "older" ipods? (I am assuming you don't already have a new one...)
the levelling curve in WoW is very steep once you hit 60, after you are, say, 5/8 T2 and exalted with the BGs the impact of rerolling is HUGE, not to mention that very likely you'll be stuck in 'alt city' with your guild (having to pass on gear etc.) and have to always use your main whenever possible.
I can see somebody just hitting 60 with a mix of greens and blues thinking 'hey, that was fun, let me redo it on another character', but the situation is a lot different for the raiding crowd: yeah, it takes a couple of weeks going to 60 (esp. with friends helping you PL and so on), but it takes many many months progressing further, getting your profession's recipes, getting reputation, getting raid gear, getting PvP ranks, etc. etc. etc.
just allow everybody to register (no captchas) and put people on a 'probationary' status, their first 2-3 posts won't appear right away but will have to be approved by the moderator: once a user passes 'probation' things will start working as usual. I bet this would reduce spam to 0, as no spambot (human or otherwise) will be able/take the time to create 2-3 on topic posts.
Of course you can set things that if any user posts more than 10 posts before being approved all of them will be deleted and the account banned (to combat flood), auto-expiration of probationary accounts, etc. etc.
This would be a lot harder to do for email accounts etc., but for msg boards/blogs/... I think the above would be pretty much cutting the spam to 0.
not only that, the tv must support 1080p over HDMI, where unfortunately nowadays most TVs support only 1080i (and yes, HDMI 1.0 supports 1080p/60 over HDMI, it's just that since there was basically no demand most manufacturers chose to implement only 1080i/720p)
I am really glad that 4 years ago when I had to get a new TV I decided to stay with a nice SDTV until the dust settled, otherwise I'd have been bitten by the first generation plasma blues (or lack of) and burnin, then by hdmi, then by first generation DLPs rainbows, then by 1080p-friendly hdmi and by the current cablecard changes. I guess another couple of years and then finally it will be reasonably safe to buy an HDTV tv finally, my sincere thanks to you early adopters!
why would you invite her 1-on-1? Send out a mass email to the team (her included) along the lines of "we're meeting tonight after work at establishment xyz, if you feel like unwinding with us look for us playing pool/chilling/playing darts/...", if she wants to partecipate she will, if not she won't, in any case no skin off your nose: not to mention that you're not putting her on the spot via peer pressure, which is the nice thing to do anyways, whether your coworker is male or female.
Singling out people where there is potential for misunderstanding (which is a lot more common than you might think, read your company's harassment policy for more info) is just asking for trouble.