I've also done 2 years of physics, at 2 different high schools, and those were well taught classes that had time to cover their material.
I also studied physics but of all my friends who started the course I was the only one who completed it. All the rest got bored of how hard it was and simply transferred to an easier subject. You have to be very passionate about wanting a career in physics to complete the degree otherwise you might as well choose an easier subject that does not involve so much maths. I knew maths students who covered less advanced maths and I did, the stuff on scalar and vector fields I seem to remember was pretty hairy, but I cant really remember as that was almost 10 years ago for me now.
I do the tech interviewing for our project and we are pretty rigorous in our screening and our interviews. The make or break quality, though, is attitude.
You can teach skills but you can't teach attitude. In fact, my summer intern this year wasn't even a programmer - he was a double major in math and econ - but his spirit and attitude were outstanding so I brought him on (sort of a Pygmalion test of skills vs attitude).
This is the most insightful comment I have read here today.
Unfortunately there are a lot of developers entering the market who have read about how the job market was for developers in the 80's and 90's and think it still applies that they will be hired on technical merit alone. Now many more companies hire based on attitude then rely on teaching the technical skills on the job.
This would be preferable to what one company I applied for a job with did recently. Gave me a fairly straight forward maths problem involving modulus, gave me about *5* seconds to solve it using real code and not just pseudocode. Sure, that was fine. Then they added the caveat 'What if % is an expensive operation? how would you work around it?'. Turns out it was a trick question. They were expecting you to statically store the result explicitly instead of finding different maths that achieved the same result dynamically but more efficiently. less than 2 seconds later the interviewer interjected with the answer before I had a chance to even say or do anything right *or* wrong.
Quite often in interviews people will ask you this sort of bs question. Some parts of and interview are about testing your technical ability but some parts are going to be about seeing how you cope with an unsolvable problem or impossible situation. Quite often they are just checking you can keep your cool and not react to crap being dumped on you without getting irate. Calmly responding that you need more information to solve a problem or need more time never did anyone any harm in this situation.
For the best training at this go and work in a support department answering the phone to a myriad of pissed off morons. Soul destroying, but will get you lots of practice at remaining calm despite some clueless halfwit screaming in your ear that "its broken" without giving you any useful information that would enable you to fix it or find out what exactly has gone wrong. What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger.
I'm all for puzzles and quizzes to test someone's experience and ability and problem solving skills during job applications, but they MUST a) be unambiguous otherwise you're just being a jerk, and b) must be given a reasonable amount of time to actually perform them otherwise, again, you're just being a jerk.
Although by not giving you enough time to work out the solution or by not giving you enough information they are actually simulating the world of work you were looking to enter. I have been working as software developer for years and I have lost track of how many times I have been asked to solve a problem that the client didn't really understand and have the solution by yesterday. That is not to say this is a good thing, but you have to get used to being asked for that crap sooner or later.
The hardest part of any development project is figuring out what you have to develop with the client. Sometimes the client is a jerk and you just have to deal with it and try your best to help them anyway. Think "The customer is always right, even when they are wrong".
This is the reason agile software development came about as you can simply not expect a client to stick to a theoretical plan. Invariably when you put the product in front of them they will start thinking of ways it can be improved. Instead you get them involved early and try and develop in such a way the moving goalposts are the most important part of the design.
Compiz works great once you get 3D working. Unfortunately, when I try to enable 3D, my system locks. It's not my X-session that locks up, but the entire system locks up. My video card is an HD Radeon 6000 series. Not a bad card, but it's over a year old and fairly popular. I've tried drivers from AMD as well as both drivers supplied with Ubuntu. Nothing works for 3D.
There's your problem right there: The only cards with decent accelerated 3D support under Linux are made by Nvidia, and then you also have to use the proprietary driver. Not exactly the biggest advert for open source of the most closed card manufacturer is the most reliable (ATI release more information on their hardware and help the open source community more than Nvidia)
I don't blame the guy for saying it, of course he probably thinks his product is the best. Maybe he even believes the thing about the two-year advantage, but he's also got a pretty vested interest in making other people believe it too.
The best way to sell something is to convince yourself it is truly great. It makes it much easier to convince other people of this if you believe it yourself.
In other words, blame is a popular game. Second guessing always happens after a major disaster. I think it's worth recalling the lesson of the IEEE article, "learn by disaster" (more accurately termed "learn by mistake"). One sometimes has to experience disasters and mistakes in order to know what the real problems are.
Its not about blame, the entire article (if you can be bothered to read it) is about learning from our mistakes. You cannot learn from any mistake and find a way to prevent a tsunami or earthquake. You can learn from a mistake that contributed to a nuclear meltdown and maybe prevent that from happening in future. Blame is about finding fault whereas learning things that you can do differently in future does not require the attribution of fault to anyone (ie - blame).
The just of the article is that entire meltdown could have been prevented if the backup generators for reactors 1 to 4 were not on the ground floor. Apparrently in reactors 5 and 6 they were higher up so were not flooded and kept running throughout. Putting the generators on the ground floor though as hardly anyone's fault so there is not point in blaming anyone.
I would highly recommend taking some classes, not so much for the programming (although it'll help), but to learn about algorithm design and computer architecture, especially if you don't want to just build websites your whole life like a chump (no offense to website builders, I do some of it too, I just hope not to forever).
I would like to strongly second this. As a software developer with almost a decade of experience without a CS degree I think I have a unique perspective. The things I am missing are things like the theory of how object orientated development works, I learnt this as I went but since these key principles needed to do my job it would have been much easier to start with them.
How each language implements the key principles always seems to differ slightly but there is an underlying core of theory and this is what I expect CS degrees to teach. The original poster seemed to be choosing to learn dart instead of studying for a CS degree and that will always hold you back whatever the language.
CS degrees are not perfect but they are very much worth doing. The really dull bits are probably the bits you are going to need too I'm afraid. The actual practical development chunks are just giving you practice at the theory you should be learning across the rest of the course.
If the original poster really wants to try and be a developer without a CS degree then the best hope is to find someone who can teach you. I did it by learning as much theory as possible at home then managed to land an apprenticeship working for free for several months so the company could teach me at no cost to them but unfortunately this was done under a UK government scheme that is no longer available.
I sometimes wish that Slashdot would do away with the UID#. A low number always seems to be used (and abused) as some form of implicit authority and seniority, when in reality, of course, it suggests none. An old fool is still a fool.
Incidentally, I am happy to admit that although I might be an old fool, I have had a (long-abandoned) 4-digit UID that presumably should qualify me as a sensei Slashdot poster.
Wow, nice reply to a very old post. As this is quite an old thread and I am bored on a long distance train you can have a long reply:)
To be honest though, I was only loosely basing my reply on his uid and did try and get across that this was not set in stone by my use of the word "suggests". The problem though is that there are a great many grad or college students who post to slashdot pretending they have more accumulated knowledge than they actually do. I particularly notice this in the field of software development as this is my chosen career.
I did also say in my post that I was not better when I was young (I might not be old but at 36 I am long past young unfortunately). In real life I generally have peoples CV's or LinkedIn profiles to go by when assessing how much weight to give their assertion that "they know of no reason for x to be true", here I can only judge them based on UID and whether they are on my list on friends or foes (or friends of friends). In the real world we also have the ability to assess peoples age by looks, this is not perfect but it is a damn good start when applying weighting to different peoples opinions.
One thing I have noticed though is that people with uids that are at least a few years old are generally more likely to post stuff I find interesting and want to read. I do not really notice crap like 4 digit uids or whatever as you do not have to me an old master to have some interesting points of view. I do think though that if you were going to do away with uids being shown you should replace it with some way that I could filter out posts from people who only signed up yesterday or last week.
I would still hold by my original sentiment which is that someone saying they know of no reason why it would need so much memory to compile something is simply not interesting unless they are actually an expert on the subject. I know of no reason why fish can breath underwater with strange flaps of skin (gills) but I am not going to post this to some biology based discussion board.
Actually, in a free market world it's pretty easy: If a company causes more damage than it can pay back, all of its officers and employees are enslaved until they earn enough money to pay back the damages. We could even chain the doors shut to keep them from running away.
Why are you going after the employees when they were just doing what they were told? Ultimately its the shareholders who decide how a business is run by the people they vote onto the board. This is the problem.
If I want to keep something at arms length from myself then I incorporate a new limited company to do it. I then set up a few other companies to site between me and that company such that it is very hard to find out that I actually own it. Registering at least of of the companies in the Cayman Islands is always a good trick, then maybe one in Antigua, one in Switzerland, etc. This is the standard way of hiding your ownership of something while still maintaining 100% control.
Another option if you have a company or business that is quite large (like a company that owns nuclear power plants) is to partially float them on the stock market. This can be done in a number of ways depending on if you want to keep absolute control or not. Often you do not so you do not have ultimate responsibility if things go tits up. In this case you float the company while keeping a sizeable minority share, this is especially good if you are also a major customer of the company in question (like a power distribution company / wholesaler). You can then rely on the other shareholders to keep electing people you suggest to the board (you are also a shareholder remember, so you can suggest people) solely to keep you happy and hence keep the profits rolling in and their dividends being paid.
If things go wrong with the plant, then you just burn the company who owns the plant, but the power distribution company is not directly liable, even though they may have built the plant in the first place. This is a corner stone of how our modern capitalist system of risk management works. It allows certain liablities to end and the subsidiary company while the parent company is protected from sinking with it if things go too wrong. Not a great plan to deal with day to day risk, but to protect from rare, one off risks (like magnitude 9 earthquakes nearby) it is a valuable insurance policy. This all stems from the fact that a limited company prevents the shareholders from being held liable for the debts of the business they hold shares in.
Of course I know nothing about who actually owned the power plant in this case, but your post was not about specific cases and this is a good (albeit made up) example.
I always get refurbished Thinkpads. 1) you get cheap high end hardware that lasts and lasts and lasts,... and is actually designed to be opened up for maintenance. 2) there's good linux hardware support since you're not on the bleeding marketing edge. 3) The nipple rocks.
I am also a massive fan of ThinksPads, even the newish Lenovo ones from after they were sold by IBM.
My current laptop is a Lenovo 3000 v100 refurb and is perfect for me. It has a slightly smaller form factor at 12.1inch rather than the 15.6 inch monsters that seem to be standard. That slight drop in size make it perfectly usable in places my old 15.6inch monster was just too clunky. The smaller screen also means I get much better battery life.
The parent posters comment about maintenance is spot on too. I have replaced the keyboard (a red wine related incident), replaced the harddisk with an SSD, added more memory to give it 2Gb. All of this was done using instructions found on the IBM / Lenovo site (yes, they actually provide instructions to allow users to service their own laptop). Adding more memory and changing the harddisk only involved removing a few screws as they each have their own cover on the bottom that come off in a jiffy. Changing the keyboard was a little harder but still took less than an hour.
As to what OS you should use, if you want things to just work the Ubuntu seems to be by far the best choice. I am on Ubuntu 10.04 still but the only thing this did not support immediately after the install was the fingerprint reader. I am not really the bothered by having to type a password to login otherwise I might have tried to get this working, but it is not exactly a deal killer to go without.
In every other way Ubuntu is second to none in terms of what the original poster asks for. The laptop locks when I close the lid, I think it used to go into standby but I prefer to have control of when it does that as I often leave it powered on and doing stuff with the lid closed. Ubuntu does have some power saving ability (like turning down the screen brightness when on battery) but to be honest I turn all that crap off thanks to the SSD and extended 6 cell battery, it gives me about 4 hours normal use so power saving features are just an annoyance for me on most journeys, on the rest like transatlantic ones I generally sleep for as long possible.
Thank you for showing me what an arrogant post looks like.;) Far from a student, and I don't think I qualify as "young" anymore but thank you for trying to make assumptions. Engineers like any other group of people come in all different flavors and there is no magic stereotype that helps you figure out which ones are "better" than others; some are loud, some are quiet, some are great at certain things while others are better at other things - blah, blah, blah...
I wasn't expecting you to admit you were a student, they never do. If you read my post though I did not actually say you were though, I said your high slashdot uid suggested that you were.
You are not professing to be an expert in compiling operating systems though and that is the only way your original post would have been with any merit. Someone who knows nothing about a topic saying they know of no reason why something is the way it is simply not interesting.
One of the better ways? I think a more accurate description would be, lazier ways that often promotes continued inefficiency and bad design. Even with a massive disk cache, I can't think of any good reason that it would take 16 GB to compile anything.
I always find it funny when people come out with things like this, especially when they have very high slashdot uids that suggest they are still young student or new types. There are many other sensible posts in this thread details possible reasons why it may require 16Gb to compile.
Let me know give you a small word of advice from someone who has spent many years posting things that are similar and even saying them in an academic or work situation: Be Humble.
By saying things like you have above you seem to be implying that since you know of no reason why something should be the case, then there can be no reason for it. I have no idea who you are or anything about you, but I am fairly sure you are not a world renowned expert on compiling mobile operating systems so you not knowing a reason for something you know very little about is not likely to be of any relevance. If you are an expert on compiling mobile operating systems, then please accept my apologies.
This is not a troll post, its just that arrogance is the biggest problem most young engineers face when the enter the work place and are suddenly surrounded by people who really know their shit, unlike when your a student when most of your fellow students are at the same or similar level. The best developers I have ever work with generally have one redeeming feature: They are quiet, humble and only contribute when they have some invaluable piece of information to contribute. This way they get remembered for the invaluable contribution only.
Plus...ummm, doesn't "search" work on folders too? Ooops!
Under Exchange searching barely works at all, and when it does it takes forever.
On my home gmails I use searching everytime and follow the "All the inbox" approach. This is fine as gmail searches come back so quickly everytime.
On my work exchange account I use the too many folders approach. I used to keep everything in my inbox but that became unwieldy as the search provided by exchange it just too damn slow at finding anything. Now that I think about it when I started work here we used to use Lotus Notes, maybe I only moved to the categorisation by folder approach after we deployed MS Exchange.
Maybe the results of this study only apply to people on a decent email system. Since a large majority of people are probably stuck on exchange what is true for Lotus Notes users in an IBM study group might not be true for us.
They (the US) spent HALF the second world war fighting the Nazis, the other half selling them computers to help round up the jews. The gov of the US has a long history of helping bad men rule innocent people with an iron fist. The only thing new here is that they're doing it to YOU.
Actually for the first part of the war when the US was remaining neutral Hitler was still concentrating on killing off as many communists, disabled people and gypsies as he could. He only turned on the Jews later as he had already exterminated or at the very least imprisoned in concentration camps all the other groups he had a dislike for. He actually killed about 11 million in total, about 6 million of them Jewish.
The first concentration camp in Dachau was founded in March 1933 and was initially just for political prisoners, mostly of the left wing, pro-communist persuasion. Since most of Europe was scared shitless about Marx's ideas taking hold amongst the poor nobody made too much of a fuss about it then. These camps were initially only for internment of prisoners though, not actual extermination although they did still have a high mortality rate simply by working people to death.
The Jews were only rounded up into Ghettos in 1939, by this point god knows how many others had died. Not saying you are wrong in your sentiment but the full extent of Hitlers murder is often left unsaid.
When I upgraded Ubuntu to natty LibreOffice came with it. I can honestly say that I haven't opened up Excel or Word for weeks. LO opens all of my existing files, with formatting unchanged, and works flawlessly
Do you get many Office 2010 files? We often get sent them at work as most of the corporate world is on MS and it often gives me issues when opening or saving them and formatting going a bit wrong. I would like to move away from Ms Office as I am loathe to learn that crazy ribbon thing but unless I can 100% rely on Libre Office or Open Office to always create or save a file that opens perfectly in Ms Office then I just can't use it.
Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.
Yep, other browsers like Opera have had this feature for a long time. How does it even close internet? It just speeds up your browsing.
Firstly, what happens if the page you try and visit doesn't exist? Maybe you get a 404 page showing you some other sites you might like to visit instead (ie - 404 page loaded with amazon paying adverts)
But more dangerously, what happens if the Amazon have some reason to block the site you are visiting. Do amazon let you visit the page? You are going through their cloud, maybe they decide to show you a different page instead that is one of their choosing.
A proxy can do some amazing things, but if you have one you cannot easily opt out of it can also be a threat. Maybe they could decide that Wikileaks is not a site anyone should visit so anyone going to any pages on any of the current list of wikileaks mirrors gets a dummy site not found error page?
One thing they can certainly do is prevent adverts and web tracking code from getting to the actual tracking companies website. They can intercept these calls and display you Amazon paying adverts instead. They then get all the tracking data and they also become the only people able to sell any tracking metrics about kindle users browsing habits.
I used to surf the web many years ago through a DNS proxy that replaced all lookups to sites like doubleclick with a local machines ip address. That local machine had a webserver set up that only served a single image for all requests, regardless of what you requested was called. The result of this was that when you browsed the web you only saw adverts for spam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(food)) and doubleclick and the like could not track your browsing as nothing ever got to their webservers.
This is a fairly good use but other people doing this could not be so benign and I would hate to see this becoming the norm for all devices like Kindles, Phones, Internet TVs, Games Consoles, etc where the user has to put up with some kind of locked down hardware.
May eventually happen, but It's going to be a bit...
Stats from from a real world web site over the last 30 days...
Stats for a single site are always a bit subjective. I could post stats that showed far more hits but had an even higher percentage of IE use, most of it IE6. That is just because it is only geared to a single market and that is NHS users and they have never moved of IE6.
I know you can find links where the UK government as told the NHS to start moving away from IE6, but that advice was given a whole year before the article linked above and the NHS still hasn't sorted it self out enough to do it.
Anyway, my little rant about having to support IE6 aside it does show that without giving us some context about what your site contains the stats are not very useful. I know you would never post a like to your site and let us judge for ourselves though unless you hate your sysadmin:)
So they're up to FF 7.0 now? Mine is 5.0 (according to the About box) and when I click on "Check for Updates" it says Firefox is up to date. Am I really expected to update to 7.0 by going to mozilla.org and downloading a new install? That's never going to happen. I might as well go to Chrome.com. Oh wait, that's been updating automatically in the background. I'ld rather it didn't, but I don't mind a little prodding every now and then like Thunderbird does. Why have a "check for Update" box if they are never going to update but just keep coming out w/ new numbers?
Not sure why everyone is such a fan of Chrome and it's "background" updates. I like the idea of an update process that takes doesn't hassle the user, but I do not like the idea of it kicking off every time I turn my PC on and chewing up loads of CPU cycles and making the boot time feel like an eternity. Then I look to see what is so damn slow in Process Manager and see good old Chrome-updater whirring away. Maybe this is just because I use the beta version though and that is updated more often but I would still rather I got some input as to when it could run, like maybe when I actually launch Chrome for the first time instead.
Of course, Firefox is just as bad though with its plugin incompatibility issues. Maybe it should check for incompatible plugins BEFORE doing the install and then display you the option of upgrading or waiting for the plugin creator to sort their stuff out first. I have at least one or two plugins I cannot live without like HTML Validator at work and LastPass / Xmarks for home and laptop. If these are not compatible with a new version then the new version can wait for a bit, regardless of what new fixes are included.
I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.
Much as I'd like to see this myself, the brief window of time that AGP existed, means it will never happen.
It can't have been that brief as they managed to get several versions out, most of which seemed to be completely incompatible with the preceding version.
If all you were doing was doubling the speed from AGP 4X to AGP 8X why the hell make the physical connector different? I know there was a voltage difference but not changing the slot would have meant we could buy motherboards that supported both.
Not really disagreeing with you, just having a rant about something that annoyed me.
Yes, but then that is not "boycotting" is it. It is using it and not paying anything towards the cost of its creation.
Now the vast majority of the money you have saved by doing this is taken from companies or people I could not give a shit about, but a very minuscule percentage will come from someone like me who just needs to work to get by in life and those minuscule percentages soon add up. It is very easy to say "screw em" to those people too and that they deserve it for signing a contract with Sony or whoever but money can be a very powerful motivator when you don't have it.
I am not thinking about the REM's of the world here, I am thinking about very small bands like Nucleus Roots. I know you haven't heard of them, but one of my mates was in the band and asked me never to post his CD's to Napster as he needed every CD sale he could get.
Children being encouraged to experiment with sex, I'd bet.
If that was the case, you should start censoring MTV. Almost every female pop idol since Madonna has indulged in a bit of pelvic thrusting or whatever in the videos.
I remember working at a gig one saturday morning building the stage with all the roadies when suddenly they were all outside the security guards hut leering at a Christina Aguilera video being shown on children's TV. They were all enjoying it immensely until someone pointed out their daughters were probably at home watching it too.
Kids are encourage to experiment with sex by every other form of media, why should books be any different?
On a different note anyone who reads A Brave New World should also read Island as in many way the books are counterpoints to each other.
However there is a bit of a negative stereotype about IT, at least in the US. You can see that in the original question at the top here, the poster is concerned that being in IT may hurt a future career. That's why people don't want to be incorrectly labeled.
Sounds a bit ridiculous to me but I see your point. In my experience any job is good experience since they all teach you transferable skills like team working. I know of a few people, myself included who have bounced back and forward between system admin work and software development.
You can't really do computer science without the foundations givin in academia.
One of those foundations should be proof reading. That is far more relevant to any job in the real world, technical or otherwise than anything you learn at college or uni.
Also, I am not sure what you count as computer science, but I work as a software developer even though my degree was actually in Physics with Space Technology. Does this mean I should pack it in or that my job doesn't count?
That's what some people think, but it is completely incorrect. There is NO degree for working in IT (ok, there's a few systems adminstration degrees at a few universities now... pretty cool).
I know you guys in the US do not specialise as much though, and maybe that is why you are losing your competitive edge with regard to specialised fields.
In the US it's mixed. Some people, like the OP, mistakenly call all areas IT. Most people frown on that classification. You say "I work in IT" I assume you're a sys admin, a helpdesk guy, or a phone support person. I do not assume you do programming. It's a separate field.
Here's an example of it causing confusion- the US is losing IT jobs. You can see all sorts of people worried about the loss of IT jobs. Programming jobs? The unemployment rate is actually negative- there's more jobs than coders.
Let's turn this around- other than the physical tools (which lets face it, every job in the world uses now) what do IT and programming have in common? Absolutely nothing. So conflating the two isn't useful.
Over here in the UK, saying you work in IT means you do something vaguely to do with computers. It is a very general term that encompasses a whole boatload of professions. Just had a quick poll in our office and everyone thinks IT is a really large definition that does not say a lot about what you actually do. So the only thing we all agree on is that we all work in IT, despite this including my department manager, his PA, a couple of software developers, a system admin and support guy.
Generally if people want any further details about what I do, I actually tell them: I write software. It takes three words (two if you discount the 'I') and makes it abundantly clear what I do. If they want any further details then I tell them I am a technical lead who works on a web based learning management system but that would only mean something to people who work in a fairly similar field.
To be honest though, this is a ridiculous argument about a label. Labels are never very descriptive and there is always room for some confusion when you use them. Short descriptions are often far more useful and usually take the same amount of words (ie - compare "I am a web developer" with "I work in IT").
I also really hate using acronyms since they are often used as way to make something less clear to certain technical people. For this reason I try and and avoid getting in the habit of using them. I often now have to talk to people who are not as familiar with them as me. Some people are very reticent to hold up a conversation if they feel they are the only person who does not understand even if it very important that they do. Using plain and simple language often solves this.
you put too much faith in the government for me - sorry but i don't trust them any more than i trust a company.
Personally if you want to snoop and see what you can dig up on me that is "public" information then feel free to do it - if i didn't want people to see it i wouldn't put it in a public place.
You did not seem to notice my point about lives being at stake. That is why government needs to vet certain employees more closely than if it were just profits as in the case of a company.
Slashdot Mirror
I've also done 2 years of physics, at 2 different high schools, and those were well taught classes that had time to cover their material.
I also studied physics but of all my friends who started the course I was the only one who completed it. All the rest got bored of how hard it was and simply transferred to an easier subject. You have to be very passionate about wanting a career in physics to complete the degree otherwise you might as well choose an easier subject that does not involve so much maths. I knew maths students who covered less advanced maths and I did, the stuff on scalar and vector fields I seem to remember was pretty hairy, but I cant really remember as that was almost 10 years ago for me now.
I do the tech interviewing for our project and we are pretty rigorous in our screening and our interviews. The make or break quality, though, is attitude.
You can teach skills but you can't teach attitude. In fact, my summer intern this year wasn't even a programmer - he was a double major in math and econ - but his spirit and attitude were outstanding so I brought him on (sort of a Pygmalion test of skills vs attitude).
This is the most insightful comment I have read here today.
Unfortunately there are a lot of developers entering the market who have read about how the job market was for developers in the 80's and 90's and think it still applies that they will be hired on technical merit alone. Now many more companies hire based on attitude then rely on teaching the technical skills on the job.
This would be preferable to what one company I applied for a job with did recently. Gave me a fairly straight forward maths problem involving modulus, gave me about *5* seconds to solve it using real code and not just pseudocode. Sure, that was fine. Then they added the caveat 'What if % is an expensive operation? how would you work around it?'. Turns out it was a trick question. They were expecting you to statically store the result explicitly instead of finding different maths that achieved the same result dynamically but more efficiently. less than 2 seconds later the interviewer interjected with the answer before I had a chance to even say or do anything right *or* wrong.
Quite often in interviews people will ask you this sort of bs question. Some parts of and interview are about testing your technical ability but some parts are going to be about seeing how you cope with an unsolvable problem or impossible situation. Quite often they are just checking you can keep your cool and not react to crap being dumped on you without getting irate. Calmly responding that you need more information to solve a problem or need more time never did anyone any harm in this situation.
For the best training at this go and work in a support department answering the phone to a myriad of pissed off morons. Soul destroying, but will get you lots of practice at remaining calm despite some clueless halfwit screaming in your ear that "its broken" without giving you any useful information that would enable you to fix it or find out what exactly has gone wrong. What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger.
I'm all for puzzles and quizzes to test someone's experience and ability and problem solving skills during job applications, but they MUST a) be unambiguous otherwise you're just being a jerk, and b) must be given a reasonable amount of time to actually perform them otherwise, again, you're just being a jerk.
Although by not giving you enough time to work out the solution or by not giving you enough information they are actually simulating the world of work you were looking to enter. I have been working as software developer for years and I have lost track of how many times I have been asked to solve a problem that the client didn't really understand and have the solution by yesterday. That is not to say this is a good thing, but you have to get used to being asked for that crap sooner or later.
The hardest part of any development project is figuring out what you have to develop with the client. Sometimes the client is a jerk and you just have to deal with it and try your best to help them anyway. Think "The customer is always right, even when they are wrong".
This is the reason agile software development came about as you can simply not expect a client to stick to a theoretical plan. Invariably when you put the product in front of them they will start thinking of ways it can be improved. Instead you get them involved early and try and develop in such a way the moving goalposts are the most important part of the design.
I might hate it but I have to deal with it.
Compiz works great once you get 3D working. Unfortunately, when I try to enable 3D, my system locks. It's not my X-session that locks up, but the entire system locks up. My video card is an HD Radeon 6000 series. Not a bad card, but it's over a year old and fairly popular. I've tried drivers from AMD as well as both drivers supplied with Ubuntu. Nothing works for 3D.
There's your problem right there: The only cards with decent accelerated 3D support under Linux are made by Nvidia, and then you also have to use the proprietary driver. Not exactly the biggest advert for open source of the most closed card manufacturer is the most reliable (ATI release more information on their hardware and help the open source community more than Nvidia)
I don't blame the guy for saying it, of course he probably thinks his product is the best. Maybe he even believes the thing about the two-year advantage, but he's also got a pretty vested interest in making other people believe it too.
The best way to sell something is to convince yourself it is truly great. It makes it much easier to convince other people of this if you believe it yourself.
In other words, blame is a popular game. Second guessing always happens after a major disaster. I think it's worth recalling the lesson of the IEEE article, "learn by disaster" (more accurately termed "learn by mistake"). One sometimes has to experience disasters and mistakes in order to know what the real problems are.
Its not about blame, the entire article (if you can be bothered to read it) is about learning from our mistakes. You cannot learn from any mistake and find a way to prevent a tsunami or earthquake. You can learn from a mistake that contributed to a nuclear meltdown and maybe prevent that from happening in future. Blame is about finding fault whereas learning things that you can do differently in future does not require the attribution of fault to anyone (ie - blame).
The just of the article is that entire meltdown could have been prevented if the backup generators for reactors 1 to 4 were not on the ground floor. Apparrently in reactors 5 and 6 they were higher up so were not flooded and kept running throughout. Putting the generators on the ground floor though as hardly anyone's fault so there is not point in blaming anyone.
I would highly recommend taking some classes, not so much for the programming (although it'll help), but to learn about algorithm design and computer architecture, especially if you don't want to just build websites your whole life like a chump (no offense to website builders, I do some of it too, I just hope not to forever).
I would like to strongly second this. As a software developer with almost a decade of experience without a CS degree I think I have a unique perspective. The things I am missing are things like the theory of how object orientated development works, I learnt this as I went but since these key principles needed to do my job it would have been much easier to start with them.
How each language implements the key principles always seems to differ slightly but there is an underlying core of theory and this is what I expect CS degrees to teach. The original poster seemed to be choosing to learn dart instead of studying for a CS degree and that will always hold you back whatever the language.
CS degrees are not perfect but they are very much worth doing. The really dull bits are probably the bits you are going to need too I'm afraid. The actual practical development chunks are just giving you practice at the theory you should be learning across the rest of the course.
If the original poster really wants to try and be a developer without a CS degree then the best hope is to find someone who can teach you. I did it by learning as much theory as possible at home then managed to land an apprenticeship working for free for several months so the company could teach me at no cost to them but unfortunately this was done under a UK government scheme that is no longer available.
I sometimes wish that Slashdot would do away with the UID#. A low number always seems to be used (and abused) as some form of implicit authority and seniority, when in reality, of course, it suggests none. An old fool is still a fool.
Incidentally, I am happy to admit that although I might be an old fool, I have had a (long-abandoned) 4-digit UID that presumably should qualify me as a sensei Slashdot poster.
Wow, nice reply to a very old post. As this is quite an old thread and I am bored on a long distance train you can have a long reply :)
To be honest though, I was only loosely basing my reply on his uid and did try and get across that this was not set in stone by my use of the word "suggests". The problem though is that there are a great many grad or college students who post to slashdot pretending they have more accumulated knowledge than they actually do. I particularly notice this in the field of software development as this is my chosen career.
I did also say in my post that I was not better when I was young (I might not be old but at 36 I am long past young unfortunately). In real life I generally have peoples CV's or LinkedIn profiles to go by when assessing how much weight to give their assertion that "they know of no reason for x to be true", here I can only judge them based on UID and whether they are on my list on friends or foes (or friends of friends). In the real world we also have the ability to assess peoples age by looks, this is not perfect but it is a damn good start when applying weighting to different peoples opinions.
One thing I have noticed though is that people with uids that are at least a few years old are generally more likely to post stuff I find interesting and want to read. I do not really notice crap like 4 digit uids or whatever as you do not have to me an old master to have some interesting points of view. I do think though that if you were going to do away with uids being shown you should replace it with some way that I could filter out posts from people who only signed up yesterday or last week.
I would still hold by my original sentiment which is that someone saying they know of no reason why it would need so much memory to compile something is simply not interesting unless they are actually an expert on the subject. I know of no reason why fish can breath underwater with strange flaps of skin (gills) but I am not going to post this to some biology based discussion board.
Actually, in a free market world it's pretty easy: If a company causes more damage than it can pay back, all of its officers and employees are enslaved until they earn enough money to pay back the damages. We could even chain the doors shut to keep them from running away.
Why are you going after the employees when they were just doing what they were told? Ultimately its the shareholders who decide how a business is run by the people they vote onto the board. This is the problem.
If I want to keep something at arms length from myself then I incorporate a new limited company to do it. I then set up a few other companies to site between me and that company such that it is very hard to find out that I actually own it. Registering at least of of the companies in the Cayman Islands is always a good trick, then maybe one in Antigua, one in Switzerland, etc. This is the standard way of hiding your ownership of something while still maintaining 100% control.
Another option if you have a company or business that is quite large (like a company that owns nuclear power plants) is to partially float them on the stock market. This can be done in a number of ways depending on if you want to keep absolute control or not. Often you do not so you do not have ultimate responsibility if things go tits up. In this case you float the company while keeping a sizeable minority share, this is especially good if you are also a major customer of the company in question (like a power distribution company / wholesaler). You can then rely on the other shareholders to keep electing people you suggest to the board (you are also a shareholder remember, so you can suggest people) solely to keep you happy and hence keep the profits rolling in and their dividends being paid.
If things go wrong with the plant, then you just burn the company who owns the plant, but the power distribution company is not directly liable, even though they may have built the plant in the first place. This is a corner stone of how our modern capitalist system of risk management works. It allows certain liablities to end and the subsidiary company while the parent company is protected from sinking with it if things go too wrong. Not a great plan to deal with day to day risk, but to protect from rare, one off risks (like magnitude 9 earthquakes nearby) it is a valuable insurance policy. This all stems from the fact that a limited company prevents the shareholders from being held liable for the debts of the business they hold shares in.
Of course I know nothing about who actually owned the power plant in this case, but your post was not about specific cases and this is a good (albeit made up) example.
I always get refurbished Thinkpads. 1) you get cheap high end hardware that lasts and lasts and lasts,... and is actually designed to be opened up for maintenance. 2) there's good linux hardware support since you're not on the bleeding marketing edge. 3) The nipple rocks.
I am also a massive fan of ThinksPads, even the newish Lenovo ones from after they were sold by IBM.
My current laptop is a Lenovo 3000 v100 refurb and is perfect for me. It has a slightly smaller form factor at 12.1inch rather than the 15.6 inch monsters that seem to be standard. That slight drop in size make it perfectly usable in places my old 15.6inch monster was just too clunky. The smaller screen also means I get much better battery life.
The parent posters comment about maintenance is spot on too. I have replaced the keyboard (a red wine related incident), replaced the harddisk with an SSD, added more memory to give it 2Gb. All of this was done using instructions found on the IBM / Lenovo site (yes, they actually provide instructions to allow users to service their own laptop). Adding more memory and changing the harddisk only involved removing a few screws as they each have their own cover on the bottom that come off in a jiffy. Changing the keyboard was a little harder but still took less than an hour.
As to what OS you should use, if you want things to just work the Ubuntu seems to be by far the best choice. I am on Ubuntu 10.04 still but the only thing this did not support immediately after the install was the fingerprint reader. I am not really the bothered by having to type a password to login otherwise I might have tried to get this working, but it is not exactly a deal killer to go without.
In every other way Ubuntu is second to none in terms of what the original poster asks for. The laptop locks when I close the lid, I think it used to go into standby but I prefer to have control of when it does that as I often leave it powered on and doing stuff with the lid closed. Ubuntu does have some power saving ability (like turning down the screen brightness when on battery) but to be honest I turn all that crap off thanks to the SSD and extended 6 cell battery, it gives me about 4 hours normal use so power saving features are just an annoyance for me on most journeys, on the rest like transatlantic ones I generally sleep for as long possible.
Thank you for showing me what an arrogant post looks like. ;) Far from a student, and I don't think I qualify as "young" anymore but thank you for trying to make assumptions. Engineers like any other group of people come in all different flavors and there is no magic stereotype that helps you figure out which ones are "better" than others; some are loud, some are quiet, some are great at certain things while others are better at other things - blah, blah, blah...
I wasn't expecting you to admit you were a student, they never do. If you read my post though I did not actually say you were though, I said your high slashdot uid suggested that you were.
You are not professing to be an expert in compiling operating systems though and that is the only way your original post would have been with any merit. Someone who knows nothing about a topic saying they know of no reason why something is the way it is simply not interesting.
One of the better ways? I think a more accurate description would be, lazier ways that often promotes continued inefficiency and bad design. Even with a massive disk cache, I can't think of any good reason that it would take 16 GB to compile anything.
I always find it funny when people come out with things like this, especially when they have very high slashdot uids that suggest they are still young student or new types. There are many other sensible posts in this thread details possible reasons why it may require 16Gb to compile.
Let me know give you a small word of advice from someone who has spent many years posting things that are similar and even saying them in an academic or work situation: Be Humble.
By saying things like you have above you seem to be implying that since you know of no reason why something should be the case, then there can be no reason for it. I have no idea who you are or anything about you, but I am fairly sure you are not a world renowned expert on compiling mobile operating systems so you not knowing a reason for something you know very little about is not likely to be of any relevance. If you are an expert on compiling mobile operating systems, then please accept my apologies.
This is not a troll post, its just that arrogance is the biggest problem most young engineers face when the enter the work place and are suddenly surrounded by people who really know their shit, unlike when your a student when most of your fellow students are at the same or similar level. The best developers I have ever work with generally have one redeeming feature: They are quiet, humble and only contribute when they have some invaluable piece of information to contribute. This way they get remembered for the invaluable contribution only.
Plus...ummm, doesn't "search" work on folders too? Ooops!
Under Exchange searching barely works at all, and when it does it takes forever.
On my home gmails I use searching everytime and follow the "All the inbox" approach. This is fine as gmail searches come back so quickly everytime.
On my work exchange account I use the too many folders approach. I used to keep everything in my inbox but that became unwieldy as the search provided by exchange it just too damn slow at finding anything. Now that I think about it when I started work here we used to use Lotus Notes, maybe I only moved to the categorisation by folder approach after we deployed MS Exchange.
Maybe the results of this study only apply to people on a decent email system. Since a large majority of people are probably stuck on exchange what is true for Lotus Notes users in an IBM study group might not be true for us.
They (the US) spent HALF the second world war fighting the Nazis, the other half selling them computers to help round up the jews. The gov of the US has a long history of helping bad men rule innocent people with an iron fist. The only thing new here is that they're doing it to YOU.
Actually for the first part of the war when the US was remaining neutral Hitler was still concentrating on killing off as many communists, disabled people and gypsies as he could. He only turned on the Jews later as he had already exterminated or at the very least imprisoned in concentration camps all the other groups he had a dislike for. He actually killed about 11 million in total, about 6 million of them Jewish.
The first concentration camp in Dachau was founded in March 1933 and was initially just for political prisoners, mostly of the left wing, pro-communist persuasion. Since most of Europe was scared shitless about Marx's ideas taking hold amongst the poor nobody made too much of a fuss about it then. These camps were initially only for internment of prisoners though, not actual extermination although they did still have a high mortality rate simply by working people to death.
The Jews were only rounded up into Ghettos in 1939, by this point god knows how many others had died. Not saying you are wrong in your sentiment but the full extent of Hitlers murder is often left unsaid.
When I upgraded Ubuntu to natty LibreOffice came with it. I can honestly say that I haven't opened up Excel or Word for weeks. LO opens all of my existing files, with formatting unchanged, and works flawlessly
Do you get many Office 2010 files? We often get sent them at work as most of the corporate world is on MS and it often gives me issues when opening or saving them and formatting going a bit wrong. I would like to move away from Ms Office as I am loathe to learn that crazy ribbon thing but unless I can 100% rely on Libre Office or Open Office to always create or save a file that opens perfectly in Ms Office then I just can't use it.
Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.
Here here.
Yep, other browsers like Opera have had this feature for a long time. How does it even close internet? It just speeds up your browsing.
Firstly, what happens if the page you try and visit doesn't exist? Maybe you get a 404 page showing you some other sites you might like to visit instead (ie - 404 page loaded with amazon paying adverts)
But more dangerously, what happens if the Amazon have some reason to block the site you are visiting. Do amazon let you visit the page? You are going through their cloud, maybe they decide to show you a different page instead that is one of their choosing.
A proxy can do some amazing things, but if you have one you cannot easily opt out of it can also be a threat. Maybe they could decide that Wikileaks is not a site anyone should visit so anyone going to any pages on any of the current list of wikileaks mirrors gets a dummy site not found error page?
One thing they can certainly do is prevent adverts and web tracking code from getting to the actual tracking companies website. They can intercept these calls and display you Amazon paying adverts instead. They then get all the tracking data and they also become the only people able to sell any tracking metrics about kindle users browsing habits.
I used to surf the web many years ago through a DNS proxy that replaced all lookups to sites like doubleclick with a local machines ip address. That local machine had a webserver set up that only served a single image for all requests, regardless of what you requested was called. The result of this was that when you browsed the web you only saw adverts for spam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(food)) and doubleclick and the like could not track your browsing as nothing ever got to their webservers.
This is a fairly good use but other people doing this could not be so benign and I would hate to see this becoming the norm for all devices like Kindles, Phones, Internet TVs, Games Consoles, etc where the user has to put up with some kind of locked down hardware.
May eventually happen, but It's going to be a bit...
Stats from from a real world web site over the last 30 days...
Stats for a single site are always a bit subjective. I could post stats that showed far more hits but had an even higher percentage of IE use, most of it IE6. That is just because it is only geared to a single market and that is NHS users and they have never moved of IE6.
http://healthinformaticist.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/ie6-where-is-thy-death/
I know you can find links where the UK government as told the NHS to start moving away from IE6, but that advice was given a whole year before the article linked above and the NHS still hasn't sorted it self out enough to do it.
Anyway, my little rant about having to support IE6 aside it does show that without giving us some context about what your site contains the stats are not very useful. I know you would never post a like to your site and let us judge for ourselves though unless you hate your sysadmin :)
So they're up to FF 7.0 now? Mine is 5.0 (according to the About box) and when I click on "Check for Updates" it says Firefox is up to date. Am I really expected to update to 7.0 by going to mozilla.org and downloading a new install? That's never going to happen. I might as well go to Chrome.com. Oh wait, that's been updating automatically in the background. I'ld rather it didn't, but I don't mind a little prodding every now and then like Thunderbird does. Why have a "check for Update" box if they are never going to update but just keep coming out w/ new numbers?
Not sure why everyone is such a fan of Chrome and it's "background" updates. I like the idea of an update process that takes doesn't hassle the user, but I do not like the idea of it kicking off every time I turn my PC on and chewing up loads of CPU cycles and making the boot time feel like an eternity. Then I look to see what is so damn slow in Process Manager and see good old Chrome-updater whirring away. Maybe this is just because I use the beta version though and that is updated more often but I would still rather I got some input as to when it could run, like maybe when I actually launch Chrome for the first time instead.
Of course, Firefox is just as bad though with its plugin incompatibility issues. Maybe it should check for incompatible plugins BEFORE doing the install and then display you the option of upgrading or waiting for the plugin creator to sort their stuff out first. I have at least one or two plugins I cannot live without like HTML Validator at work and LastPass / Xmarks for home and laptop. If these are not compatible with a new version then the new version can wait for a bit, regardless of what new fixes are included.
I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.
Much as I'd like to see this myself, the brief window of time that AGP existed, means it will never happen.
It can't have been that brief as they managed to get several versions out, most of which seemed to be completely incompatible with the preceding version.
If all you were doing was doubling the speed from AGP 4X to AGP 8X why the hell make the physical connector different? I know there was a voltage difference but not changing the slot would have meant we could buy motherboards that supported both.
Not really disagreeing with you, just having a rant about something that annoyed me.
It is if your 'other supplier' is the Pirate Bay.
Yes, but then that is not "boycotting" is it. It is using it and not paying anything towards the cost of its creation.
Now the vast majority of the money you have saved by doing this is taken from companies or people I could not give a shit about, but a very minuscule percentage will come from someone like me who just needs to work to get by in life and those minuscule percentages soon add up. It is very easy to say "screw em" to those people too and that they deserve it for signing a contract with Sony or whoever but money can be a very powerful motivator when you don't have it.
I am not thinking about the REM's of the world here, I am thinking about very small bands like Nucleus Roots. I know you haven't heard of them, but one of my mates was in the band and asked me never to post his CD's to Napster as he needed every CD sale he could get.
Children being encouraged to experiment with sex, I'd bet.
If that was the case, you should start censoring MTV. Almost every female pop idol since Madonna has indulged in a bit of pelvic thrusting or whatever in the videos.
I remember working at a gig one saturday morning building the stage with all the roadies when suddenly they were all outside the security guards hut leering at a Christina Aguilera video being shown on children's TV. They were all enjoying it immensely until someone pointed out their daughters were probably at home watching it too.
Kids are encourage to experiment with sex by every other form of media, why should books be any different?
On a different note anyone who reads A Brave New World should also read Island as in many way the books are counterpoints to each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(novel)
However there is a bit of a negative stereotype about IT, at least in the US. You can see that in the original question at the top here, the poster is concerned that being in IT may hurt a future career. That's why people don't want to be incorrectly labeled.
Sounds a bit ridiculous to me but I see your point. In my experience any job is good experience since they all teach you transferable skills like team working. I know of a few people, myself included who have bounced back and forward between system admin work and software development.
You can't really do computer science without the foundations givin in academia.
One of those foundations should be proof reading. That is far more relevant to any job in the real world, technical or otherwise than anything you learn at college or uni.
Also, I am not sure what you count as computer science, but I work as a software developer even though my degree was actually in Physics with Space Technology. Does this mean I should pack it in or that my job doesn't count?
That's what some people think, but it is completely incorrect. There is NO degree for working in IT (ok, there's a few systems adminstration degrees at a few universities now... pretty cool).
Must be different over there in the states, here in the UK there are many degrees that only cover software development or are similarly specialised. Here is a link to my local universities undergraduate degrees: http://www.kingston.ac.uk/courses/find-a-course/undergraduate-2012/subject-areas/230-computing/
I know you guys in the US do not specialise as much though, and maybe that is why you are losing your competitive edge with regard to specialised fields.
In the US it's mixed. Some people, like the OP, mistakenly call all areas IT. Most people frown on that classification. You say "I work in IT" I assume you're a sys admin, a helpdesk guy, or a phone support person. I do not assume you do programming. It's a separate field.
Here's an example of it causing confusion- the US is losing IT jobs. You can see all sorts of people worried about the loss of IT jobs. Programming jobs? The unemployment rate is actually negative- there's more jobs than coders.
Let's turn this around- other than the physical tools (which lets face it, every job in the world uses now) what do IT and programming have in common? Absolutely nothing. So conflating the two isn't useful.
Over here in the UK, saying you work in IT means you do something vaguely to do with computers. It is a very general term that encompasses a whole boatload of professions. Just had a quick poll in our office and everyone thinks IT is a really large definition that does not say a lot about what you actually do. So the only thing we all agree on is that we all work in IT, despite this including my department manager, his PA, a couple of software developers, a system admin and support guy.
Generally if people want any further details about what I do, I actually tell them: I write software. It takes three words (two if you discount the 'I') and makes it abundantly clear what I do. If they want any further details then I tell them I am a technical lead who works on a web based learning management system but that would only mean something to people who work in a fairly similar field.
To be honest though, this is a ridiculous argument about a label. Labels are never very descriptive and there is always room for some confusion when you use them. Short descriptions are often far more useful and usually take the same amount of words (ie - compare "I am a web developer" with "I work in IT").
I also really hate using acronyms since they are often used as way to make something less clear to certain technical people. For this reason I try and and avoid getting in the habit of using them. I often now have to talk to people who are not as familiar with them as me. Some people are very reticent to hold up a conversation if they feel they are the only person who does not understand even if it very important that they do. Using plain and simple language often solves this.
you put too much faith in the government for me - sorry but i don't trust them any more than i trust a company.
Personally if you want to snoop and see what you can dig up on me that is "public" information then feel free to do it - if i didn't want people to see it i wouldn't put it in a public place.
You did not seem to notice my point about lives being at stake. That is why government needs to vet certain employees more closely than if it were just profits as in the case of a company.