I was a contractor and my contract was up for renewal.
I was asked to come to a meeting where my knowledge would be evaluated (job was dbase in the dos days).
About the 2nd or 3rd question was: "How many files can you have open at one time [on a DOS system]?"
To which I replied "Yer kidding, right? I have no idea, nor do I care. I've never hit it, but I know that there's an environment variable that will let me change it at boot time. Could we just skip the questions that don't matter and could be looked up trivially?"
My "boss" wasn't impressed - mostly embarrassed, I hope. Anyway, I wasn't renewed, which was fine by me:-) Three months working for the moron was more than enough.
Maybe they enjoy networking more? Maybe they enjoy short-term projects more? Maybe they are better at juggling more balls more often than managers? Maybe for the money?
The only real skill that makes somebody a good headhunter is the abilily to sell, and I don't consider that to be a useful skill.
Wow; you HAVE had bad experiences.
My headhunters never had to sell me. They would supply my (and perhaps others) resume', and [maybe] some comments. They would supply me with some tips about the company. Then it's MY job to sell. It's their job to find the right employee/employer match - which can be hard to do. It is certainly not easy to do really well.
I've only gone on 2 interviews from 'hunters where I didn't take the job. In one case I got a better offer, and in the other the company frightened me (though they're still around, kinda, 5 years later).
I don't understand why people still go to headhunters. Even if this mysterious honest recruitment firm did exist, they'd still be taking a lot of money that could be going to your salary (they have to make a profit somehow), and they'll always be bad at matching you up with a company, because if they knew what they were talking about, they'd have a real job.
Certainly not my experience. I've had 2 very good experiences with headhunters, and 2 mediocre ones. It is certainly not true that "if they knew what they were talking about, they'd have a real job." I've had managers that couldn't code, and certainly the headhunters couldn't, but they DID know how to communicate. That's what they're there for, and if they know how to do that you're in good hands.
I can tell good UI from bad, but I have a real hard time coming up with good UI on my own. There are plenty of art critics who can't paint. Hell, everyone knows good music when they hear it, but relatively few can play.
For that matter, there are plenty who can play music but not compose - and vice versa...
I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned this already: many blog systems support an XMLRPC api. This means that nice clients can easily be written for many different platforms. Maybe you should look into something like that.
Movabletype.org says they support "Blogger and MetaWeblog XML-RPC APIs".
disclaimer: I'm an XML-RPC fan, but have NO experience with blog servers or clients.
Games, lots and lots of 64 person BF1942 and DC servers please.
And 128 person servers for HL2. (/me starts rumor)
OK, I'll bite. In the incoming freshman class of 1000 (according to the article), how many of those do you suppose will be playing BF, DC, or HL2 at any given time? How many will be playing on a server that's off-campus?
And if there's any contention of bandwith, who do you suppose the admin is going to frown on - the games or the voip?
Yeah, I know you're mostly kidding, but I'm mostly replying to "borimir" in the grandparent piece...
This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days, so having any sort of voice capabilities in dorms is a waste of resources. OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs.
No, a few geeks have high data transfer needs. And if you rule out kazaa and other "pirate networks" (which a campus seems likely to do), what does that leave?
The bandwidth being wasted in VoIP would be much better utilized in data connections.
I've used vtun for years and years. It's always been a nice, easy system to set up.
I also always turned off security on it - it's primary purpose was always to be a tunnel solution, not so much a security tool. What's more, I don't open any more ports on my server than I need to - I bet there are buffer overruns in vtun...
I always tunel vtun over ssh. Problem solved.
I need to look into openvpn (http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/).
As I'm sure the Samba, WINE, and OpenOffice.org developers would agree, maintaining compatibility with a standard controlled by any hostile party, especially Microsoft, is an uphill battle.
I don't know that all 3 of those are similar. I suspect that the WINE folks have had the easiest time of it in terms of API changes - that is, I don't think there were many. I'm sure there were API extensions, but that's entirely different. Once the win32 API solidified, it's my impression that it stayed pretty stable.
It does work on safari.... Did you click the link for examples?
What can I say? I hit the example pages and it failed to work. All I see are italicised text - no popup or other info. Bummer.
Also 40% of browsers on Slashdot are Mozilla based IIRC from the last IRC Slashdot thingy...
If that's true, then it's at least 40% as good as using links to a geekdict.
And anyway since when is it pointless to support an easy to implement feature just because some browsers haven't caught up with the standards?
It has always been mostly pointless to support features that most users can't use. Especially when you could easily use another feature that ALL browsers support (href).
The motivation is it's a good idea, it's easy to do and the Slashdot audience consists of a great many people who have browsers that support it. To make it even easier a database could be built to automatically fill in the acronyms for you. That's what I've done for my site anyway.
Kudos (honestly)./. should do something like this. Not sure if the/. readers are ready for abbr tags, but helpful links would be a good idea, at the least.
and when you hover your mouse over the acronym (in browsers other than MSIE
Didn't work for me on OSX with Safari.
So it doesn't work for M$ and it doesn't work for Apple (the default browsers for those OS's). What's the motivation, again?
Don't get me wrong, links to a geek dictionary would be welcome, but an html feature that 99% of browsers don't support (and maybe >90% of/. reader's browsers)...
It's fairly obvious that Sun has made an effort to assure that Solaris + Java == happy
And here I thought that SUN's whole purpose was to make sure that Solaris + anything = miserable. That was always my experience - but I've not touched Solaris for 4 or 5 years...
I like to compare computer speed to building materials. Yes, they're better today, but what do you reall get? Houses today are pretty similar in most respects to those build for the past several hundred years. Doors, windows, roof, rooms. Why haven't we progressed? Oh, look, there is plumbing and electricity and gas, so we have progressed a lot after all!
Computers are the same (except for the timescale:-) Yes, visicalc and excel are pretty much the same apps, but there's some extra plumbing. All my apps can print (I'm using OSX), and they all do WYSIWYG. When one app crashes, it doesn't take down the whole house. When I run outta RAM, I swap. I get to run multiple apps at once - on the same screen. I can cut and paste. I have a mouse, and it works the same in all apps. I have an input manager that can switch to Kanji. Amazing things like that. ...Yes, you could get a prompt in a couple of seconds on an Apple II, Atari 400 (my personal favorite), or whatnot, but you couldn't run multiple programs at once, do filesystem operations with a mouse, etc. It takes more resources to accomplish more things, and technology hasn't necessarily been keeping up with that curve....
I think it's hardware that has not kept up. I like to think of it as not having reached "Plastic building material". Programming isn't hard, but it should be easier for it to be safer. Java is many steps in the right direction (GC, at last!).
The other thing that should be done with the current level of technology, and regrettably rarely is done, is adding robustness. Array bounds checking, input sanity checking, the works. Except in very specialized cases, we have more than enough CPU power around to actually check all these things and still get done what needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time (as in, less than the user will notice). Instead of assuming that a function's inputs will be within range, check that they are in range, and take some sort of error action if not, rather than blowing away random areas of memory or the like...
And Java will soon have asserts as well.
The reality is that computers are still too damn slow. I'm looking forward to the day we get realtime voice recognition. I imagine that will happen (for me) in about 2 years (2 2Ghz CPU's and >1Gig RAM). The next hurdle is making it work really well (> 98% correct).
Oh, then comes vision. I can't even imagine how much CPU that is going to take.
No, it's not the programmers fault unless they code it too slow for the top of the line machine. Tomorrow it'll all be faster, and if they're developing now, why target yesterday's machine? [great] New boxes will be $500/pop soon - may as well aim for that.
The hard truth is that we're still ramping up our building materials, and we will be for the next decade or so, at least.
So, that's what? The 100+ Ghz range in a decade?
The bottom line is that today's hardware is barely useful. Yesterday's are useless.
I can sell an optimized program for an existing machine for $40, or I can sell a faster computer plus a less-optimized program for $400. What is the customer more likely to buy?
I don't think this instantaneous view of the market is a healthy one. If you plan on staying in business for some years (say 5), then I'd say they are very likely to go for the upgrade combo - maybe not this year, but sooner or later. If you're only planning on staying in business for the next month, you'd better go with something optimized for a few years ago.
What's more, in the wintel world, M$ applies constant upgrade pressure. Both in terms of hardware needed to run their latest windows release and in terms of the fact that it's generally easier to buy a new machine with the current OS installed than it is to upgrade an existing machine. Think of them as co-marketers for the $440 combo...
But why should we be stuck with C forever? Isn't there room for another mid level language suitable for systems programming?
I don't think so. If you want more than C, get better libraries. Anything "more" in the language adds overhead...
Something like a more advanced C, or a cleaned up C++?
C++ is a mess and always will be. Use Objective-C. It's a great language. But don't write kernels with it - it's got about a 10% message overhead because it supports introspection.
I do try to keep up with the times. it's hard though. I came from the world where you only had 64Kb of RAM. You made every byte count.
Me too, but we got a IIe with the 64K upgrade for a total of 128K.
But nowadays the trend seems to be "make the user upgrade."
Why not - machines are cheap. Especially cheap machines (intel).
I've got a 1.4GHz Pentium and Java still runs like a sick dog on it. I'm going to be purchasing a new system next week, but dammit it's obsolete before I've even bought it!
I'm guessing you know what your doing, so you have at least 512M RAM.
Maybe it's time to change platforms. I've got a 600Mhz iBook coming up on 2 years old, and java ain't lightning, but it's better than a sick dog...
Slashdot Mirror
I was a contractor and my contract was up for renewal.
:-) Three months working for the moron was more than enough.
I was asked to come to a meeting where my knowledge would be evaluated (job was dbase in the dos days).
About the 2nd or 3rd question was: "How many files can you have open at one time [on a DOS system]?"
To which I replied "Yer kidding, right? I have no idea, nor do I care. I've never hit it, but I know that there's an environment variable that will let me change it at boot time. Could we just skip the questions that don't matter and could be looked up trivially?"
My "boss" wasn't impressed - mostly embarrassed, I hope. Anyway, I wasn't renewed, which was fine by me
There are various IM clients that do this.
I use ichat AV.
Because Apple is a CA company, and they host part of the ichat solution, it will be interesting to me to see how/if this affects them.
Then why aren't they managers?
Maybe they enjoy networking more? Maybe they enjoy short-term projects more? Maybe they are better at juggling more balls more often than managers? Maybe for the money?
The only real skill that makes somebody a good headhunter is the abilily to sell, and I don't consider that to be a useful skill.
Wow; you HAVE had bad experiences.
My headhunters never had to sell me. They would supply my (and perhaps others) resume', and [maybe] some comments. They would supply me with some tips about the company. Then it's MY job to sell. It's their job to find the right employee/employer match - which can be hard to do. It is certainly not easy to do really well.
I've only gone on 2 interviews from 'hunters where I didn't take the job. In one case I got a better offer, and in the other the company frightened me (though they're still around, kinda, 5 years later).
I don't understand why people still go to headhunters. Even if this mysterious honest recruitment firm did exist, they'd still be taking a lot of money that could be going to your salary (they have to make a profit somehow), and they'll always be bad at matching you up with a company, because if they knew what they were talking about, they'd have a real job.
Certainly not my experience. I've had 2 very good experiences with headhunters, and 2 mediocre ones. It is certainly not true that "if they knew what they were talking about, they'd have a real job." I've had managers that couldn't code, and certainly the headhunters couldn't, but they DID know how to communicate. That's what they're there for, and if they know how to do that you're in good hands.
I can tell good UI from bad, but I have a real hard time coming up with good UI on my own. There are plenty of art critics who can't paint. Hell, everyone knows good music when they hear it, but relatively few can play.
For that matter, there are plenty who can play music but not compose - and vice versa...
I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned this already: many blog systems support an XMLRPC api. This means that nice clients can easily be written for many different platforms. Maybe you should look into something like that.
Movabletype.org says they support "Blogger and MetaWeblog XML-RPC APIs".
disclaimer: I'm an XML-RPC fan, but have NO experience with blog servers or clients.
Games, lots and lots of 64 person BF1942 and DC servers please.
And 128 person servers for HL2. (/me starts rumor)
OK, I'll bite. In the incoming freshman class of 1000 (according to the article), how many of those do you suppose will be playing BF, DC, or HL2 at any given time? How many will be playing on a server that's off-campus?
And if there's any contention of bandwith, who do you suppose the admin is going to frown on - the games or the voip?
Yeah, I know you're mostly kidding, but I'm mostly replying to "borimir" in the grandparent piece...
This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days, so having any sort of voice capabilities in dorms is a waste of resources. OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs.
No, a few geeks have high data transfer needs. And if you rule out kazaa and other "pirate networks" (which a campus seems likely to do), what does that leave?
The bandwidth being wasted in VoIP would be much better utilized in data connections.
Like what?
However, you're right in the sense that these updates don't actually require a restart. They are just doing it "to be sure".
I suppose they could try to kill the old sshd and restart it - but that's more trouble than it's worth.
As for uptime complaints because of update...
NEWSFLASH: If you don't wanna lose the uptime, don't update.
Or do it by hand and don't restart. Or just get a grip and realize that it don't matter.
I didn't restart for the Java patch...
I've used vtun for years and years. It's always been a nice, easy system to set up.
I also always turned off security on it - it's primary purpose was always to be a tunnel solution, not so much a security tool. What's more, I don't open any more ports on my server than I need to - I bet there are buffer overruns in vtun...
I always tunel vtun over ssh. Problem solved.
I need to look into openvpn (http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/).
Thanks for the example. Makes a lot more sense now.
...OK, that all sounds very exciting...
Could you give me just one example of a use case for this?
Thanks!
But didn't get the point.
What are some concrete uses of this technology?
TIA
As I'm sure the Samba, WINE, and OpenOffice.org developers would agree, maintaining compatibility with a standard controlled by any hostile party, especially Microsoft, is an uphill battle.
I don't know that all 3 of those are similar. I suspect that the WINE folks have had the easiest time of it in terms of API changes - that is, I don't think there were many. I'm sure there were API extensions, but that's entirely different. Once the win32 API solidified, it's my impression that it stayed pretty stable.
Am I wrong?
That used to be call "the internet", but it got too easy.
Now it's called the 6-bone, but it will be too easy soon.
Tell ya what - if it was to be automated, I'd vote for both. ACRONYM tags and links until most (virtually all) browsers support ACRONYM tags alone.
It does work on safari. ... Did you click the link for examples?
/. should do something like this. Not sure if the /. readers are ready for abbr tags, but helpful links would be a good idea, at the least.
What can I say? I hit the example pages and it failed to work. All I see are italicised text - no popup or other info. Bummer.
Also 40% of browsers on Slashdot are Mozilla based IIRC from the last IRC Slashdot thingy...
If that's true, then it's at least 40% as good as using links to a geekdict.
And anyway since when is it pointless to support an easy to implement feature just because some browsers haven't caught up with the standards?
It has always been mostly pointless to support features that most users can't use. Especially when you could easily use another feature that ALL browsers support (href).
The motivation is it's a good idea, it's easy to do and the Slashdot audience consists of a great many people who have browsers that support it. To make it even easier a database could be built to automatically fill in the acronyms for you. That's what I've done for my site anyway.
Kudos (honestly).
and when you hover your mouse over the acronym (in browsers other than MSIE
/. reader's browsers)...
Didn't work for me on OSX with Safari.
So it doesn't work for M$ and it doesn't work for Apple (the default browsers for those OS's). What's the motivation, again?
Don't get me wrong, links to a geek dictionary would be welcome, but an html feature that 99% of browsers don't support (and maybe >90% of
It's fairly obvious that Sun has made an effort to assure that Solaris + Java == happy
And here I thought that SUN's whole purpose was to make sure that Solaris + anything = miserable. That was always my experience - but I've not touched Solaris for 4 or 5 years...
And you complaining about this will do what exactly?
/. get a bit more professional in how they do things.
Pretty sure it was a left-handed suggestion that the fine editors at
You know - check for dupes, check links, check spelling...
Since it has been rated up, it seems that a lot of readers agree - even though this is obvious flamebait, OT, etc.
Amen to that.
/usr/ports
cd
make upgrade or make update should do the right thing.
I filed that bug and it got pissed on. More and more I'm thinking OSX will be my next server OS.
They will no more audit you for having a network than they currently enforce alcohol taxes by auditing you for what you drank last night.
Florida doesn't get your taxes if you go to Georgia and buy your hardware there...
What if you get your cables/hardware shipped to you from some other state?
Won't this just screw Florida resellers?
My lan costs me 0.00$/year. At least that's my story.
They're welcome to 9% of it.
Excellent points.
:-) Yes, visicalc and excel are pretty much the same apps, but there's some extra plumbing. All my apps can print (I'm using OSX), and they all do WYSIWYG. When one app crashes, it doesn't take down the whole house. When I run outta RAM, I swap. I get to run multiple apps at once - on the same screen. I can cut and paste. I have a mouse, and it works the same in all apps. I have an input manager that can switch to Kanji. Amazing things like that.
...Yes, you could get a prompt in a couple of seconds on an Apple II, Atari 400 (my personal favorite), or whatnot, but you couldn't run multiple programs at once, do filesystem operations with a mouse, etc. It takes more resources to accomplish more things, and technology hasn't necessarily been keeping up with that curve. ...
I like to compare computer speed to building materials. Yes, they're better today, but what do you reall get? Houses today are pretty similar in most respects to those build for the past several hundred years. Doors, windows, roof, rooms. Why haven't we progressed? Oh, look, there is plumbing and electricity and gas, so we have progressed a lot after all!
Computers are the same (except for the timescale
I think it's hardware that has not kept up. I like to think of it as not having reached "Plastic building material". Programming isn't hard, but it should be easier for it to be safer. Java is many steps in the right direction (GC, at last!).
The other thing that should be done with the current level of technology, and regrettably rarely is done, is adding robustness. Array bounds checking, input sanity checking, the works. Except in very specialized cases, we have more than enough CPU power around to actually check all these things and still get done what needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time (as in, less than the user will notice). Instead of assuming that a function's inputs will be within range, check that they are in range, and take some sort of error action if not, rather than blowing away random areas of memory or the like...
And Java will soon have asserts as well.
The reality is that computers are still too damn slow. I'm looking forward to the day we get realtime voice recognition. I imagine that will happen (for me) in about 2 years (2 2Ghz CPU's and >1Gig RAM). The next hurdle is making it work really well (> 98% correct).
Oh, then comes vision. I can't even imagine how much CPU that is going to take.
No, it's not the programmers fault unless they code it too slow for the top of the line machine. Tomorrow it'll all be faster, and if they're developing now, why target yesterday's machine? [great] New boxes will be $500/pop soon - may as well aim for that.
The hard truth is that we're still ramping up our building materials, and we will be for the next decade or so, at least.
So, that's what? The 100+ Ghz range in a decade?
The bottom line is that today's hardware is barely useful. Yesterday's are useless.
I can sell an optimized program for an existing machine for $40, or I can sell a faster computer plus a less-optimized program for $400. What is the customer more likely to buy?
I don't think this instantaneous view of the market is a healthy one. If you plan on staying in business for some years (say 5), then I'd say they are very likely to go for the upgrade combo - maybe not this year, but sooner or later. If you're only planning on staying in business for the next month, you'd better go with something optimized for a few years ago.
What's more, in the wintel world, M$ applies constant upgrade pressure. Both in terms of hardware needed to run their latest windows release and in terms of the fact that it's generally easier to buy a new machine with the current OS installed than it is to upgrade an existing machine. Think of them as co-marketers for the $440 combo...
But why should we be stuck with C forever? Isn't there room for another mid level language suitable for systems programming?
I don't think so. If you want more than C, get better libraries. Anything "more" in the language adds overhead...
Something like a more advanced C, or a cleaned up C++?
C++ is a mess and always will be. Use Objective-C. It's a great language. But don't write kernels with it - it's got about a 10% message overhead because it supports introspection.
I do try to keep up with the times. it's hard though. I came from the world where you only had 64Kb of RAM. You made every byte count.
Me too, but we got a IIe with the 64K upgrade for a total of 128K.
But nowadays the trend seems to be "make the user upgrade."
Why not - machines are cheap. Especially cheap machines (intel).
I've got a 1.4GHz Pentium and Java still runs like a sick dog on it. I'm going to be purchasing a new system next week, but dammit it's obsolete before I've even bought it!
I'm guessing you know what your doing, so you have at least 512M RAM.
Maybe it's time to change platforms. I've got a 600Mhz iBook coming up on 2 years old, and java ain't lightning, but it's better than a sick dog...