for five years. In my time I interviewed lots of candidates, probably around 80 or so. Probably 1/3 were for summer internships, 1/3 for full-time, and another 1/3 were a special category of contractors interviewing for full-time lab positions (i.e. no programming, and this was mostly in 2000 when Microsoft decided to convert qualified contractors to full-time).
I always hated puzzle interviews, and did my best to avoid giving them. Because at a certain level all you are testing for is whether they've heard the puzzle before.
I used puzzles to break the ice, just to get them thinking of something for the first 5 minutes. I always used easy puzzles (e.g. two containers, one 7 liters, one 4 liters, measure 6 liters exactly) so the candidate wouldn't get too nervous.
I would generally ask some CS or EE (my grad and undergrad respectively) theory related question. For interns, I would start by asking what classes they were taking and then ask them question related to their coursework.
I switched between two programming questions:
1) iterative and recursive Fibonacci 2) find the longest repeated letter in a string
If they got both parts of #1 correct, I'd ask about efficiency and then if they had any ideas about making it faster.
#2 has a couple of interesting test cases I'd have them step through.
Anyway, that was about it. I could go on about lame questions I've had while interviewing for other positions inside Microsoft;)
I recently cancelled my TiVo subscription, because my unit has a defect. I bought a series 2 Tivo from an online company, and it died, so I sent it back for service. They fixed my TiVo (took about a month) but left off the id chip.
Basically my TiVo doesn't identify itself properly when it calls in, so I don't get any of the software updates (mine is still on 2.0). It gets the guide data just fine. No home media option, no broadband, etc. I found this out by calling up Tivo and talking to one of their guys for a long time.
Anyway, they suggested I cancel my subscription while I have my system fixed, it might take a couple weeks to get the fix turned around.
Not to be cheap, but I'm thinking of just not having it fixed until something more drastic happens. I can live without Tivo recording suggestions, and can replace my season passes with manual recording (I mean, hey, how often do shows move around?). I would still get the benefits of time-shifting and large recording space.
Plus, I'm half thinking about building my own Tivo for fun, using a shuttle pc, ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder, etc. Then I would have access to the files for archiving, be able to easily add disk space, possibly add extra features like HDTV decoding, etc. Funny thing, I don't mind building a PC but am squeamish about opening up consumer electronics;)
Tivo charges per unit, each unit that calls up and downloads the program/guide data needs to have a subscription (and/or already has a lifetime subscription).
Descarte's demon that tricks you is the origin of his famous "I think there for I am" statement.
IIRC, Descarte used a "demon", some powerful evil being that feeds lies to you. In such a situation, you can't trust what you see, what you smell, etc. since the demon might be controlling your senses. In fact, you don't know anything except that you are alive, because you have the ability to question everything. Thus, thinking = alive, or "I think therefore I am".
I don't remember the existance of God proof, but it was a while ago that I read it;)
Not to be a Microsoft apologist, but there's a little more to it than that. OS/2 promised compatibility with Windows programs, because it wrapped some API's by basically offsetting into Windows DLL's. This of course required a legal copy of Windows to be present. Thus, usually, OS/2 and Windows were sold together to get the compatibility.
Windows for Workgroups came out, and totally broke this for OS/2. Conspiracy theory suggest Microsoft did this on purpose, but again, to be fair to Microsoft, there is pretty much no way to even fix bugs without causing the offsets to shift slightly (and offsets were what OS/2 depended on).
This was all before OS/2 Warp came out, this is based on memories of about 10 years ago.
This show has heroes that are geeks - Willow and Giles. Willow is the computer wiz, Giles is the librarian. Many a show would have them off researching for info to pass to Buffy before fights.
The show won some award from a Librarian Association for portraying librarians in such a positive way.
It is hard to tell. Bugs are filed for the obvious (software errors) but also things like new features desired, performance enhancements to be had, and occasionally things like rearchitecture needed (say, redo horribly confusing UI to something better).
It is true though, when the war room meets you have to have somebody there to vouch for any fixes checked in to resolve bugs. Mostly the war room wants to hear about impact, if the fix was tested, any issues that arose from the testing (regressions and/or new problems), and if the fix is really needed.
They use build.exe which winds up calling nmake, Microsoft's make.
The build process is divided up as well, each major group has a build lab (e.g. COM, Networking, kernel, shell) where they build their part of the product daily. Builds mean generating free, checked, for all SKUs (server, advanced, datacenter, etc.) and all CPUs (x86, ia64, amd64). When each group's build achieves a level of stability/quality, they integrate their changes into the master build lab, and eventually there is a reverse integrate from master to group to pick up other group's changes which might effect your area.
There's a morning and evening build, but we just started to ignore one of them because it was way too much time to be installing and/or upgrading twice a day.
So "they" aren't just building from scratch every day, the master build lab is building 5+ SKU's, free/checked, for 3 CPU's every day. And the group build lab's (called virtual build labs) are doing the same, but just for their area;)
Whew, good thing all the software you use on your super valuable personal data is guarenteed to work and never corrupt your information. I mean, that would be a huge liability you are protected from, thankfully.
Probably none, since if they are legit you can hardly expect the person who leaked them to announce that fact. They'd be terminated, as per Brian Valentine's policy on confidential material.
True. To add to your story, I was able to visit the UK in 2000 and went to Salisbury to see nearby Stonehenge. The Salisbury cathedral houses one of four surviving copies of the Magna Carta. This copy is quite legible (compared to the others, which have decayed, been water stained, faded, etc.)
Unfortunately, it was impossible to understand. The script was Latin (I think, this is from memory), written in a very elaborate script (heh, no Courier font back then), peppered with dozens and dozens of abbreviations in common use at the time... basically you could see an original Magna Carta but needed the info placards to make anything of it.
It was cool though given the significance of the document.
There is at least a dependency on your disk subsystem, i.e. if you have/haven't chopped out SCSI support or configured for a different card see how well you boot by transferring an image.
I think the built in hard drive sucks... at best it is a neutral feature.
It adds heat, cost, complexity, fragility, and makes the console far less portable.
Maybe this isn't typical, but I pack my PS2 up all the time and take it to a friend's place.
Is there no alternative to saving on the hard drive? I like being able to pop out the memory card and take it around as well. Buddy stuck somewhere in a game you've gotten past? Let them copy your saved game. PS2 died? Your stuff is elsewhere. If you're worried about the memory card dying, but another and copy it. Most people probably won't care enough to do this, and they don't have to do it, and save money.
Why did the XBox have to come with a hard drive? If saving games is the only benefit, why not package a memory card with the XBox??? Does it provide some superior game functionality?
I'll give that the XBox has better graphics (over a PS2). But it also came out a year later.
Uh... I don't know for certain, but I bet more people that you think have access to the source, on a product by product basis. At the very least *somebody* builds each product on a regular basis, and that means the people in the build labs have access.
Yes, people are compensated well, but then it becomes an economic exercise to find a price somebody is willing to leak for.
I don't mean to be rude, but if nuclear secrets get leaked then so can Microsoft source code.
Fairly rigorous checking of who - their employees or companies that have a source license?
And the argument that *I* can't find exploitable backdoors is stupid - if this is the case then why is Microsoft using this arument against releasing their source code in the first place?
Well I suppose there is a grain of truth in there somewhere.
The tape backup app that ships with Windows was written by Seagate. VERITAS bought them a few years ago. The tape backup app had always been written by another company.
They didn't have anything to do with the file system. Not even Seagate, since they're involvement pretty much stopped at making the BackupRead, BackupWrite, and BackupSeek API's. Those have a bit to do with the filesystem as they allow globbing NTFS metadata into a form that can be writting elsewhere and restored. But they just package the info returned from a lower layer, they didn't actually design the lower layer.
The whole sentence about VxVM and the MMC is mangled (magazine's fault, not yours). VxVM only concerns itself with volume management, while the MMC provides a framework for hosting all the little admin-type apps. The LDM is an MMC snap-in, and the LDM is a light version of VxVM.
VERITAS (the name is all caps) wrote the Logical Disk Manager (LDM) which shipped in Win2000 and WinXP. The LDM replaced Disk Administrator, which was the volume management tool in WinNT 4.0 and previous versions. Microsoft paid for VERITAS to port their unix product.
VERITAS had nothing to do with NTFS. VERITAS has their own file system, VxFS, but I haven't seen it on Windows in any form (filter driver, installable file system, etc.)
Dynamic disks are part of the VERITAS technology, the idea is essentially the MBR is a place holder for the real configuration data which is held elsewhere on the disk.
The "clunky drive letter scheme" is maintained by the Mount Manager (mountmgr.sys) which is a Microsoft binary.
Software liability will be a tricky because of a domino-like effect: you may want to "guarentee" the code you wrote, but how can you do that unless you also guarentee the operating system it runs on? A bug in the OS may ruin your program. Oh, did you write the compiler you used? Maybe the compiler has a bug and introduced an optimization bug. Did you build the hardware? Do you really know if it works properly under all circumstances?
That is to say, some limited liability would be very useful. It would force vendors to feel some pain when they unleash buggy code.
For example, if Hailstorm/Passport/whatever has a security problem that leaks user credit card info, who is liabile for the fradulent charges? Hint: not Microsoft. If by law MS had to back the faulty charges out of its bank account, I predict Passport would be immediately withdrawn for a couple years of "redesign".
I work with SCSI quite a bit (but not as much lately), and cannot wait until it dies.
SCSI means dealing with id's, termination, cable lengths, and interfaces. As if these irritations aren't enough, no scsi device I'm aware of behaves well in a hot-plug situation (except for disks in a disk cabinet).
Compare that to USB or Firewire... plug in, and it is available. No id to set, no termination to worry about, etc.
I have to keep a collection of cables around just so I can connect my peripherals together... trying to connect from a iomega zip, vhdci cabinet, scsi 2 and scsi 3 disks together is a nightmare. Then you have a differential device and it gets worse.
It looks odd the author wrote his own XOR function, what is wrong with the ^ operator?
Anyway, if I had sensitive data I'd toss my fortunes with PGP, which rests on the security of RSA and IDEA, assuming no other protocol failures (which should be flushed out as the code is available for inspection).
gov't regs are part of it but they are there for a reason.
The state is essentially tying growth to services, telling builders that slapping down 1000 houses means somebody needs to step up capacity to provide all sorts of services from police to fire to electricity to water to garbage disposal to gas to roads to schools, and jobs since not everybody is going to work for an internet startup.
It sounds like the area is suffering from a bad positive feedback loop, where merely dropping regulation and letting thousands of cheap homes go up would cause a population explosion that in turn will choke up all the over-strained infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
for five years. In my time I interviewed lots of candidates, probably around 80 or so. Probably 1/3 were for summer internships, 1/3 for full-time, and another 1/3 were a special category of contractors interviewing for full-time lab positions (i.e. no programming, and this was mostly in 2000 when Microsoft decided to convert qualified contractors to full-time).
;)
I always hated puzzle interviews, and did my best to avoid giving them. Because at a certain level all you are testing for is whether they've heard the puzzle before.
I used puzzles to break the ice, just to get them thinking of something for the first 5 minutes. I always used easy puzzles (e.g. two containers, one 7 liters, one 4 liters, measure 6 liters exactly) so the candidate wouldn't get too nervous.
I would generally ask some CS or EE (my grad and undergrad respectively) theory related question. For interns, I would start by asking what classes they were taking and then ask them question related to their coursework.
I switched between two programming questions:
1) iterative and recursive Fibonacci
2) find the longest repeated letter in a string
If they got both parts of #1 correct, I'd ask about efficiency and then if they had any ideas about making it faster.
#2 has a couple of interesting test cases I'd have them step through.
Anyway, that was about it. I could go on about lame questions I've had while interviewing for other positions inside Microsoft
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,692134, 00.asp
I recently cancelled my TiVo subscription, because my unit has a defect. I bought a series 2 Tivo from an online company, and it died, so I sent it back for service. They fixed my TiVo (took about a month) but left off the id chip.
;)
Basically my TiVo doesn't identify itself properly when it calls in, so I don't get any of the software updates (mine is still on 2.0). It gets the guide data just fine. No home media option, no broadband, etc. I found this out by calling up Tivo and talking to one of their guys for a long time.
Anyway, they suggested I cancel my subscription while I have my system fixed, it might take a couple weeks to get the fix turned around.
Not to be cheap, but I'm thinking of just not having it fixed until something more drastic happens. I can live without Tivo recording suggestions, and can replace my season passes with manual recording (I mean, hey, how often do shows move around?). I would still get the benefits of time-shifting and large recording space.
Plus, I'm half thinking about building my own Tivo for fun, using a shuttle pc, ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder, etc. Then I would have access to the files for archiving, be able to easily add disk space, possibly add extra features like HDTV decoding, etc. Funny thing, I don't mind building a PC but am squeamish about opening up consumer electronics
Tivo charges per unit, each unit that calls up and downloads the program/guide data needs to have a subscription (and/or already has a lifetime subscription).
Descarte's demon that tricks you is the origin of his famous "I think there for I am" statement.
;)
IIRC, Descarte used a "demon", some powerful evil being that feeds lies to you. In such a situation, you can't trust what you see, what you smell, etc. since the demon might be controlling your senses. In fact, you don't know anything except that you are alive, because you have the ability to question everything. Thus, thinking = alive, or "I think therefore I am".
I don't remember the existance of God proof, but it was a while ago that I read it
Not to be a Microsoft apologist, but there's a little more to it than that. OS/2 promised compatibility with Windows programs, because it wrapped some API's by basically offsetting into Windows DLL's. This of course required a legal copy of Windows to be present. Thus, usually, OS/2 and Windows were sold together to get the compatibility.
Windows for Workgroups came out, and totally broke this for OS/2. Conspiracy theory suggest Microsoft did this on purpose, but again, to be fair to Microsoft, there is pretty much no way to even fix bugs without causing the offsets to shift slightly (and offsets were what OS/2 depended on).
This was all before OS/2 Warp came out, this is based on memories of about 10 years ago.
I watch it.
This show has heroes that are geeks - Willow and Giles. Willow is the computer wiz, Giles is the librarian. Many a show would have them off researching for info to pass to Buffy before fights.
The show won some award from a Librarian Association for portraying librarians in such a positive way.
Name me another show that has that!
It is hard to tell. Bugs are filed for the obvious (software errors) but also things like new features desired, performance enhancements to be had, and occasionally things like rearchitecture needed (say, redo horribly confusing UI to something better).
It is true though, when the war room meets you have to have somebody there to vouch for any fixes checked in to resolve bugs. Mostly the war room wants to hear about impact, if the fix was tested, any issues that arose from the testing (regressions and/or new problems), and if the fix is really needed.
They use build.exe which winds up calling nmake, Microsoft's make.
;)
The build process is divided up as well, each major group has a build lab (e.g. COM, Networking, kernel, shell) where they build their part of the product daily. Builds mean generating free, checked, for all SKUs (server, advanced, datacenter, etc.) and all CPUs (x86, ia64, amd64). When each group's build achieves a level of stability/quality, they integrate their changes into the master build lab, and eventually there is a reverse integrate from master to group to pick up other group's changes which might effect your area.
There's a morning and evening build, but we just started to ignore one of them because it was way too much time to be installing and/or upgrading twice a day.
So "they" aren't just building from scratch every day, the master build lab is building 5+ SKU's, free/checked, for 3 CPU's every day. And the group build lab's (called virtual build labs) are doing the same, but just for their area
Whew, good thing all the software you use on your super valuable personal data is guarenteed to work and never corrupt your information. I mean, that would be a huge liability you are protected from, thankfully.
NOT
Probably none, since if they are legit you can hardly expect the person who leaked them to announce that fact. They'd be terminated, as per Brian Valentine's policy on confidential material.
True. To add to your story, I was able to visit the UK in 2000 and went to Salisbury to see nearby Stonehenge. The Salisbury cathedral houses one of four surviving copies of the Magna Carta. This copy is quite legible (compared to the others, which have decayed, been water stained, faded, etc.)
Unfortunately, it was impossible to understand. The script was Latin (I think, this is from memory), written in a very elaborate script (heh, no Courier font back then), peppered with dozens and dozens of abbreviations in common use at the time... basically you could see an original Magna Carta but needed the info placards to make anything of it.
It was cool though given the significance of the document.
How many hardware/module dependencies are there
There is at least a dependency on your disk subsystem, i.e. if you have/haven't chopped out SCSI support or configured for a different card see how well you boot by transferring an image.
No censorship or 1st Amendment issues here - the Bill of Rights puts a limit on what the government can do, not what a private company can do.
Yes, there is a limited space for storing programs. But, nothing stops you from connecting your VCR in to TiVo out and recording a show to tape.
For me, the advantage of Tivo is all about:
1) watching a show while it is recording, instead of having to wait for the show to finish
2) pause/replay live TV - so I can see something again (make my own football replays or redo conversation I missed)
3) set and forget recording - so that something I want to see is always on
You can't do #1 and #2 with a VCR, and I suppose you could try to do #3 but you'd have to be incredibly organized to juggle tapes around.
I think the built in hard drive sucks... at best it is a neutral feature.
It adds heat, cost, complexity, fragility, and makes the console far less portable.
Maybe this isn't typical, but I pack my PS2 up all the time and take it to a friend's place.
Is there no alternative to saving on the hard drive? I like being able to pop out the memory card and take it around as well. Buddy stuck somewhere in a game you've gotten past? Let them copy your saved game. PS2 died? Your stuff is elsewhere. If you're worried about the memory card dying, but another and copy it. Most people probably won't care enough to do this, and they don't have to do it, and save money.
Why did the XBox have to come with a hard drive? If saving games is the only benefit, why not package a memory card with the XBox??? Does it provide some superior game functionality?
I'll give that the XBox has better graphics (over a PS2). But it also came out a year later.
Uh... I don't know for certain, but I bet more people that you think have access to the source, on a product by product basis. At the very least *somebody* builds each product on a regular basis, and that means the people in the build labs have access.
Yes, people are compensated well, but then it becomes an economic exercise to find a price somebody is willing to leak for.
I don't mean to be rude, but if nuclear secrets get leaked then so can Microsoft source code.
Fairly rigorous checking of who - their employees or companies that have a source license?
And the argument that *I* can't find exploitable backdoors is stupid - if this is the case then why is Microsoft using this arument against releasing their source code in the first place?
I don't understand the goal of Microsoft's argument.
The only solution is fixing the bugs.
If "enemies" were serious about exploiting software flaws, they would:
1) bribe MS employees to get access to source code for Windows, Exchange, Office, Sql Server, etc.
2) create fake companies that would then pay for source code licenses and/or full access to the code.
Well I suppose there is a grain of truth in there somewhere.
The tape backup app that ships with Windows was written by Seagate. VERITAS bought them a few years ago. The tape backup app had always been written by another company.
They didn't have anything to do with the file system. Not even Seagate, since they're involvement pretty much stopped at making the BackupRead, BackupWrite, and BackupSeek API's. Those have a bit to do with the filesystem as they allow globbing NTFS metadata into a form that can be writting elsewhere and restored. But they just package the info returned from a lower layer, they didn't actually design the lower layer.
The whole sentence about VxVM and the MMC is mangled (magazine's fault, not yours). VxVM only concerns itself with volume management, while the MMC provides a framework for hosting all the little admin-type apps. The LDM is an MMC snap-in, and the LDM is a light version of VxVM.
Not quite.
VERITAS (the name is all caps) wrote the Logical Disk Manager (LDM) which shipped in Win2000 and WinXP. The LDM replaced Disk Administrator, which was the volume management tool in WinNT 4.0 and previous versions. Microsoft paid for VERITAS to port their unix product.
VERITAS had nothing to do with NTFS. VERITAS has their own file system, VxFS, but I haven't seen it on Windows in any form (filter driver, installable file system, etc.)
Dynamic disks are part of the VERITAS technology, the idea is essentially the MBR is a place holder for the real configuration data which is held elsewhere on the disk.
The "clunky drive letter scheme" is maintained by the Mount Manager (mountmgr.sys) which is a Microsoft binary.
Software liability will be a tricky because of a domino-like effect: you may want to "guarentee" the code you wrote, but how can you do that unless you also guarentee the operating system it runs on? A bug in the OS may ruin your program. Oh, did you write the compiler you used? Maybe the compiler has a bug and introduced an optimization bug. Did you build the hardware? Do you really know if it works properly under all circumstances?
That is to say, some limited liability would be very useful. It would force vendors to feel some pain when they unleash buggy code.
For example, if Hailstorm/Passport/whatever has a security problem that leaks user credit card info, who is liabile for the fradulent charges? Hint: not Microsoft. If by law MS had to back the faulty charges out of its bank account, I predict Passport would be immediately withdrawn for a couple years of "redesign".
I work with SCSI quite a bit (but not as much lately), and cannot wait until it dies.
SCSI means dealing with id's, termination, cable lengths, and interfaces. As if these irritations aren't enough, no scsi device I'm aware of behaves well in a hot-plug situation (except for disks in a disk cabinet).
Compare that to USB or Firewire... plug in, and it is available. No id to set, no termination to worry about, etc.
I have to keep a collection of cables around just so I can connect my peripherals together... trying to connect from a iomega zip, vhdci cabinet, scsi 2 and scsi 3 disks together is a nightmare. Then you have a differential device and it gets worse.
Anyway, if I had sensitive data I'd toss my fortunes with PGP, which rests on the security of RSA and IDEA, assuming no other protocol failures (which should be flushed out as the code is available for inspection).
maybe, maybe not... I thought I read something about embedded NT on the horizon ;-)
The state is essentially tying growth to services, telling builders that slapping down 1000 houses means somebody needs to step up capacity to provide all sorts of services from police to fire to electricity to water to garbage disposal to gas to roads to schools, and jobs since not everybody is going to work for an internet startup.
It sounds like the area is suffering from a bad positive feedback loop, where merely dropping regulation and letting thousands of cheap homes go up would cause a population explosion that in turn will choke up all the over-strained infrastructure.