A base 10 timing metric is a dreadful idea. Dividing things into units of 60 is genuinely brilliant, and there's a reason it's still around after several thousand years. You can divide groups of sixty into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, and tenths without ever cracking an integer. Base-10 numbers can only be divided into halves, fifths, tenths... you can't do thirds and quarters consistently. And yes, this was a conscientious choice. The Babylonians didn't have fraction theory fully worked out, so deliberately picked numbers that were easy to think about and use.
I doubt base-60 would, itself, be a good idea, because we'd need to come up with 60 digits. But using base 10, then using units of 60 from there on up? It's very well thought out, and behaves quite a bit better than units of 100. The metric system would arguably be much improved if it also did things this way -- tried to write down "a third of a meter" lately? I hope you like your receding decimal points.
Have you actually read anything that Bill Gates is saying on this issue? He makes pretty much the exact same points. He's already doing the stuff in your "do this" section.
If you want to get angry, go get angry at someone who deserves it.
I would guess you're lying about ever having taken Econ 101. I'm either an idiot or an expert, having taken it three times, but I do remember quite clearly about day four of the first time round, when the Economics teacher, arms flailing wildly, yelled as loudly as he could "ECONOMICS IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME!" He then went on to explain that anyone who said so is an idiot who doesn't understand economics. The textbook went on in more or less the same fashion.
Your post has approximately as many mistakes as it has sentences. Let's begin, shall we?
"There is a finite amount of money."
No, money has value only because we imagine it does, and has no intrinsic worth except as a means of trading value. The amount of value in an economy contracts and expands, and is roughly the sum of everything useful that everyone does plus the value of everything everyone owns. If you work harder, the economy gets bigger. If you slack off, the economy contracts by just so much. If you create something new and useful, you have created wealth. If you destroy or quit doing something useful, you have destroyed wealth.
"Thus, if $1000 more is spent on software, $1000 less is spent elsewhere. Roughly speaking, 6000 new software jobs equals 6000 fewer other jobs."
No. Value is measured by how much work people are doing and what they are creating. If the money supply stays constant but the amount of work being done increases, then money *becomes worth more*, because there are more things for it to buy, but the same amount of money to buy them with. This causes downward pressure on prices, and is called deflation. To counter deflation, the government prints new money. Actually, the government generally prints a little too much money, creating inflation, a phenomenon they have nigh-complete control over. Governments like inflation because it lowers their effective interest rate, making it easier to pay it back later.
"This is approximately a zero sum game."
No. It is not even approximately a zero sum game. Adequate optimization of economic systems is a major reason that the United States has done such a good job of getting absurdly wealthy, despite having a smaller population base and comparable natural resources to other major powers. This is a game of multipliers and exponential growth effects; there is very little addition involved, and the sum is certainly not zero.
"There are benefits to reducing piracy, but their argument doesn't hold water."
Oh, I apologize. One of your sentences is correct, so actually you're at 25%. Dreadfully sorry about that.
I'm guessing you are not a lawyer, and therefore I can argue with you (not that it would stop me anyway, I suppose).
Quoting from a random bank code of ethics found online:
No gifts, regardless of value, are to be encouraged or solicited by employees in connection with the Bank’s business or responsibilities. However, employees, as expressions of courtesy and appreciation may accept gifts in kind such as fruits, flowers or candy so long as their monetary value is minimal and does not represent a “substantial gift.”
I'm not a lawyer either. But he did say less than $20.00. Even legislators can usually accept in-kind gifts with a value less than $20.00. So, in fact, the rules of at least one bank specifically allow for this kind of thing, and I doubt that the bank's code of ethics is in violation of federal rules.
Regarding your own experience of receiving a gift *from your own father*, that sounds like a control-freak manager being more of a jerk than is strictly necessary. Most banks have a totally separate set of ethical rules governing dealing with employee family members anyway.
The question you answered: "why is it fair to collect if from everyone who is arrested?"
Your answer: "For the same reasons that it is only fair to put people that have been convicted in prison, but not people who haven't been." Because this sentence answers the question, you are implicitly claiming that collecting DNA from arrested persons is fair by providing a justification for it. However, the justification does not make sense, unless you believe that being arrested equates to being convicted. And you don't believe that, as you stated in the very next sentence.
Anyway, I agree with what you apparently believe, you just made a mistake in expressing that clearly.
"Innocent until proven guilty [in a court of law]" means that arrested people are, by definition, innocent. At least for the time being. Therefore, if you are against taking DNA from innocent people, then you must either be against taking DNA from arrested people, or you disagree with "innocent until proven guilty." It seems we're developing a societal taste for "innocent until accused." It's more efficient, and you don't waste so much time being nice to the people who are actually guilty.
Take a look at http://www.millenniata.com/ -- their tagline is "Write once, read forever." It's a group out of BYU, which is tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who have the largest collection of genealogical records in the world. They've been storing everything on microfiche in a massive vault, and would really like to switch to digital media but for the archival problems you mention. Millenniata grew out of research into making stable DVDs--they guess that their DVDs are stable enough to last 1000+ years (the way I've heard it, they don't know of any particular process that would cause them to decay, but you never know).
I've done a little bit of hiring at my small company (we have five programmers; I was an interviewer for two of them). You do need to be highly competent in our language of choice (C++), but I expect to spend a lot of time training a fresh-out-of-college hire.
If there are C++ fundamentals (virtual functions, pass-by-reference, use of the STL and standard libraries, polymorphism) with which you are not familiar, then you have language learning to do. But given that you have the fundamentals, the biggest question is whether you can work on a team.
Do you know how to say "I don't know" when you don't? Do you document your work clearly and effectively so that other programmers will find it usable? Are you passionately interested in naming constructions in a way that clarifies their purpose? Do you think about corner cases when you code, so that your methods can be used without fear or knowledge of their internals? Are you the kind of person who's going to get into holy wars about programming style, making the codebase into a mishmash of competing formatting styles? Or even worse, do you not care about programming style at all? Do you know how to read someone else's code and then follow their way of doing things, rather than just rolling your own every time?
The question I am asking with every new hire is "will hiring this person make my life easier?" That covers a lot more than programming knowledge.
I attended BYU, lived in that same off-campus housing, and have lived in the Provo area for over 20 years. You are exaggerating badly.
- There are no laws to "force everyone to follow LDS guidlines [sic] and join their church." Even if such a law were possible in America (I hope not!), such a law would be highly repugnant to Mormons, as there is an express prohibition against laws like that in the church's core creed (cf. eleventh article of faith).
As for laws forcing everyone to follow LDS guidelines: Cigarettes and alcohol are legal in Utah. There are no mandatory Internet filters in Utah, although they are a popular add-on for local ISPs. We have shops that legally sell sex toys and pornographic movies, and billboards on the freeways advertising their existence. What laws are you referring to? Most Mormons do strongly disapprove of these things, but that isn't the same thing as illegal.
- The "menace to society" quote is a very sarcastic sort of joke. I've heard it said a great many times, mostly by single people who wish they weren't. The original quote gets attributed to Brigham Young, although I can't find any documentation that he ever said it. It is certainly much older than "the nineties," and the age (18? 22? 25? 30?) has been revised a few times.
There is a big problem with self-loathing singles here, but that doesn't equate to social ostracism.
3. I haven't followed the vagaries of BYU housing contracts, so maybe you got this right, I don't know. But there are a very great many apartments available to non-students in Provo. As a non-student who has rented in Provo, I found being overwhelmed by which to pick to be a greater problem. I imagine that if you insist on finding non-student housing across the road from BYU that you may have some difficulties.
4. I also hate the parking laws -- I've had to fool around with the idiotic visitor permits any time I was visiting someone in that part of town. On the other hand, it sounds like you did not have enough parking spaces on the property for the number of people living there (which is a violation of the old ordinance). There were regularly so many cars parked on the streets that it became impossible for visitors to find parking in that area. The reason everyone got inflicted with the stupid street parking laws is that the law about having enough parking spaces proved unenforceable. So I blame your landlord for the bad laws.
Claiming that these laws are only enforced against single people is silly. Cars are not marked with the marital status of their owner, unless "being a minivan" counts. The laws are enforced against the people who clog up the streets, marital status notwithstanding.
5. I have rented individual housing. I was not a student at the time. I am single. My money was sufficiently green. Who is this "they" of whom you speak?
That's funny... I agree with everything you said except "Don't listen to this guy!" What about my earlier comment are you objecting to, exactly? You didn't contradict any of my points, just added a few new ones. Or do you think smelling bad doesn't count as really, really offensive?
And in an attempt to actually add to the discussion -- it doesn't bother me when interviewees are nervous. Nervousness fades in a few weeks, and at least for me it doesn't really hurt your chances. Salesmen are supposed to be confident in interviews, but I don't see why developers should be. What I'm looking for is that magical combination of "this person is competent" and "I can trust this person to do a good job." I also appreciate someone who can tell me honestly that they don't know the answer to something. Anyone new to my (very small) field is going to have gaps in their knowledge, so I need to be sure that when they're unsure, I'm going to hear about it.
Prepared answers only really bother me if they have *nothing to do with the question*.
Yes! I've done a little bit of interviewing for technical positions. If you're interviewing with me at all, then your resume was definitely good enough for me to be spending time on you. I don't think your resume is the problem.
When I'm interviewing, it's really important to me that I feel like I can stand being around you for a large percentage of my week. That means you MUST be able to express yourself, have good personal hygiene, and be amazingly intelligent.
You don't have to be my best buddy, and I'm going to be a little careful avoiding irrelevant biases (I have an unreasonable affection for British accents, i.e.). But if I find something about you deeply offensive (did he just PICK HIS NOSE?!) (seriously, a stained white T-shirt?) (what is that FUNKY smell?) then I'm going to be actively looking for reasons to not hire you. You would drive me and my team crazy, and that would impact your and our effectiveness negatively.
Give your people skills a good, hard examination, and work on improving them.
Ironically, if I were to name names, the first one that comes to mind is Sony and their disastrously anti-consumer copy protection system. Star Wars Galaxies is MADE by Sony, albeit a different division. This is what we call "black humor."
By the way, I did a little fact-checking on that study-abroad claim, and while it's close, it's not quite right. There are a few universities with higher numbers (see here. Those kinds of numbers fluctuate from year to year, of course, and my hearsay is from a little while ago;-). There may have been a year when my claim was correct. Whatever the case, the rest of it stands.
I'm LDS/Mormon. I live in Provo, Utah. My dad works at BYU. I've lived here most of my life. So I have an idea of what I'm talking about.
Let's start with Brigham Young University: BYU has an extensive study abroad program. I have heard that BYU has, at any one time, over 1,300 students studying abroad; this number is more than any other university in the United States, both as an absolute figure and as a percentage. There are volunteer or study programs in Japan, Spain, England, Austria, Jordan, Namibia, South Africa, Ghana (my grandmother just got back from Ghana), Bolivia, Romania, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, New Zealand, and a few others. Most of the U.S. has heard of "Israel/Palestine," but I'd hazard that more Mormons have actually *been there*. Heck, I've had a Palestinian over to my house before. We talked about the conflict a little, but mostly he wanted to rant about his speeding ticket (turns out that Palestinians are people too). The BYU Jerusalem Center is currently shut down because of the recent violence, but when operating it had a 170-student capacity and was always full. Getting in was quite competitive.
Another good indicator is just to look at the languages taught at BYU. Actually listing them off would add a painful amount to this post, but you might want to poke here, here, here, or here.
Next to BYU is the LDS missionary training center, where a lot of those Mormon missionaries you love to hate get trained. They teach about 50 languages (the number fluctuates a little based on need) and send those missionaries off to about 120 different countries (the number fluctuates a little based on politics). At any given time, there are about 60,000 missionaries out, and most of those are outside of the United States. The center houses anywhere from 1,500 to 4,000 missionaries year-round.
That's what I know in general; I can also speak a little from personal experience. Personally, I have been to Bulgaria, France, Austria, England, and South Africa. I've been told that "Tijuana" doesn't count as Mexico, so you can leave that off;-). I speak Bulgarian fluently, French passably, and conversational Japanese (planning to go next year). Last year, all three of my roommates visited mainland China, all for different reasons and all with different people. I missed out, but did go to visit family in South Africa instead. My roommates could speak Korean, Russian, Spanish, and German between them. We also speak English, believe it or not (yes, I'm glaring at you, Mr. British Person).
If we switch to my workplace, a tiny tech startup with all LDS employees (5 of them), you'll find a Tagalog speaker, a Norwegian speaker (who married a Norwegian), another German speaker, an Afrikaans speaker, and I can speak to my boss in Bulgarian. All have been to the respective countries.
That's probably enough. It was a fun rant, and it's not likely to get read, since I took too long writing it, and we all know that only those comments posted in the first five minutes get read. Still, here I am, posting anyway. I hope *someone* enjoys it.
If you're talking to computer science students, it might be a good idea to have them research an OSS project they like and contribute something to it. I think a lot of students are pro-OSS in theory, but haven't taken the time to actually get their hands dirty with real, live code. If you require them to find and do some work on an existing project then they get valuable experience in researching what's out there, familiarizing themselves with existing community gathering points, etc.
True, a lot of the code they contribute will suck, but that's nothing new. And if they keep trying, they'll get better at it.
Yeah, well the learning the language bit is still important;-). If you can find someone who's patient enough to point you in the right direction when you ask the really dumb questions, that helps. The thing is that programming languages aren't really very complicated. There are just a few basic ideas (variables, function calls, loops, conditional execution, compound data structures, pointers/references, expressions... did I miss anything?), and the rest is just having a good reference for the standard library.
It might be smart to find a web-site that does tutorials for utter beginners (try googling "programming tutorial beginner" or similar), and do a tutorial in any language that looks easy. They're all pretty much the same in the way you think about things, the differences are more superficial. Once that's done, go dig up a tutorial on your topic of interest and go through that as well. If you work through enough tutorials, eventually the right bits are going to start clicking.
Did I mention that a stubborn, obsessive personality is pretty much required here? Cause, you know, it really helps if you're a stubborn, obsessive type (It doesn't hurt to be lazy, egotistical, and impatient either).
I find it's more about motivation than picking a language or how hard it is. If you've got some mental image of "I want to write Quake!" (or hopefully something a hair less ambitious), then it gives you both a reason and a direction for what you're trying to learn. Then you can obsessively search the web for tutorials on the different bits and pieces you think you'll need until you have a fairly decent subset of the skills needed to reach your dream. Learning the language is a free side effect.
Yeah, and if you're downloading 3-4 DVD's worth of stuff a day this can get annoying. If you go over, it's $10 for every extra 10 gigabytes per month. Painful, but meh.
Parts of Utah now have a 15 Mbit SYMMETRIC connection available, which is enough to make any torrenting geek happy (one ISP doing this is here). That's $44/mo, and they're doing 30 Mbit symmetric for $109/mo (although technically that's a "business" package). Mostly, I'm happy to see a non-stupid upstream finally available in a home package (and looks like they don't bother blocking port 80, either).
There's been a workaround for Firefox popup blocking for a while. I get a popup off that site while using Firefox 1.0.6. The workaround is to have the window be opened from Flash (though there are a few others -- trigger pop-ups for clicking on links, for example, or make the entire page one giant pop-up launcher if you click *anywhere*).
It's true that there is a flash-blocker that can block most of these pop-ups, but it makes Firefox crash on my machine (well, it crashes ANYWAY, but more so).
So by "better browser," I assume you meant something else. Mind making a suggestion?
I think you forgot:
4. Has a sense of humor.
Cause life without a sense of humor isn't any kind of life at all. (Sad observation: This post isn't very funny. So shoot me).
I think that a universal sign-on is an awesome idea, but I don't think Microsoft can pull it off. Frankly, even outside of/., the general public is a little wary of Microsoft. To really pull it off, we'd need a trusted company to manage the actual technology. As in, a company that's not evil.
Slashdot Mirror
- The nazi grammar parallel
No combination above gramatically words possible of the is correct. You 's drop the should.
A base 10 timing metric is a dreadful idea. Dividing things into units of 60 is genuinely brilliant, and there's a reason it's still around after several thousand years. You can divide groups of sixty into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, and tenths without ever cracking an integer. Base-10 numbers can only be divided into halves, fifths, tenths ... you can't do thirds and quarters consistently. And yes, this was a conscientious choice. The Babylonians didn't have fraction theory fully worked out, so deliberately picked numbers that were easy to think about and use.
I doubt base-60 would, itself, be a good idea, because we'd need to come up with 60 digits. But using base 10, then using units of 60 from there on up? It's very well thought out, and behaves quite a bit better than units of 100. The metric system would arguably be much improved if it also did things this way -- tried to write down "a third of a meter" lately? I hope you like your receding decimal points.
Have you actually read anything that Bill Gates is saying on this issue? He makes pretty much the exact same points. He's already doing the stuff in your "do this" section.
If you want to get angry, go get angry at someone who deserves it.
... wow. You, sir, are wrong on the Internet.
I would guess you're lying about ever having taken Econ 101. I'm either an idiot or an expert, having taken it three times, but I do remember quite clearly about day four of the first time round, when the Economics teacher, arms flailing wildly, yelled as loudly as he could "ECONOMICS IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME!" He then went on to explain that anyone who said so is an idiot who doesn't understand economics. The textbook went on in more or less the same fashion.
Your post has approximately as many mistakes as it has sentences. Let's begin, shall we?
"There is a finite amount of money."
No, money has value only because we imagine it does, and has no intrinsic worth except as a means of trading value. The amount of value in an economy contracts and expands, and is roughly the sum of everything useful that everyone does plus the value of everything everyone owns. If you work harder, the economy gets bigger. If you slack off, the economy contracts by just so much. If you create something new and useful, you have created wealth. If you destroy or quit doing something useful, you have destroyed wealth.
"Thus, if $1000 more is spent on software, $1000 less is spent elsewhere. Roughly speaking, 6000 new software jobs equals 6000 fewer other jobs."
No. Value is measured by how much work people are doing and what they are creating. If the money supply stays constant but the amount of work being done increases, then money *becomes worth more*, because there are more things for it to buy, but the same amount of money to buy them with. This causes downward pressure on prices, and is called deflation. To counter deflation, the government prints new money. Actually, the government generally prints a little too much money, creating inflation, a phenomenon they have nigh-complete control over. Governments like inflation because it lowers their effective interest rate, making it easier to pay it back later.
"This is approximately a zero sum game."
No. It is not even approximately a zero sum game. Adequate optimization of economic systems is a major reason that the United States has done such a good job of getting absurdly wealthy, despite having a smaller population base and comparable natural resources to other major powers. This is a game of multipliers and exponential growth effects; there is very little addition involved, and the sum is certainly not zero.
"There are benefits to reducing piracy, but their argument doesn't hold water."
Oh, I apologize. One of your sentences is correct, so actually you're at 25%. Dreadfully sorry about that.
I'm guessing you are not a lawyer, and therefore I can argue with you (not that it would stop me anyway, I suppose).
Quoting from a random bank code of ethics found online:
No gifts, regardless of value, are to be encouraged or solicited by employees in connection with the
Bank’s business or responsibilities. However, employees, as expressions of courtesy and appreciation
may accept gifts in kind such as fruits, flowers or candy so long as their monetary value is minimal and
does not represent a “substantial gift.”
I'm not a lawyer either. But he did say less than $20.00. Even legislators can usually accept in-kind gifts with a value less than $20.00. So, in fact, the rules of at least one bank specifically allow for this kind of thing, and I doubt that the bank's code of ethics is in violation of federal rules.
Regarding your own experience of receiving a gift *from your own father*, that sounds like a control-freak manager being more of a jerk than is strictly necessary. Most banks have a totally separate set of ethical rules governing dealing with employee family members anyway.
Lovely, let's agree violently.
The question you answered: "why is it fair to collect if from everyone who is arrested?"
Your answer: "For the same reasons that it is only fair to put people that have been convicted in prison, but not people who haven't been." Because this sentence answers the question, you are implicitly claiming that collecting DNA from arrested persons is fair by providing a justification for it. However, the justification does not make sense, unless you believe that being arrested equates to being convicted. And you don't believe that, as you stated in the very next sentence.
Anyway, I agree with what you apparently believe, you just made a mistake in expressing that clearly.
Uh, so you agree that it isn't fair?
"Innocent until proven guilty [in a court of law]" means that arrested people are, by definition, innocent. At least for the time being. Therefore, if you are against taking DNA from innocent people, then you must either be against taking DNA from arrested people, or you disagree with "innocent until proven guilty." It seems we're developing a societal taste for "innocent until accused." It's more efficient, and you don't waste so much time being nice to the people who are actually guilty.
Take a look at http://www.millenniata.com/ -- their tagline is "Write once, read forever." It's a group out of BYU, which is tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who have the largest collection of genealogical records in the world. They've been storing everything on microfiche in a massive vault, and would really like to switch to digital media but for the archival problems you mention. Millenniata grew out of research into making stable DVDs--they guess that their DVDs are stable enough to last 1000+ years (the way I've heard it, they don't know of any particular process that would cause them to decay, but you never know).
I've done a little bit of hiring at my small company (we have five programmers; I was an interviewer for two of them). You do need to be highly competent in our language of choice (C++), but I expect to spend a lot of time training a fresh-out-of-college hire.
If there are C++ fundamentals (virtual functions, pass-by-reference, use of the STL and standard libraries, polymorphism) with which you are not familiar, then you have language learning to do. But given that you have the fundamentals, the biggest question is whether you can work on a team.
Do you know how to say "I don't know" when you don't? Do you document your work clearly and effectively so that other programmers will find it usable? Are you passionately interested in naming constructions in a way that clarifies their purpose? Do you think about corner cases when you code, so that your methods can be used without fear or knowledge of their internals? Are you the kind of person who's going to get into holy wars about programming style, making the codebase into a mishmash of competing formatting styles? Or even worse, do you not care about programming style at all? Do you know how to read someone else's code and then follow their way of doing things, rather than just rolling your own every time?
The question I am asking with every new hire is "will hiring this person make my life easier?" That covers a lot more than programming knowledge.
I attended BYU, lived in that same off-campus housing, and have lived in the Provo area for over 20 years. You are exaggerating badly.
- There are no laws to "force everyone to follow LDS guidlines [sic] and join their church." Even if such a law were possible in America (I hope not!), such a law would be highly repugnant to Mormons, as there is an express prohibition against laws like that in the church's core creed (cf. eleventh article of faith).
As for laws forcing everyone to follow LDS guidelines: Cigarettes and alcohol are legal in Utah. There are no mandatory Internet filters in Utah, although they are a popular add-on for local ISPs. We have shops that legally sell sex toys and pornographic movies, and billboards on the freeways advertising their existence. What laws are you referring to? Most Mormons do strongly disapprove of these things, but that isn't the same thing as illegal.
- The "menace to society" quote is a very sarcastic sort of joke. I've heard it said a great many times, mostly by single people who wish they weren't. The original quote gets attributed to Brigham Young, although I can't find any documentation that he ever said it. It is certainly much older than "the nineties," and the age (18? 22? 25? 30?) has been revised a few times.
There is a big problem with self-loathing singles here, but that doesn't equate to social ostracism.
3. I haven't followed the vagaries of BYU housing contracts, so maybe you got this right, I don't know. But there are a very great many apartments available to non-students in Provo. As a non-student who has rented in Provo, I found being overwhelmed by which to pick to be a greater problem. I imagine that if you insist on finding non-student housing across the road from BYU that you may have some difficulties.
4. I also hate the parking laws -- I've had to fool around with the idiotic visitor permits any time I was visiting someone in that part of town. On the other hand, it sounds like you did not have enough parking spaces on the property for the number of people living there (which is a violation of the old ordinance). There were regularly so many cars parked on the streets that it became impossible for visitors to find parking in that area. The reason everyone got inflicted with the stupid street parking laws is that the law about having enough parking spaces proved unenforceable. So I blame your landlord for the bad laws.
Claiming that these laws are only enforced against single people is silly. Cars are not marked with the marital status of their owner, unless "being a minivan" counts. The laws are enforced against the people who clog up the streets, marital status notwithstanding.
5. I have rented individual housing. I was not a student at the time. I am single. My money was sufficiently green. Who is this "they" of whom you speak?
That's funny ... I agree with everything you said except "Don't listen to this guy!" What about my earlier comment are you objecting to, exactly? You didn't contradict any of my points, just added a few new ones. Or do you think smelling bad doesn't count as really, really offensive?
And in an attempt to actually add to the discussion -- it doesn't bother me when interviewees are nervous. Nervousness fades in a few weeks, and at least for me it doesn't really hurt your chances. Salesmen are supposed to be confident in interviews, but I don't see why developers should be. What I'm looking for is that magical combination of "this person is competent" and "I can trust this person to do a good job." I also appreciate someone who can tell me honestly that they don't know the answer to something. Anyone new to my (very small) field is going to have gaps in their knowledge, so I need to be sure that when they're unsure, I'm going to hear about it.
Prepared answers only really bother me if they have *nothing to do with the question*.
Yes! I've done a little bit of interviewing for technical positions. If you're interviewing with me at all, then your resume was definitely good enough for me to be spending time on you. I don't think your resume is the problem.
When I'm interviewing, it's really important to me that I feel like I can stand being around you for a large percentage of my week. That means you MUST be able to express yourself, have good personal hygiene, and be amazingly intelligent.
You don't have to be my best buddy, and I'm going to be a little careful avoiding irrelevant biases (I have an unreasonable affection for British accents, i.e.). But if I find something about you deeply offensive (did he just PICK HIS NOSE?!) (seriously, a stained white T-shirt?) (what is that FUNKY smell?) then I'm going to be actively looking for reasons to not hire you. You would drive me and my team crazy, and that would impact your and our effectiveness negatively.
Give your people skills a good, hard examination, and work on improving them.
> The most returned game in history, so I'm told... ;)
Really? Did it actually beat this one? That'd be one for the history books.
Ironically, if I were to name names, the first one that comes to mind is Sony and their disastrously anti-consumer copy protection system. Star Wars Galaxies is MADE by Sony, albeit a different division. This is what we call "black humor."
By the way, I did a little fact-checking on that study-abroad claim, and while it's close, it's not quite right. There are a few universities with higher numbers (see here. Those kinds of numbers fluctuate from year to year, of course, and my hearsay is from a little while ago ;-). There may have been a year when my claim was correct. Whatever the case, the rest of it stands.
Wow ... just ... wow. How to put this:
;-). I speak Bulgarian fluently, French passably, and conversational Japanese (planning to go next year). Last year, all three of my roommates visited mainland China, all for different reasons and all with different people. I missed out, but did go to visit family in South Africa instead. My roommates could speak Korean, Russian, Spanish, and German between them. We also speak English, believe it or not (yes, I'm glaring at you, Mr. British Person).
I'm LDS/Mormon. I live in Provo, Utah. My dad works at BYU. I've lived here most of my life. So I have an idea of what I'm talking about.
Let's start with Brigham Young University: BYU has an extensive study abroad program. I have heard that BYU has, at any one time, over 1,300 students studying abroad; this number is more than any other university in the United States, both as an absolute figure and as a percentage. There are volunteer or study programs in Japan, Spain, England, Austria, Jordan, Namibia, South Africa, Ghana (my grandmother just got back from Ghana), Bolivia, Romania, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, New Zealand, and a few others. Most of the U.S. has heard of "Israel/Palestine," but I'd hazard that more Mormons have actually *been there*. Heck, I've had a Palestinian over to my house before. We talked about the conflict a little, but mostly he wanted to rant about his speeding ticket (turns out that Palestinians are people too). The BYU Jerusalem Center is currently shut down because of the recent violence, but when operating it had a 170-student capacity and was always full. Getting in was quite competitive.
Another good indicator is just to look at the languages taught at BYU. Actually listing them off would add a painful amount to this post, but you might want to poke here, here, here, or here.
Next to BYU is the LDS missionary training center, where a lot of those Mormon missionaries you love to hate get trained. They teach about 50 languages (the number fluctuates a little based on need) and send those missionaries off to about 120 different countries (the number fluctuates a little based on politics). At any given time, there are about 60,000 missionaries out, and most of those are outside of the United States. The center houses anywhere from 1,500 to 4,000 missionaries year-round.
That's what I know in general; I can also speak a little from personal experience. Personally, I have been to Bulgaria, France, Austria, England, and South Africa. I've been told that "Tijuana" doesn't count as Mexico, so you can leave that off
If we switch to my workplace, a tiny tech startup with all LDS employees (5 of them), you'll find a Tagalog speaker, a Norwegian speaker (who married a Norwegian), another German speaker, an Afrikaans speaker, and I can speak to my boss in Bulgarian. All have been to the respective countries.
That's probably enough. It was a fun rant, and it's not likely to get read, since I took too long writing it, and we all know that only those comments posted in the first five minutes get read. Still, here I am, posting anyway. I hope *someone* enjoys it.
If you're talking to computer science students, it might be a good idea to have them research an OSS project they like and contribute something to it. I think a lot of students are pro-OSS in theory, but haven't taken the time to actually get their hands dirty with real, live code. If you require them to find and do some work on an existing project then they get valuable experience in researching what's out there, familiarizing themselves with existing community gathering points, etc.
True, a lot of the code they contribute will suck, but that's nothing new. And if they keep trying, they'll get better at it.
Yeah, well the learning the language bit is still important ;-). If you can find someone who's patient enough to point you in the right direction when you ask the really dumb questions, that helps. The thing is that programming languages aren't really very complicated. There are just a few basic ideas (variables, function calls, loops, conditional execution, compound data structures, pointers/references, expressions ... did I miss anything?), and the rest is just having a good reference for the standard library.
It might be smart to find a web-site that does tutorials for utter beginners (try googling "programming tutorial beginner" or similar), and do a tutorial in any language that looks easy. They're all pretty much the same in the way you think about things, the differences are more superficial. Once that's done, go dig up a tutorial on your topic of interest and go through that as well. If you work through enough tutorials, eventually the right bits are going to start clicking.
Did I mention that a stubborn, obsessive personality is pretty much required here? Cause, you know, it really helps if you're a stubborn, obsessive type (It doesn't hurt to be lazy, egotistical, and impatient either).
I find it's more about motivation than picking a language or how hard it is. If you've got some mental image of "I want to write Quake!" (or hopefully something a hair less ambitious), then it gives you both a reason and a direction for what you're trying to learn. Then you can obsessively search the web for tutorials on the different bits and pieces you think you'll need until you have a fairly decent subset of the skills needed to reach your dream. Learning the language is a free side effect.
Yeah, and if you're downloading 3-4 DVD's worth of stuff a day this can get annoying. If you go over, it's $10 for every extra 10 gigabytes per month. Painful, but meh.
Parts of Utah now have a 15 Mbit SYMMETRIC connection available, which is enough to make any torrenting geek happy (one ISP doing this is here). That's $44/mo, and they're doing 30 Mbit symmetric for $109/mo (although technically that's a "business" package). Mostly, I'm happy to see a non-stupid upstream finally available in a home package (and looks like they don't bother blocking port 80, either).
There's been a workaround for Firefox popup blocking for a while. I get a popup off that site while using Firefox 1.0.6. The workaround is to have the window be opened from Flash (though there are a few others -- trigger pop-ups for clicking on links, for example, or make the entire page one giant pop-up launcher if you click *anywhere*).
It's true that there is a flash-blocker that can block most of these pop-ups, but it makes Firefox crash on my machine (well, it crashes ANYWAY, but more so).
So by "better browser," I assume you meant something else. Mind making a suggestion?
I think you forgot: 4. Has a sense of humor. Cause life without a sense of humor isn't any kind of life at all. (Sad observation: This post isn't very funny. So shoot me).
Hey! I've worked on stuff that hit the front page of slashdot, you insensitive clod!
... point taken.
Oh wait
I think that a universal sign-on is an awesome idea, but I don't think Microsoft can pull it off. Frankly, even outside of /., the general public is a little wary of Microsoft. To really pull it off, we'd need a trusted company to manage the actual technology. As in, a company that's not evil.
Google, are you listening?