You said yourself that you were a... let me scroll it up here... a "pedantic asshole" who told the interviewer, quite presumptuously, that a question was "silly." Furthermore, completely on the basis of the phrasing of one question, you had concluded that the entire company had a "prima donna" culture.
Maybe they didn't care about Unix experience, and were primarily testing your personal skills and your ability to hold a pleasant conversation with a non-technical person over the phone.
To be fair, FailWhale has not been seen by me of late, and the Twitter devs attribute their salvation to Scala. However, there are some pretty good arguments that the Twitter developers Mother of All Fail was initially trying to write their own hand-rolled message queue instead of simply using one off-the-shelf.
This would likely not cross into anti-trust territory.
When the film industry was finally taken to court over their vertical integration in US v. Paramount in 1948 the large holding companies that owned the production arms and theaters were forced to divest. Note though, the FTC had begun investigating the flim business for their abuse of their integrated delivery system in 1938, and it took 10 years of court cases and broken consent degrees with the Justice department before the deed was finally done.
Also note, the fact that Lowes owned MGM and Lowes Theaters, or that Paramount owned Paramount Studios and Publix Theaters was not sufficiently illegal for the court/FTC/Jusitce to take action. The real issue was that the holding companies used collusive formula deals and clearance and run arrangements to keep independent film producers from having a venue to show their own movies. The original complaints to the FTC were made by independent production companies that didn't own their own distro arm -- the first people to file suit were original United Artists partners and Sam Goldwyn, who sortof reminds of Mark Cuban minus the swearing.
What is it about the words -Criminal- and -Illegal- alien that is so hard for slashdotters to fathom.
I know exactly what they mean. I also have a working understanding of the term "universal human dignity." If you want to put a man away for comitting a crime, then do it. But to break a man, to force him to eat moldy food and to sexually humiliate him, let alone reward the state for doing it, is an altogether different thing. Absolute power over others corrupts absolutely; you let cops do awful things to people in jail, and I guarantee that eventually that's how they'll treat people on the outside, too. In this most recent case, they simply invaded a government building and staged a coup -- the police's attitude toward their responsibility as upholders of public trust has been destroyed by their chief's blatant disregard for the law in deference to his political prerogatives and his belief that his role in society is to be an arbiter of violence.
All he does is treat criminals as if they are sub-human and their dignity is his personal property. Besides, there seems to be an approximate consensus among the Maricopa anglo population people convicted of a crime aren't human beings, so clearly it's not sociopathic.
Contrary to how many see it, art is not centrally about "communication."
I'm not sure you've completely explicated this, because...
As soon as it becomes about communicating a message, producing multiple copies, making money, etc.
This is a non sequitir, it does not follow that the act of communication is tantamount to commerce. They are completely different things, there's a relationship but you're implying that any artist who is trying to communicate a message is simply prostituting himself for economic gain, or that the only true art is art that is a pure expression of the self. This is pretty contentious, particularly for folks who remix other people's works, and for people like me, who are sorta skeptical that there is such a thing as the self. The "Fountainhead" interpretation of the role of the artist in the end is pretty limited, and is bound up in a lot of trendy social ideas about individualism that are pretty parochial to the US.
Because when it becomes about the viewer, the viewer effectively controls or edits the work of the artist, effectively undermining their vision and process.
Well yeah, that's the idea. If there's a medium and a signifier, there's a signified, you can't really get away from that. And if the work has no significance, then the vision doesn't get out of the artist's head, and if it does have significance, the reader of the signs constructs his own model of the vision. The challenge of the artist is the use signs to convey his vision so that it lives intact outside of his mind, in the only other place a vision can live, in the minds of others.
(And BTW, I think the art lies more in the conceptualization than in the coding itself.)
Hmm, I'm not sure you can have an artwork without a text, or actual physical object. But there I go again being all semiotic.
Pardon me, but anytime you want to express an coding idea from one person to another, anytime you make an API that must then be understood by another, you are in the realms of art
It's an interesting thought, but it sounds more like you're describing "elegance" or "inspiration." A lot of jobs in the information age require a suceptibility to inspriation and original thinking, thought we can take it too far sometimes. When you get a sandwich at Subway, it's made by someone who's technically called a "sandwich artist" after all. I'm sensitive to people's need for creative recognition, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the guy making the sandwich an "artist" simply by dint of the fact that he's being original or taking pride in his work, or doing it in a stylish and attractive matter. A critical piece of "Art" with a capital A is exhibition, and encounter or dialogue between the artist and his society. I'm not sure computer APIs are "exhibited," except to an esoteric elite, and I've yet to see an API that actually caused me to reexamine life, or my relationship to society or the world.
That said, CS says a lot about who we are as a people, our supposed rationalism, our alienation, our prejudices, but just because computer science is a significant cultural artifact doesn't necessarily mean it's a modality for individual creative expression. I'm imaging a class 50 years from now, where a professor quizzes his students on how a programmer's use of Delegate pattern was indiciative of his anti-establishment attitudes and his foregrounding of the Other, and how another programmer who used continuation passing style was really a misogynist, because passing activation records is a metaphor for castration anxiety...
Maybe you can answer this: So Palm Pre apps are written in Javascript, HTML and CSS. What if I wanted to ship an app without giving the end user source code? Or, in other words, what if I actually wanted to credibly sell a Palm Pre app to someone?
I can see why FOSSies are happy about all of this, but the reason the iPhone app store took off is because people could make money selling apps. It just seems like this new Palm acts like the old Palm, in that you the developer sell one unit to someone and he beams it to a hundred of his friends, whereas with iPhones this is impractical.
Look harder. A shocking level of ignorance from a 5-digiter; did you buy your UID from someone?
Fun fact: the original HTML text attributes were based on the available text attributes in NSAttributedString, and HTML pages didn't support inline images until NSAttributedString did.
they'll respond to a five dollar shoplifing incident, why shouldn't they respond to my hundred dollar phone
The shoplifter is present and detained in the store, and the shopkeeper witnessed the theft with his own eyes. There's no hour-long triangulation process wherein you figure out the 100 yard radius where the phone is, and then demand that every person in the area submit to search, or maybe the guy is in his own house, and some GPS coordinates aren't probable cause for entry...
My Motorola i776 is GPS-enabled, but when it was stolen, Boost Mobile said they couldn't use the feature to find my phone.
Shoulda just called the number and said "Where you at?"
But seriously, if Boost gave you the location of the phone, they would be liable if you shot or otherwise visited an kind of harm upon the guy who stole it. Er vice versus. I suppose they could give the information to the police, but tracking down a hundred dollar theft is a waste of police resources.
It's sort of a bad example, because none of the brownouts at that time were caused by a lack of generator capacity; it was all caused by Enron and Reliant calling up their plants and telling them to call in sick for the day, causing spot prices for power to rise on account of lower supply, and calling their other plants and telling them to ship their capacity to Nevada, so they could (1) arbitrage cheap Nevada power into expensive California power and (2) sell transmission line capacity to themselves, causing the price of transmission capacity to go up and making the cost of piping the California poer to Nevada and back even more profitable.
For what it's worth, in a former life I developed with OpenGL and have contributed to two different OpenAL implementations (not much, but I'm familiar with the codebases and spec).
Did you guys actually talk to any sound designers when you designed this spec? There are so many other things you could have done, but instead you chased the chimera of "OpenGL for sound" or rather "a sound design API for people who hate sound design."
5.1 being implemetation-defined is unacceptable. The signal presented on speaker channels should never be a matter of the platform vendor's choice, it must be the designers.
My main issues with OpenAL are that it is completely based around the concept of a "listener" interacting with sounds in "space." In other words, it's the OpenGL semantic applied to sound. I looked into it originally because I wanted something more system-independent than Apple's CoreAudio, but really OpenAL is just a videogame language, and it's focused completely around choreographing sounds for interactive emulation of space. OpenAL is hell if you want to apply a subjective effects aside from its pre-cooked spatial repertory, or even do something simple like build a mixer with busses.
In my line, film post-production, the users really don't want to control the "direction" and "distance" of a sound, they want to control the pan and reverb send of a sound; the language and the model is simply too high level for people who are used to setting their own EQ poles and their own pitch-shifts for doppler.... Most of the models OpenAL uses to create distance and direction sensations are pretty subjective, arbitrary, and not really based on current pychoacoustic modelling. It works to an extent, but it doesn't give a sound designer, of a videogame or anything else, the level of control over the environment they generally expect. It certainly doesn't give a videogame sound designer the level of control over presentation that OpenGL gives the modeller or shader developer.
Oh, and OpenAL doesn't support 96k, 24 bit audio, or 5.1 surround.
I admit I am not their target audeince, and I can see how OpenAL is sufficient for videogame developers, but it really is nothing more than sufficient, and unlike OpenGL, which universal enough that it can be used in system and productivity software, on computers, phones, and in renderfarms on everything from calendar software to animated movies, OpenAL is strictly for videogames only.
IMO, the fundamental problem with OpenCL is the same as with OpenAL, which is that Operating System vendors don't provide a standard implementation as is done with OpenGL.
It's still pretty early to say, though Apple provides an API for this with Snow Leopard. I don't know it OpenAL is a bad comparison or not, but as someone that does audio coding, OpenAL is the biggest joke of an API yet devised by man. OpenAL has little support because it's an awful and usless set of resources and features.
I am wondering if HTML 5 can provide most of the functionality of Javascript without posing as much of a security risk.
What are the security risks of Javascript? I grant that different interpreters often have buffer overrun issues/string parsing shenanigans, but Javascript, taken as a thing independent of the different interpreters, really doesn't expose enough of the client's resources to the server to pose a "security risk," as that term is defined by prevailing consensus.
Only if your target browser supports the canvas tag. The canvas tag is only standardized in HTML5, but browsers starting with WebKit/Safari (around the time 10.4 came out -- Apple invented it for their Dashboard thing), and followed later by Opera, KHTML and FF, have suppported the tag ad hoc.
Sounds like the West African spin on the old incubus myths to me. If a girl wanted an abortion, it'd probably be much easier for her to claim she was carrying a gorilla child, rather than a cad's, or her uncle's...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not Mordoch, you insensitive clod! I merely share his genostructure!
Thanks for assuming that I was an ass thought. :)
You said yourself that you were a ... let me scroll it up here... a "pedantic asshole" who told the interviewer, quite presumptuously, that a question was "silly." Furthermore, completely on the basis of the phrasing of one question, you had concluded that the entire company had a "prima donna" culture.
Maybe they didn't care about Unix experience, and were primarily testing your personal skills and your ability to hold a pleasant conversation with a non-technical person over the phone.
Always keep an eye out for the psych test.
To be fair, FailWhale has not been seen by me of late, and the Twitter devs attribute their salvation to Scala. However, there are some pretty good arguments that the Twitter developers Mother of All Fail was initially trying to write their own hand-rolled message queue instead of simply using one off-the-shelf.
This would likely not cross into anti-trust territory.
When the film industry was finally taken to court over their vertical integration in US v. Paramount in 1948 the large holding companies that owned the production arms and theaters were forced to divest. Note though, the FTC had begun investigating the flim business for their abuse of their integrated delivery system in 1938, and it took 10 years of court cases and broken consent degrees with the Justice department before the deed was finally done.
Also note, the fact that Lowes owned MGM and Lowes Theaters, or that Paramount owned Paramount Studios and Publix Theaters was not sufficiently illegal for the court/FTC/Jusitce to take action. The real issue was that the holding companies used collusive formula deals and clearance and run arrangements to keep independent film producers from having a venue to show their own movies. The original complaints to the FTC were made by independent production companies that didn't own their own distro arm -- the first people to file suit were original United Artists partners and Sam Goldwyn, who sortof reminds of Mark Cuban minus the swearing.
What is it about the words -Criminal- and -Illegal- alien that is so hard for slashdotters to fathom.
I know exactly what they mean. I also have a working understanding of the term "universal human dignity." If you want to put a man away for comitting a crime, then do it. But to break a man, to force him to eat moldy food and to sexually humiliate him, let alone reward the state for doing it, is an altogether different thing. Absolute power over others corrupts absolutely; you let cops do awful things to people in jail, and I guarantee that eventually that's how they'll treat people on the outside, too. In this most recent case, they simply invaded a government building and staged a coup -- the police's attitude toward their responsibility as upholders of public trust has been destroyed by their chief's blatant disregard for the law in deference to his political prerogatives and his belief that his role in society is to be an arbiter of violence.
Mods please consider modding up, or at least going against tradition and not modding him down for swearing. Joe Arpaio probably has it coming.
I firmly believe he's a sociopath.
All he does is treat criminals as if they are sub-human and their dignity is his personal property. Besides, there seems to be an approximate consensus among the Maricopa anglo population people convicted of a crime aren't human beings, so clearly it's not sociopathic.
/sarcasm
Contrary to how many see it, art is not centrally about "communication."
I'm not sure you've completely explicated this, because...
As soon as it becomes about communicating a message, producing multiple copies, making money, etc.
This is a non sequitir, it does not follow that the act of communication is tantamount to commerce. They are completely different things, there's a relationship but you're implying that any artist who is trying to communicate a message is simply prostituting himself for economic gain, or that the only true art is art that is a pure expression of the self. This is pretty contentious, particularly for folks who remix other people's works, and for people like me, who are sorta skeptical that there is such a thing as the self. The "Fountainhead" interpretation of the role of the artist in the end is pretty limited, and is bound up in a lot of trendy social ideas about individualism that are pretty parochial to the US.
Because when it becomes about the viewer, the viewer effectively controls or edits the work of the artist, effectively undermining their vision and process.
Well yeah, that's the idea. If there's a medium and a signifier, there's a signified, you can't really get away from that. And if the work has no significance, then the vision doesn't get out of the artist's head, and if it does have significance, the reader of the signs constructs his own model of the vision. The challenge of the artist is the use signs to convey his vision so that it lives intact outside of his mind, in the only other place a vision can live, in the minds of others.
(And BTW, I think the art lies more in the conceptualization than in the coding itself.)
Hmm, I'm not sure you can have an artwork without a text, or actual physical object. But there I go again being all semiotic.
Hi, commerical artist and occasional coder here.
Pardon me, but anytime you want to express an coding idea from one person to another, anytime you make an API that must then be understood by another, you are in the realms of art
It's an interesting thought, but it sounds more like you're describing "elegance" or "inspiration." A lot of jobs in the information age require a suceptibility to inspriation and original thinking, thought we can take it too far sometimes. When you get a sandwich at Subway, it's made by someone who's technically called a "sandwich artist" after all. I'm sensitive to people's need for creative recognition, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the guy making the sandwich an "artist" simply by dint of the fact that he's being original or taking pride in his work, or doing it in a stylish and attractive matter. A critical piece of "Art" with a capital A is exhibition, and encounter or dialogue between the artist and his society. I'm not sure computer APIs are "exhibited," except to an esoteric elite, and I've yet to see an API that actually caused me to reexamine life, or my relationship to society or the world.
That said, CS says a lot about who we are as a people, our supposed rationalism, our alienation, our prejudices, but just because computer science is a significant cultural artifact doesn't necessarily mean it's a modality for individual creative expression. I'm imaging a class 50 years from now, where a professor quizzes his students on how a programmer's use of Delegate pattern was indiciative of his anti-establishment attitudes and his foregrounding of the Other, and how another programmer who used continuation passing style was really a misogynist, because passing activation records is a metaphor for castration anxiety...
What does an evil AI have to do with machine tool standards?
Saw it coming...
Maybe you can answer this: So Palm Pre apps are written in Javascript, HTML and CSS. What if I wanted to ship an app without giving the end user source code? Or, in other words, what if I actually wanted to credibly sell a Palm Pre app to someone?
I can see why FOSSies are happy about all of this, but the reason the iPhone app store took off is because people could make money selling apps. It just seems like this new Palm acts like the old Palm, in that you the developer sell one unit to someone and he beams it to a hundred of his friends, whereas with iPhones this is impractical.
Look harder. A shocking level of ignorance from a 5-digiter; did you buy your UID from someone?
Fun fact: the original HTML text attributes were based on the available text attributes in NSAttributedString, and HTML pages didn't support inline images until NSAttributedString did.
palmwitchdoctor.com work mostly in chicken.
they'll respond to a five dollar shoplifing incident, why shouldn't they respond to my hundred dollar phone
The shoplifter is present and detained in the store, and the shopkeeper witnessed the theft with his own eyes. There's no hour-long triangulation process wherein you figure out the 100 yard radius where the phone is, and then demand that every person in the area submit to search, or maybe the guy is in his own house, and some GPS coordinates aren't probable cause for entry...
My Motorola i776 is GPS-enabled, but when it was stolen, Boost Mobile said they couldn't use the feature to find my phone.
Shoulda just called the number and said "Where you at?"
But seriously, if Boost gave you the location of the phone, they would be liable if you shot or otherwise visited an kind of harm upon the guy who stole it. Er vice versus. I suppose they could give the information to the police, but tracking down a hundred dollar theft is a waste of police resources.
Gray Davis did.
The example that illustrates the point. As the wiki points out, Davis would have been happy to stop the brownouts, only the only clear way he could have done that is by removing price caps on long-term contracts that had been established through California's energy market de-regulation (CA de-regulated its power grid, but established caps as some sort of hedge against.. er... power generation companies and market makers abusing their position by creating artificial scarcity).
It's sort of a bad example, because none of the brownouts at that time were caused by a lack of generator capacity; it was all caused by Enron and Reliant calling up their plants and telling them to call in sick for the day, causing spot prices for power to rise on account of lower supply, and calling their other plants and telling them to ship their capacity to Nevada, so they could (1) arbitrage cheap Nevada power into expensive California power and (2) sell transmission line capacity to themselves, causing the price of transmission capacity to go up and making the cost of piping the California poer to Nevada and back even more profitable.
Did you guys actually talk to any sound designers when you designed this spec? There are so many other things you could have done, but instead you chased the chimera of "OpenGL for sound" or rather "a sound design API for people who hate sound design."
5.1 being implemetation-defined is unacceptable. The signal presented on speaker channels should never be a matter of the platform vendor's choice, it must be the designers.
My main issues with OpenAL are that it is completely based around the concept of a "listener" interacting with sounds in "space." In other words, it's the OpenGL semantic applied to sound. I looked into it originally because I wanted something more system-independent than Apple's CoreAudio, but really OpenAL is just a videogame language, and it's focused completely around choreographing sounds for interactive emulation of space. OpenAL is hell if you want to apply a subjective effects aside from its pre-cooked spatial repertory, or even do something simple like build a mixer with busses.
In my line, film post-production, the users really don't want to control the "direction" and "distance" of a sound, they want to control the pan and reverb send of a sound; the language and the model is simply too high level for people who are used to setting their own EQ poles and their own pitch-shifts for doppler.... Most of the models OpenAL uses to create distance and direction sensations are pretty subjective, arbitrary, and not really based on current pychoacoustic modelling. It works to an extent, but it doesn't give a sound designer, of a videogame or anything else, the level of control over the environment they generally expect. It certainly doesn't give a videogame sound designer the level of control over presentation that OpenGL gives the modeller or shader developer.
Oh, and OpenAL doesn't support 96k, 24 bit audio, or 5.1 surround.
I admit I am not their target audeince, and I can see how OpenAL is sufficient for videogame developers, but it really is nothing more than sufficient, and unlike OpenGL, which universal enough that it can be used in system and productivity software, on computers, phones, and in renderfarms on everything from calendar software to animated movies, OpenAL is strictly for videogames only.
IMO, the fundamental problem with OpenCL is the same as with OpenAL, which is that Operating System vendors don't provide a standard implementation as is done with OpenGL.
It's still pretty early to say, though Apple provides an API for this with Snow Leopard. I don't know it OpenAL is a bad comparison or not, but as someone that does audio coding, OpenAL is the biggest joke of an API yet devised by man. OpenAL has little support because it's an awful and usless set of resources and features.
I am wondering if HTML 5 can provide most of the functionality of Javascript without posing as much of a security risk.
What are the security risks of Javascript? I grant that different interpreters often have buffer overrun issues/string parsing shenanigans, but Javascript, taken as a thing independent of the different interpreters, really doesn't expose enough of the client's resources to the server to pose a "security risk," as that term is defined by prevailing consensus.
Only if your target browser supports the canvas tag. The canvas tag is only standardized in HTML5, but browsers starting with WebKit/Safari (around the time 10.4 came out -- Apple invented it for their Dashboard thing), and followed later by Opera, KHTML and FF, have suppported the tag ad hoc.
Sounds like the West African spin on the old incubus myths to me. If a girl wanted an abortion, it'd probably be much easier for her to claim she was carrying a gorilla child, rather than a cad's, or her uncle's...
I agree that it was basically impossible for then to recast the roles, because of the fanboys, it was just Fox going thru the motions.