good point about requiring experience. at the moment I am working at a startup where very few people would have the necessary experience, so it'd be hard to find the perfect candidate, although experience can give an indication of aptitude as well.
at previous job, an ecommerce payment system, direct experience would also have been hard to come by, but the experience that leads to the ability to fix things promptly and not to break stuff was definitely desirable.
when I interview people for a technical position, I'm measuring aptitude, attitude and experience, and perhaps the least important is the latter, provided that the candidate is capable and enthusiastic; I also work hard to weed out the bullshitters! I definitely do not discuss salary etc until the candidate is on the short list, perhaps not until they are made a job offer, although it is made clear that salaries are towards the upper range of the industry standard for the right person, but I am not interested in someone who sees it as merely a job, rather than an interesting career.
for example...
firstly, a simple practical exam to weed out bullshitters, for example, a linux box which has been sabotaged to not boot properly. I apologise to the candidate if they think it is demeaning - I explain that it's as much about seeing if I can work alongside the person to solve a problem as much as to test their skills. in some cases this sort of test reveals quite a lot about whether the person actually knows jack shit. some people might say it's unfair, but if you're working with complex computer systems, and the shit hits the fan and the bosses are looming, you're going to be fixing things under pressure, so if you can do it in an interview situation it's a good sign! If the candidate enjoys the challenge, that's a very good sign.
secondly, I test depth of knowledge... asking questions beyond their field of expertise. I might ask the difference between bluetooth and wifi, or discuss network switching latency. If the candidate bullshits, it's a bad mark. If they don't know, but show interest in the subject and can grasp the key concepts quickly and discuss intelligently, it's a major bonus.
thirdly, I like to test character; discussing whether using an open wireless access point is moral or not can give an interesting insight into someone's morality.
I have some shutter glasses that came with my Elsa Gladix Geforce2MX card; there's a dongle that connects between the card and the VGA cable which has some IR leds on it, and the glasses have a couple of button cells and IR sensors built it.
snag was that unless the cells had good charge, the shutter effect was poor, and you could quickly lose the 3D effect. the glasses were quite smart.
I later bought an Asus v7100deluxe kit which had a socket on the back to which you connected the eye glasses; it was more reliable but the glasses were big chunky things more like laboratory protective eyewear (in black).
you don't have to register a trademark to have some form of ownership - merely using it for long enough can protect you from someone deciding to own it. or at least that's the case in many jurisdictions. basically, a kind of prior art.
that said, you'd definitely better off registering your trademark to keep things simple.
I just sold one of these fabulous cloaks to a neighbouring monarch. Mind you, he wasn't too happy when he went out in the street and the kids all shouted out "the emperor's got no clothes on".
I have another one, but I put it down somewhere and now I can't find it.
I can see that cryptography + steganography will become a significant growth industry. Sure, it looks like you're trading innocent home movies that don't violate copyright, but hidden inside apparently as noise will be the black-market stuff.
I created a certificate authority cert at work, imported it into web browsers and mail clients.
I then created a bunch of certs for internal web servers and mail servers, and it worked fine.
Then we bought a wildcard cert and I can use that everywhere now (where I can keep the certificate files secure), so the need to install our CA cert on all new computers is avoided, and everything "just works"
I've often wondered whether any viruses/trojans have tried to subvert the browser's list of certificate authorities... if they could add one without the user knowing, they could then hack the user's DNS or hosts file to divert the browser to their spoofed bank website without any security alerts being generated.
Isn't DARPA the real founding agency (or at least the funding agency) for the first backbone of the internet in the early 1970's? yeah, and look what a mess that turned into!
I added to a wikipedia article about the small village where I live. A wikipedant who lives in California decided to remove swathes of basic facts for some arbitrary reason. That was my most important lesson in wikipolitics - people are are asshats and do things for arbitrary reasons with the truth being one of the lesser.
er, did you not notice that the CCA allows the gov't to suspend "habeas corpus" and other vital processes of law, and also drive a truck through parliamentary process? sure, if invoked, they need to renew it, but then if parliamentary processes have already been bypassed we're into marshall law/dictatorship. Oh sure, this is "not the intention of the act", but how many times have we heard that?
actually, VOIP works very well. and this is despite the lack of proper QoS management in the internet's infrastructure. however, on a large scale, VOIP only really works in a full managed environment where you can keep voice and data traffic on separate networks, so that the low latency/low jitter needs of VOIP - which doesn't need much bandwidth - won't conflict with the uncritical high bandwidth data hog.
the fox hunting bill was a massive smokescreen for the Civil Contingencies Bill, now an Act, which took away some fundamental rights. Even now, many people have not heard of it despite it giving the government the right to do anything they damn well please merely by asserting there is some kind of emergency!
well, China wants to be like the west, so it's only copying the English government.
sadly, whilst this is a vague attempt at humour, it's also mostly true.
I did have a longer response but the stupid new slashdot posting mechanism caused me to lose it when I accidentally clicked on something using my overly sensitive touch pad, had to click back and of course its gone.
My vaio TX2/XP came with linux installed, but not in an obvious way - the "instant on" media player app that you start from power-up is a mini linux distro that's loaded from the main NTFS partition.
yeah, it seems to be a general principle of opensource. just look at sourceforge for the number of variants of projects doing much the same thing, many of which never get anywhere near completed before being abandoned.
its only when a program gains decent "market share" that attention becomes focussed, and people stop trying to reinvent the wheel.
yet another light-weight desktop. fluxbox, xfce, ratpoison, etc etc. why so many?
herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.
program $Z is bloated and slow, lets write a small, streamlined, lightweight replacement
0.0 - the program runs, does something but not much
0.1 - it's beginning to be useful
0.2 - it's not bad, you don't miss program $Z so much now
0.3 - 0.9 - hey, where's my fave feature $F, you can't be seriously missing that out, ok, we'll add that in
release 1.0 - quite good, not too bloated, fairly quick, has its serious fanboys, but most people would rather stick with $Z and buy a faster computer to keep the missing features
1.1 to 2.0 - adding all the features that made $Z great, gaining bloat and bugs, losing speed all the way
release 2.0 - a direct replacement for $Z and runs 20% faster
release 2.1 - fixing all the bugs discovered now the code base is too big to audit, making it much less secure than the now quite mature $Z
Hey, your new program is a bit bloated and slow, I'm going to write a replacement for it and it's going to be a small, streamlined, lightweight replacemen
discourages derivative works... seriously harms hip hop music
and that's a problem because?
seriously, dude, that's a bad example, as if all the wealthy white middle class people in control of the government and the **AA's will care!
it'd be better to suggest that if the current IP laws had been implemented 500 years ago, 95% of our culture would either not exist or not be available to any of us - our heritage relies on vast numbers of compositions now in the public domain, whether classical music works, traditional folk ballads, negro spirituals, catholic/protestant church music etc, which adapt and borrow from previous works, and whose authors did not expect to live off for the next 80 years of their lives!
depends what you mean by good and bad. a good manager works for the company's benefit, so he would keep the staff member on until bled dry of all useful knowledge and then replace when convenient to the project. a bad manager would allow a member of staff to hold the project to ransom, which other staff would soon learn, and before long the whole situation gets out of hand.
Douglas Adams had a theory about missing matter...
For a long period of time there was much speculation and controversy about where the so-called "missing matter" of the Universe had got to. All over the Galaxy the science departments of all the major universities were acquiring more and more elaborate equipment to probe and search the hearts of distant galaxies, and then the very centre and the very edges of the whole Universe, but when eventually it was tracked down it turned out in fact to be all the stuff which the equipment had been packed in.
Slashdot Mirror
good point about requiring experience. at the moment I am working at a startup where very few people would have the necessary experience, so it'd be hard to find the perfect candidate, although experience can give an indication of aptitude as well.
at previous job, an ecommerce payment system, direct experience would also have been hard to come by, but the experience that leads to the ability to fix things promptly and not to break stuff was definitely desirable.
when I interview people for a technical position, I'm measuring aptitude, attitude and experience, and perhaps the least important is the latter, provided that the candidate is capable and enthusiastic; I also work hard to weed out the bullshitters! I definitely do not discuss salary etc until the candidate is on the short list, perhaps not until they are made a job offer, although it is made clear that salaries are towards the upper range of the industry standard for the right person, but I am not interested in someone who sees it as merely a job, rather than an interesting career.
for example...
firstly, a simple practical exam to weed out bullshitters, for example, a linux box which has been sabotaged to not boot properly. I apologise to the candidate if they think it is demeaning - I explain that it's as much about seeing if I can work alongside the person to solve a problem as much as to test their skills. in some cases this sort of test reveals quite a lot about whether the person actually knows jack shit. some people might say it's unfair, but if you're working with complex computer systems, and the shit hits the fan and the bosses are looming, you're going to be fixing things under pressure, so if you can do it in an interview situation it's a good sign! If the candidate enjoys the challenge, that's a very good sign.
secondly, I test depth of knowledge... asking questions beyond their field of expertise. I might ask the difference between bluetooth and wifi, or discuss network switching latency. If the candidate bullshits, it's a bad mark. If they don't know, but show interest in the subject and can grasp the key concepts quickly and discuss intelligently, it's a major bonus.
thirdly, I like to test character; discussing whether using an open wireless access point is moral or not can give an interesting insight into someone's morality.
I have some shutter glasses that came with my Elsa Gladix Geforce2MX card; there's a dongle that connects between the card and the VGA cable which has some IR leds on it, and the glasses have a couple of button cells and IR sensors built it. snag was that unless the cells had good charge, the shutter effect was poor, and you could quickly lose the 3D effect. the glasses were quite smart. I later bought an Asus v7100deluxe kit which had a socket on the back to which you connected the eye glasses; it was more reliable but the glasses were big chunky things more like laboratory protective eyewear (in black).
vote it into office?
is it grey, and is it gooey? in which case, it looks like the end of the world is nigh!
yes, drilling holes in your phone would definitely stop it from connecting to the cell network.
you don't have to register a trademark to have some form of ownership - merely using it for long enough can protect you from someone deciding to own it. or at least that's the case in many jurisdictions. basically, a kind of prior art. that said, you'd definitely better off registering your trademark to keep things simple.
I just sold one of these fabulous cloaks to a neighbouring monarch. Mind you, he wasn't too happy when he went out in the street and the kids all shouted out "the emperor's got no clothes on".
I have another one, but I put it down somewhere and now I can't find it.
I can see that cryptography + steganography will become a significant growth industry. Sure, it looks like you're trading innocent home movies that don't violate copyright, but hidden inside apparently as noise will be the black-market stuff.
Brian May is in a class all by himself.
well, he did take quite a long time to finish his thesis and the other students had long gone home by then!
I created a certificate authority cert at work, imported it into web browsers and mail clients.
I then created a bunch of certs for internal web servers and mail servers, and it worked fine.
Then we bought a wildcard cert and I can use that everywhere now (where I can keep the certificate files secure), so the need to install our CA cert on all new computers is avoided, and everything "just works"
I've often wondered whether any viruses/trojans have tried to subvert the browser's list of certificate authorities... if they could add one without the user knowing, they could then hack the user's DNS or hosts file to divert the browser to their spoofed bank website without any security alerts being generated.
I added to a wikipedia article about the small village where I live. A wikipedant who lives in California decided to remove swathes of basic facts for some arbitrary reason. That was my most important lesson in wikipolitics - people are are asshats and do things for arbitrary reasons with the truth being one of the lesser.
er, did you not notice that the CCA allows the gov't to suspend "habeas corpus" and other vital processes of law, and also drive a truck through parliamentary process? sure, if invoked, they need to renew it, but then if parliamentary processes have already been bypassed we're into marshall law/dictatorship. Oh sure, this is "not the intention of the act", but how many times have we heard that?
actually, VOIP works very well. and this is despite the lack of proper QoS management in the internet's infrastructure. however, on a large scale, VOIP only really works in a full managed environment where you can keep voice and data traffic on separate networks, so that the low latency/low jitter needs of VOIP - which doesn't need much bandwidth - won't conflict with the uncritical high bandwidth data hog.
the fox hunting bill was a massive smokescreen for the Civil Contingencies Bill, now an Act, which took away some fundamental rights. Even now, many people have not heard of it despite it giving the government the right to do anything they damn well please merely by asserting there is some kind of emergency!
sadly, whilst this is a vague attempt at humour, it's also mostly true.
I did have a longer response but the stupid new slashdot posting mechanism caused me to lose it when I accidentally clicked on something using my overly sensitive touch pad, had to click back and of course its gone.
There seem to be a lot of really sick people these days.
No, there's a lot of publicity about a tiny minority of really sick people these days
example of it here
yeah, it seems to be a general principle of opensource. just look at sourceforge for the number of variants of projects doing much the same thing, many of which never get anywhere near completed before being abandoned.
its only when a program gains decent "market share" that attention becomes focussed, and people stop trying to reinvent the wheel.
yet another light-weight desktop. fluxbox, xfce, ratpoison, etc etc. why so many?
herewith my theory of the cycle of lightweight software.
- program $Z is bloated and slow, lets write a small, streamlined, lightweight replacement
- 0.0 - the program runs, does something but not much
- 0.1 - it's beginning to be useful
- 0.2 - it's not bad, you don't miss program $Z so much now
- 0.3 - 0.9 - hey, where's my fave feature $F, you can't be seriously missing that out, ok, we'll add that in
- release 1.0 - quite good, not too bloated, fairly quick, has its serious fanboys, but most people would rather stick with $Z and buy a faster computer to keep the missing features
- 1.1 to 2.0 - adding all the features that made $Z great, gaining bloat and bugs, losing speed all the way
- release 2.0 - a direct replacement for $Z and runs 20% faster
- release 2.1 - fixing all the bugs discovered now the code base is too big to audit, making it much less secure than the now quite mature $Z
- Hey, your new program is a bit bloated and slow, I'm going to write a replacement for it and it's going to be a small, streamlined, lightweight replacemen
and repeat ad nauseamdiscourages derivative works... seriously harms hip hop music
and that's a problem because?
seriously, dude, that's a bad example, as if all the wealthy white middle class people in control of the government and the **AA's will care!
it'd be better to suggest that if the current IP laws had been implemented 500 years ago, 95% of our culture would either not exist or not be available to any of us - our heritage relies on vast numbers of compositions now in the public domain, whether classical music works, traditional folk ballads, negro spirituals, catholic/protestant church music etc, which adapt and borrow from previous works, and whose authors did not expect to live off for the next 80 years of their lives!
depends what you mean by good and bad. a good manager works for the company's benefit, so he would keep the staff member on until bled dry of all useful knowledge and then replace when convenient to the project. a bad manager would allow a member of staff to hold the project to ransom, which other staff would soon learn, and before long the whole situation gets out of hand.
For a long period of time there was much speculation and controversy about where the so-called "missing matter" of the Universe had got to. All over the Galaxy the science departments of all the major universities were acquiring more and more elaborate equipment to probe and search the hearts of distant galaxies, and then the very centre and the very edges of the whole Universe, but when eventually it was tracked down it turned out in fact to be all the stuff which the equipment had been packed in.