How many would have been searched without the system ? Using the same budget (TSA system + current number of guards) on trained guards only, and more importantly : how many of those would then have to be arrested ? I think that's a much more interesting figure... more than 1200 or less ?
Then again, there is quite a difference. Allow me to some major 'on average this is true' kind of thinking, I'm sure there are exceptions but then again, we don't need to add drugs/alcohol to find "exceptions" either...
Mentally spoken :
Drunk : you could be all over the place, from silly docile to murderous angry High : you could be all over the place, from silly docile to murderous angry
Physically spoken :
Drunk : you're somewhere between : less focused to comatose. High : you're somewhere between : highly focused to comatose.
Although I'll agree, large parts will overlap, there is quite a big area on the 'drugs-part' only that would make doing something like committing murder much more likely to "succeed".
Personally, looking at it from a 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong'-point of view I doubt regulating drugs would be such a great idea; in fact, making alcohol illegal would make much more sense. But, history has shown that this doesn't come without it's own dangers (think Al-Capone), so in that respect I would be quite interested to see what would happen if we flooded the markets with legal versions of every party-drug. It would dry up AL LOT of the vested criminal networks existing today (heck, even 'the war on terror' would benefit)... but I'd have a hard time sleeping when my kids are out 'partying'.
Say 100 people work at an office. Around 5-ish PM 95 of those go home and turn on the lights there. However, although there are only 5 people left in the office, all the lights remains on. So, yes, it makes sense to me. Even when all 100 of them go home, it's still likely that the lights will be on for another couple of hours until the cleaning crew and janitor go home too.
That said, 16:45 sounds like early to me... I'm more & more convinced I'm in the wrong business =(
I'm guessing we're not only way off-topic here, but also adding to a ridiculous thread, so there goes my karma =( Nevertheless here's my serious question : wouldn't it be super-easy to shoot anything into the sun once you're out of the gravity field of the earth ?
In my (short-sighted, uneducated) opinion, if you get it through the 'drag' of the solar-wind (which I'm guessing is minimal), anything getting close to the sun (and aimed nicely at it's center, not sideways along it) would only accelerate and plunge straight down into it, not ? (**)
(**: not taking into account that most stuff would probably vaporize long before it would actually reach the sun off course)
I'm mostly glad nobody got hurt in the process, it was bad weather (rainy) and rather heavy traffic at that moment, so getting 3 lanes to the right was kinda stressy. In afterthought I 'm guessing the exhaust must have produced quite a remarkable 'cloud' in it's last living seconds, so the people behind me were pretty much warned... In the end, the worst part was waiting for help in that damned cold =) (**)
Oh well, another great story to tell the grandkids, if I ever get any =)
hmm, I had my engine break down on me once while driving full speed on the high-way : a coolant leak drained the engine surprisingly fast and caused my engine temperature go from the blue side to the red side in a couple of seconds, which was what caught my attention. Foolishly my first reaction was to press the clutch and that very moment the engine stalled. As I feared that the cylinders might have gripped (overheated remember), I didn't dare engaging it again as I might rip something apart, be it the crank-shaft, something in the gearbox or whatever, plenty of scenarios passed my mind. As it was a rather old Ford Sierra, there was no loss regarding steering functionality, it simply wasn't that advanced to have power steering =), but I did have to get rid of all the speed mostly using the handbrake because even with my entire weight on the brake-pedal, it hardly slowed down coming from 120kph while I was frantically hoping to make that 'emergency parking' (or whatever it is called in English) that was coming closer FAST. For those interested, yes I made it, but only just... the car never drove a meter anymore after that sadly. You could still start it up once it was cooled down, but it leaked oil / water / gas all over the place... It got loaded on a lorry and brought to a junkyard, lesson learned regarding checking if there is enough anti-freeze in the system when buying a (cheap) second-hand car.
Moral of the story : NEVER turn of your engine while driving, you'll loose at least two important features of the machine : * power steering * brake-assist (!!!!)
(And that steer-lock engaging might be annoying too)
Oh come on, I've gotten plenty of Obama or/vs McCain mails too and I have a.be email address for gods sake.
These mails are NOT targeted, they are just sent out at random based on some lousy email-list; So yes, that implies they are coming from some spammer/bot-net. However, receiving a mail from candidate X does not necessarily mean that X (or his spin-team) asked given spammer to send these out. Jumping to that conclusion is just bad-mouthing IMHO. In fact, I find it much more likely that
* the spammer is simply sending out spam to un-train the filters
* the spammer prefers candidate Y and tries to make X look bad by drowning people in annoying X-spam, whether Y paid given spammer for this or not is impossible for me to find out.
* the message contains some malicious payload
Frankly, I don't care, it's going straight to the recycle bin anyway.
Don't want to rain on your Mac-Love but I think Dell desktops & notebooks have had this feature since well before 1999, might have been earlier... I never had a look at a Dell BIOS before that time. It's probably something they added when ATX was introduced (which was ca 1995 according to wikipedia). Anyway, I'm guessing that there's plenty of other brands out there that have the same feature too...
Agreed, being able to set this via the OS seems a lot more user-friendly than going via the BIOS, but then again, how often will you change this ? And for all I know there might be utilities around to set it from within Windows or Linux too... not a clue, never needed it.
FYI : I drove a Xantia Td for many years and still think it was one of the best cars I ever drove, a bit quirky, but superb for cruising around (**), as always, YMMV (pun intended).
(**: no, it's not a sports car, so don't come sulking that it can't do 0-100 in under 10 seconds and other silliness like that. As far as I care -and imho most people should learn to think about it like that too- : a car is a (costly) tool for transportation, not a dick-enhancement)
Although I fully agree about VNC/RDP not being 'noticable' when running in observer mode, having the background disappear tends to be a bit of a give-away... (**)
Then again, if you don't know about VNC/RDP, it's unlikely to raise more than an eyebrow...
(**: yes, you can switch this feature off in the options, but I prefer to have it on as I tend to use the feature mostly for non-'stolen_laptop_recovery' purposes, and it makes loading quite a bit faster on slow connections.)
Dito here. Whether it will impact the usefulness of the article's subject I don't know... I've tried a friends pair once (say 1999 or something) and although I did get the 3D effect, the computer simply wasn't able to deliver a satisfactory framerate to make it 'enjoyable'. Given the performance jump between then and now, things hopefully have changed... although it would be quite a downer if it turns out to work only ag 640x480.
As for the being sensitive to low refresh rates : the strange thing about this is that * I can see Fluorescent Tube lighting flashing @ 50Hz when looking directly at it, when they are part of 'a group', the resulting light doesn't bother me at all. Wouldn't they all 'flash' synchronous being on the same electrical grid ? That said, I can usually tell weeks up front when one of them is going to give up and I simply HATE it when they aren't replaced once they start doing this "Now I'm off, now I'm on again" thing before breaking down completely. * watching TV (oldish Sony Trinitron @ 50Hz) WILL give me a headache, especially if there are a lot of bright scenes, a 100Hz does not. * working on an CRT with a 60Hz refresh rate (wrong driver etc) gives me an instant head-ache * working on most any CRT screen will give me a headache when I have to work on it for 2hours +, even when set to 85Hz or more.
However, I can work on most any laptop screen all day without any problem, except maybe some websites that think alternating horizontal lines are a great background... these 'shimmer' badly and will get me away from given page quite fast. Some colours also cause some kind of 'sub-pixel-movement', but it's at worst distracting.
What I do find strange though is that going to the cinema has never, ever bothered me 'vision-wise'. Although, as far as I understand the concept of film-projection', it works at a 'low' 24 fps ?!? Maybe because it throws less light (lumen) directly at my eyes ?
Agreed and in fact close to reality. However, again : how do you know the person does or does not really know what he claims to know ?
You can't simply make everyone start at a low(er) salary and then pull it up when you are 'pleased' with their actual performance, that would most likely scare away those that ARE capable since they might get the 'correct' salary elsewhere right away.
Ok then, you can pass 'a lot of' exams without really knowing everything.
What you described isn't a decent exam IMHO, although I've heard alike stories. If 23 out of 26 fail an exam, something is wrong with either what or how something is thought and/or tested.
Maybe I generalized a bit too much, but I'll "admit" that I've passed several exams by either 'sheer luck' and/or 'a bit of steering'; in fact, quite a bit of these were done on a "what to do to get away with it putting the least amount of effort possible". Like I said, spending over 15 years in a system like 'education' is bound to give you a clue on how things work (or don't work), and how you should be able make use of that.
To my defense, that was for stuff like "history", "geography", languages, "law", etc where one needed to know stuff by heart and there was (too) little correlation/associations between the entire contents for me to be able to remember it, my brain sadly doesn't work that way. "Math", "physics", "IT", etc... all went rather easy as I merely had to 'understand' stuff and not learn it by heart. So maybe I should add that my statement works mostly for the 'know by heart' stuff, or at least that's how it went with me.
The way I remember school/uni is that all that was truly needed was : * to be on good foot with most of the teachers/professors (go to most, if possible all, of the classes and ask an intelligent question now and then) * know SOMETHING about the course * try to figure out what he/she considers the most interesting part of the course, focus on that * try to figure out what has been asked in the previous years * remain polite and interested even if you don't have a clue what you're being asking for, when possible steer towards what you do know : "Misinterpreting the question" can be blamed on nerves * make sure to pass 2 out of 3 exams (at least) with decent marks, it will make those 1/3 failures look like 'bad luck'
Don't get me wrong, I loved going to school, and I'm glad to heave learned lots of stuff even though I don't use 90% of it in real life. Nor do I regret that I wiggled my way through stuff like history and law by knowing the bare minimum even though I would have some use for eg law in real life now. The biggest regret I have is that I never realized how useful languages would be =(
ps: hope I didn't insult any people who are in to History and Law etc... all statements are strictly my own personal views on life =)
We don't care that much for syntax, pseudo-code would do too... (although perfect syntax probably shows that he/she has more recent experience with it)
Feel free to dismiss the test-approach, but then please come up with a better way. Over all, it all comes down to the fact that we can't simply take in everyone ringing at our door, spend months on training them and then risk to have them leave again because they now feel more confident to apply for that job that's closer to their home. On-the-job training is fine, but then apply for a junior position; simply putting the right TLA's on your resume won't make you a senior.
We don't ask them to write something complex like a stored procedure or something on paper, nor write an entire functioning program, or debug some spaghetti-code. Instead we ask them to come up with a/realistic/ 'ad-hoc' query; for example see how they would grab the most recent record out of a table.
Maybe tests are difficult elsewhere, but IMHO they are dead-simple here, at least the first ones. There might be more specific stuff later on as we don't want to insult the people who DO know what they claim to know either, but we start out easy and work from there. These tests can work against us too as someone might think we only have a faint understanding about what we do and there is nothing to learn here ! Again, that's why there always is a 'talk' about the test afterwards.
I'm sure you'd bring in a bagful of knowledge regarding the stuff you mentioned, but right now we're looking for MSSQL and/or C# developers, and when they claim to be 'fluent' in T-SQL, the least we can expect is a shot at something along the lines of:
-- Given : imagine a table with the following layout with a couple of million records in it create table t_agenda (entry_date datetime NOT NULL , user_name varchar(200) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (entry_date, user_name), job varchar(800) NOT NULL)
-- Question : get latest entry for Mike
We're also not very picky on how the candidate replies. Below some of the answers we're "expecting" and have seen, but for all we care they come up with something drastically different. If they do, and are able to put a 'satisfactory' explanation forward, great. However, all to often we get people leaving most everything blank and admitting they're not all that familiar with it and actually never went further than clicking around in the GUI a bit, it's amazing what people will put on their CV to get a foot in the door =( I'm not saying they wouldn't be able to learn it quickly, it simply "proves" that they do not know right now. Whether someone would be able to learn things quickly is something that's quite hard to 'measure', by any test but time.
I won't claim tests are THE answer, but they DO "weed out the fakers". May they'll weed out some 'false hits' too, but by lack of a better tool... Hopefully the latter can defend themselves better when discussing the (lack of) result than the true fakers. Naively believing whatever someone claims to know has turned out not being the answer either...
some likely answers:
-- "ideal" : (IMHO) SELECT TOP 1 * FROM t_agenda WHERE user_name = 'Mike' ORDER BY entry_date DESC
-- fine too, this one seems to be more in favor with "old-timers" SELECT *
FROM t_agenda a
WHERE user_name = 'Mike'
AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1
FROM t_agenda b
WHERE b.user_name = 'Mike'
AND b.entry_date > a.entry_date)
-- fine too SELECT *
FROM t_agenda a
WHERE user_name = 'Mike'
AND entry_date = (SELECT Max(entry_date)
FROM t_agenda b
WHERE b.user_name = 'Mike')
-- fine too DECLARE @entry_date datetime SELECT entry_date = Max(entry_date)
FROM t_agenda
WHERE user_name = 'Mike'
From how I interpret this : "The interview" is a face to face conversation that allows HR to get an idea about the 'personality' of the candidate. They'll talk about the company and the candidate on a more 'generic' level, both job-related and not. Once they are happy about him/her, we come in and start of with a bit of smalltalk to get a feel of what (s)he knows or has experience with, followed by some "tests". Afterwards we briefly discuss the results of these tests with the candidate. All this is fed back to HR and in the end it's up to them to hire or not hire the person in question.
Like someone else said above : what's "better" about a test is that it's 'off-line'. Some people might be very good at something but simply get too nervous when being interviewed by 'strangers' (**). This might not be an issue for some jobs where they will work within a closed team and won't likely scare themselves into a 'blackout'. (***)
"The test" is useful to evaluate the more technical skills : it's directly related to what they will be doing in the future. It gives a rather correct view on what they know RIGHT NOW. "The interview" is more about interpersonal skills and might also give an idea on what they might be able to learn quite quickly... In a way these tests, which are basically just some rather simple questions / exercises, are just a tool that allow us to put an objective mark on the current skill-set of the candidate. It's hard to measure personality, IQ, team-spirit etc... we'll leave all that to HR, but we get to judge how much added value he/she would be when being added to our team next Monday.
**: Having had such a cross-fire of a squad of/techies/ once myself, I can testify that this can be VERY intimidating indeed.I did survive those 40 minutes of rapid-questions, and to my surprise even got offered the job some days later, but up-to today I have no actual recollection of the questions I was asked, nor the questions I tried to give them. One person would ask a question and before I had spoken 2 sentences a new question would be asked by someone else. Quite confusing; when I left that room I had only the vaguest idea on whether I had done well or not. That said, I truly believe it was a rather sound approach to find the right person for the job at hand and I wouldn't have given it any bad thought when they had given me the "Thank you for trying" reply. Still, doing an off-line test would likely have given a 'deeper' insight on the skills of all the candidates...
***: when the person in question is 'destined' to go out to clients, being overly shy would indeed pose a problem, but this would probably show in the interview already, regardless of technical tests...
The problem is : on what are they supposed to judge you then ?
*You* saying you have a major working knowledge of god-knows-how-many programming languages ?
I'm sure that would be truthful for some, but man have we had comical situations before where people simply wrote whichever fashionable item they could come up with on their CV, read some wikipedia article about the matter at hand and then tried to bluff their way in, often demanding an outrageous wage and every conceivable benefit.
One particularly fun one was that guy claiming to have over 10 years of experience with c#, and that was 3 years ago.
IMHO, sending in a CV is just a way of matching your skills with their requirements, sure you can be a bit 'overly optimistic', but IMHO there's no use in trying to get in under false pretenses : after a while you'll fall through anyway, and having a long list of 'worked there for 3 months but didn't like the atmosphere so I quit' on your CV kinda gets 'obvious'.
Doing an interview gives both parties an idea on what's to be expected, on both sides, but they hardly ever cover the (in-depth) technical stuff. Having some tests (partially) verifies the raised expectations. I'm not sure why the OP bothers with them that much. If he fears he will fail them, well, then most likely it's rather due to his skills lacking than the employer trying to pester him; after all, the employer IS putting effort into finding the right person for the job and he is sincerely hoping that that person will be you because if not, you've both wasted time. Getting that dream-job should be considered a privilege, not a right because you managed to pass some certification once.
Not quite, at school you can guess quite well what the questions will be, so with a bit of 'educated guesswork' you can pass any exam without really knowing 'everything', let alone 'understanding' it. Heck, you spend over 10 years learning to 'work' the system, it's no surprise one gets good at it.
When we hire people we try to prune out those that either simply wrote the right words on their CV and/or those that worked their way through education purely based on the above way. Not because we think they 'cheated', but because we are looking for people to help us with a certain task that involves certain skills. (This is for development job, I'm not sure how the Sales department does it's selection =)
It's amazing how often people will write to be 'very good' at eg. SQL while all they know is that it stands for "Structured Query Language". When asked to write a query 'out of thin air' to get the most recent date from a simple agenda-like-table and they are unable to come up with ANYTHING, then we both know where are wasting each others time.
Before we tested people, we got burned once too often by people who bluffed themselves into the company but turned out to be more of a burden than a helping hand =( By introducing simple tests we now only waste time at the interview level, we don't have to put time into educating them something they claim to be expert in already. That said, we sometimes DO hire people who/fail/ the test, simply because they show potential and we ARE willing to put time & effort in them. You'll find though that this will is a lot less present when the candidate's CV turns out to be 90%+ 'vapoorware'.
If the database is 'only' 40GB, wouldn't it be cheaper to put more RAM into the machine ?? I'm not sure how the data is organized off course, but 32Gb should be able to get the cache-hit ratio in the +99% region, and cache still being faster than SSD imho, making up for the sub 1% cache-misses.
** some looking around for ram-prices later : damned, ram is expensive... makes these drives look cheap =(
Slashdot Mirror
that's weird, most certainly doesn't work for me (Belgium)... and I've tested on different providers =)
Well, yes and no ...
How many would have been searched without the system ? Using the same budget (TSA system + current number of guards) on trained guards only, and more importantly : how many of those would then have to be arrested ? I think that's a much more interesting figure... more than 1200 or less ?
Then again, there is quite a difference. Allow me to some major 'on average this is true' kind of thinking, I'm sure there are exceptions but then again, we don't need to add drugs/alcohol to find "exceptions" either...
Mentally spoken :
Drunk : you could be all over the place, from silly docile to murderous angry
High : you could be all over the place, from silly docile to murderous angry
Physically spoken :
Drunk : you're somewhere between : less focused to comatose.
High : you're somewhere between : highly focused to comatose.
Although I'll agree, large parts will overlap, there is quite a big area on the 'drugs-part' only that would make doing something like committing murder much more likely to "succeed".
Personally, looking at it from a 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong'-point of view I doubt regulating drugs would be such a great idea; in fact, making alcohol illegal would make much more sense. But, history has shown that this doesn't come without it's own dangers (think Al-Capone), so in that respect I would be quite interested to see what would happen if we flooded the markets with legal versions of every party-drug. It would dry up AL LOT of the vested criminal networks existing today (heck, even 'the war on terror' would benefit)... but I'd have a hard time sleeping when my kids are out 'partying'.
Say 100 people work at an office. Around 5-ish PM 95 of those go home and turn on the lights there.
However, although there are only 5 people left in the office, all the lights remains on. So, yes, it makes sense to me.
Even when all 100 of them go home, it's still likely that the lights will be on for another couple of hours until the cleaning crew and janitor go home too.
That said, 16:45 sounds like early to me... I'm more & more convinced I'm in the wrong business =(
The Maldives is a set of smallish islands, according to Wikipedia it's about 298km^2 spread over 1190 islands. That's A LOT of coastline to defend !
Compared to the Netherlands : 41,525 km^2 and water only coming from 2 sides (East & North), there's simply NO way to compare both situations.
... and shouldn't be a problem
Hmmm, sounds lonely =)
But indeed, I kind of forgot about Kepler...
I guess "The Final Countdown" by Europe won't work as we're going the other direction =(
I'm guessing we're not only way off-topic here, but also adding to a ridiculous thread, so there goes my karma =( Nevertheless here's my serious question : wouldn't it be super-easy to shoot anything into the sun once you're out of the gravity field of the earth ?
In my (short-sighted, uneducated) opinion, if you get it through the 'drag' of the solar-wind (which I'm guessing is minimal), anything getting close to the sun (and aimed nicely at it's center, not sideways along it) would only accelerate and plunge straight down into it, not ? (**)
(**: not taking into account that most stuff would probably vaporize long before it would actually reach the sun off course)
Just curious where your remark comes from....
Oh well, stuff happens.
I'm mostly glad nobody got hurt in the process, it was bad weather (rainy) and rather heavy traffic at that moment, so getting 3 lanes to the right was kinda stressy. In afterthought I 'm guessing the exhaust must have produced quite a remarkable 'cloud' in it's last living seconds, so the people behind me were pretty much warned... In the end, the worst part was waiting for help in that damned cold =) (**)
Oh well, another great story to tell the grandkids, if I ever get any =)
(**: how DID people manage pre-gsm ? =)
hmm, I had my engine break down on me once while driving full speed on the high-way : a coolant leak drained the engine surprisingly fast and caused my engine temperature go from the blue side to the red side in a couple of seconds, which was what caught my attention. Foolishly my first reaction was to press the clutch and that very moment the engine stalled. As I feared that the cylinders might have gripped (overheated remember), I didn't dare engaging it again as I might rip something apart, be it the crank-shaft, something in the gearbox or whatever, plenty of scenarios passed my mind.
As it was a rather old Ford Sierra, there was no loss regarding steering functionality, it simply wasn't that advanced to have power steering =), but I did have to get rid of all the speed mostly using the handbrake because even with my entire weight on the brake-pedal, it hardly slowed down coming from 120kph while I was frantically hoping to make that 'emergency parking' (or whatever it is called in English) that was coming closer FAST.
For those interested, yes I made it, but only just... the car never drove a meter anymore after that sadly. You could still start it up once it was cooled down, but it leaked oil / water / gas all over the place... It got loaded on a lorry and brought to a junkyard, lesson learned regarding checking if there is enough anti-freeze in the system when buying a (cheap) second-hand car.
Moral of the story : NEVER turn of your engine while driving, you'll loose at least two important features of the machine :
* power steering
* brake-assist (!!!!)
(And that steer-lock engaging might be annoying too)
Oh come on, .be email address for gods sake.
I've gotten plenty of Obama or/vs McCain mails too and I have a
These mails are NOT targeted, they are just sent out at random based on some lousy email-list; So yes, that implies they are coming from some spammer/bot-net.
However, receiving a mail from candidate X does not necessarily mean that X (or his spin-team) asked given spammer to send these out. Jumping to that conclusion is just bad-mouthing IMHO. In fact, I find it much more likely that
* the spammer is simply sending out spam to un-train the filters
* the spammer prefers candidate Y and tries to make X look bad by drowning people in annoying X-spam, whether Y paid given spammer for this or not is impossible for me to find out.
* the message contains some malicious payload
Frankly, I don't care, it's going straight to the recycle bin anyway.
Don't want to rain on your Mac-Love but I think Dell desktops & notebooks have had this feature since well before 1999, might have been earlier... I never had a look at a Dell BIOS before that time. It's probably something they added when ATX was introduced (which was ca 1995 according to wikipedia). Anyway, I'm guessing that there's plenty of other brands out there that have the same feature too...
Agreed, being able to set this via the OS seems a lot more user-friendly than going via the BIOS, but then again, how often will you change this ? And for all I know there might be utilities around to set it from within Windows or Linux too... not a clue, never needed it.
Depends what you like imho.
I used to love citroen for their 'angular' approach, especially the XM and Xantia come to mind. They both resemble those early TGV's, I've always enjoyed that look above the more roundish speed-trains (eg. Shinkansen 0 series). Seems Citroen went the 'mainstream' roundish all-cars-look-the-same road after that, blending in with all the rest. Although they are trying to stand out again "lately" (C4 Coupé, C4 Gran Picasso), I hope they stick to it.
FYI : I drove a Xantia Td for many years and still think it was one of the best cars I ever drove, a bit quirky, but superb for cruising around (**),
as always, YMMV (pun intended).
(**: no, it's not a sports car, so don't come sulking that it can't do 0-100 in under 10 seconds and other silliness like that. As far as I care -and imho most people should learn to think about it like that too- : a car is a (costly) tool for transportation, not a dick-enhancement)
Although I fully agree about VNC/RDP not being 'noticable' when running in observer mode, having the background disappear tends to be a bit of a give-away ... (**)
Then again, if you don't know about VNC/RDP, it's unlikely to raise more than an eyebrow...
(**: yes, you can switch this feature off in the options, but I prefer to have it on as I tend to use the feature mostly for non-'stolen_laptop_recovery' purposes, and it makes loading quite a bit faster on slow connections.)
Dito here. Whether it will impact the usefulness of the article's subject I don't know... I've tried a friends pair once (say 1999 or something) and although I did get the 3D effect, the computer simply wasn't able to deliver a satisfactory framerate to make it 'enjoyable'. Given the performance jump between then and now, things hopefully have changed... although it would be quite a downer if it turns out to work only ag 640x480.
As for the being sensitive to low refresh rates : the strange thing about this is that
* I can see Fluorescent Tube lighting flashing @ 50Hz when looking directly at it, when they are part of 'a group', the resulting light doesn't bother me at all. Wouldn't they all 'flash' synchronous being on the same electrical grid ? That said, I can usually tell weeks up front when one of them is going to give up and I simply HATE it when they aren't replaced once they start doing this "Now I'm off, now I'm on again" thing before breaking down completely.
* watching TV (oldish Sony Trinitron @ 50Hz) WILL give me a headache, especially if there are a lot of bright scenes, a 100Hz does not.
* working on an CRT with a 60Hz refresh rate (wrong driver etc) gives me an instant head-ache
* working on most any CRT screen will give me a headache when I have to work on it for 2hours +, even when set to 85Hz or more.
However, I can work on most any laptop screen all day without any problem, except maybe some websites that think alternating horizontal lines are a great background... these 'shimmer' badly and will get me away from given page quite fast. Some colours also cause some kind of 'sub-pixel-movement', but it's at worst distracting.
What I do find strange though is that going to the cinema has never, ever bothered me 'vision-wise'. Although, as far as I understand the concept of film-projection', it works at a 'low' 24 fps ?!? Maybe because it throws less light (lumen) directly at my eyes ?
Agreed and in fact close to reality.
However, again : how do you know the person does or does not really know what he claims to know ?
You can't simply make everyone start at a low(er) salary and then pull it up when you are 'pleased' with their actual performance, that would most likely scare away those that ARE capable since they might get the 'correct' salary elsewhere right away.
Ok then, you can pass 'a lot of' exams without really knowing everything.
What you described isn't a decent exam IMHO, although I've heard alike stories. If 23 out of 26 fail an exam, something is wrong with either what or how something is thought and/or tested.
Maybe I generalized a bit too much, but I'll "admit" that I've passed several exams by either 'sheer luck' and/or 'a bit of steering'; in fact, quite a bit of these were done on a "what to do to get away with it putting the least amount of effort possible". Like I said, spending over 15 years in a system like 'education' is bound to give you a clue on how things work (or don't work), and how you should be able make use of that.
To my defense, that was for stuff like "history", "geography", languages, "law", etc where one needed to know stuff by heart and there was (too) little correlation/associations between the entire contents for me to be able to remember it, my brain sadly doesn't work that way. "Math", "physics", "IT", etc... all went rather easy as I merely had to 'understand' stuff and not learn it by heart. So maybe I should add that my statement works mostly for the 'know by heart' stuff, or at least that's how it went with me.
The way I remember school/uni is that all that was truly needed was :
* to be on good foot with most of the teachers/professors (go to most, if possible all, of the classes and ask an intelligent question now and then)
* know SOMETHING about the course
* try to figure out what he/she considers the most interesting part of the course, focus on that
* try to figure out what has been asked in the previous years
* remain polite and interested even if you don't have a clue what you're being asking for, when possible steer towards what you do know : "Misinterpreting the question" can be blamed on nerves
* make sure to pass 2 out of 3 exams (at least) with decent marks, it will make those 1/3 failures look like 'bad luck'
Don't get me wrong, I loved going to school, and I'm glad to heave learned lots of stuff even though I don't use 90% of it in real life. Nor do I regret that I wiggled my way through stuff like history and law by knowing the bare minimum even though I would have some use for eg law in real life now. The biggest regret I have is that I never realized how useful languages would be =(
ps: hope I didn't insult any people who are in to History and Law etc... all statements are strictly my own personal views on life =)
We don't care that much for syntax, pseudo-code would do too...
(although perfect syntax probably shows that he/she has more recent experience with it)
Feel free to dismiss the test-approach, but then please come up with a better way.
Over all, it all comes down to the fact that we can't simply take in everyone ringing at our door, spend months on training them and then risk to have them leave again because they now feel more confident to apply for that job that's closer to their home. On-the-job training is fine, but then apply for a junior position; simply putting the right TLA's on your resume won't make you a senior.
We don't ask them to write something complex like a stored procedure or something on paper, nor write an entire functioning program, or debug some spaghetti-code. Instead we ask them to come up with a /realistic/ 'ad-hoc' query; for example see how they would grab the most recent record out of a table.
Maybe tests are difficult elsewhere, but IMHO they are dead-simple here, at least the first ones. There might be more specific stuff later on as we don't want to insult the people who DO know what they claim to know either, but we start out easy and work from there. These tests can work against us too as someone might think we only have a faint understanding about what we do and there is nothing to learn here ! Again, that's why there always is a 'talk' about the test afterwards.
I'm sure you'd bring in a bagful of knowledge regarding the stuff you mentioned, but right now we're looking for MSSQL and/or C# developers, and when they claim to be 'fluent' in T-SQL, the least we can expect is a shot at something along the lines of :
-- Given : imagine a table with the following layout with a couple of million records in it
create table t_agenda (entry_date datetime NOT NULL , user_name varchar(200) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (entry_date, user_name), job varchar(800) NOT NULL)
-- Question : get latest entry for Mike
We're also not very picky on how the candidate replies. Below some of the answers we're "expecting" and have seen, but for all we care they come up with something drastically different. If they do, and are able to put a 'satisfactory' explanation forward, great. However, all to often we get people leaving most everything blank and admitting they're not all that familiar with it and actually never went further than clicking around in the GUI a bit, it's amazing what people will put on their CV to get a foot in the door =(
I'm not saying they wouldn't be able to learn it quickly, it simply "proves" that they do not know right now. Whether someone would be able to learn things quickly is something that's quite hard to 'measure', by any test but time.
I won't claim tests are THE answer, but they DO "weed out the fakers". May they'll weed out some 'false hits' too, but by lack of a better tool... Hopefully the latter can defend themselves better when discussing the (lack of) result than the true fakers. Naively believing whatever someone claims to know has turned out not being the answer either...
some likely answers :
-- "ideal" : (IMHO)
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM t_agenda WHERE user_name = 'Mike' ORDER BY entry_date DESC
-- fine too, this one seems to be more in favor with "old-timers"
SELECT *
FROM t_agenda a
WHERE user_name = 'Mike'
AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1
FROM t_agenda b
WHERE b.user_name = 'Mike'
AND b.entry_date > a.entry_date)
-- fine too
SELECT *
FROM t_agenda a
WHERE user_name = 'Mike'
AND entry_date = (SELECT Max(entry_date)
FROM t_agenda b
WHERE b.user_name = 'Mike')
-- fine too
DECLARE @entry_date datetime
SELECT entry_date = Max(entry_date)
FROM t_agenda
WHERE user_name = 'Mike'
SELECT *
FROM t_agenda
From how I interpret this :
"The interview" is a face to face conversation that allows HR to get an idea about the 'personality' of the candidate. They'll talk about the company and the candidate on a more 'generic' level, both job-related and not. Once they are happy about him/her, we come in and start of with a bit of smalltalk to get a feel of what (s)he knows or has experience with, followed by some "tests". Afterwards we briefly discuss the results of these tests with the candidate. All this is fed back to HR and in the end it's up to them to hire or not hire the person in question.
Like someone else said above : what's "better" about a test is that it's 'off-line'. Some people might be very good at something but simply get too nervous when being interviewed by 'strangers' (**). This might not be an issue for some jobs where they will work within a closed team and won't likely scare themselves into a 'blackout'. (***)
"The test" is useful to evaluate the more technical skills : it's directly related to what they will be doing in the future. It gives a rather correct view on what they know RIGHT NOW. "The interview" is more about interpersonal skills and might also give an idea on what they might be able to learn quite quickly... In a way these tests, which are basically just some rather simple questions / exercises, are just a tool that allow us to put an objective mark on the current skill-set of the candidate. It's hard to measure personality, IQ, team-spirit etc... we'll leave all that to HR, but we get to judge how much added value he/she would be when being added to our team next Monday.
**: Having had such a cross-fire of a squad of /techies/ once myself, I can testify that this can be VERY intimidating indeed .I did survive those 40 minutes of rapid-questions, and to my surprise even got offered the job some days later, but up-to today I have no actual recollection of the questions I was asked, nor the questions I tried to give them. One person would ask a question and before I had spoken 2 sentences a new question would be asked by someone else. Quite confusing; when I left that room I had only the vaguest idea on whether I had done well or not. That said, I truly believe it was a rather sound approach to find the right person for the job at hand and I wouldn't have given it any bad thought when they had given me the "Thank you for trying" reply. Still, doing an off-line test would likely have given a 'deeper' insight on the skills of all the candidates ...
***: when the person in question is 'destined' to go out to clients, being overly shy would indeed pose a problem, but this would probably show in the interview already, regardless of technical tests...
The problem is : on what are they supposed to judge you then ?
*You* saying you have a major working knowledge of god-knows-how-many programming languages ?
I'm sure that would be truthful for some, but man have we had comical situations before where people simply wrote whichever fashionable item they could come up with on their CV, read some wikipedia article about the matter at hand and then tried to bluff their way in, often demanding an outrageous wage and every conceivable benefit.
One particularly fun one was that guy claiming to have over 10 years of experience with c#, and that was 3 years ago.
IMHO, sending in a CV is just a way of matching your skills with their requirements, sure you can be a bit 'overly optimistic', but IMHO there's no use in trying to get in under false pretenses : after a while you'll fall through anyway, and having a long list of 'worked there for 3 months but didn't like the atmosphere so I quit' on your CV kinda gets 'obvious'.
Doing an interview gives both parties an idea on what's to be expected, on both sides, but they hardly ever cover the (in-depth) technical stuff.
Having some tests (partially) verifies the raised expectations. I'm not sure why the OP bothers with them that much. If he fears he will fail them, well, then most likely it's rather due to his skills lacking than the employer trying to pester him; after all, the employer IS putting effort into finding the right person for the job and he is sincerely hoping that that person will be you because if not, you've both wasted time.
Getting that dream-job should be considered a privilege, not a right because you managed to pass some certification once.
Not quite,
at school you can guess quite well what the questions will be, so with a bit of 'educated guesswork' you can pass any exam without really knowing 'everything', let alone 'understanding' it. Heck, you spend over 10 years learning to 'work' the system, it's no surprise one gets good at it.
When we hire people we try to prune out those that either simply wrote the right words on their CV and/or those that worked their way through education purely based on the above way. Not because we think they 'cheated', but because we are looking for people to help us with a certain task that involves certain skills. (This is for development job, I'm not sure how the Sales department does it's selection =)
It's amazing how often people will write to be 'very good' at eg. SQL while all they know is that it stands for "Structured Query Language". When asked to write a query 'out of thin air' to get the most recent date from a simple agenda-like-table and they are unable to come up with ANYTHING, then we both know where are wasting each others time.
Before we tested people, we got burned once too often by people who bluffed themselves into the company but turned out to be more of a burden than a helping hand =( By introducing simple tests we now only waste time at the interview level, we don't have to put time into educating them something they claim to be expert in already. That said, we sometimes DO hire people who /fail/ the test, simply because they show potential and we ARE willing to put time & effort in them. You'll find though that this will is a lot less present when the candidate's CV turns out to be 90%+ 'vapoorware'.
reminds me of stuff like this :
http://shop.ebay.com/items/?_nkw=copper+bullion&_fromfsb=0&_trksid=m270.l1313
some of them are ridiculously priced imho, especially if you compare them to :
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp#
and to go a bit further off-topic : yes, there's even "lead bullion" =P
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-12-av-oz-999-Pure-Lead-Bullion-Bar-Ingot_W0QQitemZ380056862549QQcmdZViewItem?_trksid=p3286.m20.l1116
If the database is 'only' 40GB, wouldn't it be cheaper to put more RAM into the machine ?? I'm not sure how the data is organized off course, but 32Gb should be able to get the cache-hit ratio in the +99% region, and cache still being faster than SSD imho, making up for the sub 1% cache-misses.
** some looking around for ram-prices later : damned, ram is expensive... makes these drives look cheap =(