$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.
Is it? Is it *really*? What decent office software can your corporate (read, Windows) users buy for $50 a year? Compared with a world-class mail, calendar and collaboration suite?
Surely, $50 a head to save your IT department from having to provide:
* Mail servers (training, architecture, backing store, backups)
* Calendar server (as above)
* Shared document access is cost-effective.
As an example, I worked out how much it cost my university of 20,000 users to migrate to and use MS Exchange over five years. I might add, the worst of it was that they went for Exchange and now students are mandated to use Outlook Web Access for their email. It came to about $2M in staff costs alone. Factor in hardware costs (they were talking 25 high-end servers and a pair of beefy NetApps storage devices), power, space and aircon -- suddenly $50 p.a. starts to look really well worth it.
Sorry, didn't quite catch that. Did you say, "Open yourself up to massive liability and provide a critical service that will break on the same day the student has deleted his thesis?"
In my previous job, I had been maltreated and, worse, ignored by the senior management team -- they were and are dead set to deploy MS Exchange for our university mail system. I found a better job and whilst waiting out my three-month notice period, I kept smiling, even when told I was going to get a demotion in the old job. I'm glad I didn't unleash my ire on the fools in management because I still have friends there and could well want to return, once the managers have cycled.
Now I work for a large company and do phone-screens and in-person interviews in addition to my day-to-day engineering work. I always try to be polite and clear to the candidates: they're under enough stress as it is. On several occasions, a candidate has thanked me for the informative interview -- these are usually the candidates I'll be rejecting, but at least they are getting something of value for their efforts.
I don't really care whether the candidates remember me or not, since we have such a high attenuation curve for the interview process. However, it's important that the candidate leaves that process with a positive impression of the company and an idea that he would at least like to work for us. After all, even failed candidates can recommend that others apply to us.
I can actually relate to the concept of playing with a candidate like a cat with an injured mouse: this may be how some people see our interviews, especially if we keep asking them to clarify a given point. However bad it feels to do this, it's in the candidate's best interest for us to persevere and winkle out the knowledge they have so we can report back more completely about their skills.
I'm sorry; you seemed so negative about the process. I'm glad it was at least useful for you.
On a scale from -10 (tooth extraction without anaesthetic) to +10 (teh best ever sex), this hideously unrepresentative sample of three Googlers rate the interview process at 4, with nobody marking it below 2.
These are five separate interviews hosted by five different people, each of whom tests a different competence. I like it, and I approved of the interview system even before I started working for Google. Different people's perspectives give a more well-rounded answer about how good someone is.
Oh No! You actually get asked interesting questions by people who you might end up working alongside! How terrible that must be for you. Far better to waste a day being interviewed by a panel of five or six clueless managers who haven't the faintest idea what your job would actually entail if you can lie most convincingly.
I can see just how dreadful that must be, to have a rigorous test of your competence.
BTW, we tend not to have more than five in-person interviews these days.
I use a slide rule quite often for converting between, say, pounds and kilos. Since I can just set it and read off the requisite weights, I don't need to get it dirty.
ObSad: Mine is a British Thornton AA 010 Comprehensive. Made in England, don't you know!
I connected my University to Usenet II (on our new Debian GNU/Linux box!) and found that there is practically no traffic. There have only been 11 articles in the past week or so.
However, this is only because people aren't joining up and talking. So I would recommend that you still make the effort to find a Usenet II peer as long as you can keep your site 'sound'.
Cooling to really low temperatures is important for physicists to study the properties of weird things like Bose-Einstein condensates -- macroscopic amounts of stuff behaving in a quantum manner. This, as usual, helps with our understanding of quantum mechanics in specific and physics in general.
However, you may not be satisfied with such a response -- not practical enough? Cold atoms are essential for decent atomic clocks, because such a clock works by measuring the natural frequency of oscillation of the atoms. If they have heat too, they wobble due to this temperature as well as due to the natural frequency so you get a lower signal-to-noise ratio.
Atomic clocks are also very useful for physics -- some aspects of special relativity have been confirmed directly by this (twin paradox, anyone?).
Ultimately you might ask what the practical point is for this too. Those funky global positioning satellites need accuracy of this order to work out where the satellite is at any one time and hence where you are.
I was chatting this over with my systems administrator, and she tells me that you absolutely must not snoop into somebody else's files because the trust between a sysadmin and the users would be irrevocably broken.
She never su's into anyone else's account unless they are in the room with her and have given their tacit approval, or she's phoned them for explicit permission, or it's a screaming emergency and she must in case another World War breaks out.
Admittedly, I was a tad sceptical about all this but it does seem to be right. For real-time communications only, of course.
A caveat: If there exists a wormhole between A and B such that the time taken from A to B is 'subverted' to be smaller than expected, the whole system breaks down.
So in effect, you have to check that the local space between A and B is Minkowski-like before communicating. Or just trust!
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$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.
Is it? Is it *really*? What decent office software can your corporate (read, Windows) users buy for $50 a year? Compared with a world-class mail, calendar and collaboration suite?
Surely, $50 a head to save your IT department from having to provide:
* Mail servers (training, architecture, backing store, backups)
* Calendar server (as above)
* Shared document access
is cost-effective.
As an example, I worked out how much it cost my university of 20,000 users to migrate to and use MS Exchange over five years. I might add, the worst of it was that they went for Exchange and now students are mandated to use Outlook Web Access for their email. It came to about $2M in staff costs alone. Factor in hardware costs (they were talking 25 high-end servers and a pair of beefy NetApps storage devices), power, space and aircon -- suddenly $50 p.a. starts to look really well worth it.
Sorry, didn't quite catch that. Did you say, "Open yourself up to massive liability and provide a critical service that will break on the same day the student has deleted his thesis?"
In my previous job, I had been maltreated and, worse, ignored by the senior management team -- they were and are dead set to deploy MS Exchange for our university mail system. I found a better job and whilst waiting out my three-month notice period, I kept smiling, even when told I was going to get a demotion in the old job. I'm glad I didn't unleash my ire on the fools in management because I still have friends there and could well want to return, once the managers have cycled.
Now I work for a large company and do phone-screens and in-person interviews in addition to my day-to-day engineering work. I always try to be polite and clear to the candidates: they're under enough stress as it is. On several occasions, a candidate has thanked me for the informative interview -- these are usually the candidates I'll be rejecting, but at least they are getting something of value for their efforts.
I don't really care whether the candidates remember me or not, since we have such a high attenuation curve for the interview process. However, it's important that the candidate leaves that process with a positive impression of the company and an idea that he would at least like to work for us. After all, even failed candidates can recommend that others apply to us.
I can actually relate to the concept of playing with a candidate like a cat with an injured mouse: this may be how some people see our interviews, especially if we keep asking them to clarify a given point. However bad it feels to do this, it's in the candidate's best interest for us to persevere and winkle out the knowledge they have so we can report back more completely about their skills.
I'm sorry; you seemed so negative about the process. I'm glad it was at least useful for you.
On a scale from -10 (tooth extraction without anaesthetic) to +10 (teh best ever sex), this hideously unrepresentative sample of three Googlers rate the interview process at 4, with nobody marking it below 2.
These are five separate interviews hosted by five different people, each of whom tests a different competence. I like it, and I approved of the interview system even before I started working for Google. Different people's perspectives give a more well-rounded answer about how good someone is.
> The interview process is not very fun at all.
Oh No! You actually get asked interesting questions by people who you might end up working alongside! How terrible that must be for you. Far better to waste a day being interviewed by a panel of five or six clueless managers who haven't the faintest idea what your job would actually entail if you can lie most convincingly.
I can see just how dreadful that must be, to have a rigorous test of your competence.
BTW, we tend not to have more than five in-person interviews these days.
"When Google Desktop encounters a situation in which Internet Explorer's security hole could be exploited, it raises E_IEIO" said MacDonald.
You can arbitrarily indent .ws files; you just have to use CR and non-space, non-tab ASCII characters.
If you look here you'll find the Debian Intent To Package statement.
In case you haven't already tumbled to it, the language is real.
Have you found which of the files in the source distribution are executable wspace programs?
I use a slide rule quite often for converting between, say, pounds and kilos. Since I can just set it and read off the requisite weights, I don't need to get it dirty.
ObSad: Mine is a British Thornton AA 010 Comprehensive. Made in England, don't you know!
I connected my University to Usenet II (on our new Debian GNU/Linux box!) and found that there is practically no traffic. There have only been 11 articles in the past week or so.
However, this is only because people aren't joining up and talking. So I would recommend that you still make the effort to find a Usenet II peer as long as you can keep your site 'sound'.
Cooling to really low temperatures is important for physicists to study the properties of weird things like Bose-Einstein condensates -- macroscopic amounts of stuff behaving in a quantum manner. This, as usual, helps with our understanding of quantum mechanics in specific and physics in general.
However, you may not be satisfied with such a response -- not practical enough? Cold atoms are essential for decent atomic clocks, because such a clock works by measuring the natural frequency of oscillation of the atoms. If they have heat too, they wobble due to this temperature as well as due to the natural frequency so you get a lower signal-to-noise ratio.
Atomic clocks are also very useful for physics -- some aspects of special relativity have been confirmed directly by this (twin paradox, anyone?).
Ultimately you might ask what the practical point is for this too. Those funky global positioning satellites need accuracy of this order to work out where the satellite is at any one time and hence where you are.
Quantum computing has great potential (sic) but it is essentially a Brute Force Attack. It's just like a massively parallel attack.
Nothing complicated in how you use quantum computing -- it's just how to make them that's the big problem!
I reckon ease of use is the most important thing when doing embedded programming -- and the divide and multiply instructions certainly do that.
But the thing I liked best about the Z80 was that it would automagically refresh your memory for you. Great stuff!
Still, can't beat the 6502.
I was chatting this over with my systems administrator, and she tells me that you absolutely must not snoop into somebody else's files because the trust between a sysadmin and the users would be irrevocably broken.
She never su's into anyone else's account unless they are in the room with her and have given their tacit approval, or she's phoned them for explicit permission, or it's a screaming emergency and she must in case another World War breaks out.
Sounds like a good policy to me.
Admittedly, I was a tad sceptical about all this but it does seem to be right. For real-time communications only, of course.
A caveat: If there exists a wormhole between A and B such that the time taken from A to B is 'subverted' to be smaller than expected, the whole system breaks down.
So in effect, you have to check that the local space between A and B is Minkowski-like before communicating. Or just trust!