But seriously, my 80% success rate seems to be based on the fact that I asked the interviewer a lot of questions, thus demonstrating I was ready to hit the ground running, that I knew what I was doing, and was looking how I could integrate myself into their processes should I be hired.
I wore a nice suit, but that part of it felt so artificial and pointless. I felt like an idiot being shown around the officies and labs and being the only one in a tie. Carrying through with the product idea, the suit was like the bikini babes in beer ads. What the flying bleep do they have to do with taste and hops and fermentation?
I actually don't disagree with all the responses I have gotten here. My complaint is that there must be a better way, because I have seen the current standard interview process fail so many times in both the positive and negative direction. What they better way is, well, I really have no idea.
I'm also just so tired of all the vapid nonsense in this world, and have always considered the typical "professional" interview process to capture in a nutshell a lot of what's wrong with human interaction in this world.
I'm very happy in my current position, but I sometimes threaten to go on interviews just for the practice, and try out different things. For example, wear a very casual getup- nice jacket, polo shirt and slacks and NO TIE. Project an image of style but comfort.
There's probably a thesis lurking here for some psych major out there.
Complete scum can tart themselves up and look respectable, therefore I can effectively read NOTHING into the fact that an interviewee is wearing a suit. That's my complaint. I know a lot is read into body language and other things. What I'm saying is that it is not the correct way to go about it because I've seen it fail so many times in both directions. We need better ways to conduct interviews.
And I'm not complaining as someone who has problems with interviews. I've had five serious interviews in my life, and four resulted in jobs. The fifth did not because the company didn't really have an opening but liked to bring in promising candidates anyway. I play the game fine. I just think it's bullshit, and as I get older, I find I suffer bullshit less and less rather than getting use to the stench like most people.
I'm reminded of auditions for a symphony orchesta. The candidate is behind a screen when they play, so nothing but the music can influence the judges. I don't think they even look at the person's name until after the initial audition. How you do this for enginerring I don't know, but there has to be a better way. The whole thing is just so fabricated and plastic as it is.
It's the result of shallow mentalities. Sane, coherent minds should be able to overcome this prattle, but I know they don't, and hence I'm a 33rd degree misanthrope.
Many applicants came to the job fair dressed in non-formal attire.
See, I don't get this. I wear ties when expected by our dippy culture, but I never understood what the hell they are supposed to mean. As far as I can tell, it's some pointless relic from an bygone era. I'm not saying show up in torn jeans, but why can't people be comfortable in an interveiw instead of tarting themselves up with clothing they will never be wearing on the job? Why can't we have some sort of happy medium?
Some of the most brilliant engineers and scientists have are perpetually casual dressers. It's irrelevant. Drug dealers wear suits. Kenneth Lay wore suits. Saddam Hussein wore suits. It's meaningless.
We hired a guy last year who showed up in an expensive Italian suit (he came from a semi-rich family). He turned out to be one of the biggest screw ups we've ever had, and was fired six months later for accessing porn sites on his work PC.
In a sane world, I'd be able to show up dressed in a comfortable and casual manner, and not have to play suck up. I coming to your company to design circuits, not host a freaking game show. It's ridiculous. You always know the interviewees around here because they are all tarted up and turning purple because their tie is constricting the bloodflow to their head. They are the only ones wearing suits.
And no more of this "You have a fox, a mouse and a wombat, and you must get them across a river with only a straw, a nickel and a pair of women's panties..." I guarantee I can out design, out think and out engineer someone who feels the need to ask dipshit questions like that. Is this an engineering company or Romper Room?
Ahhhh! Feh.... the hell with all of ya... bunch plastic robots...
Well, the encoding computers don't have to be powerful as the encoders, especially in the case of a trellis code, are orders of magnitude simpler.
I recently designed a constraint length 9 decoder. The encoder is eight flip-flops. The decoder fills a 2 million gate FPGA. JPL's K=14 encoder is just 14 flip flops where as their decoder was at least a large board of components if i recall correctly.
It's a similar situation with block codes. The encoder does a few polynomial multiplications and send the data on its way. the decoder has to do root searches.
That's what makes these codes great for space probes. 99% of the complexity of the codec remains back here on Earth.
Yeah, that's the idea for making the actual download error free, but once it's downloaded and configured, you have a further problem. A cosmic ray comes along and flips a bit in the FPGA's configuration SRAM *after* configuration, and everything is ruined. An OR gate somewhere is now and AND gate, or a signal is rerouted to the wrong register. You need to do a reload. So just do constant reloads, and when a bad event happens, its effect lasts just for a second or less.
What's the codec(s) are used by the rover comm links? Is it trellis codes? Concatenated with block codes? Are they using that K=14 Viterbi decoder I saw on another JPL page?
I always figured space probes can glom on coding because the receive side on Earth doesn't have to do real time decoding. You can just capture it over the DSN and decode with computers at your leisure.
All those things people are crediting to Gates here were happening already, and would have happened without Gates. He and Microsoft were perpetually Johhny-Come-Latelys in the computer world. MS succeeded because corporate America, for better or worse, settle on IBM (the old no one ever got fired for buying IBM attitude). MS rode the coattails.
The only "clever" thing he did was buy QDOS and foist it as a useable system to IBM, and somehow talk IBM into letting MS retain the rights. And to this day the 8.3 naming system lurks underneath everything (yeah, even in XP), showing up unexpctedly and at the most annoying moments.
As for his chairty, more wealthy people give to charity than you seem to think. Most of them just don't feel the need to issue press releases when they do so, or name their caritable donations after themselves.
But then againt knighthoods were once bestowed for those who could gather the most swag and booty for king and country, so maybe this *is* appropriate.
I've actually consulted on this for another group inside my company. You don't wait for a cosmic ray to change a programming bit in an FPGA.
You have two or more running in parallel. While one is running, the next reloads from ROM. When it's loaded and synchronized, you switch to it, and load the next one. You do that in series, over and over, so you're only using any particular FPGA for a couple of seconds at a time, and their configurations are constantly being refreshed. It's a very simple idea that can be done now.
They expect with the increased volume the RFID tags will cost under five cents by '06. And since estimates for things like that tend to be slightly conservative, I'd guess a penny each.
I can buy a typical logic chip for 49 cents in quantities of one, and the RFID tags don't need the same elaborate packaging or physical pinouts. There's the antenna, but that's still easier than wire bonds.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve with me. The Earth changes, and evolves, and it's not the exact some Earth from one epoch to the next, but it is most assuredly not "fragile". I'm not making any general argument against the existence of environmental dangers and risks here, and it is always Good Science to make things more efficient and cleaner and less wasteful, but this idea that we're living in some sort of metastable, hair trigger condition really needs to go away.
If this place were as fragile as some make it out to be, the KT event or the Manson impact would have put an end to all multicelled life.
1. I was never impressed by tabbed folders, but I used them. I felt they were a real kludge. The Dock is heaven in comparison, and I never looked back or missed tabbed folders. I dunno. I must just have a unique approach to these things. I use the dock for things I use often. Everything else I can go find in a couple clicks.
The other guy above who has 50 things in his dock and then hides it is like people who fill their Windows desktop with icons and then complain they can't find anything in the clutter. There's a right way and a wrong way to all things, and any interface paradigm can be broken by the motivated user. What, a dropdown menu with 50 items is going to be any better?
2. Again, I don't get it. I never miss the trash. Never. I also tend to do a lot of command-delete. I picked that up from work where I use Win2000, and the Recycle Bin is NEVER visible EVER.
3. No problem with personal preferences, but Tog does seem to have an axe to grind. He deliberatley inflated his complaints by splitting them into multiples, and he defends things in OS9 as if they were mana from the gods themselves.
You are so wrong it's not even funny... [tortured analogy snipped]...Now put it at (134,204). Oops, pretty tough... But I guess you are some superhuman who can move the mouse to an arbitrary point in exactly the same time you can move it to a memorized point in the corner of the screen.
Except that the Dock (or any part of Mac OS) does not require that we hit single pixels. This such is a strawman it goes beyond not funny into funny again.
In that case, never mind, all this cognative research doesn't apply to you.
I guess not. I just don't seem to be fumfering about and missing big fat targets like these critics seem to be.
I love the attitude on slashdot that people are "stupid" or "retarded" because they want things to be *easier*.
Yeah? Well I love responses that clearly indicate the responder did not read what I said with anything remotely approaching clairty. Go back and look. I did not call anyone retarded or stupid.
I don't know about you , but I want to be treated like a fucking baby when I'm at the computer, so I can do my WORK quickly and not waste time trying to hit the fuckin' trash can on my hidden 50-item dock.
Nice language. Very telling. And I have no problem hitting the trash can. Ever. This is Motor Nervous Skills 101. Perhaps you should be tested? And *YOU* are the one who put 50 things in it and hid it.
But I can't take seriously the word of anyone who seems to think the Applications menu and Apple menu from OS9 were some sort of holy duality of perfection. And I rarely heed the word of grown adults who still use the word "sucks".
The Dock is not perfect, but his ranting against it comes across as just so much hyperbole. I get along with it just fine. The problem of identical icons is gone now that I can put my project folders in the Finder's side bar, and I don't minimize folders and documents much anymore thanks to Expose.
He may be a Guy Who Knows (or was at one time), but he's flat out wrong here, and there definitely a hint of an axe being ground. It also comes across as simply "I got used to this way. I never want to change. Whaaaaa!"
Some of the reasons can be combined (6, 7 and 8, for example). Some are purely subjective, like 5. I have zero problem trashing things.
The rest seem to read like "people's hands have minds of their own, and those minds are retarded, so they can never get used to the Dock. It's Fitt's Law, which is as immutable and perfect as the Laws Of Thermodynamics, dammit!".
And I love "Oh! I dragged something out of the dock and it puffed into smoke!" Wow. So call 911, you silly man, and tell them you need an IV with Zoloft or something. Sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
But if people never bitched about things, we'd still be huddling in caves, capisca?
Or a supercomputer that the football team can spell. "G5" is shorter than "Pentium".
E. Bay.
But seriously, my 80% success rate seems to be based on the fact that I asked the interviewer a lot of questions, thus demonstrating I was ready to hit the ground running, that I knew what I was doing, and was looking how I could integrate myself into their processes should I be hired.
I wore a nice suit, but that part of it felt so artificial and pointless. I felt like an idiot being shown around the officies and labs and being the only one in a tie. Carrying through with the product idea, the suit was like the bikini babes in beer ads. What the flying bleep do they have to do with taste and hops and fermentation?
I actually don't disagree with all the responses I have gotten here. My complaint is that there must be a better way, because I have seen the current standard interview process fail so many times in both the positive and negative direction. What they better way is, well, I really have no idea.
I'm also just so tired of all the vapid nonsense in this world, and have always considered the typical "professional" interview process to capture in a nutshell a lot of what's wrong with human interaction in this world.
I'm very happy in my current position, but I sometimes threaten to go on interviews just for the practice, and try out different things. For example, wear a very casual getup- nice jacket, polo shirt and slacks and NO TIE. Project an image of style but comfort.
There's probably a thesis lurking here for some psych major out there.
And I'm not complaining as someone who has problems with interviews. I've had five serious interviews in my life, and four resulted in jobs. The fifth did not because the company didn't really have an opening but liked to bring in promising candidates anyway. I play the game fine. I just think it's bullshit, and as I get older, I find I suffer bullshit less and less rather than getting use to the stench like most people.
I'm reminded of auditions for a symphony orchesta. The candidate is behind a screen when they play, so nothing but the music can influence the judges. I don't think they even look at the person's name until after the initial audition. How you do this for enginerring I don't know, but there has to be a better way. The whole thing is just so fabricated and plastic as it is.
It's the result of shallow mentalities. Sane, coherent minds should be able to overcome this prattle, but I know they don't, and hence I'm a 33rd degree misanthrope.
If you can't understand the different in complaining about ties and walking around nude, you have my sympathies.
See, I don't get this. I wear ties when expected by our dippy culture, but I never understood what the hell they are supposed to mean. As far as I can tell, it's some pointless relic from an bygone era. I'm not saying show up in torn jeans, but why can't people be comfortable in an interveiw instead of tarting themselves up with clothing they will never be wearing on the job? Why can't we have some sort of happy medium?
Some of the most brilliant engineers and scientists have are perpetually casual dressers. It's irrelevant. Drug dealers wear suits. Kenneth Lay wore suits. Saddam Hussein wore suits. It's meaningless.
We hired a guy last year who showed up in an expensive Italian suit (he came from a semi-rich family). He turned out to be one of the biggest screw ups we've ever had, and was fired six months later for accessing porn sites on his work PC.
In a sane world, I'd be able to show up dressed in a comfortable and casual manner, and not have to play suck up. I coming to your company to design circuits, not host a freaking game show. It's ridiculous. You always know the interviewees around here because they are all tarted up and turning purple because their tie is constricting the bloodflow to their head. They are the only ones wearing suits.
And no more of this "You have a fox, a mouse and a wombat, and you must get them across a river with only a straw, a nickel and a pair of women's panties..." I guarantee I can out design, out think and out engineer someone who feels the need to ask dipshit questions like that. Is this an engineering company or Romper Room?
Ahhhh! Feh.... the hell with all of ya... bunch plastic robots...
I recently designed a constraint length 9 decoder. The encoder is eight flip-flops. The decoder fills a 2 million gate FPGA. JPL's K=14 encoder is just 14 flip flops where as their decoder was at least a large board of components if i recall correctly.
It's a similar situation with block codes. The encoder does a few polynomial multiplications and send the data on its way. the decoder has to do root searches.
That's what makes these codes great for space probes. 99% of the complexity of the codec remains back here on Earth.
Yeah, that's the idea for making the actual download error free, but once it's downloaded and configured, you have a further problem. A cosmic ray comes along and flips a bit in the FPGA's configuration SRAM *after* configuration, and everything is ruined. An OR gate somewhere is now and AND gate, or a signal is rerouted to the wrong register. You need to do a reload. So just do constant reloads, and when a bad event happens, its effect lasts just for a second or less.
I always figured space probes can glom on coding because the receive side on Earth doesn't have to do real time decoding. You can just capture it over the DSN and decode with computers at your leisure.
The only "clever" thing he did was buy QDOS and foist it as a useable system to IBM, and somehow talk IBM into letting MS retain the rights. And to this day the 8.3 naming system lurks underneath everything (yeah, even in XP), showing up unexpctedly and at the most annoying moments.
As for his chairty, more wealthy people give to charity than you seem to think. Most of them just don't feel the need to issue press releases when they do so, or name their caritable donations after themselves.
But then againt knighthoods were once bestowed for those who could gather the most swag and booty for king and country, so maybe this *is* appropriate.
You have two or more running in parallel. While one is running, the next reloads from ROM. When it's loaded and synchronized, you switch to it, and load the next one. You do that in series, over and over, so you're only using any particular FPGA for a couple of seconds at a time, and their configurations are constantly being refreshed. It's a very simple idea that can be done now.
Just, like, like, like, STOP IT already!
My cat craps better software after a happy day of eating bugs!
Damn it, just STOP!
For the love of Yog-Soggoth and all that is transhuman and the Lords Of Kobol, STOP, I tell you, STOP!
Argh! Ack! Thppbbt! (gurgle)
I can buy a typical logic chip for 49 cents in quantities of one, and the RFID tags don't need the same elaborate packaging or physical pinouts. There's the antenna, but that's still easier than wire bonds.
A picture of an RFID card.
If you eat a little of it, it will look like all sorts of colors.
Oh, heads rolled that day, I tell you.
Waw oo epo doo wa wa wa meeee hoo boo la doo pee maa naa too?
If this place were as fragile as some make it out to be, the KT event or the Manson impact would have put an end to all multicelled life.
The other guy above who has 50 things in his dock and then hides it is like people who fill their Windows desktop with icons and then complain they can't find anything in the clutter. There's a right way and a wrong way to all things, and any interface paradigm can be broken by the motivated user. What, a dropdown menu with 50 items is going to be any better?
2. Again, I don't get it. I never miss the trash. Never. I also tend to do a lot of command-delete. I picked that up from work where I use Win2000, and the Recycle Bin is NEVER visible EVER.
3. No problem with personal preferences, but Tog does seem to have an axe to grind. He deliberatley inflated his complaints by splitting them into multiples, and he defends things in OS9 as if they were mana from the gods themselves.
Except that the Dock (or any part of Mac OS) does not require that we hit single pixels. This such is a strawman it goes beyond not funny into funny again.
In that case, never mind, all this cognative research doesn't apply to you.
I guess not. I just don't seem to be fumfering about and missing big fat targets like these critics seem to be.
I love the attitude on slashdot that people are "stupid" or "retarded" because they want things to be *easier*.
Yeah? Well I love responses that clearly indicate the responder did not read what I said with anything remotely approaching clairty. Go back and look. I did not call anyone retarded or stupid.
I don't know about you , but I want to be treated like a fucking baby when I'm at the computer, so I can do my WORK quickly and not waste time trying to hit the fuckin' trash can on my hidden 50-item dock.
Nice language. Very telling. And I have no problem hitting the trash can. Ever. This is Motor Nervous Skills 101. Perhaps you should be tested? And *YOU* are the one who put 50 things in it and hid it.
The Dock is not perfect, but his ranting against it comes across as just so much hyperbole. I get along with it just fine. The problem of identical icons is gone now that I can put my project folders in the Finder's side bar, and I don't minimize folders and documents much anymore thanks to Expose.
He may be a Guy Who Knows (or was at one time), but he's flat out wrong here, and there definitely a hint of an axe being ground. It also comes across as simply "I got used to this way. I never want to change. Whaaaaa!"
Some of the reasons can be combined (6, 7 and 8, for example). Some are purely subjective, like 5. I have zero problem trashing things.
The rest seem to read like "people's hands have minds of their own, and those minds are retarded, so they can never get used to the Dock. It's Fitt's Law, which is as immutable and perfect as the Laws Of Thermodynamics, dammit!".
And I love "Oh! I dragged something out of the dock and it puffed into smoke!" Wow. So call 911, you silly man, and tell them you need an IV with Zoloft or something. Sheesh.
So the Earth *IS* the center of the universe! :)
Did they find the money leak that put this thing way over budget?