eg. Personally I like context-menus, it's one of the first things I missed when the "no need for a rich client, we can do it with a poor browser replacement"-religion went mainstream. If I click a grid [on a website] and it offers me the options to add a row, delete a row, and I dontknowwhat than I like that a lot better than having the default popup-menu of the browser.
FWIW : I've been running NoScript for ages and I like the idea of (temporarily) white-listing over the global on/off approach. I only wished there was an easier way to 'study' the scripts at hand before I enable an entire domain; even temporary. Then again, I suppose that it wouldn't be too hard for a malware programmer to obfuscate nasty stuff into something that looks benign to a Joe Average like me. I wonder if it would make sense to have some kind of repository where (hashes of) code can be stored and 'voted' upon as being safe or not. I'm sure there's plenty of people with too much time on their hands that would love to hunt down 'bad code'. Then again, the amount of code available on the net must be staggering making it non-practical.
I have no opinion on the change.org website, but I do object to your feelings about SGU.
I too had to 'force myself' through season 1; I hated the build-up of the characters and the spun out "we have problems out there AND at home, man we're pathetic" story line. BUT, once they got over that and got (some) control over the ship, things got quite interesting imho. I quite enjoyed the end of season 1 and probably the entirety of season 2 which you -I'm pretty sure by your sentiments- probably didn't bother to look at (yet).
I agree that I only kept watching it because there wasn't much else to view + I had all episodes on DVD. At first I was on the 'I can see why they cancelled this' team too, but in the end I think they completely missed the ball.
I've tried 3 monitors for a while and it didn't 'work out'. I think mainly because my eyes/head had to turn too far to go from the left monitor to the right monitor. Admittedly, this was with 3 different monitors so not quite the layout as you suggest, but still.
Anyway, I absolutely agree that going from 1 to 2 monitors is a big jump up in productivity !
AFAIK, most of Europe-mainland runs on 220V but you're right that some buildings have 3-phase 380V coming in which might indeed cause some legs to not see the other as they are on different 'combinations'. But in this case I doubt this would have been the case. Then again, I too find it strange that a GFCI would interfere with the signal so I'm most surely going to ask him next time we meet. Interesting take on the problem.
Anyway, my neighbour and I tried to link our powerline networks just for fun but the devices were unable to see each other. Not sure if this is because we're on different 'legs', because the distance is too big (not-connected houses, all in all the cabling takes about 100m) or because the meter-boxes between them somehow block the signal. The only thing I know for sure is that there is no transformer along the route. Wifi works fine off course (line-of-sight is a much smaller distance to begin with).
PS: most PoE devices allow for some kind of encryption along the line, it's probably more secure than some of the things we have on wifi for the simple reason that I don't know about any software that automates brute-forcing the thing, thus keeping bored script-kiddies out. Off course I never looked for it nor have a clue on how hard/simple it would be, might well be that some determined technician works around it in couple of minutes; I'm most certainly not holding my breath on that one. Personally, I run mine completely open as I assume that the lack of encryption saves me a little on energy and gains me a little on speed, although I fear both will be very marginally.
I'm not so sure about this. At least here in Belgium most apartments have their own 'circuit' with electricity meter and ground fault circuit interrupter(s) [GFCI]. From practical experience, the signal will not get through that barrier. In fact, a friend tried to connect his (free-standing) garage with his network in the house using EoP and couldn't get it working as the cabling to his garage had an extra GFCI upon entry. As a work-around he installed an extra outlet 'before' the GFCI and plugged the powerline in there, works like a charm.
The trouble is not that you're writing some big blocks, the trouble is you're writing a lot of small blocks. Given the way NAND works, even changing 1 bit requires an entire 'sector' to be erased and re-written.
FYI: To avoid my SSD getting worn out too quickly I've taken the following measures : * I enabled write caching and turned off write-cache flushing for the SSD. * I disabled the 'last-accessed' thing on NTFS, not sure what use it has anyway * tempdb (MSSQL) got a (small) extra log and data file in a ramdisk, seems MSSQL prefers to use that part over the ssd location as long as it has free space in there * when testing out IO-heavy stuff I always try to do it from a combination of the ramdisk/secondary HDD unless I'm in a hurry and then I use the ramdisk/ssd combination. * I take backups pretty much every weekend, if things go wrong on Friday you'll hear me curse from 3 blocks away but in the end damage will be limited.
I've considered figuring out how to put e.g. FireFox cache in the ramdisk too, but in the end I think adding more RAM would probably have a much bigger benefit as the filesystem then can do some extra caching without having the memory pressure to write the buffers to disk. I've also been meaning to try out eBoostr to 'cache' the most active parts of the secondary HDD by means of the SSD, but most stuff there is either 'very big' (games) or very volatile (source-code) or simply not worth caching (music).
I may have sounded a bit too harsh, I did not mean to slam you as an evil-doer. Upon rereading my post it seems it does read a bit like that though, sorry.
Anyway : I really don't care what you do with the data that passes through your network. Like you said, there is no EULA/SLA being agreed upon so implicitly all is fair imho. I mostly wanted to point out that there's probably a lot of people, me including, who have Skype running all the time who thus inadvertently --quote: "Anyone pounding on Skype to get it to work gets banned by IP address" -- will be denied access to the network entirely while in fact they may have no bad intentions at all. AFAIK I can't make Skype play nice, but then again, I haven't tried very hard either. I understand you want to block things like Bittorrent and eMule etc... the only reason I can think of to run those over "free wifi" are to avoid getting metered on one's own ISP connection and/or trying to avoid getting traced'; both things an open wifi should not cater for indeed. Then again, I've heard WoW also uses bittorrent to push updates so it might be more of a grey area than expected.
PS: In a way I actually applaud what you're doing as it helps understanding how things work under the hood; there's way too few people around who wonder/care these days... Simply don't abuse whatever you find. [preaching mode=OFF]
But honestly, how many laptop-screen-size-like TV's have you ever seen ? There isn't all that much overlap IMHO ! The resolution of a 32" TV (or bigger) may be identical to my Dell laptop here, it still requires a different production line to make this 15.6 inch screen. They could have stuck to 1920x1200 and pump out just as many, it wouldn't have affected the TV-production-lines in any significant way IMHO.
(I guess they can re-use the driver/electronics parts somehow but I doubt it would add that much to the cost. Damned bean-counters.)
My wide-screen allows me to have 2 pages next to each other which can be utmost convenient at times. Off course you need to have decent resolution for that, but I have my current wide-screen 1920x1080 over your 1280x960 any time. Sadly there's a lot of 1366x768 screens out there which is like going back to the middle ages.
I'll admit that I hate everything has shifted from 16:10 to 16:9 though, 1920x1200 was bliss.
So, actually, you've been running a 'not very open wifi'... worse, seems you're actively playing Big-Brother on unsuspecting users. I guess those tcpdump logs must have gotten you quite a bit of login/pwd credentials. Not that I care that much. If you log on to some unknown SSID you're implicitly giving up all "rights". IMHO that's true for anonymous wifi as well as the UTP port in your hotel room. Heck, I often wonder how much of my paid-for traffic is being traced/rerouted/throttled/manipulated by my ISP.
Anyway, to be honest, I think you're a bit harsh on Skype and iCloud. I have no experience with the latter but I have Skype running 'all the time' although almost exclusively for chat. So if I'd connect on our network, I'd get black-listed "instantly" although I'd probably would not want to do anything other than check email, see if any messages are queued on Skype and browse around a bit.
If everyone would use these 'rules' for his "public" wifi we'd soon all be running VPN services that route all traffic via port 443 leaving 'volume' to be the only viable measurement left.... So why not simply skip all the complexity and ban abusers when they are hoarding the connection ? I honestly don't understand what it is you are trying to protect here, it's not like 'exotic ports' are a scarce commodity or anything... Simply turn on quotas and throttle whomever tries to get more out of it than seems reasonable. I'm pretty sure I do a lot less 'damage' to your network with 'my' Skype than some random guy watching HD Youtube videos.
PS: IMHO you also seem to be naively paranoid about 'hackers' willing to put in effort to circumvent your rules... do you honestly believe someone will be that desperate ? In an extreme case scenario I can see some bored neighbour taking a stab at it just for fun, not because he actually needs it but rather because a closed up system screams 'hack me' to the 'initiated'. Once he had his fun and that itch is over (s)he'll be gone again but you'll probably go all mental if you read the logs =)
We did rewrite the question over time as indeed some people managed to understand it in other ways than we intended. But if the answer is just a copy-paste of the sample output (including the three dots and 'etc') then he either missed the question or was putting up his middle finger to us. Not sure which one it was (I presume the former as he claimed to be a SQL enthusiast but was unable to OUTER JOIN two tables) but the end result was that we didn't think much of his programming skills indeed.
In any case, that answer will never be the only reason he didn't get hired; chances are we'll never hire anyone if we get too picky. We have several people from several departments talk to most applicants; usually those who do things related to the things found on the CV and/or the things found in the application advert. And quite often people get turned down because they try to bluff their way in. It somehow seems logical to me that when you write on your CV you speak a certain language fluently but when presented with a native speaker it turns out you're unable to keep a simple conversation, well that will reflect bad on all your other 'claims' too. Same goes for all the buzzwords regarding IT IMHO. Just put down what you know/can, add what you've worked with in the past with a note that it's been some years and for crying out loud don't go wild on every single buzz-technology you might have ever read something about.
PS: It's too long ago for me to remember how he did on those other tests/talks, but all in all it's always the combined result of these tests and those interviews that go to HR and they decide on who gets the job (or not).
Otherwise, if he had done as you suggest we might indeed have considered it a valid answer. Although we'd probably have asked him about it in the talk afterwards. In fact, we've had several 'creative' solutions to the problem were they somehow interpret things in the most contrived ways and I think that over time the question has been changed slightly and split into two questions to make it as non-ambiguous as possible.
From top of my head it's now something along the lines of :
1) write a function that takes a positive integer as argument and returns a bit that indicates if the input is prime or not. 2) write a procedure that prints out the first 100 primes using the above function.
And yes, we've had solutions that hard-coded-wise check if the input is 1 or 2 or 3 or 5 or... for the function. But AFAIK, so far nobody persisted all the way through the first 100 primes. Those that started out hard-coding them kind of realised they were on the wrong track when working on part 2 and either gave up or wrote a more generic approach. Those that already had a function you could feed any input never had any trouble with part 2 either.
The issue at hand simply is that people either seem to be willing to lie in their CV (and I mean outright lie, not just 'make it sound a little bit better') or they suffer from some kind of reality-distortion field where knowing the difference between starboard and port makes you the perfect captain.
Because he completely missed the question ("Print all prime numbers up to 100.") and simply copied the example output (including the 'etc' !).
When applying for a job it's not just a matter of being a smart-ass but also about being able to grasp what is expected of you.
It's like as if an applicant for an interpreter role would get the question "How do you say 'House' in Spanish ?" and then answers "House in Spanish". Or when a cook is being asked how to prepare chicken answers he gets it from KFC.
All fun and well here, but I would suggest you go the extra mile when doing a job-interview. If time permits you can still put a note/example of what might be a better approach but I think we both can agree that these interview questions rarely are rocket-science in need of ultra-optimisations.
Funny, we once had someone write a similar solution during an actual interview.
The question was to print all prime numbers upto 100. eg. 2, 3. 5, 7, 11, 13, etc.. We even added a basic description of what prime numbers are, incredibly a lot of people need it re-explained. Worse, some even don't get it after the explanation !?
Anyway, so the guys program came down to :
PRINT "2, 3. 5, 7, 11, 13, etc.."
We had a good laugh on his behalf but needless to say he didn't get the job as a programmer... (we considered a sales position though =P )
In his favour though, at least he wrote something down. It's unbelievable how many people simply skip those questions even though we allow for pseudo code and don't really care about the syntax even though they often apply for a specific programming language. That said, I too hate programming "on paper" but that wouldn't stop me from at least trying. I've already suggested to simply give them an old pc with an OS and IDE + all documentation of the programming language at hand. I'd consider giving them internet access too as that would be a more realistic scenario, but then again, printing out primes is probably too easy to google and the idea is to test if they can come up with some (simple) logic, not if they can use google.
Surely you're referring to the loss of contrast, the weird looking 'enhanced colours' and the occasional artefact introduced by the 'motion-engine' you're now experiencing ? =)
I'll admit that a decent LCD will outclass a terrible CRT but it will take some extra years until I'm willing to let go of my 100Hz Sony Trinitron! I know it doesn't handle HD and I'll admit that HD content often looks great on HD TV's (although I think plasma is better than LCD). However, given the fact that most content comes in SD or faked (read:upscaled) HD, why should I spend money on what -imho- is a downgrade ?
Kids at 6 months are VERY alike. Off course the kid loves the tablet, it's got bright, moving, pictures; it's shiny and it makes funny sounds.
I also think it's the stupidest thing to hook a young child on. At that age (s)he's supposed to start looking around, learn how to move and build up a sense of the world and probably even more important : build some social skills, people-interaction. The latter quickly turns into finding ways to get your attention in the most diverse ways which you'll have to 'direct' into some positive way. But heck, you're supposed to play peek-a-boo with him/her, not Angry Birds !
That said, I don't think of it as being "bad" to have the child watch you play on the tablet; can't be worse than e.g. watching TV. But the posters question seems to imply that he wants to let a toddler "play safely" on it without supervision and I can see some kind of time-line evolving like this : * watch zombo.com for a while, get bored * play some tap-the-clown and he starts-laughing games, get bored * play some simple puzzles, get bored... * play some of those never-ending games where time == success and get your reality-view completely screwed up.
(OK, maybe I'm exaggerating here; but I surely am not taking the risk with my kids, and yes I have 2. Have you Icebraining ?)
Disclaimer: I really don't have a clue, hence the question.
Are automatic-fire rifles that much more dangerous ? I've always thought of it working counter-productive. I can see the use of automatic (or even burst) fire in panicky close-combat situations where the "target" would be "stopped" by 5 bullets instead of 1; but in 'normal situations' I would assume _trained_ people would use single-shot anyway. Sure, in the movies they just keep shooting, but with firing rates of 800/min a magazine of 20 would be emptied in under 2 seconds. I'm guessing it takes some moments to switch to the next one + you can only carry so much.
So, wouldn't it be "overall" better if the guy in question had run out of bullets faster ?
PS: come to think of it, instead of banishing automatic-fire it would have made more sense to banish automatic-loading weapons. Having to pump the gun between shots would slow down an attacker much more.
With a bit of patience -- and we can assume he planned this for while -- ANY combo lock can be opened. Even 4-digit versions don't require all that long.(Yes, I know from experience).
Maybe an electronic one would be better as it might log the number of failed attempts and/or do some kind of tar-pitting in case of a 'brute force' attempt. Then again, I've never heard of an electronic gun-lock, nor of a safe-lock that would actually report number of failed attempts; but never really looked around for one either.
Actually, you're quite wrong there. Looking back on the people gone mental and going on a shooting spree : I doubt a lot of them were gun-nuts. Besides : I don't have a clue what your hobby is, but most people who have one tend to be rather fanatic about it. That doesn't mean they are truly 'nuts'!
* Some people love to run. They buy GPS watches and cardio-loggers and track & analyse every single run and go as far as buying 10 pair of different shoes because that one 'obviously' works better on Sundays. Nuts! * Some people love cars. They can dwell on the effect of some massively expensive oversized silencer (which isn't!) bringing another 3 HP to a car that already has more power than anyone would ever need in such a small package. Nuts! * Some people like flowers. They'll spent a lifetime cross-breeding fairy-tale-named roses never getting that one which has the exact red and pink hue they are chasing after. Nuts! * Some people like guns. They'll rant for ages on how the bore of rifle X combined with some bullet-tip of type X causes a fraction more spin so they can hit a nail-pin sitting at a distance which makes the thing invisible to my eyes. Nuts! * Some people like MMO's and spent as much time as possible on the acquisition/improvement of virtual goods. Nuts! * etc...
All of the above are just as stupid as the next one when looked at from the outside and all (**) can have some dangerous side-effects on society... should we simply abolish the concept of hobbies all together ? All work, no play ? In all honesty, there are virtually no things in life that are both interesting and 100% safe... In the end everything can be abused : guns, cars, spray cans, bananas,... As long as people use them sensibly I have no problem with that...
FYI: I've tagged along to the shooting range once [requires certificate you don't have a criminal record btw] and the people there came in different types : some were mostly focused on the guns from an 'engineering' point of view and knew all the stats, how to assemble and disassemble them, what parts were exchangeable etc... Others were more into the actual firing, accuracy and speed... others simply considered it some kind of 'duty' to train once in a while as they had the gun 'in the family' for ages and didn't want to get rid of it, but neither wanted it to rust away ("It used to be my uncle's"). Regardless what 'group' they were in, they all shared one trait : they were extremely vocal about gun-safety. E.g. no gun would enter/leave the premises loaded, preferably with some kind of protection mechanism (eg. some kind of lock on the trigger) on top.
(**: OK, the flower guy is kinda hard to find a dangerous side-effect for... maybe some kind of pesticide bound to be drunk by a toddler that was playing in the shed.)
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It's not a bug if it's intentionally !?!
eg. Personally I like context-menus, it's one of the first things I missed when the "no need for a rich client, we can do it with a poor browser replacement"-religion went mainstream. If I click a grid [on a website] and it offers me the options to add a row, delete a row, and I dontknowwhat than I like that a lot better than having the default popup-menu of the browser.
FWIW : I've been running NoScript for ages and I like the idea of (temporarily) white-listing over the global on/off approach. I only wished there was an easier way to 'study' the scripts at hand before I enable an entire domain; even temporary. Then again, I suppose that it wouldn't be too hard for a malware programmer to obfuscate nasty stuff into something that looks benign to a Joe Average like me. I wonder if it would make sense to have some kind of repository where (hashes of) code can be stored and 'voted' upon as being safe or not. I'm sure there's plenty of people with too much time on their hands that would love to hunt down 'bad code'. Then again, the amount of code available on the net must be staggering making it non-practical.
I have no opinion on the change.org website, but I do object to your feelings about SGU.
I too had to 'force myself' through season 1; I hated the build-up of the characters and the spun out "we have problems out there AND at home, man we're pathetic" story line. BUT, once they got over that and got (some) control over the ship, things got quite interesting imho. I quite enjoyed the end of season 1 and probably the entirety of season 2 which you -I'm pretty sure by your sentiments- probably didn't bother to look at (yet).
I agree that I only kept watching it because there wasn't much else to view + I had all episodes on DVD. At first I was on the 'I can see why they cancelled this' team too, but in the end I think they completely missed the ball.
... I assumed everybody knew by now you should always go with Monster Cables ! ...or maybe they didn't run them in properly ?
I've tried 3 monitors for a while and it didn't 'work out'. I think mainly because my eyes/head had to turn too far to go from the left monitor to the right monitor.
Admittedly, this was with 3 different monitors so not quite the layout as you suggest, but still.
Anyway, I absolutely agree that going from 1 to 2 monitors is a big jump up in productivity !
By all means continue to pirate Hollywood movies, however.
I wonder if Comcast users will get reprimanded for watching this ...
AFAIK, most of Europe-mainland runs on 220V but you're right that some buildings have 3-phase 380V coming in which might indeed cause some legs to not see the other as they are on different 'combinations'. But in this case I doubt this would have been the case. Then again, I too find it strange that a GFCI would interfere with the signal so I'm most surely going to ask him next time we meet. Interesting take on the problem.
Anyway, my neighbour and I tried to link our powerline networks just for fun but the devices were unable to see each other. Not sure if this is because we're on different 'legs', because the distance is too big (not-connected houses, all in all the cabling takes about 100m) or because the meter-boxes between them somehow block the signal. The only thing I know for sure is that there is no transformer along the route.
Wifi works fine off course (line-of-sight is a much smaller distance to begin with).
PS: most PoE devices allow for some kind of encryption along the line, it's probably more secure than some of the things we have on wifi for the simple reason that I don't know about any software that automates brute-forcing the thing, thus keeping bored script-kiddies out. Off course I never looked for it nor have a clue on how hard/simple it would be, might well be that some determined technician works around it in couple of minutes; I'm most certainly not holding my breath on that one. Personally, I run mine completely open as I assume that the lack of encryption saves me a little on energy and gains me a little on speed, although I fear both will be very marginally.
I'm not so sure about this. At least here in Belgium most apartments have their own 'circuit' with electricity meter and ground fault circuit interrupter(s) [GFCI]. From practical experience, the signal will not get through that barrier.
In fact, a friend tried to connect his (free-standing) garage with his network in the house using EoP and couldn't get it working as the cabling to his garage had an extra GFCI upon entry. As a work-around he installed an extra outlet 'before' the GFCI and plugged the powerline in there, works like a charm.
The trouble is not that you're writing some big blocks, the trouble is you're writing a lot of small blocks. Given the way NAND works, even changing 1 bit requires an entire 'sector' to be erased and re-written.
FYI: To avoid my SSD getting worn out too quickly I've taken the following measures :
* I enabled write caching and turned off write-cache flushing for the SSD.
* I disabled the 'last-accessed' thing on NTFS, not sure what use it has anyway
* tempdb (MSSQL) got a (small) extra log and data file in a ramdisk, seems MSSQL prefers to use that part over the ssd location as long as it has free space in there
* when testing out IO-heavy stuff I always try to do it from a combination of the ramdisk/secondary HDD unless I'm in a hurry and then I use the ramdisk/ssd combination.
* I take backups pretty much every weekend, if things go wrong on Friday you'll hear me curse from 3 blocks away but in the end damage will be limited.
I've considered figuring out how to put e.g. FireFox cache in the ramdisk too, but in the end I think adding more RAM would probably have a much bigger benefit as the filesystem then can do some extra caching without having the memory pressure to write the buffers to disk.
I've also been meaning to try out eBoostr to 'cache' the most active parts of the secondary HDD by means of the SSD, but most stuff there is either 'very big' (games) or very volatile (source-code) or simply not worth caching (music).
I may have sounded a bit too harsh, I did not mean to slam you as an evil-doer. Upon rereading my post it seems it does read a bit like that though, sorry.
Anyway : I really don't care what you do with the data that passes through your network. Like you said, there is no EULA/SLA being agreed upon so implicitly all is fair imho. I mostly wanted to point out that there's probably a lot of people, me including, who have Skype running all the time who thus inadvertently --quote: "Anyone pounding on Skype to get it to work gets banned by IP address" -- will be denied access to the network entirely while in fact they may have no bad intentions at all. AFAIK I can't make Skype play nice, but then again, I haven't tried very hard either. I understand you want to block things like Bittorrent and eMule etc... the only reason I can think of to run those over "free wifi" are to avoid getting metered on one's own ISP connection and/or trying to avoid getting traced'; both things an open wifi should not cater for indeed. Then again, I've heard WoW also uses bittorrent to push updates so it might be more of a grey area than expected.
PS: In a way I actually applaud what you're doing as it helps understanding how things work under the hood; there's way too few people around who wonder/care these days... Simply don't abuse whatever you find.
[preaching mode=OFF]
I understand the why, more or less.
But honestly, how many laptop-screen-size-like TV's have you ever seen ? There isn't all that much overlap IMHO ! The resolution of a 32" TV (or bigger) may be identical to my Dell laptop here, it still requires a different production line to make this 15.6 inch screen. They could have stuck to 1920x1200 and pump out just as many, it wouldn't have affected the TV-production-lines in any significant way IMHO.
(I guess they can re-use the driver/electronics parts somehow but I doubt it would add that much to the cost. Damned bean-counters.)
That's not quite true.
My wide-screen allows me to have 2 pages next to each other which can be utmost convenient at times. Off course you need to have decent resolution for that, but I have my current wide-screen 1920x1080 over your 1280x960 any time. Sadly there's a lot of 1366x768 screens out there which is like going back to the middle ages.
I'll admit that I hate everything has shifted from 16:10 to 16:9 though, 1920x1200 was bliss.
So, actually, you've been running a 'not very open wifi' ... worse, seems you're actively playing Big-Brother on unsuspecting users. I guess those tcpdump logs must have gotten you quite a bit of login/pwd credentials. Not that I care that much. If you log on to some unknown SSID you're implicitly giving up all "rights". IMHO that's true for anonymous wifi as well as the UTP port in your hotel room. Heck, I often wonder how much of my paid-for traffic is being traced/rerouted/throttled/manipulated by my ISP.
Anyway, to be honest, I think you're a bit harsh on Skype and iCloud. I have no experience with the latter but I have Skype running 'all the time' although almost exclusively for chat. So if I'd connect on our network, I'd get black-listed "instantly" although I'd probably would not want to do anything other than check email, see if any messages are queued on Skype and browse around a bit.
If everyone would use these 'rules' for his "public" wifi we'd soon all be running VPN services that route all traffic via port 443 leaving 'volume' to be the only viable measurement left.... So why not simply skip all the complexity and ban abusers when they are hoarding the connection ? I honestly don't understand what it is you are trying to protect here, it's not like 'exotic ports' are a scarce commodity or anything... Simply turn on quotas and throttle whomever tries to get more out of it than seems reasonable. I'm pretty sure I do a lot less 'damage' to your network with 'my' Skype than some random guy watching HD Youtube videos.
PS: IMHO you also seem to be naively paranoid about 'hackers' willing to put in effort to circumvent your rules... do you honestly believe someone will be that desperate ? In an extreme case scenario I can see some bored neighbour taking a stab at it just for fun, not because he actually needs it but rather because a closed up system screams 'hack me' to the 'initiated'. Once he had his fun and that itch is over (s)he'll be gone again but you'll probably go all mental if you read the logs =)
ah, I guess that's why all laptop and computer displays these days are plasma then ?
We did rewrite the question over time as indeed some people managed to understand it in other ways than we intended.
But if the answer is just a copy-paste of the sample output (including the three dots and 'etc') then he either missed the question or was putting up his middle finger to us. Not sure which one it was (I presume the former as he claimed to be a SQL enthusiast but was unable to OUTER JOIN two tables) but the end result was that we didn't think much of his programming skills indeed.
In any case, that answer will never be the only reason he didn't get hired; chances are we'll never hire anyone if we get too picky. We have several people from several departments talk to most applicants; usually those who do things related to the things found on the CV and/or the things found in the application advert. And quite often people get turned down because they try to bluff their way in. It somehow seems logical to me that when you write on your CV you speak a certain language fluently but when presented with a native speaker it turns out you're unable to keep a simple conversation, well that will reflect bad on all your other 'claims' too. Same goes for all the buzzwords regarding IT IMHO. Just put down what you know/can, add what you've worked with in the past with a note that it's been some years and for crying out loud don't go wild on every single buzz-technology you might have ever read something about.
PS: It's too long ago for me to remember how he did on those other tests/talks, but all in all it's always the combined result of these tests and those interviews that go to HR and they decide on who gets the job (or not).
Alas, he DID include the 'etc' =/
Otherwise, if he had done as you suggest we might indeed have considered it a valid answer. Although we'd probably have asked him about it in the talk afterwards.
In fact, we've had several 'creative' solutions to the problem were they somehow interpret things in the most contrived ways and I think that over time the question has been changed slightly and split into two questions to make it as non-ambiguous as possible.
From top of my head it's now something along the lines of :
1) write a function that takes a positive integer as argument and returns a bit that indicates if the input is prime or not.
2) write a procedure that prints out the first 100 primes using the above function.
And yes, we've had solutions that hard-coded-wise check if the input is 1 or 2 or 3 or 5 or ... for the function. But AFAIK, so far nobody persisted all the way through the first 100 primes. Those that started out hard-coding them kind of realised they were on the wrong track when working on part 2 and either gave up or wrote a more generic approach. Those that already had a function you could feed any input never had any trouble with part 2 either.
The issue at hand simply is that people either seem to be willing to lie in their CV (and I mean outright lie, not just 'make it sound a little bit better') or they suffer from some kind of reality-distortion field where knowing the difference between starboard and port makes you the perfect captain.
Because he completely missed the question ("Print all prime numbers up to 100.") and simply copied the example output (including the 'etc' !).
When applying for a job it's not just a matter of being a smart-ass but also about being able to grasp what is expected of you.
It's like as if an applicant for an interpreter role would get the question "How do you say 'House' in Spanish ?" and then answers "House in Spanish". Or when a cook is being asked how to prepare chicken answers he gets it from KFC.
All fun and well here, but I would suggest you go the extra mile when doing a job-interview. If time permits you can still put a note/example of what might be a better approach but I think we both can agree that these interview questions rarely are rocket-science in need of ultra-optimisations.
Funny, we once had someone write a similar solution during an actual interview.
The question was to print all prime numbers upto 100. eg. 2, 3. 5, 7, 11, 13, etc..
We even added a basic description of what prime numbers are, incredibly a lot of people need it re-explained. Worse, some even don't get it after the explanation !?
Anyway, so the guys program came down to :
PRINT "2, 3. 5, 7, 11, 13, etc.."
We had a good laugh on his behalf but needless to say he didn't get the job as a programmer... (we considered a sales position though =P )
In his favour though, at least he wrote something down. It's unbelievable how many people simply skip those questions even though we allow for pseudo code and don't really care about the syntax even though they often apply for a specific programming language. That said, I too hate programming "on paper" but that wouldn't stop me from at least trying. I've already suggested to simply give them an old pc with an OS and IDE + all documentation of the programming language at hand. I'd consider giving them internet access too as that would be a more realistic scenario, but then again, printing out primes is probably too easy to google and the idea is to test if they can come up with some (simple) logic, not if they can use google.
Surely you're referring to the loss of contrast, the weird looking 'enhanced colours' and the occasional artefact introduced by the 'motion-engine' you're now experiencing ? =)
I'll admit that a decent LCD will outclass a terrible CRT but it will take some extra years until I'm willing to let go of my 100Hz Sony Trinitron!
I know it doesn't handle HD and I'll admit that HD content often looks great on HD TV's (although I think plasma is better than LCD). However, given the fact that most content comes in SD or faked (read:upscaled) HD, why should I spend money on what -imho- is a downgrade ?
You forgot Freedom USB =P
Kids at 6 months are VERY alike. Off course the kid loves the tablet, it's got bright, moving, pictures; it's shiny and it makes funny sounds.
I also think it's the stupidest thing to hook a young child on. At that age (s)he's supposed to start looking around, learn how to move and build up a sense of the world and probably even more important : build some social skills, people-interaction. The latter quickly turns into finding ways to get your attention in the most diverse ways which you'll have to 'direct' into some positive way. But heck, you're supposed to play peek-a-boo with him/her, not Angry Birds !
That said, I don't think of it as being "bad" to have the child watch you play on the tablet; can't be worse than e.g. watching TV. But the posters question seems to imply that he wants to let a toddler "play safely" on it without supervision and I can see some kind of time-line evolving like this : ...
* watch zombo.com for a while, get bored
* play some tap-the-clown and he starts-laughing games, get bored
* play some simple puzzles, get bored
* play some of those never-ending games where time == success and get your reality-view completely screwed up.
(OK, maybe I'm exaggerating here; but I surely am not taking the risk with my kids, and yes I have 2. Have you Icebraining ?)
Ah, but he did it using a computer ! Totally different thing !
I doubt Jay Leno would agree to it being the same thing.
Disclaimer: I really don't have a clue, hence the question.
Are automatic-fire rifles that much more dangerous ? I've always thought of it working counter-productive. I can see the use of automatic (or even burst) fire in panicky close-combat situations where the "target" would be "stopped" by 5 bullets instead of 1; but in 'normal situations' I would assume _trained_ people would use single-shot anyway.
Sure, in the movies they just keep shooting, but with firing rates of 800/min a magazine of 20 would be emptied in under 2 seconds. I'm guessing it takes some moments to switch to the next one + you can only carry so much.
So, wouldn't it be "overall" better if the guy in question had run out of bullets faster ?
PS: come to think of it, instead of banishing automatic-fire it would have made more sense to banish automatic-loading weapons. Having to pump the gun between shots would slow down an attacker much more.
With a bit of patience -- and we can assume he planned this for while -- ANY combo lock can be opened. Even 4-digit versions don't require all that long.(Yes, I know from experience).
Maybe an electronic one would be better as it might log the number of failed attempts and/or do some kind of tar-pitting in case of a 'brute force' attempt. Then again, I've never heard of an electronic gun-lock, nor of a safe-lock that would actually report number of failed attempts; but never really looked around for one either.
Actually, you're quite wrong there.
Looking back on the people gone mental and going on a shooting spree : I doubt a lot of them were gun-nuts.
Besides : I don't have a clue what your hobby is, but most people who have one tend to be rather fanatic about it. That doesn't mean they are truly 'nuts'!
* Some people love to run. They buy GPS watches and cardio-loggers and track & analyse every single run and go as far as buying 10 pair of different shoes because that one 'obviously' works better on Sundays. Nuts!
* Some people love cars. They can dwell on the effect of some massively expensive oversized silencer (which isn't!) bringing another 3 HP to a car that already has more power than anyone would ever need in such a small package. Nuts!
* Some people like flowers. They'll spent a lifetime cross-breeding fairy-tale-named roses never getting that one which has the exact red and pink hue they are chasing after. Nuts!
* Some people like guns. They'll rant for ages on how the bore of rifle X combined with some bullet-tip of type X causes a fraction more spin so they can hit a nail-pin sitting at a distance which makes the thing invisible to my eyes. Nuts!
* Some people like MMO's and spent as much time as possible on the acquisition/improvement of virtual goods. Nuts!
* etc...
All of the above are just as stupid as the next one when looked at from the outside and all (**) can have some dangerous side-effects on society... should we simply abolish the concept of hobbies all together ? All work, no play ? In all honesty, there are virtually no things in life that are both interesting and 100% safe... In the end everything can be abused : guns, cars, spray cans, bananas, ... As long as people use them sensibly I have no problem with that...
FYI: I've tagged along to the shooting range once [requires certificate you don't have a criminal record btw] and the people there came in different types : some were mostly focused on the guns from an 'engineering' point of view and knew all the stats, how to assemble and disassemble them, what parts were exchangeable etc... Others were more into the actual firing, accuracy and speed... others simply considered it some kind of 'duty' to train once in a while as they had the gun 'in the family' for ages and didn't want to get rid of it, but neither wanted it to rust away ("It used to be my uncle's").
Regardless what 'group' they were in, they all shared one trait : they were extremely vocal about gun-safety. E.g. no gun would enter/leave the premises loaded, preferably with some kind of protection mechanism (eg. some kind of lock on the trigger) on top.
(**: OK, the flower guy is kinda hard to find a dangerous side-effect for... maybe some kind of pesticide bound to be drunk by a toddler that was playing in the shed.)