The NSA already knows about those live goat porn sites you browse, that you like to dress up like a nun and get spanked with a toilet brush on Friday nights and they already have a picture of your dong. So really, what do you need a secret spy phone for, again?
Back then you could crap a pile of text onto a page and not worry too much about formatting. Modern word processors are distracting, annoying and the documents they produce look like shit despite (because of?) all this. If I want a document to look pretty, I use LaTeX. Word processors of the WordStar era aren't much different than using a typewriter. As long as you don't try to use white-out on the screen, it should be fine.
Yeah. Back in the 90's I had to clean up after someone who'd been the sole programmer on a project for the better part of a year. They left a month before the project was due. I come in and discover they didn't realize that C strings were null terminated. And that although the target system was a UNIX system that needed text-base screen stuff done (IE: ncurses,) they'd written all their screens with Borland's text I/O utilities. They wouldn't let me redesign any of the stuff the original person had done. I think the project ended up being later than it would have if they'd just let me start from scratch.
Most of the time when they ask you to do a function on the white board, that you can code it is not really what they're looking for. They want to see if you can listen to the interviewer, gather requirements and actually design out the thing before you start writing code. Let's say I ask you to write a function to reverse a string. Pretty straight forward, right? But also pretty ambiguous. Should I test the pointer I'm passed to make sure it's not null? Should I modify the memory in-place, or make a copy? If I'm going to modify it in place, should I return a pointer to the same string or is there something else they want returned? Maybe the number of characters I modified? I also like to ask if there's anything else I really should be aware of before I start? I'm still waiting for someone to tell me that the strings will be palindromes frequently enough that it's worth checking in advance to see if you really need to reverse it in the first place...
Once you have your requirements, draw out what's going to happen in memory with a few test strings just to get a feel for what your loops will look like. You don't need a particularly massive design phase for a function like that, but you really should have a feel for corner cases before you start to put it to code. Ironically by the time you get to the point where you're going to write code, it'll seem pretty simple what you need to do, but the interviewer will probably stop you because you've done something he's never seen before in an interview, and he's ready to hire you.
I've seen a lot of otherwise good interviews go bad with this seemingly simple little function, but they really don't have to work out that way. Make this one little change and you'll go from hating interviews to loving them. It really is just that simple.
I could point you at several companies that are using them for IT and end user support. They schedule a deskside visit to fix your hardware and you end up covered in monkey shit and banana peels.
A friend of mine and I play to determine exit order on the aircraft. I've beaten him 4 out of the last 5 times we've done it playing rock. Next time we play I'm going to point that out to him in advance and then the head games begin! Will I play rock again, because it's the predictable move, or am I just setting him up to throw paper because I'm planning to throw scissors?
Why should bitcoin have any more or less value than our paper currency? US Dollars are only worth what people think they are, and have a whole lot less effort put into their design than bitcoin does.
Replace the airbag with a spike. If you get in an accident, you get a spike directly in the face. I bet you'll pay a LOT more attention to what's going on around you, then!
Same here, Old PDP system at RPI back in '87, for an assembly language programming class. We had to type the bootstrap sequence to the console in octal to get the system to jmp to the first instruction on the floppy. I still have the book for that class. It postulates in the forward that one day 16 bit systems might be widespread but it doesn't anticipate that 32 bit systems will ever be inexpensive enough to enjoy widespread adoption.
It'd be a bummer if you had to type the bootstrap sequence in to launch your missile. I assume they solve that problem by leaving the system on all the time.
It's actually just a guy with a machine gun. He just likes to pretend he's an antipersonnel mine. It's very awkward when he occasionally explodes on someone.
They could be slow-boating and we'd never know it. Even if you're in the same galaxy, a slow boat could take longer to get to the next star over than our entire civilization has ever existed. If we ever achieve a good AI or move our minds into computers, space would be a lot more hospitable. I'd guess we'd mostly just sit around the sun sucking in the solar power until the star burns out and we need to find a new one.
Though I have seen a few less-badly run ones. Sometimes there's actually a competent guy in there, trying to manage a few hundred servers and dealing with constant user abuse. Sometimes there're nothing but a bunch of monkeys who will just keep trying to reboot the machines in the hopes that will somehow fix all those misconfigured servers. The single unifying theme is that there are never enough resources allocated for even the best people to do a good job in those departments. I could point to companies that could be growing two or three times faster if not for their shoddy IT practices. Or companies that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to BFI their IT solution, while shackling their developers with Citrix. I guess because even on today's ultra-fast computers, everyone deserves the experience of doing all their work on a network-connected computer via 2400 bps dial-up. I suppose IT will take the blame for that as well, though. It's OK. They're used to it.
Around the time I was going through college, there was an article about scurvy making a comeback because a lot of college students ate Ramen noodles and nothing else. Turns out there's no vitamin C in Ramen.
I used to joke that you had to supplement your Ramen with pop tarts but I checked the nutrition information on those recently and they also have 0% of your RDA of vitamin C. So, I guess you're down to foraging for rose hips or something. And if you're lucky maybe you can kill a squirrel with one of your textbooks...
It's that people think they can drop Oracle on top of a crappy design and that will somehow magically fix it. By the time people get done trying to use brute force, ignorance and massive amounts of IT resources, you may as well have Dbase III on your back end. Oracle might let you get away with a shitty design if your application didn't really need a database, but it's not going to help you that much if what you're trying to do is complicated enough to need one.
Since I started skydiving and hanging out at the grill down at the airport, I've been surprised at how approachable private aviation is. If I wanted another 5 digit hobby, I could wander in to the office at the local airport and start pilot lessons immediately. As it stands,a jump ticket only sets me back about $25. The trip's only one way, but if you're sitting next to the door in the summer time, it's a hell of a view -- they open it at 2000 feet to cool the plane off and close it again at 8000 feet when it starts getting kind of chilly. I was the first out the door for night jumps last July and looking out the open door of the plane on the ride to altitude was one of the more amazing things I've ever got to do in my life.
I'm pretty sure it was "Catholic School" that's to blame for my atheism. Every time I meet an atheist (you know, down at the Church of Atheism) it's always the same story -- they spent some number of years in a Catholic School. Sometimes it's a little, sometimes it's a lot, but there's always some there. Sure this is anecdotal, but it's common enough that someone could probably get a research paper out of it.
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The NSA already knows about those live goat porn sites you browse, that you like to dress up like a nun and get spanked with a toilet brush on Friday nights and they already have a picture of your dong. So really, what do you need a secret spy phone for, again?
Back then you could crap a pile of text onto a page and not worry too much about formatting. Modern word processors are distracting, annoying and the documents they produce look like shit despite (because of?) all this. If I want a document to look pretty, I use LaTeX. Word processors of the WordStar era aren't much different than using a typewriter. As long as you don't try to use white-out on the screen, it should be fine.
Yeah. Back in the 90's I had to clean up after someone who'd been the sole programmer on a project for the better part of a year. They left a month before the project was due. I come in and discover they didn't realize that C strings were null terminated. And that although the target system was a UNIX system that needed text-base screen stuff done (IE: ncurses,) they'd written all their screens with Borland's text I/O utilities. They wouldn't let me redesign any of the stuff the original person had done. I think the project ended up being later than it would have if they'd just let me start from scratch.
Once you have your requirements, draw out what's going to happen in memory with a few test strings just to get a feel for what your loops will look like. You don't need a particularly massive design phase for a function like that, but you really should have a feel for corner cases before you start to put it to code. Ironically by the time you get to the point where you're going to write code, it'll seem pretty simple what you need to do, but the interviewer will probably stop you because you've done something he's never seen before in an interview, and he's ready to hire you.
I've seen a lot of otherwise good interviews go bad with this seemingly simple little function, but they really don't have to work out that way. Make this one little change and you'll go from hating interviews to loving them. It really is just that simple.
I'm contractually obliged to mention this in every Star Wars thread on the Internet.
But I can still ask if the carport matches the drapes?
But I wanted to make killer robots! Now what am I going to do with this libKillerRobot I was working on?!
I could point you at several companies that are using them for IT and end user support. They schedule a deskside visit to fix your hardware and you end up covered in monkey shit and banana peels.
A friend of mine and I play to determine exit order on the aircraft. I've beaten him 4 out of the last 5 times we've done it playing rock. Next time we play I'm going to point that out to him in advance and then the head games begin! Will I play rock again, because it's the predictable move, or am I just setting him up to throw paper because I'm planning to throw scissors?
Why should bitcoin have any more or less value than our paper currency? US Dollars are only worth what people think they are, and have a whole lot less effort put into their design than bitcoin does.
Replace the airbag with a spike. If you get in an accident, you get a spike directly in the face. I bet you'll pay a LOT more attention to what's going on around you, then!
It'd be a bummer if you had to type the bootstrap sequence in to launch your missile. I assume they solve that problem by leaving the system on all the time.
It's actually just a guy with a machine gun. He just likes to pretend he's an antipersonnel mine. It's very awkward when he occasionally explodes on someone.
It's probably a mercy killing. Some of those poor servers were probably forced to run HP/UX. I'd want to die, if I had to run HP/UX...
They could be slow-boating and we'd never know it. Even if you're in the same galaxy, a slow boat could take longer to get to the next star over than our entire civilization has ever existed. If we ever achieve a good AI or move our minds into computers, space would be a lot more hospitable. I'd guess we'd mostly just sit around the sun sucking in the solar power until the star burns out and we need to find a new one.
Though I have seen a few less-badly run ones. Sometimes there's actually a competent guy in there, trying to manage a few hundred servers and dealing with constant user abuse. Sometimes there're nothing but a bunch of monkeys who will just keep trying to reboot the machines in the hopes that will somehow fix all those misconfigured servers. The single unifying theme is that there are never enough resources allocated for even the best people to do a good job in those departments. I could point to companies that could be growing two or three times faster if not for their shoddy IT practices. Or companies that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to BFI their IT solution, while shackling their developers with Citrix. I guess because even on today's ultra-fast computers, everyone deserves the experience of doing all their work on a network-connected computer via 2400 bps dial-up. I suppose IT will take the blame for that as well, though. It's OK. They're used to it.
I'm guessing it'll be, "If those guys didn't want to explode, they wouldn't be in Derkaderkastan."
I used to joke that you had to supplement your Ramen with pop tarts but I checked the nutrition information on those recently and they also have 0% of your RDA of vitamin C. So, I guess you're down to foraging for rose hips or something. And if you're lucky maybe you can kill a squirrel with one of your textbooks...
It's that people think they can drop Oracle on top of a crappy design and that will somehow magically fix it. By the time people get done trying to use brute force, ignorance and massive amounts of IT resources, you may as well have Dbase III on your back end. Oracle might let you get away with a shitty design if your application didn't really need a database, but it's not going to help you that much if what you're trying to do is complicated enough to need one.
You really don't want to know what robots do when they sit idle.
Since I started skydiving and hanging out at the grill down at the airport, I've been surprised at how approachable private aviation is. If I wanted another 5 digit hobby, I could wander in to the office at the local airport and start pilot lessons immediately. As it stands,a jump ticket only sets me back about $25. The trip's only one way, but if you're sitting next to the door in the summer time, it's a hell of a view -- they open it at 2000 feet to cool the plane off and close it again at 8000 feet when it starts getting kind of chilly. I was the first out the door for night jumps last July and looking out the open door of the plane on the ride to altitude was one of the more amazing things I've ever got to do in my life.
So you're saying intelligent life is more likely to exist in a void?
Or maybe he just doesn't want it to stop.
I'm pretty sure it was "Catholic School" that's to blame for my atheism. Every time I meet an atheist (you know, down at the Church of Atheism) it's always the same story -- they spent some number of years in a Catholic School. Sometimes it's a little, sometimes it's a lot, but there's always some there. Sure this is anecdotal, but it's common enough that someone could probably get a research paper out of it.
Man with one atomic clock knows what time it is, man with two isn't sure.