For the same reason that some suspects are kept in jail pending their trial: it is considered highly likely by the judge presiding over the case that the criminal activity would continue, or evidence be destroyed. "Due process" includes that decision, and the prosecution and defendant both state their position before the judge makes that decision. That stage has passed.
BTW, I read the complaint. The core of the accusations are twofold: first that the Megaupload folks willfully hosted infringing content (thus losing the safe harbor protections that shield other hosting services); they knew and did nothing. Second, that through other businesses and websites they controlled, the Megaupload folks deliberately solicited infringing content and directed it to Megaupload (hence the "conspiracy" charges, which mean something very specific and not necessarily the tinfoil hats and black helicopters so popular among bloggers who think they know the meaning of a word). If those complaints are true (and none of us here knows that or will decide that; we are not the jury, and we are not seeing the evidence), then yeah, they're gonna go to jail and be stripped of every penny they own. That's reality, regardless of whether Anonymous, Slashdot, or anyone else likes it or not.
If you're getting no bites on your resume, it sounds like your resume isn't all that compelling, or you're applying for positions which your listed skills are not going to be considered relevant. Post an anonymized version of it somewhere (change the names of the companies and yourself), post a link here, and see what people think. Many engineers scoff at resumes. Don't. Your credibility depends upon it.
What do I look for when I go through a stack of resumes? As I mentioned, decent editing skills do matter... if you're sloppy on your resume your code will be sloppy too. I also read the job descriptions; I want to know what the applicant did. What's wrong with this:
Gadgetronic, Inc. (May 2009-July 2011) Gadgetronic is a leading manufacturer of innovative USB-enabled sex toys. We have 75% of the North American market, and hold over 100 patents in anal stimulation. We have a proud 100-year history of excellent customer service, and have won numerous awards both within our field and for general business excellence. Our clients include the Republican National Committee, Michael Moore, Mel Gibson, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Boards of Directors of almost half of the Fortune 500. We have international sales offices in Frankfurt, Pyong-Yang, and Riyadh. I was a test engnieer.
First, the vast majority of the entry describes the company, not what the applicant did there. Who cares about where the sales offices are, this is a technical applicant! Second, it reads just like a cut-and-paste from the company website; the applicant could have at least copy/pasted their actual job description. Third, the only part that WASN'T copy/pasted has an egregious misspelling. Fourth, I would have no idea what the applicant actually did. I'm not going to go any further with this resume. What would be better, then?
Gadgetronic, Inc. (May 2009-July 2011) Test lead for a line of USB-controlled personal stimulation devices. Responsible for testing of the scripting APIs which enabled scenario-based operations. Wrote test automation scripts in Python, including automated reporting and regression suites; tracked defects through their life-cycle; reviewed technical documents. Maintained a compatibility lab including Windows, Linux, OS/X and FreeBSD hosts. Responsible for WHQL certification, and was the point-of-contact with Microsoft. Promoted from intern to engineer to test lead within the first year of employment.
OK, that's a little better. I know this candidate has done scripting work, both in Python and in whatever scripting language the vibrating scenarios are written in (probably TCL... get it? "Tickle'? Ahem). I know that the candidate takes reporting seriously enough to be entrusted with it (that "communication" thing), can deal with other departments (tech pubs and product management) and has a broad knowledge of operating systems. I also see a very specific skill (WHQL certification) that could be a critical keyword that might be the reason the recruiter brought this to my attention; if I needed a WHQL test lead for a video card, I might well think that this is a more relevant skill than video card knowledge. I might also be interested in someone with a good working relationship with Microsoft's WHQL group. There are no spelling errors, so maybe the candidate's feedback on technical documents is worth paying him/her/it for. I also can see that Gadgetronic thought well enough of our candidate to give greater responsibility over time.
And you can bet your ass (heh heh) that I will verify every claim that I think is relevant. I will ask about the WHQL signing procedure. I will ask that the candidate write some Python code. I will ask questions about how FreeBSD handles device driver installation. I will ask how reporting was done (and sneak in a question about exit codes while doing so, as it's relevant to the claim). I will probe (heh heh) the candidate's knowledge of the differences between USB 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, and how much po
"And no matter what, I'm going to ask about the implications of the GPL in coding. "
So you expect your programmers to also come with law degrees?
Seriously...
I expect programmers to know that it's not okay to just grab code off of a Google search and cram it into a product. That doesn't take a law degree. Seriously, programmers who don't recognize (or refuse to recognize) that licensing terms affect whether code can be used or how that affects where you split modules up, or why you can't just grab any code you want any time you want and put it anywhere you want are a hazard to the entire company. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not; that's how the real world works. "License 'unspecified' taints kernel" is a land mine.
"Expert at TCP/IP Networking" can imply a lot of things, ranging from knowing IP internals (ie: the handshakes you describe), to being a router configuration wizard. Test someone in an area not quite covered by their expertise, and you could end up throwing away a perfectly good candidate.
As I said, I work at a networking products company. If you claim to be an expert in the field in which we require expertise, then you bet I'm going to test you in that area. A "router configuration wizard" who doesn't understand the TCP handshake, for instance, is neither a router configuration wizard, nor a perfectly good candidate. They may do very well elsewhere, but not here. And resume inflation stinks of dishonesty.
Cynical hiring personnel are a real problem in the industry, and considering the depth and breadth of skills that many engineers have, its not fair to harp on the lack of a very few specific skills that can be relatively easily acquired.
I'm not cynical, but I am tired of being lied to by people who want me to depend on them to get work done. Ever met a "Python expert" who didn't know what a dictionary was or how to trap an exception in a try/except block? Well, I've interviewed a couple.
Tech jobs often require skills which are not relatively easily required. I would consider a candidate who was lacking in one particular skill area, but only if they were strong in the others AND weren't trying to BS me about it. As I mentioned, the bar isn't that high; our positions require that you know a major scripting language (Python, Perl or TCL, your choice, we don't have a "one true language"), can automate simple tasks in that language, know TCP/IP networking well (hello! Networking infrastructure products company! THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL), be able to come up with good test cases, and has at least some awareness of how the real world works. I don't think that's at all unreasonable, nor do any of the other folks doing interviews at my company.
Be able to solve practical problems. More and more frequently, employers (like my company) are using quizzes as a filter. I can't speak to other industries; I'm in QA at a networking products company.
Don't claim to be an expert in something you can't back up. If your resume says "Expert in TCP/IP networking", I'm going to be asking for more than just "describe the handshake at the start of a TCP session". If you claim to know Python, I'm going to ask you to write some code on the whiteboard that will involve process management, recursion and exception-handling. If you claim to know regular expressions, you're going to need to know how to extract phone numbers. If you say you know Linux, be prepared to tell me what the/proc filesystem is. And no matter what, I'm going to ask about the implications of the GPL in coding.
Know what the company does and what its main products/services are. When I ask someone if they're familiar with what we do, there's little that is going to be more off-putting than "I didn't bother to find out".
If you have a serious mad-on against Apple, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, or whatever, leave it at home. All operating systems suck. All phone suck. All database servers All business practices suck. They just suck in different ways, and I don't want to have doubts raised about whether someone is going to be disruptive, argumentative, or less than enthusiastic when they're asked to work on a particular port of a product. The more opinionated someone is, the less they actually know.
For the love of Celestia, please spell-check your resume. Communication is important, and if someone can't be bothered to get it right on their application/resume, I'm pretty sure they're going to be even worse on the job. Resumes loaded with errors go straight into the trash can.
In short, be able to demonstrate coding skills, initiative, and enough platform skills to convince folks of your basic competence. You do that and you're above about 80% of the folks out there right away.
Ask questions. Remember, you're interviewing us right back! There are quite a few companies out there that you want no part of (stress-monkey coworkers,
In my recent (and extensive) experience with interviewing people who are recent graduates, I am finding a very large percentage of people with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science who can't write even the most simple scripts in any language... people with "expert in TCP/IP networking" in their qualifications, or who have three years testing routers and switches listed as experience who don't know what NAT means or what a MAC address is... people who don't know how to list running processes on any platform. These are people who are graduates. They have their degree. And those degrees are worthless. We've had half a dozen positions open where I work for a long while, the bar just isn't set that high, but we're not finding qualified applicants.
It doesn't matter what nationality the school or the "graduate" is. Poorly-prepared graduates are a world-wide phenomenon. Sure, Asia is producing a large number of graduates, but the majority of them aren't going to be very useful. The U.S. is producing fewer engineering graduates, but they're just as useless.
Yes, the universities are to blame. I don't know what they're teaching but it has little to do with reality and doesn't prepare the students to be employable. But the students are also to blame. Surveys show that between 75 and 98% of students admit to cheating, and don't feel particularly bad about it; the universities also don't seem to think that cheating is anything to get worked up over either. No wonder nobody is learning anything.
All of this is why I don't think that it's a big deal that the US produces only 4% of engineering degrees; 4% of "nothing useful" is no worse than "35% of nothing useful". If those degrees actually meant something, or correlated in any meaningful way to success (both for the individual and for the employer), I'd be more concerned. My real worry is that Westerners aren't even interested in engineering any more; they all want to be in sales and marketing and other nontechnical fields (or "soft" majors like political science or humanities, followed by whining about how nobody will pay six figure salaries for their chosen field). I'm not sure why this is,,, given how little tech work someone with a tech degree seems to actually be required to do, it can't be because of academic workload. Mind you, the profound anti-intellectualism that is still the rule in Western society may have something to do with it.
So, if transits are a viable way of detecting habitable planets at very long distances... do we have a list of stars that we would be transit-visible to? (say, within an degree of the ecliptic) A good survey would be to examine those stars which might well be examining us back.
I can't speak to the effectiveness of a one-year coding boot camp.
What I CAN speak to is the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the academic training people are getting. My group has had open positions for almost a year, because we can't find anyone with decent IP networking, scripting/automation, and QA skills. We're getting applicants... lots of them.... with master-of-science degrees in computer science who can't write code to traverse a directory tree or automate an SSH login. And these degrees aren't from "Smilin' Fred's Used Truck Parts and University"; these are major accredited universities like Stanford and UCLA. It doesn't matter whether the applicants come from the US, Europe or Asia; none of them are qualified. Those folks should be mighty upset at their schools, because by the time they emerge from college with a Master's degree they're carrying six figures of student loan debt, and all that money has not prepared them to be hired.
We pay well, we're consistently in the top 5% of places-to-work rankings, we pile benefits on employees until they submerge, we don't do 60+ hour workweeks, and we still can't find a qualified candidate.
I'm all for the one-year boot camp, because six-plus years of academia sure aren't working for squat.
If we outlaw corporate contributions to candidates, we must also outlaw:
union contributions (direct or indirect)
PAC contributions (ALL of them, including YOUR special interests)
national party committee spending (direct or indirect)
governmental agency lobbying
any financing originating outside the country
The only source of campaign contributions should be registered voters, and capped. Corporations are not registered voters. Neither are unions, PACs, non-citizen immigrants (legal or otherwise), minors, felons (sorry, Wall Street, sorry, Earth First), or anything else. If you can't vote, why should you be allowed any other influence? That is a privilege reserved for citizens... it is what citizenship is all about. Yeah, sure, that means a whole lot less money floating around for propaganda, but is that bad? Why would replacing glitzy attack TV ads (expensive) with written position statements (cheap) be undesirable? And if someone isn't sufficiently motivated to open their wallets to support their candidates, fuck 'em. The lazy and apathetic will do what the motivated damned well tell them to (I'm looking at YOU, moderates, you lazy couch-dwelling motherfuckers. The national party committees, ALL of them, are owned by Constitution-hating would-be dictators because extremists are the only ones who give a damn enough to do anything other than whine, and the national committees are not about philosophy... they're about money.).
But... but... we're so GOOD at user interface design! Being a programmer means you are an expert in everything! Disciplines other than our own are worthless!
The average weight of cars has been increasing because crash survival standards have been becoming stricter, and that requires that more material be used in the car to protect the passenger compartment. This adds weight and bulk; with bulk (thicker doors, etc.) comes an overall increase in vehicle sizes, which itself adds weight AND frontal area. The frontal area increase comes with an increase in drag. Exotic materials like carbon fiber are still very expensive, so it's still aluminum and steel. And despite what legislators seem to think, you can't pass a law that increases the number of joules of energy in a gram of fuel.
It's not just American cars (so lose the anti-American screeching please). The average vehicle weight in ALL markets has been increasing. Go look up the dimensions and weights of just about any vehicle model and manufacturer regardless of market or whether the vehicle in question is sold in North America, and see how it's changed over time.
Safety costs weight and size. Weight and size cost fuel. At a given price point, you can have increased safety XOR increased fuel economy.
Windshield wipers! My kingdom for windshield wipers!
A good guess is that, going forward, all new Mars landers will have either a wiper system or the ability to compress Martian atmosphere and then go POOF on the solar panels. Yes, more weight, but when the payoff is potentially many more functional months of service, it'd be worth it.
My point is that corporations, not home users, are the ones paying the Mozilla Foundation's bills and payroll, and were slapped in the face for their troubles. Just how many FireFox logo polo-shirts and coffee mugs do you think it would take to run the Mozilla Foundation? Have you ever been in their headquarters and seen how they are spending other people's money? I have. Really really nice place and location. Have you first-hand heard and seen their attitude toward the people who ultimately are the ones funding their paychecks? I have. The "Occupy" people would be proud of those sneers.
Corporations are abandoning Mozilla both as users and contributors because Mozilla abandoned them and made a big show of it, and Mozilla is only doing an about-face because a significant portion of their userbase AND contribution stream AND developer community became offended by their antics. Their market share is plummeting for a reason, and they're getting in bed with that great social-justice bastion Microsoft because they've managed to piss off just about everyone else. Too little, too late, credibility gone. You talk about entitlement... well, Mozilla is not entitled to contributions, users, developer support or trust. All of those have to be earned, not granted for free... a concept which goes right over a bunch of people's heads here on Slashdot. Case in point.
Someone tell me why any enterprise should ever donate Mozilla a single penny of support ever again? Mozilla has aggressively and loudly snubbed enterprise users (after having courted them), has refused to listen to anything other than their politically-driven BS, and have told people to change their way of dealing with upgrades just to accommodate Mozilla. Looks like an abrupt about-face after those "evil corporations" stopped contributing. So when's the next ideologically-motivated "fuck you" change coming?
It's very disappointing. I worked at Netscape back in the 1994-1996 timeframe, and I knew some of the people who did very well in the Netscape IPO then went on to Mozilla. They've apparently changed. I guess it's okay to be enterprise-hostile after the enterprises have landed them a huge paycheck...
I wonder what the IRS, state tax boards, various employment/workplace regulatory bodies and such are going to have to say about this... they're going to want their cut of the action.
I also suspect the Treasury Department may have something to say about virtual currencies being used to pay for real-world goods and services. This ain't Second Life scripted wang-doodles we're talkin' about here. Scrip is a legal minefield.
"If we cannot reassemble our monopoly, it's bad for everyone!" We're dominating you, enshrining ourselves in legal scripture, raising your prices and smashing your service quality FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!"
In Earth orbit, you can always go home in an emergency. Even going as far as the moon, you can manually get home (as Apollo 13 demonstrated 41 years ago, and at least in theory we've learned something since then.
Not so in interplanetary space. You're completely on your own, with no place to run to. Therefore your crew is going to have to be extraordinarily calm and self-sufficient, able to perform emergency repairs very quickly while the emergency is unfolding around your ears, and be able to do so in a cramped environment. Fortunately, there is a pool of people available who have exactly this training and experience: submarine crew.
A submarine damage control specialist would make an excellent crew member for an interplanetary mission. Military members have the inside track to being considered for such missions anyway, and nothing beats a proven track record. Just as military test pilots were the first astronauts, a submariner would be an excellent candidate. Submariners are also frequently trained to deal with nuclear power units and, of course, nuclear warheads. In addition to dealing with tight quarters (moreso on a Russian sub than an American boomer), they're used to operating in an environment in which a shell of metal is what separates you from an instantly-lethal environment. An experienced submariner would have proven they can handle that particular psychological pressure.
Now if you're into intrigues in your story, having someone like that as a crew member allows the opportunity to inject "the mission is actually secretly this much more interesting thing" into the mix. And what if this submariner has for his entire career been a mole for some other government? The Opposition would always be trying to get someone onto a U.S. or Russian missile boat, and what if they succeeded? And then what if that person did so well they were offered the position on the interplanetary mission? Oh, what an opportunity...
...and iOS 5.0 supports my two-and-a-half year old iPhone 3GS.
Can someone tell me if any Android-based phone of that age is still supported by any vendor? Rail against Apple all you want, but the fact is that iPhones are supported longer than any Android-based phones. It's not iPhone buyers that are compelled to rush to the store to buy the newest model. It's Android-based phone users that are flavor-of-the-week... because they have no choice.
Such metrisc also disincentivize people taking proactive steps to reduce the number of incoming tickets (i.e. making the system/environment more robust or your users more educated), and disincentivizes managers for so doing by reducing the number of people needed to service incoming tickets (thus reducing the size of the empire and the pay grade of the manager).
I've seen both "disincentives" in action. It ain't pretty.
Valid contention, provided there is a list of games that require firmware installs of v3.21 or up; please mod parent UP in this case.
True, but if those games were released after the PS3 in question was sold and after Other OS was being advertised, the fact that those new games won't run without the update will be irrelevant for any assertion of warranty or suitability of purpose. If the PS3 with pre-3.21 firmware continues to run every game that it ran at the time you bought it, it passes the legal test (as HizzonorTheJudge pointed out). It's the linkage of continuing PSN access to accepting 3.21+ (and loss of Other OS) that was the remaining point of contention, and it looks like Sony set things up "correctly" (from their perspective).
Yup, it sucks. The recourse now is to punish Sony with your wallet rather than with a lawyer. Frankly, I think that a boycott will be more effective in any case, as it is much more directly tied to Sony's profit-and-loss statements than a court case that would have at most resulted in a half-hearted firmware update. I buy thousands of dollars' worth of consumer electronics, music, movies, computing equipment and games per year, both for myself and as gifts to others; some of my work has also had me as the decision-maker on five-to-six-figure computer purchases (for both the test lab and for users' desktops and laptops). Sony used to get a good chunk of that. They now get zero, and I don't see what could Sony could possibly do to convince me to change that in the future.
Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.
It's one of the reasons why I've always insisted upon having at least one guaranteed-uninterrupted (nothing short of "the building's on fire... again") two-hour block of time per day in any tech job I have. If I don't have that, don't complain to me that I write bad code, but DO expect me to gripe about it in my status and my supervisor evaluation.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys, time, re, LeaveMeTheFuckAlone
If you RTFPDF, an automotive analogy is, in fact, cited in the case. Here, let me get that for you...
"With the exception of the “Unjust Enrichment” claim discussed further
below, all of the counts are based on plaintiffs’ fundamental contention that it was wrongful for
Sony to disable the Other OS feature, or, more precisely, to put PS3 owners to the “Hobson’s
choice” of either permitting the Other OS feature to be disabled or forgoing their access to the PSN
and any other benefits available through installing Firmware Update 3.21. Plaintiffs offer an
analogy: “if Toyota disabled the battery feature in its hybrids and forced owners to use only
gasoline, it would not matter whether the auto’s warranties had expired.” Opposition at 1:8-9. In
plaintiffs’ view, it should be self evident that, “A manufacturer cannot unilaterally take away a
fundamental feature of a product after that product has been sold to a consumer – regardless of
whether the warranty is still in effect.” Id. at 1:9-11."2
But the judge said it's a flawed analogy (as most automotive analogies are):
The flaw in plaintiffs’ analogy is that they are claiming rights not only with respect to the
features of the PS3 product, but also to have ongoing access to an internet service offered by Sony,
the PSN. A somewhat fanciful, but more apt, analogy would be if Toyota sold hybrid vehicles with
an advertisement campaign touting that Toyota owners would have access to a recreational driving
facility, a no-speed limit amusement park for cars. Then, at some time thereafter, Toyota instituted
a rule that its hybrids would not be permitted in the park unless the owners allowed the battery
feature to be disabled. In those circumstances, Toyota hybrid owners who declined to authorize
disabling of the battery feature would still have fully-functional hybrid vehicles, capable of running
on an electric motor or a gasoline engine, as appropriate under the conditions. Similarly, PS3
owners who declined to install Firmware Update 3.21 still have fully-functioning devices, capable
of either being used as game consoles to play games on optical disks, or as computers, with the
Other OS feature.
So, what the judge is saying is that this isn't really about Other OS. It's about access to PSN, and that linking access to PSN to disabling Other OS is legal. That doesn't make it ethical, but this is a court not a church. He has to rule on matters of law not emotion.
For what it's worth, I think that Sony was slime for doing what it did (as they are for many other things that they have done... rootkits, not giving a damn about customer security, etc.), and it will be a cold day in hell before I buy a Sony product or fail to advise others to not buy any Sony product, but IN THIS CASE they didn't run afoul of the law. I also think that it's vastly preferable that judges wield their powers objectively rather than emotionally, because otherwise a racist or homophobic or nationalist or otherwise reprehensible judge would be completely able to get away with imposing their emotion as law.
I also hope that some of the shrill voices here are never allowed to sit on a jury, because if they are, they would surely decide the case based upon who they liked and hated rather than on the facts and guilt-or-innocence. Mob-think is not a suitable substitute for law or rationality.
Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book
Do your math, do your math, do your goddamned math
Blame yourself, blame yourself, not your skin or dick or cooch
Dumb's a choice, dumb's a choice, so SUCK IT UP if you drop out.
Slashdot Mirror
For the same reason that some suspects are kept in jail pending their trial: it is considered highly likely by the judge presiding over the case that the criminal activity would continue, or evidence be destroyed. "Due process" includes that decision, and the prosecution and defendant both state their position before the judge makes that decision. That stage has passed.
BTW, I read the complaint. The core of the accusations are twofold: first that the Megaupload folks willfully hosted infringing content (thus losing the safe harbor protections that shield other hosting services); they knew and did nothing. Second, that through other businesses and websites they controlled, the Megaupload folks deliberately solicited infringing content and directed it to Megaupload (hence the "conspiracy" charges, which mean something very specific and not necessarily the tinfoil hats and black helicopters so popular among bloggers who think they know the meaning of a word). If those complaints are true (and none of us here knows that or will decide that; we are not the jury, and we are not seeing the evidence), then yeah, they're gonna go to jail and be stripped of every penny they own. That's reality, regardless of whether Anonymous, Slashdot, or anyone else likes it or not.
If you're getting no bites on your resume, it sounds like your resume isn't all that compelling, or you're applying for positions which your listed skills are not going to be considered relevant. Post an anonymized version of it somewhere (change the names of the companies and yourself), post a link here, and see what people think. Many engineers scoff at resumes. Don't. Your credibility depends upon it.
What do I look for when I go through a stack of resumes? As I mentioned, decent editing skills do matter... if you're sloppy on your resume your code will be sloppy too. I also read the job descriptions; I want to know what the applicant did. What's wrong with this:
Gadgetronic is a leading manufacturer of innovative USB-enabled sex toys. We have 75% of the North American market, and hold over 100 patents in anal stimulation. We have a proud 100-year history of excellent customer service, and have won numerous awards both within our field and for general business excellence. Our clients include the Republican National Committee, Michael Moore, Mel Gibson, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Boards of Directors of almost half of the Fortune 500. We have international sales offices in Frankfurt, Pyong-Yang, and Riyadh.
I was a test engnieer.
First, the vast majority of the entry describes the company, not what the applicant did there. Who cares about where the sales offices are, this is a technical applicant! Second, it reads just like a cut-and-paste from the company website; the applicant could have at least copy/pasted their actual job description. Third, the only part that WASN'T copy/pasted has an egregious misspelling. Fourth, I would have no idea what the applicant actually did. I'm not going to go any further with this resume. What would be better, then?
Test lead for a line of USB-controlled personal stimulation devices. Responsible for testing of the scripting APIs which enabled scenario-based operations. Wrote test automation scripts in Python, including automated reporting and regression suites; tracked defects through their life-cycle; reviewed technical documents. Maintained a compatibility lab including Windows, Linux, OS/X and FreeBSD hosts. Responsible for WHQL certification, and was the point-of-contact with Microsoft. Promoted from intern to engineer to test lead within the first year of employment.
OK, that's a little better. I know this candidate has done scripting work, both in Python and in whatever scripting language the vibrating scenarios are written in (probably TCL... get it? "Tickle'? Ahem). I know that the candidate takes reporting seriously enough to be entrusted with it (that "communication" thing), can deal with other departments (tech pubs and product management) and has a broad knowledge of operating systems. I also see a very specific skill (WHQL certification) that could be a critical keyword that might be the reason the recruiter brought this to my attention; if I needed a WHQL test lead for a video card, I might well think that this is a more relevant skill than video card knowledge. I might also be interested in someone with a good working relationship with Microsoft's WHQL group. There are no spelling errors, so maybe the candidate's feedback on technical documents is worth paying him/her/it for. I also can see that Gadgetronic thought well enough of our candidate to give greater responsibility over time.
And you can bet your ass (heh heh) that I will verify every claim that I think is relevant. I will ask about the WHQL signing procedure. I will ask that the candidate write some Python code. I will ask questions about how FreeBSD handles device driver installation. I will ask how reporting was done (and sneak in a question about exit codes while doing so, as it's relevant to the claim). I will probe (heh heh) the candidate's knowledge of the differences between USB 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, and how much po
"And no matter what, I'm going to ask about the implications of the GPL in coding. "
So you expect your programmers to also come with law degrees?
Seriously...
I expect programmers to know that it's not okay to just grab code off of a Google search and cram it into a product. That doesn't take a law degree. Seriously, programmers who don't recognize (or refuse to recognize) that licensing terms affect whether code can be used or how that affects where you split modules up, or why you can't just grab any code you want any time you want and put it anywhere you want are a hazard to the entire company. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not; that's how the real world works. "License 'unspecified' taints kernel" is a land mine.
"Expert at TCP/IP Networking" can imply a lot of things, ranging from knowing IP internals (ie: the handshakes you describe), to being a router configuration wizard. Test someone in an area not quite covered by their expertise, and you could end up throwing away a perfectly good candidate.
As I said, I work at a networking products company. If you claim to be an expert in the field in which we require expertise, then you bet I'm going to test you in that area. A "router configuration wizard" who doesn't understand the TCP handshake, for instance, is neither a router configuration wizard, nor a perfectly good candidate. They may do very well elsewhere, but not here. And resume inflation stinks of dishonesty.
Cynical hiring personnel are a real problem in the industry, and considering the depth and breadth of skills that many engineers have, its not fair to harp on the lack of a very few specific skills that can be relatively easily acquired.
I'm not cynical, but I am tired of being lied to by people who want me to depend on them to get work done. Ever met a "Python expert" who didn't know what a dictionary was or how to trap an exception in a try/except block? Well, I've interviewed a couple.
Tech jobs often require skills which are not relatively easily required. I would consider a candidate who was lacking in one particular skill area, but only if they were strong in the others AND weren't trying to BS me about it. As I mentioned, the bar isn't that high; our positions require that you know a major scripting language (Python, Perl or TCL, your choice, we don't have a "one true language"), can automate simple tasks in that language, know TCP/IP networking well (hello! Networking infrastructure products company! THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL), be able to come up with good test cases, and has at least some awareness of how the real world works. I don't think that's at all unreasonable, nor do any of the other folks doing interviews at my company.
Be able to solve practical problems. More and more frequently, employers (like my company) are using quizzes as a filter. I can't speak to other industries; I'm in QA at a networking products company.
Don't claim to be an expert in something you can't back up. If your resume says "Expert in TCP/IP networking", I'm going to be asking for more than just "describe the handshake at the start of a TCP session". If you claim to know Python, I'm going to ask you to write some code on the whiteboard that will involve process management, recursion and exception-handling. If you claim to know regular expressions, you're going to need to know how to extract phone numbers. If you say you know Linux, be prepared to tell me what the /proc filesystem is. And no matter what, I'm going to ask about the implications of the GPL in coding.
Know what the company does and what its main products/services are. When I ask someone if they're familiar with what we do, there's little that is going to be more off-putting than "I didn't bother to find out".
If you have a serious mad-on against Apple, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, or whatever, leave it at home. All operating systems suck. All phone suck. All database servers All business practices suck. They just suck in different ways, and I don't want to have doubts raised about whether someone is going to be disruptive, argumentative, or less than enthusiastic when they're asked to work on a particular port of a product. The more opinionated someone is, the less they actually know.
For the love of Celestia, please spell-check your resume. Communication is important, and if someone can't be bothered to get it right on their application/resume, I'm pretty sure they're going to be even worse on the job. Resumes loaded with errors go straight into the trash can.
In short, be able to demonstrate coding skills, initiative, and enough platform skills to convince folks of your basic competence. You do that and you're above about 80% of the folks out there right away.
Ask questions. Remember, you're interviewing us right back! There are quite a few companies out there that you want no part of (stress-monkey coworkers,
In my recent (and extensive) experience with interviewing people who are recent graduates, I am finding a very large percentage of people with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science who can't write even the most simple scripts in any language... people with "expert in TCP/IP networking" in their qualifications, or who have three years testing routers and switches listed as experience who don't know what NAT means or what a MAC address is... people who don't know how to list running processes on any platform. These are people who are graduates. They have their degree. And those degrees are worthless. We've had half a dozen positions open where I work for a long while, the bar just isn't set that high, but we're not finding qualified applicants.
It doesn't matter what nationality the school or the "graduate" is. Poorly-prepared graduates are a world-wide phenomenon. Sure, Asia is producing a large number of graduates, but the majority of them aren't going to be very useful. The U.S. is producing fewer engineering graduates, but they're just as useless.
Yes, the universities are to blame. I don't know what they're teaching but it has little to do with reality and doesn't prepare the students to be employable. But the students are also to blame. Surveys show that between 75 and 98% of students admit to cheating, and don't feel particularly bad about it; the universities also don't seem to think that cheating is anything to get worked up over either. No wonder nobody is learning anything.
All of this is why I don't think that it's a big deal that the US produces only 4% of engineering degrees; 4% of "nothing useful" is no worse than "35% of nothing useful". If those degrees actually meant something, or correlated in any meaningful way to success (both for the individual and for the employer), I'd be more concerned. My real worry is that Westerners aren't even interested in engineering any more; they all want to be in sales and marketing and other nontechnical fields (or "soft" majors like political science or humanities, followed by whining about how nobody will pay six figure salaries for their chosen field). I'm not sure why this is,,, given how little tech work someone with a tech degree seems to actually be required to do, it can't be because of academic workload. Mind you, the profound anti-intellectualism that is still the rule in Western society may have something to do with it.
-sigh- Kids these days.
So, if transits are a viable way of detecting habitable planets at very long distances... do we have a list of stars that we would be transit-visible to? (say, within an degree of the ecliptic) A good survey would be to examine those stars which might well be examining us back.
I can't speak to the effectiveness of a one-year coding boot camp.
What I CAN speak to is the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the academic training people are getting. My group has had open positions for almost a year, because we can't find anyone with decent IP networking, scripting/automation, and QA skills. We're getting applicants... lots of them.... with master-of-science degrees in computer science who can't write code to traverse a directory tree or automate an SSH login. And these degrees aren't from "Smilin' Fred's Used Truck Parts and University"; these are major accredited universities like Stanford and UCLA. It doesn't matter whether the applicants come from the US, Europe or Asia; none of them are qualified. Those folks should be mighty upset at their schools, because by the time they emerge from college with a Master's degree they're carrying six figures of student loan debt, and all that money has not prepared them to be hired.
We pay well, we're consistently in the top 5% of places-to-work rankings, we pile benefits on employees until they submerge, we don't do 60+ hour workweeks, and we still can't find a qualified candidate.
I'm all for the one-year boot camp, because six-plus years of academia sure aren't working for squat.
If we outlaw corporate contributions to candidates, we must also outlaw:
The only source of campaign contributions should be registered voters, and capped. Corporations are not registered voters. Neither are unions, PACs, non-citizen immigrants (legal or otherwise), minors, felons (sorry, Wall Street, sorry, Earth First), or anything else. If you can't vote, why should you be allowed any other influence? That is a privilege reserved for citizens... it is what citizenship is all about. Yeah, sure, that means a whole lot less money floating around for propaganda, but is that bad? Why would replacing glitzy attack TV ads (expensive) with written position statements (cheap) be undesirable? And if someone isn't sufficiently motivated to open their wallets to support their candidates, fuck 'em. The lazy and apathetic will do what the motivated damned well tell them to (I'm looking at YOU, moderates, you lazy couch-dwelling motherfuckers. The national party committees, ALL of them, are owned by Constitution-hating would-be dictators because extremists are the only ones who give a damn enough to do anything other than whine, and the national committees are not about philosophy... they're about money.).
Sounds like someone needs their pet social experiment to be funded.
But... but... we're so GOOD at user interface design! Being a programmer means you are an expert in everything! Disciplines other than our own are worthless!
What a load of tripe.
The average weight of cars has been increasing because crash survival standards have been becoming stricter, and that requires that more material be used in the car to protect the passenger compartment. This adds weight and bulk; with bulk (thicker doors, etc.) comes an overall increase in vehicle sizes, which itself adds weight AND frontal area. The frontal area increase comes with an increase in drag. Exotic materials like carbon fiber are still very expensive, so it's still aluminum and steel. And despite what legislators seem to think, you can't pass a law that increases the number of joules of energy in a gram of fuel.
It's not just American cars (so lose the anti-American screeching please). The average vehicle weight in ALL markets has been increasing. Go look up the dimensions and weights of just about any vehicle model and manufacturer regardless of market or whether the vehicle in question is sold in North America, and see how it's changed over time.
Safety costs weight and size. Weight and size cost fuel. At a given price point, you can have increased safety XOR increased fuel economy.
Choose.
The windshield wipers flap REALLY FAST, thus providing motive force.
Then the windshield wipers should work really well.
Windshield wipers! My kingdom for windshield wipers!
A good guess is that, going forward, all new Mars landers will have either a wiper system or the ability to compress Martian atmosphere and then go POOF on the solar panels. Yes, more weight, but when the payoff is potentially many more functional months of service, it'd be worth it.
My point is that corporations, not home users, are the ones paying the Mozilla Foundation's bills and payroll, and were slapped in the face for their troubles. Just how many FireFox logo polo-shirts and coffee mugs do you think it would take to run the Mozilla Foundation? Have you ever been in their headquarters and seen how they are spending other people's money? I have. Really really nice place and location. Have you first-hand heard and seen their attitude toward the people who ultimately are the ones funding their paychecks? I have. The "Occupy" people would be proud of those sneers.
Corporations are abandoning Mozilla both as users and contributors because Mozilla abandoned them and made a big show of it, and Mozilla is only doing an about-face because a significant portion of their userbase AND contribution stream AND developer community became offended by their antics. Their market share is plummeting for a reason, and they're getting in bed with that great social-justice bastion Microsoft because they've managed to piss off just about everyone else. Too little, too late, credibility gone. You talk about entitlement... well, Mozilla is not entitled to contributions, users, developer support or trust. All of those have to be earned, not granted for free... a concept which goes right over a bunch of people's heads here on Slashdot. Case in point.
Someone tell me why any enterprise should ever donate Mozilla a single penny of support ever again? Mozilla has aggressively and loudly snubbed enterprise users (after having courted them), has refused to listen to anything other than their politically-driven BS, and have told people to change their way of dealing with upgrades just to accommodate Mozilla. Looks like an abrupt about-face after those "evil corporations" stopped contributing. So when's the next ideologically-motivated "fuck you" change coming?
It's very disappointing. I worked at Netscape back in the 1994-1996 timeframe, and I knew some of the people who did very well in the Netscape IPO then went on to Mozilla. They've apparently changed. I guess it's okay to be enterprise-hostile after the enterprises have landed them a huge paycheck...
I wonder what the IRS, state tax boards, various employment/workplace regulatory bodies and such are going to have to say about this... they're going to want their cut of the action.
I also suspect the Treasury Department may have something to say about virtual currencies being used to pay for real-world goods and services. This ain't Second Life scripted wang-doodles we're talkin' about here. Scrip is a legal minefield.
"If we cannot reassemble our monopoly, it's bad for everyone!" We're dominating you, enshrining ourselves in legal scripture, raising your prices and smashing your service quality FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!"
In Earth orbit, you can always go home in an emergency. Even going as far as the moon, you can manually get home (as Apollo 13 demonstrated 41 years ago, and at least in theory we've learned something since then.
Not so in interplanetary space. You're completely on your own, with no place to run to. Therefore your crew is going to have to be extraordinarily calm and self-sufficient, able to perform emergency repairs very quickly while the emergency is unfolding around your ears, and be able to do so in a cramped environment. Fortunately, there is a pool of people available who have exactly this training and experience: submarine crew.
A submarine damage control specialist would make an excellent crew member for an interplanetary mission. Military members have the inside track to being considered for such missions anyway, and nothing beats a proven track record. Just as military test pilots were the first astronauts, a submariner would be an excellent candidate. Submariners are also frequently trained to deal with nuclear power units and, of course, nuclear warheads. In addition to dealing with tight quarters (moreso on a Russian sub than an American boomer), they're used to operating in an environment in which a shell of metal is what separates you from an instantly-lethal environment. An experienced submariner would have proven they can handle that particular psychological pressure.
Now if you're into intrigues in your story, having someone like that as a crew member allows the opportunity to inject "the mission is actually secretly this much more interesting thing" into the mix. And what if this submariner has for his entire career been a mole for some other government? The Opposition would always be trying to get someone onto a U.S. or Russian missile boat, and what if they succeeded? And then what if that person did so well they were offered the position on the interplanetary mission? Oh, what an opportunity...
...and iOS 5.0 supports my two-and-a-half year old iPhone 3GS.
Can someone tell me if any Android-based phone of that age is still supported by any vendor? Rail against Apple all you want, but the fact is that iPhones are supported longer than any Android-based phones. It's not iPhone buyers that are compelled to rush to the store to buy the newest model. It's Android-based phone users that are flavor-of-the-week... because they have no choice.
Such metrisc also disincentivize people taking proactive steps to reduce the number of incoming tickets (i.e. making the system/environment more robust or your users more educated), and disincentivizes managers for so doing by reducing the number of people needed to service incoming tickets (thus reducing the size of the empire and the pay grade of the manager).
I've seen both "disincentives" in action. It ain't pretty.
Valid contention, provided there is a list of games that require firmware installs of v3.21 or up; please mod parent UP in this case.
True, but if those games were released after the PS3 in question was sold and after Other OS was being advertised, the fact that those new games won't run without the update will be irrelevant for any assertion of warranty or suitability of purpose. If the PS3 with pre-3.21 firmware continues to run every game that it ran at the time you bought it, it passes the legal test (as HizzonorTheJudge pointed out). It's the linkage of continuing PSN access to accepting 3.21+ (and loss of Other OS) that was the remaining point of contention, and it looks like Sony set things up "correctly" (from their perspective).
Yup, it sucks. The recourse now is to punish Sony with your wallet rather than with a lawyer. Frankly, I think that a boycott will be more effective in any case, as it is much more directly tied to Sony's profit-and-loss statements than a court case that would have at most resulted in a half-hearted firmware update. I buy thousands of dollars' worth of consumer electronics, music, movies, computing equipment and games per year, both for myself and as gifts to others; some of my work has also had me as the decision-maker on five-to-six-figure computer purchases (for both the test lab and for users' desktops and laptops). Sony used to get a good chunk of that. They now get zero, and I don't see what could Sony could possibly do to convince me to change that in the future.
Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.
It's one of the reasons why I've always insisted upon having at least one guaranteed-uninterrupted (nothing short of "the building's on fire... again") two-hour block of time per day in any tech job I have. If I don't have that, don't complain to me that I write bad code, but DO expect me to gripe about it in my status and my supervisor evaluation.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys, time, re, LeaveMeTheFuckAlone
If you RTFPDF, an automotive analogy is, in fact, cited in the case. Here, let me get that for you...
But the judge said it's a flawed analogy (as most automotive analogies are):
So, what the judge is saying is that this isn't really about Other OS. It's about access to PSN, and that linking access to PSN to disabling Other OS is legal. That doesn't make it ethical, but this is a court not a church. He has to rule on matters of law not emotion.
For what it's worth, I think that Sony was slime for doing what it did (as they are for many other things that they have done... rootkits, not giving a damn about customer security, etc.), and it will be a cold day in hell before I buy a Sony product or fail to advise others to not buy any Sony product, but IN THIS CASE they didn't run afoul of the law. I also think that it's vastly preferable that judges wield their powers objectively rather than emotionally, because otherwise a racist or homophobic or nationalist or otherwise reprehensible judge would be completely able to get away with imposing their emotion as law.
I also hope that some of the shrill voices here are never allowed to sit on a jury, because if they are, they would surely decide the case based upon who they liked and hated rather than on the facts and guilt-or-innocence. Mob-think is not a suitable substitute for law or rationality.
Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book
Do your math, do your math, do your goddamned math
Blame yourself, blame yourself, not your skin or dick or cooch
Dumb's a choice, dumb's a choice, so SUCK IT UP if you drop out.
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.