The Panera in Princeton is often crowded, but you rarely see students on WiFi there. There is enough free* WiFi on campus that students don't need to flock to Panera for access. My sister at Cornell tells me the opposite is true in Ithaca, were a number a restaurants offer free WiFi which attracts students.
Here are my observations, as promised yesterday:
I found it interesting to compare the processes of both Google and Microsoft. Microsoft seems more willing to spend money on you. They give you incredible flexibility with travel arrangements and let you stay up to two extra days to see Seattle. I interviewed in 2003 for an internship and spent the entire weekend out there and Microsoft paid for all of it. It was as much fun as a solo vacation could be.
Google on the other hand was very stingy. They required that I take only the cheapest flights that they could find and wouldn't let me stay any extra time (I asked, since I hadn't really been in the bay area before). This is more frustrating since the fact that they flew me home the next morning seemed to be pretty influential in their decision, not allowing me to meet with all the right people. Google also had a less formal expense system. It also took them a lot longer to reimburse me for my meals and I had to pay for the car rental upfront (which they didn't warn me of).
As for the questions, I don't know if I should give away all of them, because from what I hear the companies don't really like that (I still may end up working for either of them some day). The Microsoft ethics question was a complete hypothetical, about a company that created medical equipment, not about something Microsoft-related. Many of Microsoft's questions required me to design a product that Microsoft would probably not be interested in. For my final interview I then had to explain why Microsoft WOULD be interested in selling such a product. That last interview didn't go as well as the rest (another reason it didn't is that in the middle of the interview I realized that I had lost my cell phone, so I was distracted the rest of the interview).
One of the fun parts about interviewing at Google is lunch. You've probably heard about their great cafeteria: the food is amazing and free. Because of this the lines seem to be very long to eat, but everyone at lunch seems pretty happy, as opposed to the Microsoft cafeteria that I ate at, where most people didn't seem so enthusiastic (although I have certainly seen far worse employee lunch rooms in terms of people's demeanor).
At Microsoft your lunch is one of your interviews. I found that my lunch interviewers were often the nicest interviewers. They asked the easiest questions and seemed to focus mostly on my opinions and less on my creativity or technical ability. This was my experience with my two trips out there, so I don't know if this standard. My first time the interviewer took me to a restaurant and put it on an American Express card (I'm assuming he can expense that) and this past year we just ate in the cafeteria. In the morning the recruiter gives you free lunch tickets for you and your interviewer. Since I didn't use them my first year I gave mine to a friend of mine who was working for Microsoft so he can have a free lunch (not like he needs it though).
Unlike Microsoft, Google gave us all lots of swag. I came home with a whole lot of pens, and the coolest freebie, a Blogger sweatshirt, although that was a special gift from one of my interviewers . (I was an original Blogger Pro customer but didn't read the end of the email where they told us we get free sweatshirts for supporting the company before Google bought them until after the deadline, so she got me a sweatshirt.)
At Google I felt a lot like a group of interviewees. We all had name tags and had a lot of time to meet each other. Everybody was my age (graduating senior) and the majority of the kids were from nearby schools like Stanford. Many of them only had half the interviews that I did, and were scheduled to come back the next day for more. I met one girl that originally had her interviews scheduled for the day that they announced the IPO but they sent her home because no one wanted to interview her. Luckily she was a Stanford student.
At Microsoft an interviewee feels very alone. I spent very little time around other candidates other than the 20 mi
If you look at the source of the message you'll see that I did put in line breaks but I left the comment as HTML formatted, so they are ignored by your browser. I don't post that often to Slashdot, I apologize for the mistake.
As for the other observations. I wrote them all up at the end of work today and hit preview, but forgot to submit it all. I'll do it tomorrow morning when I get back to work.
I interviewed in May
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I flew out to Google in May for an interview. I had first interviewed on campus (I actually thought I bombed that interview). They flew me out to California for an interview (the only person from my school that interviewed for that position). I was interviewing for an Associate Product Marketing Manager position.
My day consisted of about six half-hour interviews, all in the same small conference room, with a break for lunch. The process was very different in comparison to Microsoft (I had just flown out to Microsoft two weeks earlier). While Microsoft moves you from building to building, room to room, so you get sufficiently lost and disoriented (while the different interviewers talk about you behind your back) at Google the interviewers come to you and they don't know anything about you until you meet them (so they claim). Google's questions seemed significantly easier than Microsoft's, but I was interviewing for a Program Manager position at Microsoft, so the focus of the questions was pretty different. Microsoft gives you brain teasers, tells you to write code on the board (even though it was a non-coding position), and even gave me an ethics question. Google gave me a lot of estimation questions (number of pizzas sold at college in a year), which I don't really understand since I don't see how being a good estimator makes you good at anything else. Regardless, I was really proud of all of my estimations (I prepared myself with a bunch of dumb facts, like the number of Wal-Mart stores in the US, to use as references, which worked well.
At the end of my day of interviews (which I thought went really well) I was talking with an HR guy (not my HR guy, strangely) and he asked me what time I was coming back the next day. I told him that I wasn't coming back since my flight home was the next morning (this was set up by the Google travel people, I had no choice in this matter). He told me that I needed to meet with two more people and he went back upstairs to see if they were free to meet with me that afternoon. It took him a long time to come back and tell me that they were too busy, so I was sent home, pretty much knowing that I wouldn't be getting a job since I couldn't complete the interview process. I was an east-coaster, and unlike all the Stanford kids that they seemed to move in by the busload for interviews, I had to go home.
It took them a long time to get back to me about their decision. The HR guy kept telling me that the meeting to discuss my interviews kept getting postponed. Then one day he told me that I needed to set aside two hours for a timed essay. I took the essay, which was the "final step" in the interview process, according to the Word doc they sent me (I was expecting some high-tech web form that prevents me from missing the deadline, but instead I just got the email at the time specified and had to email it back within two hours). I got an email about a week later telling me I didn't get the job. My essay kicked ass. I should post it online.
Oh well. I've got a lot of other observations about the differences between the Google and Microsoft interview processes if anyone cares.
I've been up and down the entire length of the NJ Turnpike several times and I am pretty familiar with its history. This certainly sounds like Texas's own version of the NJT. For those not in the area (I went to college in central NJ), the NJ Turnpike is a massive north-south highway that runs the entire length of the state of NJ. For most of the length the highway is separated (3 truck lanes, 3 car lanes) and in the north there is an eastern and western spur. The highway carries Interstate 95 for most of its length.
The highway carries a large amount of interstate traffic and is the main artery connecting the north east with the rest of the nation. The state makes some big money on the tolls, however the story of its construction is different. It was built using the New Deal money that is responsible for most of the interstate highways in the US. That kind of federal money just isn't available today for public works projects anymore (if it was then New York's mass transit situation would be very different today).
That being said, a toll road can make a lot of money for the state but it has its drawbacks. Everyone that I went to school with had a negative impression of the state of NJ because all they knew of the state was the turnpike. Whether they came from the north or south, all they saw of New Jersey was the massive behemoth of concrete that dug through the state, and the ugliness which surrounds it. The worst is the areas between exit 14 and exit 12, which is very industrial and does not seem to resemble a "Garden State." The turnpike has contributed to the pollution of the state, is responsible for numerous traffic fatalities, and is a nuissance to many.
New Jersey has a second major highway, the Garden State Parkway, which is for cars only (parkways in the northeast do not allow trucks, my roommate from Texas couldn't understand that one) and is meant as an alternative (yet somewhat different) north-south route through the state. The Parkway connects many of the suburban towns with the NJ shore beach resort areas (its packed on summer weekends). Yet the parkway is not as ugly as the Turnpike since trucks aren't allowed. Parkways in general are more scenic and destroy less of the landscape.
As for comments about the highway becoming a parking lot, it probably won't. The prime example of "the worlds largest parking lot" is the Long Island Expressway, the one main artery connecting most of Long Island with New York City. It's parking lot status is due to the fact that Robert Moses decided to create many parkways around Long Island, not as commuter highways, but as recreational roads, and only one actual road designed for moving people and cargo. The LIE cannot handle this burden and it is hurt even more by the fact that the highway terminates at the Queens Midtown Tunnel, a slow-moving tunnel under the East River which lets out on the even slower moving streets of Manhattan. This Texas Turnpike won't have such a problem.
Out of curiosity, how long does it usually take for something like this to show up in urpmi? I'd like to install it that way on my Mandrake server if at all possible but right now its only offering me 1.6.
Also, I've been a longtime fan of AFP. As an OS X user it offers many great advantages over SMB, specifically the ability to move a file around on the server while it is open without the application losing track of it (just like a local file on an HFS+ disk). Also, most ISPs block the SMB port since Windows viruses spread through shares but they don't block the AFP port, which makes connecting to AFP shares over IP a breeze.
Although for the record I'm not so much a fan of AFP over AppleTalk. AT was good about 15 years ago but Rendezvous has made it useless nowadays.
It wasn't much in the way of reverse engineering. He just extracted the public key from the iTunes executable, allowing other applications to stream music to an Airport Express. The private key, however, would be required to impersonate an Airport Express, and as far as I know, no one knows that key (anyone up for pooling the CPU power to crack it? I hear it only takes like 100 years or something...)
If this turns out to be true, and the iPod ends up having a nice color screen then Apple could have a real winner on their hands with the iPod + iSight combination. Right now the iSight only needs a firewire connection. With a color screen it would now be possible to use the two as a camcorder if Apple would support this.
Apple sent college students to both the democratic and republican conventions with iBooks and iSights to do interviews with the delegates. It seems pretty obvious that that camcorder-like feature is on Apple's radar screen.
Personally I could care less about video and more about audio recording. I wish Apple would allow 44.1khz lossless recording with the iPod. Then the iPod (plus external battery) would supplant the portable DAT recorder as the primary tool for LEGAL concert tapers. This is not piracy, but sanctioned recording from the artists. For more information see archive.org/audio
That's not the issue. The issue is with the initial settlement, where Apple Records sued Apple Computer. Stupidly (in my opinion) on Apple Computer's part, they signed a settlement that 1) gave the Beatles a lot of money and 2) said that Apple Computer could never enter the "music" business. As far as what the "music" business actually is defined as is questionable.
As many people know, when Apple first shipped the LC, with a microphone, they added the "Sosumi" (so sue me) sound to System 7. In January 2001 Apple released iTunes and in October they released the first ipod. In 2002 Apple purchased Emagic. In 2003 they launched the iTunes music store. Which of these actions constitutes entering the "music business" ?
To me the problem was with the original settlement. The wording is not clear. Apple Computer was also stupid to agree to something like this. They SHOULD have agreed not to become a record label, since that would never be their interest. iTMS is a store, not a label.
If Apple Computer didn't sign such a stupid deal back in the 80s this wouldn't be an issue today.
How fast is this service? I've used my T-Mobile phone with my PowerBook over bluetooth (irda a few years back) and it has always been dirt slow. Is this card faster than modem speeds?
I'm a Mac user. Macintouch is certainly one of the higher level sites in terms of writing quality. If these tests were run on the spymac forums I think we would see pretty atrocious results. I think a better way to do this would be to take samples from all major discussion sites and weight them by their readership percentages, if that information is even available.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not entirely correct. The Newton name is obviously apple related, although not a type of fruit, of course.
Raskin is one of my personal heros as well. He will be missed.
The Panera in Princeton is often crowded, but you rarely see students on WiFi there. There is enough free* WiFi on campus that students don't need to flock to Panera for access. My sister at Cornell tells me the opposite is true in Ithaca, were a number a restaurants offer free WiFi which attracts students.
* Free WiFi with $40,000/yr tuition fee.
Jukebox Project
This was originally my senior independent work in the Comp Sci department at Princeton, advisor Brian Kernighan.
I am looking to open source the project when I get around to it. I built it on OS X 10.2, using PHP, AppleScript and iTunes.
Here are my observations, as promised yesterday: I found it interesting to compare the processes of both Google and Microsoft. Microsoft seems more willing to spend money on you. They give you incredible flexibility with travel arrangements and let you stay up to two extra days to see Seattle. I interviewed in 2003 for an internship and spent the entire weekend out there and Microsoft paid for all of it. It was as much fun as a solo vacation could be. Google on the other hand was very stingy. They required that I take only the cheapest flights that they could find and wouldn't let me stay any extra time (I asked, since I hadn't really been in the bay area before). This is more frustrating since the fact that they flew me home the next morning seemed to be pretty influential in their decision, not allowing me to meet with all the right people. Google also had a less formal expense system. It also took them a lot longer to reimburse me for my meals and I had to pay for the car rental upfront (which they didn't warn me of). As for the questions, I don't know if I should give away all of them, because from what I hear the companies don't really like that (I still may end up working for either of them some day). The Microsoft ethics question was a complete hypothetical, about a company that created medical equipment, not about something Microsoft-related. Many of Microsoft's questions required me to design a product that Microsoft would probably not be interested in. For my final interview I then had to explain why Microsoft WOULD be interested in selling such a product. That last interview didn't go as well as the rest (another reason it didn't is that in the middle of the interview I realized that I had lost my cell phone, so I was distracted the rest of the interview). One of the fun parts about interviewing at Google is lunch. You've probably heard about their great cafeteria: the food is amazing and free. Because of this the lines seem to be very long to eat, but everyone at lunch seems pretty happy, as opposed to the Microsoft cafeteria that I ate at, where most people didn't seem so enthusiastic (although I have certainly seen far worse employee lunch rooms in terms of people's demeanor). At Microsoft your lunch is one of your interviews. I found that my lunch interviewers were often the nicest interviewers. They asked the easiest questions and seemed to focus mostly on my opinions and less on my creativity or technical ability. This was my experience with my two trips out there, so I don't know if this standard. My first time the interviewer took me to a restaurant and put it on an American Express card (I'm assuming he can expense that) and this past year we just ate in the cafeteria. In the morning the recruiter gives you free lunch tickets for you and your interviewer. Since I didn't use them my first year I gave mine to a friend of mine who was working for Microsoft so he can have a free lunch (not like he needs it though). Unlike Microsoft, Google gave us all lots of swag. I came home with a whole lot of pens, and the coolest freebie, a Blogger sweatshirt, although that was a special gift from one of my interviewers . (I was an original Blogger Pro customer but didn't read the end of the email where they told us we get free sweatshirts for supporting the company before Google bought them until after the deadline, so she got me a sweatshirt.) At Google I felt a lot like a group of interviewees. We all had name tags and had a lot of time to meet each other. Everybody was my age (graduating senior) and the majority of the kids were from nearby schools like Stanford. Many of them only had half the interviews that I did, and were scheduled to come back the next day for more. I met one girl that originally had her interviews scheduled for the day that they announced the IPO but they sent her home because no one wanted to interview her. Luckily she was a Stanford student. At Microsoft an interviewee feels very alone. I spent very little time around other candidates other than the 20 mi
If you look at the source of the message you'll see that I did put in line breaks but I left the comment as HTML formatted, so they are ignored by your browser. I don't post that often to Slashdot, I apologize for the mistake.
As for the other observations. I wrote them all up at the end of work today and hit preview, but forgot to submit it all. I'll do it tomorrow morning when I get back to work.
I flew out to Google in May for an interview. I had first interviewed on campus (I actually thought I bombed that interview). They flew me out to California for an interview (the only person from my school that interviewed for that position). I was interviewing for an Associate Product Marketing Manager position. My day consisted of about six half-hour interviews, all in the same small conference room, with a break for lunch. The process was very different in comparison to Microsoft (I had just flown out to Microsoft two weeks earlier). While Microsoft moves you from building to building, room to room, so you get sufficiently lost and disoriented (while the different interviewers talk about you behind your back) at Google the interviewers come to you and they don't know anything about you until you meet them (so they claim). Google's questions seemed significantly easier than Microsoft's, but I was interviewing for a Program Manager position at Microsoft, so the focus of the questions was pretty different. Microsoft gives you brain teasers, tells you to write code on the board (even though it was a non-coding position), and even gave me an ethics question. Google gave me a lot of estimation questions (number of pizzas sold at college in a year), which I don't really understand since I don't see how being a good estimator makes you good at anything else. Regardless, I was really proud of all of my estimations (I prepared myself with a bunch of dumb facts, like the number of Wal-Mart stores in the US, to use as references, which worked well. At the end of my day of interviews (which I thought went really well) I was talking with an HR guy (not my HR guy, strangely) and he asked me what time I was coming back the next day. I told him that I wasn't coming back since my flight home was the next morning (this was set up by the Google travel people, I had no choice in this matter). He told me that I needed to meet with two more people and he went back upstairs to see if they were free to meet with me that afternoon. It took him a long time to come back and tell me that they were too busy, so I was sent home, pretty much knowing that I wouldn't be getting a job since I couldn't complete the interview process. I was an east-coaster, and unlike all the Stanford kids that they seemed to move in by the busload for interviews, I had to go home. It took them a long time to get back to me about their decision. The HR guy kept telling me that the meeting to discuss my interviews kept getting postponed. Then one day he told me that I needed to set aside two hours for a timed essay. I took the essay, which was the "final step" in the interview process, according to the Word doc they sent me (I was expecting some high-tech web form that prevents me from missing the deadline, but instead I just got the email at the time specified and had to email it back within two hours). I got an email about a week later telling me I didn't get the job. My essay kicked ass. I should post it online. Oh well. I've got a lot of other observations about the differences between the Google and Microsoft interview processes if anyone cares.
I've been up and down the entire length of the NJ Turnpike several times and I am pretty familiar with its history. This certainly sounds like Texas's own version of the NJT. For those not in the area (I went to college in central NJ), the NJ Turnpike is a massive north-south highway that runs the entire length of the state of NJ. For most of the length the highway is separated (3 truck lanes, 3 car lanes) and in the north there is an eastern and western spur. The highway carries Interstate 95 for most of its length.
The highway carries a large amount of interstate traffic and is the main artery connecting the north east with the rest of the nation. The state makes some big money on the tolls, however the story of its construction is different. It was built using the New Deal money that is responsible for most of the interstate highways in the US. That kind of federal money just isn't available today for public works projects anymore (if it was then New York's mass transit situation would be very different today).
That being said, a toll road can make a lot of money for the state but it has its drawbacks. Everyone that I went to school with had a negative impression of the state of NJ because all they knew of the state was the turnpike. Whether they came from the north or south, all they saw of New Jersey was the massive behemoth of concrete that dug through the state, and the ugliness which surrounds it. The worst is the areas between exit 14 and exit 12, which is very industrial and does not seem to resemble a "Garden State." The turnpike has contributed to the pollution of the state, is responsible for numerous traffic fatalities, and is a nuissance to many.
New Jersey has a second major highway, the Garden State Parkway, which is for cars only (parkways in the northeast do not allow trucks, my roommate from Texas couldn't understand that one) and is meant as an alternative (yet somewhat different) north-south route through the state. The Parkway connects many of the suburban towns with the NJ shore beach resort areas (its packed on summer weekends). Yet the parkway is not as ugly as the Turnpike since trucks aren't allowed. Parkways in general are more scenic and destroy less of the landscape.
As for comments about the highway becoming a parking lot, it probably won't. The prime example of "the worlds largest parking lot" is the Long Island Expressway, the one main artery connecting most of Long Island with New York City. It's parking lot status is due to the fact that Robert Moses decided to create many parkways around Long Island, not as commuter highways, but as recreational roads, and only one actual road designed for moving people and cargo. The LIE cannot handle this burden and it is hurt even more by the fact that the highway terminates at the Queens Midtown Tunnel, a slow-moving tunnel under the East River which lets out on the even slower moving streets of Manhattan. This Texas Turnpike won't have such a problem.
I also included all of the mirror sites: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 8, 9
My first slashdot news contribution, but I missed out. Someone else got to it first. Oh well.
Out of curiosity, how long does it usually take for something like this to show up in urpmi? I'd like to install it that way on my Mandrake server if at all possible but right now its only offering me 1.6. Also, I've been a longtime fan of AFP. As an OS X user it offers many great advantages over SMB, specifically the ability to move a file around on the server while it is open without the application losing track of it (just like a local file on an HFS+ disk). Also, most ISPs block the SMB port since Windows viruses spread through shares but they don't block the AFP port, which makes connecting to AFP shares over IP a breeze. Although for the record I'm not so much a fan of AFP over AppleTalk. AT was good about 15 years ago but Rendezvous has made it useless nowadays.
It wasn't much in the way of reverse engineering. He just extracted the public key from the iTunes executable, allowing other applications to stream music to an Airport Express. The private key, however, would be required to impersonate an Airport Express, and as far as I know, no one knows that key (anyone up for pooling the CPU power to crack it? I hear it only takes like 100 years or something...)
If this turns out to be true, and the iPod ends up having a nice color screen then Apple could have a real winner on their hands with the iPod + iSight combination. Right now the iSight only needs a firewire connection. With a color screen it would now be possible to use the two as a camcorder if Apple would support this. Apple sent college students to both the democratic and republican conventions with iBooks and iSights to do interviews with the delegates. It seems pretty obvious that that camcorder-like feature is on Apple's radar screen. Personally I could care less about video and more about audio recording. I wish Apple would allow 44.1khz lossless recording with the iPod. Then the iPod (plus external battery) would supplant the portable DAT recorder as the primary tool for LEGAL concert tapers. This is not piracy, but sanctioned recording from the artists. For more information see archive.org/audio
That's not the issue. The issue is with the initial settlement, where Apple Records sued Apple Computer. Stupidly (in my opinion) on Apple Computer's part, they signed a settlement that 1) gave the Beatles a lot of money and 2) said that Apple Computer could never enter the "music" business. As far as what the "music" business actually is defined as is questionable. As many people know, when Apple first shipped the LC, with a microphone, they added the "Sosumi" (so sue me) sound to System 7. In January 2001 Apple released iTunes and in October they released the first ipod. In 2002 Apple purchased Emagic. In 2003 they launched the iTunes music store. Which of these actions constitutes entering the "music business" ? To me the problem was with the original settlement. The wording is not clear. Apple Computer was also stupid to agree to something like this. They SHOULD have agreed not to become a record label, since that would never be their interest. iTMS is a store, not a label. If Apple Computer didn't sign such a stupid deal back in the 80s this wouldn't be an issue today.
How fast is this service? I've used my T-Mobile phone with my PowerBook over bluetooth (irda a few years back) and it has always been dirt slow. Is this card faster than modem speeds?
How big is the image? How big is your Dell image?
Man takes wrong turn: Half-naked motorist arrested with kiddie porn
I'm a Mac user. Macintouch is certainly one of the higher level sites in terms of writing quality. If these tests were run on the spymac forums I think we would see pretty atrocious results. I think a better way to do this would be to take samples from all major discussion sites and weight them by their readership percentages, if that information is even available.