moderators, I am *AMAZED* at you. Not two lines up this SAME guy posted the SAME message (#4577406) and was modded redundant.
I take it he re-posted as a correction when he realised he had his line-breaks missing (see the point he makes in the newer version).
So, if you read "newest posts first" like many of us do, then as a moderator will see his corrected post (where he included the line breaks) and mod it as "funny". They then see the "original" that he was correcting in his re-post and mark it "redundant" (closest there is to a moderation of "obsolete" or "corrected") - not to tell him "you are a bad poster", but to aid you, the reader, reading at +1, so you'll only see the corrected version.
Moderation is about making slashdot easy for the reader, it's NOT about rewarding a poster (although I bet he comes out about +2 on karma from this exercise anyway).
I'll probably get modded at OT for this post of course;^)
I'm not saying X can't be improved for the sort of things we want now out a display protocol that we didn't know we'd want 10 years ago, but you can still get excellent performance from it if you know what you're doing, and you try.
If I wrote a book and released it as "Written by MeerCat and George Bush", or J. Frantzen, or J.D. Salinger, or anyone else famous, do you think they would have reason to complain ?
How about if (knowing the way I write) it was a poor rip-off of one of their writings, but was also volume 3 of an 8-volume set that was complete and utter shite, and slanderous and pornographic. Don't you think I'd be trading off their name and unjustly trying to claim authority for my work ?
Now, there's nothing to stop me putting a dedication to a famous author, or claiming it's an homage to them, but if I claim that they WROTE the book with me, I guess I'd get my arse sued off endlessly.
Batt was being an idiot, and just enjoyed mis-reporting the case because it gets him publicity.
Scott McNeally long ago openly stated that it's his aim to put lots of IT workers out of a job. He thinks IT takes up too many resources in terms of staff and manpower
No, he just thinks they take up too much money which could otherwise be used to buy his overpriced oversold boxes. £25k for a dual 1 Ghz UltraSparc III workstation just so I can compile my C++ at a speed vaguely comparable to my £2k dual Athlon ? And run a bastardised Unix that daren't even acknowledge it's parentage ??
Mod me down, but everything from Sun apart from the colour schemes and the name sucks... god I wish Apollo had been the one to survive those early workstation wars rather than the self-congratulatory Sun. And yes I know they supposedly contributed more source to GNU/Linux than anyone else, but I reckon that's just their badly structured.h files. Don't even get me started on Java ("oh, you cut yourself on the nasty sharp edged tool, here, have a blunt edged one instead").
Ooops, sorry, thought I was on Slashdot for a moment there
Einstein's theory says that nothing with mass can be accelerated beyond the speed of light, true, and this doesn't stop the idea of items that always travel faster than the speed of light.
But AFAIK it also says (or this may be deduced from above) that "information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light", and if gravity acts simultaneously then I could transmit information by moving an object and letting you detect the change in the gravitational field. OK, me moving a rock might be hard to distinguish from a couple of light years away (anyone care to work out what the hamming distance would be, how many correction bits you'd need) but it is something I've always wondered about.
The range isn't high, but I've been meaning to get one of these to try out - it's small enough (size of your thumb) that weather-proofing should be easy, it'll run off anything from 6-15V I believe, so wire it up to a few D-cells or a car battery if you want (consumes 180mA), and if you can get the receiver within 100m and plug it into a networked PC with video-capture then you should be fine.
I believe they do B+W, Colour, or Colour with Sound versions, and they all seem to be quite cheap and quite well reviewed.
Background - I needed to hire 10 solid capable C++ developers for a new product development. I'm gaves candidates a (C++) language test, but not a "sit in a room and do it" test, but a "we'll work thru this together and see where it takes us". I want to cover some solid items, but I'm mostly looking for the ability to empathise, and for a way to provoke conversation about what they've done.
So my test is more along the lines of a few simple items like "Read this real production code and tell me what it's doing. Do you spot any errors in it?" Then I use these questions to seed the conversation: "How would you write this code differently? Do you understand the problem this is addressing? Does the code fix the problem or not?" I also get an idea of how they read code (hint: given a strange function the good ones ask for scrap paper and walk through the operations by hand almost immediately).
I really dislike the "put these 4 operators in order of precedence" tests--in fact I want people that say "It's a bad thing to memorise these details, because the person reading the code may not know them, so I always use explicit braces anyway." - but then, that's how I answer the question in an interview....
I also throw a few syntax errors, style errors, off-by-one errors, resource leak errors, etc. into the code to see how much eye they have for detail, allowing of course for the pressure of an interview. Some things should be in-grained in C/C++ developers, even in an interview. If they mention the typo in the comments...well, it's more about HOW they comment: is it patronising, informative, a throw-away line ("I'll gloss over the typo here.")? If they don't mention it they may be just polite, but by the time you have a dozen of these openings in 10 lines of code it gives at least one chance for a conversation to start, and it gives me an idea of how they operate....
Similarly for testing Awareness I give them a list of names of people and technologies and ask them what these mean to them. We can then use that to chat further: "So, you've read Mythical Man-Month, tell me what you think of it?", "How much of slashdot do you read then?", "If I was new to OO, how would you describe polymorphism to me in a single sentence?", "What kind of books DO you read then ?".
None of these are "trick questions", and I tell them that it's not a "you scored 7 / 10" test (I also tell them that I know all the answers because I wrote the test, not because I'm smarter than them), but I find this method useful for helping me be consistent between interviews, for giving a clear plan and structure (and control) of an interview to both sides, and for seeing HOW they address the question even if the ANSWER eludes them, and that's what I REALLY want to know: "How do you react when you don't know the answer (yet)....?"
It ends with discussuion items including "This interview process sucks/works/is-skewed" where we chat for 5 minutes about how they interview, what the problems of hiring people/accepting a job are etc.
Here in the UK we can get Digital TV over the airwaves, by satellite or over Cable, and ALL of them have terrible picture quality (funnily enough the adverts are the only parts that they seem to pre-compress and spend some time and effort doing properly), because the broadcasters MPEG encode on the fly, and try to get a much higher compression ratio than their hardware will allow. This is most obvious with live TV (news and sport especially, and when the news footage was already compressed to come over the satellite, then expanded and re-compressed... well I'll let you guess what it looks like)
Digital TV is nearly unwatchable at times - when the picture isn't breaking up and freezing then the MPEG artefacts and the blurred textures render stuff unwatchable. Go to a TV shop, and get them to show you BBC1 on analog and on digital on 2 adjacent TV's and you'll never want digital TV.
My wife runs a DVD mastering studio, and she just kills herself laughing at the picture quality over Sky etc.
The problem with these simplistic metrics is that it encourages a parent to absolve themselves of responsibility, and the "kid" learns that "safe-driving is anything that doesn't make the box go beep".
"hey, I don't have to check if johnnie is safe, the box will tell me" - well I bet it won't tell you if johnnie isn't paying attention, if he drives without lights, if he wanders onto the wrong side of the road, if he lets his mates start mooning passing motorists with guns....
Similarly johnnie has the perfect excuse when he has an accident "but the box said I was OK, so it couldn't have been my fault".
Teach kids to drive safely, to act responsibly, to look out for the welfare of themselves and for others, then let them know that you're putting your trust in them to do so. Good parenting is NOT a technology issue.
T
Re:These tech interview questions are STUPID
on
Tech-Interview Riddles
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Precisely why companies end up with the wrong employees. My usual answer to these questions is "Sorry, the interview ends here, you failed", or (if I feel like baiting them) to "think outside the box" eg the bridge/flashlight/limited time issue "so, one guy is lighter than the others and they realise they can cross together, or they wait til their eyes adjust to the darkness and they're fine, or they check their watch and realise they have more time than they thought". If the interviewer says "no, wrong answer" I tell them they've missed "the big picture" and they need to "free their minds from the imagined constraints", and then ask them what we're doing next...
On a similar note, I do NOT want to hire staff who can put a list of obscure C++ operators in order of precedence, I want to hire those who say "well, I'd look it up if need be, but to make sure the next guy reading my code doesn't get confused I'd simplify the expressions with braces"... bingo - instant pass !
Thanks for the reply, but what I mean is not to improve transfer rate so much as transfer latency... the gap between the request and the data.
If you have multiple r/w reads, but the drive itself still appeared "as normal" then it could optimise its movements to reduce latency by using which ever head was closest, assuming it only used one head at a time.
The guys who said "mechanical-complexity vs RAID-multiple-drives" sort of answered the question, but i was wondering if multiple heads caused balance problems, or disruptive airflow problems dominated, or what....
I remember someone telling me from back in the magnetic drum days, that the fastest drums had one head per track, so you only ever had rotational latency delays (average half the the rotation time) - no physical seek (move the head) delays. I often wondered if multiple heads on a modern disk drive would improve performance...
I know on a modern disk the tracks are too tightly packed to do a head-per-track, but was wondering if you had (say) 2 heads on a single arm seperated by a third the width of the disk, then any track could be read with a much smaller movement (compared to full disk seeks) by seeking with the closest head, and when queuing up reads for an "elevator algorithm" of seeks you could also get performance gains by grabbing out of order data with the "trailing" head.
I realise the price goes up with complexity, and the heavier head might take longer to settle, but was wondering if this wouldn't give better performance for scattered reads for those who need it (eg servers) and don't mind paying....
Now I'm a software geek, not a hardware bod, so does anyone know why this isn't done ? (I can guess lots of reasons myself, thanks). Is it effectively just RAID striping on a single disk ?
And how about more heads (5 across, 10 across...), or 2 sets of heads on opposite sides of the disk to cut rotational latency in half (if kept in step) or... again, let the disk controller decide to move the closer head... I know that I can pick items out a heap much quicker with two hands than one due to economy of movement....
If you want to know more about life in antarctica, and the realities of being a doctor, a friend of mine resigned a top surgeon's job to spend a year in antartica as medical officer (plus dentist, plus hairdresser).
Great diary, the real issues of life at the south pole, great photos... have a read of Ingrid On Ice
Without wanting to show off, I just pushed by 19" CRT to one side to fit one of these as my primary display in a multi-head setup. And in the UK it cost only £1,100, which means that I can't see you yanks paying more than $1,800 or so for the same (YMMV).
Apart from the pain of trying to find a card that will drive the DVI interface at UXGA (most top out at 1280x1024, a Radeon 8500 should do it) then I've got to say that it's a very nice screen (no dead pixels so far), and I have no problems with 1600x1200 - I've always preferred a higher resolution (that's what adjustable font size if for). A CRT may have truer colours, but the rock solid, flat, matt image is fine for me and emacs...
You say "DLLs" so I'm guessing PC rather than Linux... Source Dynamics produce Source Insight which is a groovy C++ editor that scans all your code, holds it all in a metabase, and while you're perusing it runs a lazy thread in a seperate window to show you more details of whatever is under the cursor. It's not a C++ visualisation tools (it has a speedbar outline of the current file) but is very good at helping you jump navigate thru large amounts of source code.
The bonus is that it runs very fast, is useful as an editor, and knows enough about all your code to do smart things like smart-gloabl-rename, find all references to symbols, etc.
hasn't been able to wean itself off of the old Vi/Emacs crap that it's been stuck with for years
Vi and emacs are text editors, not word processors - there is a world of difference between the mindset of the two tools.
I've seen users write essays in Excel as it's the only program they know... doesn't mean Excel is "old [...] crap", just that it's not the right tool for the job.
I don't know how well it copes with the latest abomination code that Word pumps out as HTML, but I used to use Demoroniser to clean up HTML that people would save from Word...
The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.
A classic (if now considered somewhat unethical) experiment in the 60s by Milgram shows the dangers with telling people to administer punishment to others... especially where they're told that they should do so (in short, when told to administer punishment to a level that could cause serious permanent physical damage to a stranger, two-thirds of people will tend to do so if sufficiently emotionally detached).
A lynch mob is never too far away, try Canetti's Crowds and Power too...
Slashdot Mirror
moderators, I am *AMAZED* at you. Not two lines up this SAME guy posted the SAME message (#4577406) and was modded redundant.
;^)
I take it he re-posted as a correction when he realised he had his line-breaks missing (see the point he makes in the newer version).
So, if you read "newest posts first" like many of us do, then as a moderator will see his corrected post (where he included the line breaks) and mod it as "funny". They then see the "original" that he was correcting in his re-post and mark it "redundant" (closest there is to a moderation of "obsolete" or "corrected") - not to tell him "you are a bad poster", but to aid you, the reader, reading at +1, so you'll only see the corrected version.
Moderation is about making slashdot easy for the reader, it's NOT about rewarding a poster (although I bet he comes out about +2 on karma from this exercise anyway).
I'll probably get modded at OT for this post of course
--
T
With those, I can do (or get) anything else I need.
...and if you use the SGI X server on SGI machines...
True, but it still implies that the "architectural flaws" that everyone loves to bitch about are somehow missing from the SGI version. Funny that...
I still like X. If you don't mind debugging and profiling your X usage with xmon then you can get some excellent performance out of limited resources.
C-x C-c
... being completely unsuitable for 3D work ...
I'm not saying X can't be improved for the sort of things we want now out a display protocol that we didn't know we'd want 10 years ago, but you can still get excellent performance from it if you know what you're doing, and you try.
T
An easy 38th with this - the only OS written in QBasic !
As enthusiastically reviewed by NTK
If I wrote a book and released it as "Written by MeerCat and George Bush", or J. Frantzen, or J.D. Salinger, or anyone else famous, do you think they would have reason to complain ?
How about if (knowing the way I write) it was a poor rip-off of one of their writings, but was also volume 3 of an 8-volume set that was complete and utter shite, and slanderous and pornographic. Don't you think I'd be trading off their name and unjustly trying to claim authority for my work ?
Now, there's nothing to stop me putting a dedication to a famous author, or claiming it's an homage to them, but if I claim that they WROTE the book with me, I guess I'd get my arse sued off endlessly.
Batt was being an idiot, and just enjoyed mis-reporting the case because it gets him publicity.
T
Scott McNeally long ago openly stated that it's his aim to put lots of IT workers out of a job. He thinks IT takes up too many resources in terms of staff and manpower
.h files. Don't even get me started on Java ("oh, you cut yourself on the nasty sharp edged tool, here, have a blunt edged one instead").
No, he just thinks they take up too much money which could otherwise be used to buy his overpriced oversold boxes. £25k for a dual 1 Ghz UltraSparc III workstation just so I can compile my C++ at a speed vaguely comparable to my £2k dual Athlon ? And run a bastardised Unix that daren't even acknowledge it's parentage ??
Mod me down, but everything from Sun apart from the colour schemes and the name sucks... god I wish Apollo had been the one to survive those early workstation wars rather than the self-congratulatory Sun. And yes I know they supposedly contributed more source to GNU/Linux than anyone else, but I reckon that's just their badly structured
Ooops, sorry, thought I was on Slashdot for a moment there
--
T
Sorry that was a 4831
I have an Iiyama AU4531D which is a 19 inch 1600x1200 DVI screen, costs £1,100 in the UK, and is superb (oh, and no dead pixels after 6 months use).
USB and normal features included, and it pivots to do 1200x1600 which is sort of used less often than you'd think, but nice for gee-whiz shows.
--
T
Einstein's theory says that nothing with mass can be accelerated beyond the speed of light, true, and this doesn't stop the idea of items that always travel faster than the speed of light.
But AFAIK it also says (or this may be deduced from above) that "information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light", and if gravity acts simultaneously then I could transmit information by moving an object and letting you detect the change in the gravitational field. OK, me moving a rock might be hard to distinguish from a couple of light years away (anyone care to work out what the hamming distance would be, how many correction bits you'd need) but it is something I've always wondered about.
The range isn't high, but I've been meaning to get one of these to try out - it's small enough (size of your thumb) that weather-proofing should be easy, it'll run off anything from 6-15V I believe, so wire it up to a few D-cells or a car battery if you want (consumes 180mA), and if you can get the receiver within 100m and plug it into a networked PC with video-capture then you should be fine.
I believe they do B+W, Colour, or Colour with Sound versions, and they all seem to be quite cheap and quite well reviewed.
Background - I needed to hire 10 solid capable C++ developers for a new product development. I'm gaves candidates a (C++) language test, but not a "sit in a room and do it" test, but a "we'll work thru this together and see where it takes us". I want to cover some solid items, but I'm mostly looking for the ability to empathise, and for a way to provoke conversation about what they've done.
So my test is more along the lines of a few simple items like "Read this real production code and tell me what it's doing. Do you spot any errors in it?" Then I use these questions to seed the conversation: "How would you write this code differently? Do you understand the problem this is addressing? Does the code fix the problem or not?" I also get an idea of how they read code (hint: given a strange function the good ones ask for scrap paper and walk through the operations by hand almost immediately).
I really dislike the "put these 4 operators in order of precedence" tests--in fact I want people that say "It's a bad thing to memorise these details, because the person reading the code may not know them, so I always use explicit braces anyway." - but then, that's how I answer the question in an interview....
I also throw a few syntax errors, style errors, off-by-one errors, resource leak errors, etc. into the code to see how much eye they have for detail, allowing of course for the pressure of an interview. Some things should be in-grained in C/C++ developers, even in an interview. If they mention the typo in the comments...well, it's more about HOW they comment: is it patronising, informative, a throw-away line ("I'll gloss over the typo here.")? If they don't mention it they may be just polite, but by the time you have a dozen of these openings in 10 lines of code it gives at least one chance for a conversation to start, and it gives me an idea of how they operate....
Similarly for testing Awareness I give them a list of names of people and technologies and ask them what these mean to them. We can then use that to chat further: "So, you've read Mythical Man-Month, tell me what you think of it?", "How much of slashdot do you read then?", "If I was new to OO, how would you describe polymorphism to me in a single sentence?", "What kind of books DO you read then ?".
None of these are "trick questions", and I tell them that it's not a "you scored 7 / 10" test (I also tell them that I know all the answers because I wrote the test, not because I'm smarter than them), but I find this method useful for helping me be consistent between interviews, for giving a clear plan and structure (and control) of an interview to both sides, and for seeing HOW they address the question even if the ANSWER eludes them, and that's what I REALLY want to know: "How do you react when you don't know the answer (yet)....?"
It ends with discussuion items including "This interview process sucks/works/is-skewed" where we chat for 5 minutes about how they interview, what the problems of hiring people/accepting a job are etc.
"Perfect copies" - spare me.
... well I'll let you guess what it looks like)
Here in the UK we can get Digital TV over the airwaves, by satellite or over Cable, and ALL of them have terrible picture quality (funnily enough the adverts are the only parts that they seem to pre-compress and spend some time and effort doing properly), because the broadcasters MPEG encode on the fly, and try to get a much higher compression ratio than their hardware will allow. This is most obvious with live TV (news and sport especially, and when the news footage was already compressed to come over the satellite, then expanded and re-compressed
Digital TV is nearly unwatchable at times - when the picture isn't breaking up and freezing then the MPEG artefacts and the blurred textures render stuff unwatchable. Go to a TV shop, and get them to show you BBC1 on analog and on digital on 2 adjacent TV's and you'll never want digital TV.
My wife runs a DVD mastering studio, and she just kills herself laughing at the picture quality over Sky etc.
--
T
The problem with these simplistic metrics is that it encourages a parent to absolve themselves of responsibility, and the "kid" learns that "safe-driving is anything that doesn't make the box go beep".
"hey, I don't have to check if johnnie is safe, the box will tell me" - well I bet it won't tell you if johnnie isn't paying attention, if he drives without lights, if he wanders onto the wrong side of the road, if he lets his mates start mooning passing motorists with guns....
Similarly johnnie has the perfect excuse when he has an accident "but the box said I was OK, so it couldn't have been my fault".
Teach kids to drive safely, to act responsibly, to look out for the welfare of themselves and for others, then let them know that you're putting your trust in them to do so. Good parenting is NOT a technology issue.
T
Precisely why companies end up with the wrong employees. My usual answer to these questions is "Sorry, the interview ends here, you failed", or (if I feel like baiting them) to "think outside the box" eg the bridge/flashlight/limited time issue "so, one guy is lighter than the others and they realise they can cross together, or they wait til their eyes adjust to the darkness and they're fine, or they check their watch and realise they have more time than they thought". If the interviewer says "no, wrong answer" I tell them they've missed "the big picture" and they need to "free their minds from the imagined constraints", and then ask them what we're doing next...
On a similar note, I do NOT want to hire staff who can put a list of obscure C++ operators in order of precedence, I want to hire those who say "well, I'd look it up if need be, but to make sure the next guy reading my code doesn't get confused I'd simplify the expressions with braces"... bingo - instant pass !
Interview questions should be open, not closed.
--
T
Thanks for the reply, but what I mean is not to improve transfer rate so much as transfer latency... the gap between the request and the data.
If you have multiple r/w reads, but the drive itself still appeared "as normal" then it could optimise its movements to reduce latency by using which ever head was closest, assuming it only used one head at a time.
The guys who said "mechanical-complexity vs RAID-multiple-drives" sort of answered the question, but i was wondering if multiple heads caused balance problems, or disruptive airflow problems dominated, or what....
Cheers
--
T
I remember someone telling me from back in the magnetic drum days, that the fastest drums had one head per track, so you only ever had rotational latency delays (average half the the rotation time) - no physical seek (move the head) delays. I often wondered if multiple heads on a modern disk drive would improve performance...
... again, let the disk controller decide to move the closer head ... I know that I can pick items out a heap much quicker with two hands than one due to economy of movement....
I know on a modern disk the tracks are too tightly packed to do a head-per-track, but was wondering if you had (say) 2 heads on a single arm seperated by a third the width of the disk, then any track could be read with a much smaller movement (compared to full disk seeks) by seeking with the closest head, and when queuing up reads for an "elevator algorithm" of seeks you could also get performance gains by grabbing out of order data with the "trailing" head.
I realise the price goes up with complexity, and the heavier head might take longer to settle, but was wondering if this wouldn't give better performance for scattered reads for those who need it (eg servers) and don't mind paying....
Now I'm a software geek, not a hardware bod, so does anyone know why this isn't done ? (I can guess lots of reasons myself, thanks). Is it effectively just RAID striping on a single disk ?
And how about more heads (5 across, 10 across...), or 2 sets of heads on opposite sides of the disk to cut rotational latency in half (if kept in step) or
--
T
If you want to know more about life in antarctica, and the realities of being a doctor, a friend of mine resigned a top surgeon's job to spend a year in antartica as medical officer (plus dentist, plus hairdresser).
Great diary, the real issues of life at the south pole, great photos... have a read of Ingrid On Ice
Without wanting to show off, I just pushed by 19" CRT to one side to fit one of these as my primary display in a multi-head setup. And in the UK it cost only £1,100, which means that I can't see you yanks paying more than $1,800 or so for the same (YMMV).
Apart from the pain of trying to find a card that will drive the DVI interface at UXGA (most top out at 1280x1024, a Radeon 8500 should do it) then I've got to say that it's a very nice screen (no dead pixels so far), and I have no problems with 1600x1200 - I've always preferred a higher resolution (that's what adjustable font size if for). A CRT may have truer colours, but the rock solid, flat, matt image is fine for me and emacs...
--
T
You say "DLLs" so I'm guessing PC rather than Linux... Source Dynamics produce Source Insight which is a groovy C++ editor that scans all your code, holds it all in a metabase, and while you're perusing it runs a lazy thread in a seperate window to show you more details of whatever is under the cursor. It's not a C++ visualisation tools (it has a speedbar outline of the current file) but is very good at helping you jump navigate thru large amounts of source code.
The bonus is that it runs very fast, is useful as an editor, and knows enough about all your code to do smart things like smart-gloabl-rename, find all references to symbols, etc.
They do a 30 day free eval too...
T
I post this just to read other peoples comments and bam like 10 people who said basically the same thing.
Well, if it's any consolation, 9 of them did almost the same thing....
T
... that we've slashdotted NASA !!
Surely not...
T
hasn't been able to wean itself off of the old Vi/Emacs crap that it's been stuck with for years
Vi and emacs are text editors, not word processors - there is a world of difference between the mindset of the two tools.
I've seen users write essays in Excel as it's the only program they know... doesn't mean Excel is "old [...] crap", just that it's not the right tool for the job.
T
T
A classic (if now considered somewhat unethical) experiment in the 60s by Milgram shows the dangers with telling people to administer punishment to others... especially where they're told that they should do so (in short, when told to administer punishment to a level that could cause serious permanent physical damage to a stranger, two-thirds of people will tend to do so if sufficiently emotionally detached).
A lynch mob is never too far away, try Canetti's Crowds and Power too...
T