>>I've been working at Google for four months, and of all the companies I interviewed at, Google seemed to care the least about my past projects, experience, or my GPA. Google's interviewing process is all about finding very smart computer people.
That's exactly why I quit Google after six months. Their hiring process is/was severely flawed for anyone who has deep specific experience that is not search related. New hires are assigned to the next available vacancy, largely independent of the new employee's skill or interest. "You were a welder, eh? Built ships and stuff. Cool. Now you're a florist. Have fun."
Doesn't it seem strange that Google is only now creating a survey to find out what prospective employees / new hires actually what to do?
There are already identity verification processes available on the web, and it doesn't require government involvement. Check out the Thawte Web of Trust. To receive a "trusted" certificate, you have to appear in person before at least two WoT notaries to have your claimed identity verified against real documents.
It's not perfect, but it's as trustworthy as what you describe.
>> but you could power a laptop for a full transatlantic flight
Why not just plug the laptop into the power port under your seat? Most of the newer Airbus planes and American Airlines planes have power ports even in coach. It's not rocket science...
>>> All of our work on Wine goes back to the public Wine tree
So where is the 6 months of work that Borland did on WINElib (with CodeWeavers, and paid CodeWeavers) to fix the multitude of threading and exception handling issues in the WINE sources? Borland submitted the fixes, but AFAICT, they were never accepted by the WINE maintainers due to "theological differences". Talk about a collossal waste of time and effort...
I'm not talking about WINE the binary PE file emulator that tries to run Windows code that was never intended for Linux but WINElib the native Linux.so library built from the same sources as WINE that Win32 API source can link against when recompiled for Linux.
I've been using the same 1GB Microdrive for the past three years in nearly daily use. I've dropped it, sat on it, run with it in a thigh pocket, and done just about every abuse an outdoor photographer subjects his camera equipment to except get it wet. It's worked flawlessly in subfreezing temperatures in Alaska and Antarctica as well as summer heat in Death Valley. Battery temperature and LCD use have more effect on battery life than Microdrive power consumption, at least in the Canon G1 and Nikon D100 cameras I'm familiar with.
It's interesting that the tales of Microdrive failures are told primarily by those who don't use Microdrives.
The recent Sony Vaios have gotten fat. My 2 year old PCG-C1VPK (666MHz Crusoe, 192M w/ WinXP) weighs in at 2.2 pounds with the standard battery. Nothing on the market today even comes close.
That Psion would release a "super PDA" that can't run off-the-shelf software that is bigger and heavier than my full-on XP Vaio laptop is pretty sad.
I own a Sony Vaio Picturebook from 3 years ago, and even with the larger screen and built-in networking advancements they've made since then, I'm still waiting for a new Vaio to beat my old one.
This new Vaio is heaver (3.1 vs 2.2 lbs) and has less battery life than my Picturebook (7 hours on double battery). I also prefer the torque-stick cursor device over the touchpad.
Fluke Networks, makers of industrial test instruments, has two extremely powerful handheld wireless network analysis tools that make the Kensington ping detector look like a Fisher-Price telephone.
As my employer has found out they are in the continual process of making customers re-write their applications to run on Windows
You're surprised by this? Your boss just figured out the cornerstone of consumerism?
All together now: "Planned Obsolescence"
It's what makes cars fall apart 6 months after they're paid for. It's what makes DIMMs not work in SIMM slots. Out with the old, in with the new, spend spend spend to get your new better life!
There is nothing standard about the Evangelion plot! The first half of the series may appear somewhat traditional, but the last half will definitely mess with your head. And don't stop with the "packaged" ending (which is crap), you have to seek out the more controversial ending as intended by the director.
More than just dealing with aliens attacking humans, Evangelion is about mankind at war with God. The level to which Judeo-Christian symbolism is incorporated into the techno-futuristic storyline is absolutely fascinating.
Example: the NERV supercomputer cluster has three mainframes, referred to in the story as the magi. Their names are Balthazar, Malchior, and Caspar. Those are also the names of the three magi, the three kings who journeyed to Bethlehem bearing gifts for the newborn Jesus.
Evangelion grapples with questions like what is a human without a soul? And what is man's relationship to God? Just how omnipotent is God, anyway? Consider the slogan on the NERV corporation's logo: "God is in His heaven, all is right in the world"
One of the "hooks" that really gets some people interested in NGE is that so many details are mentioned tangentially or at best only hinted at. The more you dig into what the various names mean, the more mysteries or possible links you will find.
Evangelion is not for the faint of heart, nor the faint of faith. If you are hypersensitive about your faith or are offended by any interpretation of scripture that deviates from (your) tradition, you should not view Evangelion. Period.
Anyway, here's one of many web sites devoted to Evangelion lore: http://www.sbs.com.au/NGE/
You can buy the DVDs on Amazon.com and at mall chain video stores like Suncoast Video. Most video rental places that carry serious anime should have NGE. Blockbuster had them for awhile, but seem to have rotated them out of stock (or removed NGE from the shelves because of complaints from people offended by the religious references). Comic book shops are another source.
Just go google for "Neon Genesis Evangelion". Plenty of reading material there.
Something like the Thawte Web of Trust network, established to certify personal identity certificates for email and web authentication?
Thawte has provided free personal certificates through this Web of Trust for more than 5 years. I know, because I'm a WOT notary.
I agree with the apathy of many of the posts on this thread. People like the idea of being annonymous on the Internet, but they don't like the consequences that go with it.
Spam is a consequence of the freedoms provided by annonymity. While it may be possible to construct a new mail exchange system that prevents mail of uncertain origin, such solutions will likely have a cost of reduced personal annonymity (aka certification of origin or identification of sender).
Yes, TMDA has loop detection built-in, both for TMDA responses and for other mail agent autoresponses. Mail storms are caused by people who don't follow the RFC standards for mail processing.
Opteron is only a few months off the 2002 target date that AMD set 3 years ago when they first published the x86-64 instruction set spec.
It would be rather difficult for a chip maker to be "a couple of years late" when the project started only a couple of years ago. AMD has brought Opteron to market in record time.
.NET JIT'd code is 100% native machine code running on the host processor in the host processor's naive instruction set. The first time a routine is executed, the JIT'r jumps in and compiles the bytecode down to machine code. The next time the routine is called, it's already in machine code.
It doesn't get any more 'native' than that.
You want "native API calls"? You can, through the P/Invoke mechanism. You declare what external DLL function you want to call, and at JIT time the JIT compiler codegens a native call to the external DLL, all in native instructions.
If I remember correctly there is, for example, no way to guarantee a destructor will run for a particular instance before it is recycled.
There are no destructors in.NET. There are finalizers, which are guaranteed to be executed sometime after the object is no longer in use, but the restrictions on what you can do in a finalizer and the costs of having one on a type are pretty high.
With the exception of closing file handles, most of what destructors do in the unmanaged world is no longer needed in the managed world. File handles (and other unmanaged resource releasing) is taken care of by the IDisposeable pattern.
American television wouldn't come anywhere near the religious references that underscore many of the adult-themed Japanese anime. Evangelion is by far the most extreme example I've encountered so far, but that also makes it the most fascinating - to pick apart references to Judao-Christian symbolism that most Jews/Christians have never heard of. American TV producers don't have the spine to incorporate potentially religious topics into anything.
Japanese fascination with religious symbolism shows up in "kids" games, too. Remember Final Fantasy 7? The main 'bad guy' was a fellow named Sephiroth. He was on a crazed quest to achieve god-like powers (enlightenment) at the expense of all the lives on Earth. "Sephiroth" is the name of the Tree of Life, a central element of Kabalism regarded as a roadmap of states one must achieve to attain enlightenment. Not exactly what you'd expect to find in a kid's computer game, eh?
What I'm wondering about is how you would buy something online where you can't really predict the address that shipping-confirmations will come from.
TMDA stores mails from non-confirmed senders in a pending folder. If you're expecting an email confirmation from an online merchant, you can just fire up TMDA's cgi web interface to check your pending queue. You can then release the merchant's confirmation message from the queue (to let it go through to your inbox) and optionally add the sender address to your whitelist to expedite future purchase confirmations.
You should also create a cron job to delete the accumulated crud from the pending folder after a reasonable amount of time - two weeks should be plenty of time for a real person to respond to the challenge response sent out by TMDA.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Hejlsberg got a heck of a lot more than $1M in cash and stock to join MS.
>>I've been working at Google for four months, and of all the companies I interviewed at, Google seemed to care the least about my past projects, experience, or my GPA. Google's interviewing process is all about finding very smart computer people.
That's exactly why I quit Google after six months. Their hiring process is/was severely flawed for anyone who has deep specific experience that is not search related. New hires are assigned to the next available vacancy, largely independent of the new employee's skill or interest. "You were a welder, eh? Built ships and stuff. Cool. Now you're a florist. Have fun."
Doesn't it seem strange that Google is only now creating a survey to find out what prospective employees / new hires actually what to do?
There are already identity verification processes available on the web, and it doesn't require government involvement. Check out the Thawte Web of Trust. To receive a "trusted" certificate, you have to appear in person before at least two WoT notaries to have your claimed identity verified against real documents.
It's not perfect, but it's as trustworthy as what you describe.
>> but you could power a laptop for a full transatlantic flight
Why not just plug the laptop into the power port under your seat? Most of the newer Airbus planes and American Airlines planes have power ports even in coach. It's not rocket science...
>>> All of our work on Wine goes back to the public Wine tree
.so library built from the same sources as WINE that Win32 API source can link against when recompiled for Linux.
So where is the 6 months of work that Borland did on WINElib (with CodeWeavers, and paid CodeWeavers) to fix the multitude of threading and exception handling issues in the WINE sources? Borland submitted the fixes, but AFAICT, they were never accepted by the WINE maintainers due to "theological differences". Talk about a collossal waste of time and effort...
I'm not talking about WINE the binary PE file emulator that tries to run Windows code that was never intended for Linux but WINElib the native Linux
--mazor
I've been using a 1GB Microdrive regularly for nearly 3 years now. It's worked flawlessly for me. My only complaint about it is that it's only 1GB. ;>
As soon as the Hitachi 4GBs are out, I'm gettin one! Maybe two. Then I'll have 9 gigs in my shirt pocket for shooting RAW all day.
-mazor
I've been using the same 1GB Microdrive for the past three years in nearly daily use. I've dropped it, sat on it, run with it in a thigh pocket, and done just about every abuse an outdoor photographer subjects his camera equipment to except get it wet. It's worked flawlessly in subfreezing temperatures in Alaska and Antarctica as well as summer heat in Death Valley. Battery temperature and LCD use have more effect on battery life than Microdrive power consumption, at least in the Canon G1 and Nikon D100 cameras I'm familiar with.
It's interesting that the tales of Microdrive failures are told primarily by those who don't use Microdrives.
--mazor
"Am I the only one who finds it depressing that there are people in this world who still think of disk size relative to Floppys?"
;>
That depends. What's a floppy?
MicroFocus is late to the .NET game. Fujitsu Cobol has been on .NET since .NET began.
The recent Sony Vaios have gotten fat. My 2 year old PCG-C1VPK (666MHz Crusoe, 192M w/ WinXP) weighs in at 2.2 pounds with the standard battery. Nothing on the market today even comes close.
That Psion would release a "super PDA" that can't run off-the-shelf software that is bigger and heavier than my full-on XP Vaio laptop is pretty sad.
-mazor
I own a Sony Vaio Picturebook from 3 years ago, and even with the larger screen and built-in networking advancements they've made since then, I'm still waiting for a new Vaio to beat my old one.
This new Vaio is heaver (3.1 vs 2.2 lbs) and has less battery life than my Picturebook (7 hours on double battery). I also prefer the torque-stick cursor device over the touchpad.
Not good enough.
-mazor
-mazor
You're surprised by this? Your boss just figured out the cornerstone of consumerism?
All together now: "Planned Obsolescence"
It's what makes cars fall apart 6 months after they're paid for. It's what makes DIMMs not work in SIMM slots. Out with the old, in with the new, spend spend spend to get your new better life!
-mazor
Letsee.. adaptive packet rate, dynamicly resized transmit windows, acks as probes...
Haven't these people ever heard of ZModem?
-mazor
More than just dealing with aliens attacking humans, Evangelion is about mankind at war with God. The level to which Judeo-Christian symbolism is incorporated into the techno-futuristic storyline is absolutely fascinating.
Example: the NERV supercomputer cluster has three mainframes, referred to in the story as the magi. Their names are Balthazar, Malchior, and Caspar. Those are also the names of the three magi, the three kings who journeyed to Bethlehem bearing gifts for the newborn Jesus.
Evangelion grapples with questions like what is a human without a soul? And what is man's relationship to God? Just how omnipotent is God, anyway? Consider the slogan on the NERV corporation's logo: "God is in His heaven, all is right in the world"
One of the "hooks" that really gets some people interested in NGE is that so many details are mentioned tangentially or at best only hinted at. The more you dig into what the various names mean, the more mysteries or possible links you will find.
Evangelion is not for the faint of heart, nor the faint of faith. If you are hypersensitive about your faith or are offended by any interpretation of scripture that deviates from (your) tradition, you should not view Evangelion. Period.
Anyway, here's one of many web sites devoted to Evangelion lore: http://www.sbs.com.au/NGE/ You can buy the DVDs on Amazon.com and at mall chain video stores like Suncoast Video. Most video rental places that carry serious anime should have NGE. Blockbuster had them for awhile, but seem to have rotated them out of stock (or removed NGE from the shelves because of complaints from people offended by the religious references). Comic book shops are another source.
Just go google for "Neon Genesis Evangelion". Plenty of reading material there.
-mazor
Nextel does use SIMS. My i2000 Plus has a SIM chip in it.
-mazor
Thawte has provided free personal certificates through this Web of Trust for more than 5 years. I know, because I'm a WOT notary.
I agree with the apathy of many of the posts on this thread. People like the idea of being annonymous on the Internet, but they don't like the consequences that go with it.
Spam is a consequence of the freedoms provided by annonymity. While it may be possible to construct a new mail exchange system that prevents mail of uncertain origin, such solutions will likely have a cost of reduced personal annonymity (aka certification of origin or identification of sender).
-mazor
-mazor
-mazor
It would be rather difficult for a chip maker to be "a couple of years late" when the project started only a couple of years ago. AMD has brought Opteron to market in record time.
-mazor
It doesn't get any more 'native' than that. You want "native API calls"? You can, through the P/Invoke mechanism. You declare what external DLL function you want to call, and at JIT time the JIT compiler codegens a native call to the external DLL, all in native instructions.
--mazor
There are no destructors in .NET. There are finalizers, which are guaranteed to be executed sometime after the object is no longer in use, but the restrictions on what you can do in a finalizer and the costs of having one on a type are pretty high.
With the exception of closing file handles, most of what destructors do in the unmanaged world is no longer needed in the managed world. File handles (and other unmanaged resource releasing) is taken care of by the IDisposeable pattern.
--mazor
Japanese fascination with religious symbolism shows up in "kids" games, too. Remember Final Fantasy 7? The main 'bad guy' was a fellow named Sephiroth. He was on a crazed quest to achieve god-like powers (enlightenment) at the expense of all the lives on Earth. "Sephiroth" is the name of the Tree of Life, a central element of Kabalism regarded as a roadmap of states one must achieve to attain enlightenment. Not exactly what you'd expect to find in a kid's computer game, eh?
-mazor
-mazor
TMDA stores mails from non-confirmed senders in a pending folder. If you're expecting an email confirmation from an online merchant, you can just fire up TMDA's cgi web interface to check your pending queue. You can then release the merchant's confirmation message from the queue (to let it go through to your inbox) and optionally add the sender address to your whitelist to expedite future purchase confirmations.
You should also create a cron job to delete the accumulated crud from the pending folder after a reasonable amount of time - two weeks should be plenty of time for a real person to respond to the challenge response sent out by TMDA.
-mazor