Oh do fuck off, some of us remember the internet before the dotcom boom, where there were thousands of sites without an advert in sight and tons of really interesting content and the word or concept of paywall didn't even really exist.
The web was built as a tool for easy and open information sharing, and grew on that premise for a decade before people started believing it was all about the ad revenue and paywalls.
In fact, I still believe the internet was better back then, there was no corporate interference in what you can and can't do on the internet.
If the advertisers go away the web will be far better, because people will be putting content up because they're passionate about that topic, rather than because they're trying to make a quick buck, which is exactly how it used to be.
"Exactly what makes you think that an economy in the grip of a 4 year recession about to hit it's third dip, recovering less well than it did in the 1930s is the right time to continue with GDP shrinking austerity?"
Why assume austerity is the only method of deficit reduction? investment can increase growth which will in turn increase tax receipts which will in turn reduce the deficit.
Deficit reduction doesn't have to be just about making cuts.
"Spectrum is a scarce resource and if it doesn't fetch a price which reflects that scarcity, then somebody wins and somebody loses."
Scarcity in itself doesn't define the value of something, you could take the most scarce thing on earth, but if no one cares about it and is willing to pay for it it has no monetary value.
The spectrum was sold at auction and it reached the price that companies were willing to bid against each other too. That's about as fair a value as you can place on the thing as it was determined by a genuinely competitive market competing for it.
It wasn't the Tory party that sold it off, it was Ofcom, but you can guarantee it's the Tory party that instigated this investigation.
Osborne factored the income from the auction into his budget to mask a shortfall in his budget to try and maintain the facade that he is economically competent and reducing the deficit. The problem is now, as the money that has actually come in is over £1bn lower than expected, his books now will struggle to balance so he's more likely to end up failing to hit his target yet again of deficit reduction.
There was nothing wrong with the auction, but Osborne is just upset he's going to have egg on his face that his attempt to mask a shortfall in his deficit reduction plan with a one off windfall (rather than do something that will reduce the deficit perpetually) has failed.
For what it's worth though it's not as if it's just the Tories that do this sort of thing that's bad for our country- Brown for example gave away billions of our EU rebate under some misguided delusion that France would then give up some agricultural subsidies which of course they didn't, and have only sought to increase them. Both Labour and the Tories are equally guilty of throwing money away, so don't try and make it about this part or that, they're all just as incompetent.
Yeah, I agree with you really, by cheating I was thinking more along the lines of getting someone to do the entire task for them but as I said in my other post in this thread I've not personally found this an issue in practice as it usually means they have a lack of knowledge that comes out in interview regardless.
Agreed, the US is definitely one of, if not the hardest country to migrate to even as a skilled worker.
America suffers from a lot of nationalism anyway, stemming largely from the ideology of American exceptionalism, but I can't help but think that as an outsider a lot of H1B complaints stem from that nationalism.
Whilst there are companies that are paying, what I assume are low wages for the US market, a lot of large companies, especially those often under the spotlight on this issue, such as Facebook, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Google are paying well over $100,000 for developers. A good number of Google's in fact are getting close to and in some cases over $200,000.
Is this really dragging wages down? If so then what the hell kind of wages do Americans expect? Even at the lower end of these companies offerings, $100,000, that's still £65,000 which is plenty enough to live a very comfortable life on in the UK and we have much higher taxes and get screwed far harder on many products like fuel.
Are Americans really sure H1B users are driving wages down and that it's not simply because said companies genuinely do want to be able to get the best talent globally, something which H1B cap puts a limit on? Are there any studies I can read showing a definitive link between H1B usage and decreased wages. I'm not even sure that the cap is large enough to even be able to have a tangible effect on wages when spread across every industry.
If it looks like nationalism, sounds like nationalism, and smells like nationalism it normally is. But I'd love to be proven wrong and see some evidence that there is a demonstrable causative link between H1B uptake and decrease in wages in fields such as software. On that note, are software engineering wages even actually going down in the US in the first place?
I don't really have a horse in this race as I'm neither American, nor do I, or have I ever had any intention of becoming American, but I'm intrigued to see what the evidence is on this issue and learn a bit more about it as each time it's brought up it always sounds like one of those topics that's strong on the rhetoric, and loose on the facts.
I tend to find that concerns that may arise from time taken will be obvious from questions asked, I normally would ask how much time they spent on it, how they found it, whether they enjoyed it and so on. It's generally enough to tell from their responses and their face how honest they are about this sort of thing.
There also tends to be a healthy correlation between general technical knowledge and competence and time taken too - if someone spent all night on the task, it may still not be as good as the person who did it in 2hrs because they still suffered from a fundamental lack of understanding, but even if they do manage to produce something better they'll then stumble on different, but related questions.
I think the key thing is that there are people who just "get it" and people who don't and it's that separation that is important to filter out. If someone takes 12hrs on a 2hr project because it was a framework they were weak on and they basically had to install all the tools and learn the framework from scratch then that's okay - that's not a general problem, and I wouldn't want them to fail an interview based on that. If however someone takes 12hrs because they simply don't get it, and are desperately piecing something together then I have a problem with that - they're way out of their depth, and even 36 or 72hrs wouldn't be enough for them to hide that in their solution to a task or in the interview.
I think if someone can produce an impressive solution it doesn't matter how long it took them, to produce an impressive solution is more about inherent competence, which is what matters. Their speed will vary only on their experience with the content in question, and once they're in the job they'll quickly get up to speed on the things we do and technology they use if they have that underlying inherent competence that I'm looking for.
On a final and related note, the tests I set tend to cover a mini-project, I don't just ask for code, I tend to give a problem, and ask for a short solution, sometimes with an explanation of technologies chosen and why if that's relevant to the role, a simple class diagram (or database schema or whatever), an implementation of the whole, or if I set a potentially large project, just a subset of classes or whatever required, and a brief write up of what potential additions could be made in future. This latter part is quite telling as there becomes a stark difference between people who say "The button could be made red to make it look better" and people who say "The underlying algorithm could be replaced with a genetic algorithm to provide decent solutions to complex cases which the current implementation cannot solve due to the combinatorial explosion that occurs".
All in, there tends to be enough information from this sort of exercise to gather what that important underlying level of competence in a candidate is, and again, as I say, if you can detect that then I don't think much else matters.
As an aside another thing I've noticed is that a lot of employers don't even set time aside to plan this kind of exercise- many managers claim they're too rushed to spend an afternoon planning and designing such a task, but it's a false economy not to do it IMO - part the reason a manager will be rushed in the first place is because they need good staff to lessen the burden on them. So when it comes to recruitment I always treat it as a drop everything task, I prioritise it above all else. I think it's one of those things that's just simply worth doing right and I cringe at the managers who turn up late for interviews keeping the candidate waiting, completely unprepared, having said they haven't had time to set up a technical test so they used one from 3 years ago that is just a mini-exam full of outdated questions - people like that are just asking to hire people who will only serve to further increase the burden on themselves but I've seen so many of these over the years. Similarly, as a courtesy I always give detailed feedback to failed candidates (at inter
Always-on refers to need a constant connection to the internet when in use, not that the console should be always switched on.
People tend not to like this because it a) can rack up their bandwidth bill even though all they're doing is playing a single player game, b) Mean their bandwidth is being used up by ads they just don't want to see and that may ruin the immersion in the game, c) Means that if their connection fails even temporarily for a moment they may be kicked out of the game and lose all their progress, d) That if they don't have an internet connection, or a fast enough connection, such as on the move in an RV, they can't even play the single player games they've purchased, e) Everything you do is being monitored for the purposes of advertising, if you have a camera like Kinect or the Sony Eye camera then they may even be data mining image data of you for advertising purposes etc. (i.e. what can of drink are you holding and drinking) or listening.
People shouldn't be prevented from playing games they've legally purchased just because they don't have an internet connection or whatever and shouldn't have to fear being spied on in their own living room just because companies are paranoid you're pirating their software and want to monetise you to the extreme by measuring every aspect of your lives and filling everything you do on your console with live streamed ads. Always on means your console's microphone could listen for you saying "I'm hungry" and then flash up a Dominos pizza advert for example. This is what they want to do, but it's way too intrusive - if all you want is to play games, you should be able to do that without becoming a product sold to advertisers and without being interrupted and losing your progress because the company didn't trust you to have a legit copy for the short period that your connection went down.
The reason Apple's iPhone/iPad sales were up last quarter but their profit remained flat is because they were losing more money on the supply chain.
So I wouldn't assume it wont hurt them, it already did on other components (screens), it likely will on flash too. It may well mean that not only will profits be flat again with an increase in sales, but might actually decline despite shifting more units.
Effectively much of Apple's profits have been gained because they had great deals on components, they don't have those deals any more, and their suppliers like Samsung are sick of their lawsuit antics and in close competition now so are unlikely to sign such sweet deals again either. You're right that they could raise prices but that will have an impact on sales - maybe not to fans, but certainly to the average Joe who also buys the iPhone normally.
Effectively they're in a quandary, because costs of production has gone up as fast as rate of sales causing flat profits, if they raise prices then they'll lose even the continued increase in rate of sales, if they don't, then profit might actually go down. The only way they can deal with it is to make more profit elsewhere (i.e. a new product line), or somehow more drastically increase rate of iThing sales to outpace the growth in component cost.
In reality they'll probably attempt both, the success of which will no doubt play out in front of our eyes in the next year dependent on whether the iWatch and iTV turn up, or the iPhone 6 and iPad 5 can steal a serious share of the market back off of Android. They certainly can't rely on cheap component deals though - I suspect even Foxconn will be reaching a point where it realises it's got Apple by the balls in terms of manufacture given that perhaps no one else can churn out the levels Apple needs to meet demand and may start upping it's prices somewhat too.
I do agree, Sony has raised it's game, whilst Microsoft has at best stood still.
But it still has so far to go to catch up with XBL, and given that Microsoft has stood still for at least a few years, and arguably gone backwards (as you say, more ads, a slightly less nice UI) it's pretty damning that it's not just outright overtaken it as it's fairly clear what needs to be done.
I'm especially surprised though that with the PS4 they've kept the controller pretty much the same, this almost tells me that Sony just don't give a shit about taking on criticism of such things or learning from their competitors. That's not a good sign given that's what caused them so many problems with the current gen.
"This shows you have never actually used a PS3. After installation, there is just "the game". "Game data" and "Patch/DLC" may exist at some point, but only if you have run the game or downloaded them. These are all clearly labeled (assuming you know the definition of "DLC" or "Settings") and in a single location with the same game icon. There are no "files" that are "non-obvious"."
So tell me genius, why when I download the trial of Joe Danger, and then later bought the Joe Danger + Joe Danger 2 pack that was on sale did I end up with two copies of Joe Danger, with no way of telling which was my bought copy and which wasn't when I go to delete? Why when I downloaded Guardians of Middle Earth as a PS+ subscriber do I get a license file that remains after I've unlocked the game, can I delete it or not? Do I need this license file? You mention yourself DLC downloads - some of these I got by unlocking free content, I download them, they appear, so can I delete them then or what? Sometimes I seem to have to install them and they dissapear, other times not. It's non-obvious, it's inconsistent. There's literally nothing anywhere that tells you if it's safe to delete, it's entirely guess work and the user interface is structures such that you really need to delete it as that single file vertical list can get rather annoyingly long rather quickly.
"While the demo+key solution may not seem like the most elegant, it's pretty nice when you try a game, decide you like it, and then don't have to spend another hour redownloading the full version.. you can just unlock it and continue playing in a minute or few total."
Yes and that's great, that's how it works on the 360 (although it's more streamlined - you buy the game and the license file installation is performed automatically and transparently) but it's not even consistent, some games do it others don't, when I download the free game "Guardians of Middle Earth" I end up with this 300kb or so file which obviously isn't the full game, I have to figure out for myself that somewhere else on the store in a completely different place, buried out the way, is the trial which I can download and apply this license to manually.
"This is not "objective"."
It's objective because I have no interest in some petty fanboy fight because I grew up and got past that, and as someone who has some experience with ergonomics and interface design I can see that objectively, Microsoft have done a better job of putting things together in those regards. Yes you may feel personally you prefer the PS3 controller, but I guarantee you that in an unbiased study, you'd be very much in the minority.
"OK at this point it's clear we're dealing with FUD. The biggest patch I've ever seen was around 200MB. The biggest downloadable full game I've ever seen is 14GB (though I typically buy discs.. infamous 2 was free for PS+). Never have these required "10s of gigabytes of patches"."
So let me get this straight, you're saying I've never used a PS3 and then you proceed to spout what is trivially demonstrably false? Little Big Planet 2, 1.20 is 1gb alone. When you patch LBP, and LBP2 up alone you've got a few gigabytes, doing Resistance, God of War series, Killzone series, MGS4 etc. easily pumped that up to over 10gb.
"Er... so filling in a few blanks on the screen was "brutal"? I suppose if you're really a cluebie"
Yes, when the site repeatedly goes down, and when completely innocent and harmless nicknames I try I can't have without reason why and where the message as to why I can't have it changes from already taken, to some arbitrary message about invalid nickname (even though it was valid in terms of the rules stated).
"In any case, this entire rant comes off either FUD, an incredibly inexperienced user, or someone who uses a 360 and watched their kids using a PS3."
This would be funny if it weren't so sad that you make such a statement whilst apparently knowing less about the system t
The term piracy in this context stems from the 60s and 70s UK when radio broadcasting was heavily regulated such that there were only 1 or 2 radio stations about.
As such people who wanted more choice in their radio stations, i.e. those that broadcast music and things they were more interested in took boats out into international waters and broadcast there own stations from there where the UK authorities couldn't touch them.
Because they hijacked the airwaves from the high seas, they became known as pirate radio stations.
In the end their perseverance despite harassment by the UK authorities paid off and their actions led to the opening up of the UK's radio broadcast infrastructure and spectrum to give us the variety of stations we have today.
This is why I think piracy is an apt name for the current movement - because it stems from a past battle to broaden the availability of content using at the time, relatively new trends in use of technology which constant attempts at regulation failed to halt and only deregulation could deal with in the end. I honestly think the current situation will turn out the same, the music industry and governments will lose once more when they realise they're fighting a losing battle.
As such I think the term piracy is perfectly apt, it should remind governments what happened last time they tried to label something surrounding content distribution they didn't like as piracy and lost miserably and embarrassingly to the will of the public on the issue of a new content distribution mechanism they were in love with. They lost, and they lost hard.
Is there a good reason there's no pirate DNS service run by someone trustworthy like one of the Pirate Parties that mirrors standard DNS, but overrides it on issues such as this, and on ICE domain seizures? If enough techies started moving friends and family over to it it would weaken the stranglehold of official registrars somewhat and force them to start listening more to the will of the people and less to corporate interests if they wanted to remain relevant no?
It could also act as a service for people in oppressive countries that implement censorship through basic DNS manipulation, like the UK, where such things have been ordered by our lovely courts who greenlight censorship for corporations and throw people like Assange to the wolves at the drop of a hat but then spend a decade or so blocking deportation of folks like Abu Qatada who actually killed people.
Oh and yes, the oppresive countries bit regarding the UK was meant sarcastically before those with a fly in their ass start telling me I don't know how easy I have it compared to the folks in North Korea and Iran or whatever.
FWIW I started with a 360 and bought a PS3 later on, I was an XBox fanboy originally, but nowadays I could care less who "wins" a console battle (I guess I'm getting old).
But now I do have both, now I am apathetic to fanboyism I do feel that objectively the 360 feels more polished, the controllers not only feel better to hold and use, but the PS3 buttons even just outright feel like they don't respond sometimes. There's a lot of awkward inconsistencies such as sometimes when you download a game from the store you get an unlock file, and others you get the full game, and other times you get random extra downloads on top, then it's non-obvious what files you can delete so you end up with these files that do nothing but you're unsure if it's safe to delete them. Patching is horrendous, I had to download many 10s of gigabytes of patches for the handful of games I bought such that on my connection (a mere 4mbps, but still double the recommended 2mbps minimum for modern consoles) I ended up spending my first two to three days of owning the system patching games. The sign up process to Sony online was brutal, the site kept going down and I desperately tried to recover an SOE account from years ago but apparently that's a different Sony online thing to the Playstation one and that made it all a bit of a pain. It's still not a bad console, and yes Microsoft's advertising on the 360 UI after you've paid £40 a year is annoying, and yes it costs £40 a year, but the 360 is just so much more of a pleasure to use, it's so much more polished, and you spend so much less time patching.
All that ignores Sony's arrogance towards it's customers, but I bought mine after the Linux debacle, the removal of backwards compat. etc. so I knew exactly what I was buying (though that's subject to change given their history I guess).
If the 360 never existed the PS3 would still be a decent console, and even with the 360 I've had many hours of enjoyment out of my PS3 as both a Bluray player and on games like the Little Big Planet series, the Killzone series, and the Uncharted series. But if I was doing it all again knowing what I know now, even with the RROD debacle, I'd most definitely still have bought the 360 first.
Some people don't like the idea of the UK being at the centre of the map, they say that it's a relic of British imperialism and hence if they have strong anti-British views they find it something worth complaining about, because god forbid something that happened in the distant past has an effect on how something is commonly done today.
Others complain that the common Mercator projection distorts the world to make their favourite country too small/a country they hate too big and then offer some conspiracy about how that's some kind of psychological warfare against the country that's too small or to make the country that's too big seem more "powerful" than it is or whatever. On this note, there's a somewhat relevant XKCD:
I'm sure it'll be based on one or both of these things, it usually is. That and probably renaming Israel to Palestine, calling the Falklands the Malvinas, calling South Korea just Korea with Pyongyang as it's capital, calling Taiwan China, reverting Alaska back to Russian territory, and that sort of typical pointless and childish nation state trolling.
That's what I thought, I don't see how "either way it's not good news for Microsoft". If the employee was incompetent because he caused harm to the company then getting rid of him is damn good news because it means he can't do it again.
I somewhat wonder if Microsoft have been having the always-on DRM debate internally and Adam Orth was in fact on the losing side of that internal discussion and took to Twitter to bitch about consumers who don't like always-on DRM simply because he lost the internal debate on the topic to the argument that consumers will fucking hate it.
I say this because I'd be surprised if Microsoft do go the always on DRM route, I don't think even MS is that stupid, but time will tell I guess.
Either way, good fucking riddance. This is one of those few things every once in a while Microsoft does that is absolutely right and that they absolutely shouldn't be faulted for. This guy was an idiot.
"I've not missed anything. I know more about DHCP than you."
Yet you simultaneously keep proving you know very little by making incorrect statements, or are you saying you're simply lying because you do in fact refuse to accept you were wrong? I mean which is it? You either don't know what you're on about or you can't admit you're wrong, you can't have it both ways- you can't say things that are wrong and then pretend you're still right, it has to be one or the other.
"The IP identifies the object with that IP assigned to it."
I'm glad you've given an answer, so you're saying DHCP logs have ultimate authority, and the actual state of the network beyond that is of no relevance, interesting to say the least, hopefully you'll never have any influence on law enforcement resulting in innocent people getting jailed.
"Usually the ARP tables of multiple routers are not in sync. One will see one from one location, and the other from the other. Thus, you can get loops, network crashes, or neither working.
Yes, when the extent of your experience is one "server" (a 10 year old Compaq desktop running Linux) and 5 workstations plugged into a single hub, yes, you are right. One day, when you grow up, maybe you'll work on more complex networks and learn what really happens."
This is awesome, on one hand you're accusing me of having only worked with toy equipment, and on the other you're simultaneously showing a complete lack of understanding of the way ARP caching works, describing scenarios that would only arise with toy equipment given the mechanisms that carrier grade (and to be honest, even down to much modern consumer) equipment has to deal with such situations, showing what is quite possible a complete lack of understanding of internet related network topology, and showing a clear lack of understanding of faults that can arise within networks to cause scenarios previously described. Irony at it's finest.
For what it's worth I'm not saying that in most normal circumstances an IP wouldn't be uniquely assigned and wouldn't uniquely identify, but to pretend that's always guaranteed to be the case is completely wrong for the aforementioned reason there are many circumstances under which that will not remain the case.
Still it's obvious you're not going to admit that your pedanticism was misplaced and that there are indeed circumstances where an IP will not be a genuinely unique identifier, and that's okay, if you're happy to be wrong without admitting it, even if you don't realise it then that's your choice I guess, so have fun with that.
"9/10 people still fail the damn things! These tests are merely to see if the person was completely lying about knowing how to code, not "write a recursive binary search using the observer pattern... in C"."
You'd be surprised how many incredibly good coders just turn to jelly over the most simple tasks in interview environments. Judging by the fact you mention they can ask you questions I can only assume you're sat with them when they do the question but even knowing someone is sitting there, particular a prospective future employer is enough to destroy someone's ability to concentrate or think straight on such a task. You could be throwing away people who are absolutely great programmers over this as it's a mistake I made in the past.
I've found that if you want to sample people's development abilities as part of the recruitment process it's actually far better to give them a task to do outside of the interview, to e-mail it you by some deadline within a few days of them being sent it, and then for you to ask them questions on their solution as part of the interview to verify their understanding of it and to help filter out anyone who may have tried to get someone else to do it for them. Many worry (and I did too at first) that taking it home would make it too easy for cheaters, but I noticed a definite increase in our ability to recruit the best talent, but I've never had anyone yet who has turned up and been unable to answer questions I ask about their solution such as why they chose the solution they did, how they felt they could improve it, what they'd consider doing differently. I do get a lot of people who simply never submit and we never here from again. Maybe I'm wrong, but I like to think that this is in itself filtering out people who couldn't solve the issue or weren't interested enough in the job to give up a couple of hours of their time to solve a development problem. At the end of the day, there's always a clause we have to protect ourselves regardless and that's that new hires go through a 3 month probation period during which we only have to give a week's notice and which can be extended to 6 months if necessary, which is plenty long enough to weed out bad hires. Thankfully though I've never had to use this clause or even extend the probation period it which again gives me confidence that the recruitment processes I use work.
At the end of the day I'm not hiring people to sit nervously writing code in front of someone they don't yet know well, I don't want them to have to worry about whether Googling a function and parameters that they should know, but has simply slipped from their mind under the stress of interview when they've been busy trying to remember many other things will make them look bad in front of an interviewer. I just want to know if they can solve problems I set them within the timeframe I give them, whilst being able to explain their solutions when they're in a comfortable environment and don't feel pressured, because that's the environment I'll make sure they're working in if they get the role. Even if you do insist that they do the task there, during the interview, I feel it's better to leave the room and leave them to it at the very least.
It'd be a different story if I was hiring for a sales role or something because I'd be a bit worried about a salesman who couldn't talk his way out of an awkward situation, but developers aren't exactly known for performing well in social situations in normal circumstances, and interviews are one of the most awkward social situations you can find yourself in. Doing bad in them doesn't preclude them from being excellent at the job they're applying for though.
For what it's worth I agree with pretty much everything else you say, but I think that technical testing is one of the things that's most poorly understood and most poorly done in the development recruitment world and so many companies throw so many good potential hires away because they get it wrong and then complain the talent just isn't out there when it is - they just don't get how to spot it even when it's right in front their face.
No I don't think that's what he's saying. Though I didn't quite grasp whether there was a purpose to him selecting 10 pairs I think I understand what he's getting at, so I'll simplify what I think he's getting at, or at least explain how I foresee information being transmitted.
You don't necessarily need to know what the values are, the simple act of change is enough for data transfer, for example, say you instead have 2 pairs that have been separated, let's call the first pair 1_1 and 1_2, and the second pair that are a hundred miles away or whatever 2_1 and 2_2.
You could surely just set up a scheme where by if you cause a state change in 1_1 and 1_2 simultaneously, you can also detect that 2_1 and 2_2 changed simultaneously - forget what they changed to for now, that doesn't matter, just recognise that they changed. Then if of course 1_1 changes without 1_2 changing the person at the other end sees that only 2_1 changes and not 2_2.
So what if you say well, if 2_1 and 2_2 both change you treat that as binary 0, but if 2_1 changes without 2_2 changing, then you treat that as binary 1. This means that you could encode the simple act of what particles change into a form of data transfer. If you expand this out to 8 pairs of entangled pairs, you could surely transmit a byte using this mechanism.
I assume there is some difficulty in causing state change simultaneously so it may be that your measuring equipment would define simultaneous change between two pairs as something a bit loser than absolutely instantaneously such as both changing with 10^-100 seconds (I made up that number) or whatever. I assume also that things could still go wrong, what if they just happen to "change" to the same state they were already in giving the appearance of no change if that's a think that can happen, but at that point it's no big deal, at that point you're simply at the point where you can apply the well established field of coding theory to create meaningful data transfer.
Does that makes sense? As I say I don't know the first thing about quantum mechanics, but I do get data encoding and coding theory, and it seems to me that if you can simply measure the fact something has changed, even if not necessarily what it's changed to, then that is already enough to create a meaningful data transfer scheme.
I'm sure that the act of encoding into binary means we lose some of the potential benefits of quantum physics given that we can already punt binary round the globe at the speed of light through fibre cable anyway and from what little I do know the perceived benefit of quantum computing would be in being able to measure spin because you're then not limited to the mere two states of binary, but this would still at least allow for instantaneous uninterceptable wireless data transfer anywhere in the world (universe?) wouldn't it?
You need to look at why they can't find a job, if unemployment is at 2.2%, 6%, 10% or whatever in their sector then why can't they compete when it comes to getting interviews or in interviews?
People are pretty much never willing to accept when they are in the bottom 2.2%, 6%, 10% or whatever, and that's the fundamental problem they face.
If we're still talking about software development here and your friends still can't find a job even when unemployment in that sector is down to 2.2% then you need to simply start to accept that your friends aren't as competent or have skills as relevant as you or they think.
"Why must it be a "who?" In some places, the owner of the Internet service is liable for the use of it, in which case it does uniquely identify the responsible party, even if that responsible party did not do the act in question."
You've completely and utterly dodged the question here, I'll assume that's because you misunderstood or misread the situation, rather than simply because you don't want to admit to being wrong and will explain it again. If an IP is assigned to one system by a DHCP server, let's call it system A and the logs show it as being assigned as such, but in practice it's being routed to another system which we'll call system B, then which one does it "uniquely" identify? The DHCP assignment logs say it identifies A, but the router is passing data to and from B, which is correct? This isn't unique identification as it's subjective as to which source you check as to what it identifies.
"In practice, neither service will work, and the "crime" would not have taken place. You might as well have said "What happens if aliens come down from space and alter the ISP's logs?""
This is completely false, if you think either of these scenarios would stop both systems working then you clearly have very little networking experience. Things like IP conflicts do not tend to cause both systems to fail, only one, and the outcome of that is mostly determined by the ARP records stored on switches and routers on the network, something that's often not recoverable after the fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the only flaw is that said ants only live in a tiny fraction of the world where quakes are a threat.
Oh do fuck off, some of us remember the internet before the dotcom boom, where there were thousands of sites without an advert in sight and tons of really interesting content and the word or concept of paywall didn't even really exist.
The web was built as a tool for easy and open information sharing, and grew on that premise for a decade before people started believing it was all about the ad revenue and paywalls.
In fact, I still believe the internet was better back then, there was no corporate interference in what you can and can't do on the internet.
If the advertisers go away the web will be far better, because people will be putting content up because they're passionate about that topic, rather than because they're trying to make a quick buck, which is exactly how it used to be.
"Exactly what makes you think that an economy in the grip of a 4 year recession about to hit it's third dip, recovering less well than it did in the 1930s is the right time to continue with GDP shrinking austerity?"
Why assume austerity is the only method of deficit reduction? investment can increase growth which will in turn increase tax receipts which will in turn reduce the deficit.
Deficit reduction doesn't have to be just about making cuts.
"Spectrum is a scarce resource and if it doesn't fetch a price which reflects that scarcity, then somebody wins and somebody loses."
Scarcity in itself doesn't define the value of something, you could take the most scarce thing on earth, but if no one cares about it and is willing to pay for it it has no monetary value.
The spectrum was sold at auction and it reached the price that companies were willing to bid against each other too. That's about as fair a value as you can place on the thing as it was determined by a genuinely competitive market competing for it.
It wasn't the Tory party that sold it off, it was Ofcom, but you can guarantee it's the Tory party that instigated this investigation.
Osborne factored the income from the auction into his budget to mask a shortfall in his budget to try and maintain the facade that he is economically competent and reducing the deficit. The problem is now, as the money that has actually come in is over £1bn lower than expected, his books now will struggle to balance so he's more likely to end up failing to hit his target yet again of deficit reduction.
There was nothing wrong with the auction, but Osborne is just upset he's going to have egg on his face that his attempt to mask a shortfall in his deficit reduction plan with a one off windfall (rather than do something that will reduce the deficit perpetually) has failed.
For what it's worth though it's not as if it's just the Tories that do this sort of thing that's bad for our country- Brown for example gave away billions of our EU rebate under some misguided delusion that France would then give up some agricultural subsidies which of course they didn't, and have only sought to increase them. Both Labour and the Tories are equally guilty of throwing money away, so don't try and make it about this part or that, they're all just as incompetent.
Please learn to follow the conversation and make sense.
You've obviously never been to Wales.
Yeah, I agree with you really, by cheating I was thinking more along the lines of getting someone to do the entire task for them but as I said in my other post in this thread I've not personally found this an issue in practice as it usually means they have a lack of knowledge that comes out in interview regardless.
Agreed, the US is definitely one of, if not the hardest country to migrate to even as a skilled worker.
America suffers from a lot of nationalism anyway, stemming largely from the ideology of American exceptionalism, but I can't help but think that as an outsider a lot of H1B complaints stem from that nationalism.
I Googled a bit and found this site for example:
http://www.h1bwage.com/index.php
Whilst there are companies that are paying, what I assume are low wages for the US market, a lot of large companies, especially those often under the spotlight on this issue, such as Facebook, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Google are paying well over $100,000 for developers. A good number of Google's in fact are getting close to and in some cases over $200,000.
Is this really dragging wages down? If so then what the hell kind of wages do Americans expect? Even at the lower end of these companies offerings, $100,000, that's still £65,000 which is plenty enough to live a very comfortable life on in the UK and we have much higher taxes and get screwed far harder on many products like fuel.
Are Americans really sure H1B users are driving wages down and that it's not simply because said companies genuinely do want to be able to get the best talent globally, something which H1B cap puts a limit on? Are there any studies I can read showing a definitive link between H1B usage and decreased wages. I'm not even sure that the cap is large enough to even be able to have a tangible effect on wages when spread across every industry.
If it looks like nationalism, sounds like nationalism, and smells like nationalism it normally is. But I'd love to be proven wrong and see some evidence that there is a demonstrable causative link between H1B uptake and decrease in wages in fields such as software. On that note, are software engineering wages even actually going down in the US in the first place?
I don't really have a horse in this race as I'm neither American, nor do I, or have I ever had any intention of becoming American, but I'm intrigued to see what the evidence is on this issue and learn a bit more about it as each time it's brought up it always sounds like one of those topics that's strong on the rhetoric, and loose on the facts.
I tend to find that concerns that may arise from time taken will be obvious from questions asked, I normally would ask how much time they spent on it, how they found it, whether they enjoyed it and so on. It's generally enough to tell from their responses and their face how honest they are about this sort of thing.
There also tends to be a healthy correlation between general technical knowledge and competence and time taken too - if someone spent all night on the task, it may still not be as good as the person who did it in 2hrs because they still suffered from a fundamental lack of understanding, but even if they do manage to produce something better they'll then stumble on different, but related questions.
I think the key thing is that there are people who just "get it" and people who don't and it's that separation that is important to filter out. If someone takes 12hrs on a 2hr project because it was a framework they were weak on and they basically had to install all the tools and learn the framework from scratch then that's okay - that's not a general problem, and I wouldn't want them to fail an interview based on that. If however someone takes 12hrs because they simply don't get it, and are desperately piecing something together then I have a problem with that - they're way out of their depth, and even 36 or 72hrs wouldn't be enough for them to hide that in their solution to a task or in the interview.
I think if someone can produce an impressive solution it doesn't matter how long it took them, to produce an impressive solution is more about inherent competence, which is what matters. Their speed will vary only on their experience with the content in question, and once they're in the job they'll quickly get up to speed on the things we do and technology they use if they have that underlying inherent competence that I'm looking for.
On a final and related note, the tests I set tend to cover a mini-project, I don't just ask for code, I tend to give a problem, and ask for a short solution, sometimes with an explanation of technologies chosen and why if that's relevant to the role, a simple class diagram (or database schema or whatever), an implementation of the whole, or if I set a potentially large project, just a subset of classes or whatever required, and a brief write up of what potential additions could be made in future. This latter part is quite telling as there becomes a stark difference between people who say "The button could be made red to make it look better" and people who say "The underlying algorithm could be replaced with a genetic algorithm to provide decent solutions to complex cases which the current implementation cannot solve due to the combinatorial explosion that occurs".
All in, there tends to be enough information from this sort of exercise to gather what that important underlying level of competence in a candidate is, and again, as I say, if you can detect that then I don't think much else matters.
As an aside another thing I've noticed is that a lot of employers don't even set time aside to plan this kind of exercise- many managers claim they're too rushed to spend an afternoon planning and designing such a task, but it's a false economy not to do it IMO - part the reason a manager will be rushed in the first place is because they need good staff to lessen the burden on them. So when it comes to recruitment I always treat it as a drop everything task, I prioritise it above all else. I think it's one of those things that's just simply worth doing right and I cringe at the managers who turn up late for interviews keeping the candidate waiting, completely unprepared, having said they haven't had time to set up a technical test so they used one from 3 years ago that is just a mini-exam full of outdated questions - people like that are just asking to hire people who will only serve to further increase the burden on themselves but I've seen so many of these over the years. Similarly, as a courtesy I always give detailed feedback to failed candidates (at inter
Always-on refers to need a constant connection to the internet when in use, not that the console should be always switched on.
People tend not to like this because it a) can rack up their bandwidth bill even though all they're doing is playing a single player game, b) Mean their bandwidth is being used up by ads they just don't want to see and that may ruin the immersion in the game, c) Means that if their connection fails even temporarily for a moment they may be kicked out of the game and lose all their progress, d) That if they don't have an internet connection, or a fast enough connection, such as on the move in an RV, they can't even play the single player games they've purchased, e) Everything you do is being monitored for the purposes of advertising, if you have a camera like Kinect or the Sony Eye camera then they may even be data mining image data of you for advertising purposes etc. (i.e. what can of drink are you holding and drinking) or listening.
People shouldn't be prevented from playing games they've legally purchased just because they don't have an internet connection or whatever and shouldn't have to fear being spied on in their own living room just because companies are paranoid you're pirating their software and want to monetise you to the extreme by measuring every aspect of your lives and filling everything you do on your console with live streamed ads. Always on means your console's microphone could listen for you saying "I'm hungry" and then flash up a Dominos pizza advert for example. This is what they want to do, but it's way too intrusive - if all you want is to play games, you should be able to do that without becoming a product sold to advertisers and without being interrupted and losing your progress because the company didn't trust you to have a legit copy for the short period that your connection went down.
Fair enough then. The posts above seemed to suggest you could detect change, just not to what state.
How does quantum computing and communication work then exactly?
The reason Apple's iPhone/iPad sales were up last quarter but their profit remained flat is because they were losing more money on the supply chain.
So I wouldn't assume it wont hurt them, it already did on other components (screens), it likely will on flash too. It may well mean that not only will profits be flat again with an increase in sales, but might actually decline despite shifting more units.
Effectively much of Apple's profits have been gained because they had great deals on components, they don't have those deals any more, and their suppliers like Samsung are sick of their lawsuit antics and in close competition now so are unlikely to sign such sweet deals again either. You're right that they could raise prices but that will have an impact on sales - maybe not to fans, but certainly to the average Joe who also buys the iPhone normally.
Effectively they're in a quandary, because costs of production has gone up as fast as rate of sales causing flat profits, if they raise prices then they'll lose even the continued increase in rate of sales, if they don't, then profit might actually go down. The only way they can deal with it is to make more profit elsewhere (i.e. a new product line), or somehow more drastically increase rate of iThing sales to outpace the growth in component cost.
In reality they'll probably attempt both, the success of which will no doubt play out in front of our eyes in the next year dependent on whether the iWatch and iTV turn up, or the iPhone 6 and iPad 5 can steal a serious share of the market back off of Android. They certainly can't rely on cheap component deals though - I suspect even Foxconn will be reaching a point where it realises it's got Apple by the balls in terms of manufacture given that perhaps no one else can churn out the levels Apple needs to meet demand and may start upping it's prices somewhat too.
I do agree, Sony has raised it's game, whilst Microsoft has at best stood still.
But it still has so far to go to catch up with XBL, and given that Microsoft has stood still for at least a few years, and arguably gone backwards (as you say, more ads, a slightly less nice UI) it's pretty damning that it's not just outright overtaken it as it's fairly clear what needs to be done.
I'm especially surprised though that with the PS4 they've kept the controller pretty much the same, this almost tells me that Sony just don't give a shit about taking on criticism of such things or learning from their competitors. That's not a good sign given that's what caused them so many problems with the current gen.
Oh dear, we have a fanboy.
"This shows you have never actually used a PS3. After installation, there is just "the game". "Game data" and "Patch/DLC" may exist at some point, but only if you have run the game or downloaded them. These are all clearly labeled (assuming you know the definition of "DLC" or "Settings") and in a single location with the same game icon. There are no "files" that are "non-obvious"."
So tell me genius, why when I download the trial of Joe Danger, and then later bought the Joe Danger + Joe Danger 2 pack that was on sale did I end up with two copies of Joe Danger, with no way of telling which was my bought copy and which wasn't when I go to delete? Why when I downloaded Guardians of Middle Earth as a PS+ subscriber do I get a license file that remains after I've unlocked the game, can I delete it or not? Do I need this license file? You mention yourself DLC downloads - some of these I got by unlocking free content, I download them, they appear, so can I delete them then or what? Sometimes I seem to have to install them and they dissapear, other times not. It's non-obvious, it's inconsistent. There's literally nothing anywhere that tells you if it's safe to delete, it's entirely guess work and the user interface is structures such that you really need to delete it as that single file vertical list can get rather annoyingly long rather quickly.
"While the demo+key solution may not seem like the most elegant, it's pretty nice when you try a game, decide you like it, and then don't have to spend another hour redownloading the full version .. you can just unlock it and continue playing in a minute or few total."
Yes and that's great, that's how it works on the 360 (although it's more streamlined - you buy the game and the license file installation is performed automatically and transparently) but it's not even consistent, some games do it others don't, when I download the free game "Guardians of Middle Earth" I end up with this 300kb or so file which obviously isn't the full game, I have to figure out for myself that somewhere else on the store in a completely different place, buried out the way, is the trial which I can download and apply this license to manually.
"This is not "objective"."
It's objective because I have no interest in some petty fanboy fight because I grew up and got past that, and as someone who has some experience with ergonomics and interface design I can see that objectively, Microsoft have done a better job of putting things together in those regards. Yes you may feel personally you prefer the PS3 controller, but I guarantee you that in an unbiased study, you'd be very much in the minority.
"OK at this point it's clear we're dealing with FUD. The biggest patch I've ever seen was around 200MB. The biggest downloadable full game I've ever seen is 14GB (though I typically buy discs .. infamous 2 was free for PS+). Never have these required "10s of gigabytes of patches"."
So let me get this straight, you're saying I've never used a PS3 and then you proceed to spout what is trivially demonstrably false? Little Big Planet 2, 1.20 is 1gb alone. When you patch LBP, and LBP2 up alone you've got a few gigabytes, doing Resistance, God of War series, Killzone series, MGS4 etc. easily pumped that up to over 10gb.
"Er... so filling in a few blanks on the screen was "brutal"? I suppose if you're really a cluebie"
Yes, when the site repeatedly goes down, and when completely innocent and harmless nicknames I try I can't have without reason why and where the message as to why I can't have it changes from already taken, to some arbitrary message about invalid nickname (even though it was valid in terms of the rules stated).
"In any case, this entire rant comes off either FUD, an incredibly inexperienced user, or someone who uses a 360 and watched their kids using a PS3."
This would be funny if it weren't so sad that you make such a statement whilst apparently knowing less about the system t
The term piracy in this context stems from the 60s and 70s UK when radio broadcasting was heavily regulated such that there were only 1 or 2 radio stations about.
As such people who wanted more choice in their radio stations, i.e. those that broadcast music and things they were more interested in took boats out into international waters and broadcast there own stations from there where the UK authorities couldn't touch them.
Because they hijacked the airwaves from the high seas, they became known as pirate radio stations.
In the end their perseverance despite harassment by the UK authorities paid off and their actions led to the opening up of the UK's radio broadcast infrastructure and spectrum to give us the variety of stations we have today.
This is why I think piracy is an apt name for the current movement - because it stems from a past battle to broaden the availability of content using at the time, relatively new trends in use of technology which constant attempts at regulation failed to halt and only deregulation could deal with in the end. I honestly think the current situation will turn out the same, the music industry and governments will lose once more when they realise they're fighting a losing battle.
As such I think the term piracy is perfectly apt, it should remind governments what happened last time they tried to label something surrounding content distribution they didn't like as piracy and lost miserably and embarrassingly to the will of the public on the issue of a new content distribution mechanism they were in love with. They lost, and they lost hard.
Is there a good reason there's no pirate DNS service run by someone trustworthy like one of the Pirate Parties that mirrors standard DNS, but overrides it on issues such as this, and on ICE domain seizures? If enough techies started moving friends and family over to it it would weaken the stranglehold of official registrars somewhat and force them to start listening more to the will of the people and less to corporate interests if they wanted to remain relevant no?
It could also act as a service for people in oppressive countries that implement censorship through basic DNS manipulation, like the UK, where such things have been ordered by our lovely courts who greenlight censorship for corporations and throw people like Assange to the wolves at the drop of a hat but then spend a decade or so blocking deportation of folks like Abu Qatada who actually killed people.
Oh and yes, the oppresive countries bit regarding the UK was meant sarcastically before those with a fly in their ass start telling me I don't know how easy I have it compared to the folks in North Korea and Iran or whatever.
FWIW I started with a 360 and bought a PS3 later on, I was an XBox fanboy originally, but nowadays I could care less who "wins" a console battle (I guess I'm getting old).
But now I do have both, now I am apathetic to fanboyism I do feel that objectively the 360 feels more polished, the controllers not only feel better to hold and use, but the PS3 buttons even just outright feel like they don't respond sometimes. There's a lot of awkward inconsistencies such as sometimes when you download a game from the store you get an unlock file, and others you get the full game, and other times you get random extra downloads on top, then it's non-obvious what files you can delete so you end up with these files that do nothing but you're unsure if it's safe to delete them. Patching is horrendous, I had to download many 10s of gigabytes of patches for the handful of games I bought such that on my connection (a mere 4mbps, but still double the recommended 2mbps minimum for modern consoles) I ended up spending my first two to three days of owning the system patching games. The sign up process to Sony online was brutal, the site kept going down and I desperately tried to recover an SOE account from years ago but apparently that's a different Sony online thing to the Playstation one and that made it all a bit of a pain. It's still not a bad console, and yes Microsoft's advertising on the 360 UI after you've paid £40 a year is annoying, and yes it costs £40 a year, but the 360 is just so much more of a pleasure to use, it's so much more polished, and you spend so much less time patching.
All that ignores Sony's arrogance towards it's customers, but I bought mine after the Linux debacle, the removal of backwards compat. etc. so I knew exactly what I was buying (though that's subject to change given their history I guess).
If the 360 never existed the PS3 would still be a decent console, and even with the 360 I've had many hours of enjoyment out of my PS3 as both a Bluray player and on games like the Little Big Planet series, the Killzone series, and the Uncharted series. But if I was doing it all again knowing what I know now, even with the RROD debacle, I'd most definitely still have bought the 360 first.
Some people don't like the idea of the UK being at the centre of the map, they say that it's a relic of British imperialism and hence if they have strong anti-British views they find it something worth complaining about, because god forbid something that happened in the distant past has an effect on how something is commonly done today.
Others complain that the common Mercator projection distorts the world to make their favourite country too small/a country they hate too big and then offer some conspiracy about how that's some kind of psychological warfare against the country that's too small or to make the country that's too big seem more "powerful" than it is or whatever. On this note, there's a somewhat relevant XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/977/
I'm sure it'll be based on one or both of these things, it usually is. That and probably renaming Israel to Palestine, calling the Falklands the Malvinas, calling South Korea just Korea with Pyongyang as it's capital, calling Taiwan China, reverting Alaska back to Russian territory, and that sort of typical pointless and childish nation state trolling.
That's what I thought, I don't see how "either way it's not good news for Microsoft". If the employee was incompetent because he caused harm to the company then getting rid of him is damn good news because it means he can't do it again.
I somewhat wonder if Microsoft have been having the always-on DRM debate internally and Adam Orth was in fact on the losing side of that internal discussion and took to Twitter to bitch about consumers who don't like always-on DRM simply because he lost the internal debate on the topic to the argument that consumers will fucking hate it.
I say this because I'd be surprised if Microsoft do go the always on DRM route, I don't think even MS is that stupid, but time will tell I guess.
Either way, good fucking riddance. This is one of those few things every once in a while Microsoft does that is absolutely right and that they absolutely shouldn't be faulted for. This guy was an idiot.
"I've not missed anything. I know more about DHCP than you."
Yet you simultaneously keep proving you know very little by making incorrect statements, or are you saying you're simply lying because you do in fact refuse to accept you were wrong? I mean which is it? You either don't know what you're on about or you can't admit you're wrong, you can't have it both ways- you can't say things that are wrong and then pretend you're still right, it has to be one or the other.
"The IP identifies the object with that IP assigned to it."
I'm glad you've given an answer, so you're saying DHCP logs have ultimate authority, and the actual state of the network beyond that is of no relevance, interesting to say the least, hopefully you'll never have any influence on law enforcement resulting in innocent people getting jailed.
"Usually the ARP tables of multiple routers are not in sync. One will see one from one location, and the other from the other. Thus, you can get loops, network crashes, or neither working.
Yes, when the extent of your experience is one "server" (a 10 year old Compaq desktop running Linux) and 5 workstations plugged into a single hub, yes, you are right. One day, when you grow up, maybe you'll work on more complex networks and learn what really happens."
This is awesome, on one hand you're accusing me of having only worked with toy equipment, and on the other you're simultaneously showing a complete lack of understanding of the way ARP caching works, describing scenarios that would only arise with toy equipment given the mechanisms that carrier grade (and to be honest, even down to much modern consumer) equipment has to deal with such situations, showing what is quite possible a complete lack of understanding of internet related network topology, and showing a clear lack of understanding of faults that can arise within networks to cause scenarios previously described. Irony at it's finest.
For what it's worth I'm not saying that in most normal circumstances an IP wouldn't be uniquely assigned and wouldn't uniquely identify, but to pretend that's always guaranteed to be the case is completely wrong for the aforementioned reason there are many circumstances under which that will not remain the case.
Still it's obvious you're not going to admit that your pedanticism was misplaced and that there are indeed circumstances where an IP will not be a genuinely unique identifier, and that's okay, if you're happy to be wrong without admitting it, even if you don't realise it then that's your choice I guess, so have fun with that.
"9/10 people still fail the damn things! These tests are merely to see if the person was completely lying about knowing how to code, not "write a recursive binary search using the observer pattern... in C"."
You'd be surprised how many incredibly good coders just turn to jelly over the most simple tasks in interview environments. Judging by the fact you mention they can ask you questions I can only assume you're sat with them when they do the question but even knowing someone is sitting there, particular a prospective future employer is enough to destroy someone's ability to concentrate or think straight on such a task. You could be throwing away people who are absolutely great programmers over this as it's a mistake I made in the past.
I've found that if you want to sample people's development abilities as part of the recruitment process it's actually far better to give them a task to do outside of the interview, to e-mail it you by some deadline within a few days of them being sent it, and then for you to ask them questions on their solution as part of the interview to verify their understanding of it and to help filter out anyone who may have tried to get someone else to do it for them. Many worry (and I did too at first) that taking it home would make it too easy for cheaters, but I noticed a definite increase in our ability to recruit the best talent, but I've never had anyone yet who has turned up and been unable to answer questions I ask about their solution such as why they chose the solution they did, how they felt they could improve it, what they'd consider doing differently. I do get a lot of people who simply never submit and we never here from again. Maybe I'm wrong, but I like to think that this is in itself filtering out people who couldn't solve the issue or weren't interested enough in the job to give up a couple of hours of their time to solve a development problem. At the end of the day, there's always a clause we have to protect ourselves regardless and that's that new hires go through a 3 month probation period during which we only have to give a week's notice and which can be extended to 6 months if necessary, which is plenty long enough to weed out bad hires. Thankfully though I've never had to use this clause or even extend the probation period it which again gives me confidence that the recruitment processes I use work.
At the end of the day I'm not hiring people to sit nervously writing code in front of someone they don't yet know well, I don't want them to have to worry about whether Googling a function and parameters that they should know, but has simply slipped from their mind under the stress of interview when they've been busy trying to remember many other things will make them look bad in front of an interviewer. I just want to know if they can solve problems I set them within the timeframe I give them, whilst being able to explain their solutions when they're in a comfortable environment and don't feel pressured, because that's the environment I'll make sure they're working in if they get the role. Even if you do insist that they do the task there, during the interview, I feel it's better to leave the room and leave them to it at the very least.
It'd be a different story if I was hiring for a sales role or something because I'd be a bit worried about a salesman who couldn't talk his way out of an awkward situation, but developers aren't exactly known for performing well in social situations in normal circumstances, and interviews are one of the most awkward social situations you can find yourself in. Doing bad in them doesn't preclude them from being excellent at the job they're applying for though.
For what it's worth I agree with pretty much everything else you say, but I think that technical testing is one of the things that's most poorly understood and most poorly done in the development recruitment world and so many companies throw so many good potential hires away because they get it wrong and then complain the talent just isn't out there when it is - they just don't get how to spot it even when it's right in front their face.
No I don't think that's what he's saying. Though I didn't quite grasp whether there was a purpose to him selecting 10 pairs I think I understand what he's getting at, so I'll simplify what I think he's getting at, or at least explain how I foresee information being transmitted.
You don't necessarily need to know what the values are, the simple act of change is enough for data transfer, for example, say you instead have 2 pairs that have been separated, let's call the first pair 1_1 and 1_2, and the second pair that are a hundred miles away or whatever 2_1 and 2_2.
You could surely just set up a scheme where by if you cause a state change in 1_1 and 1_2 simultaneously, you can also detect that 2_1 and 2_2 changed simultaneously - forget what they changed to for now, that doesn't matter, just recognise that they changed. Then if of course 1_1 changes without 1_2 changing the person at the other end sees that only 2_1 changes and not 2_2.
So what if you say well, if 2_1 and 2_2 both change you treat that as binary 0, but if 2_1 changes without 2_2 changing, then you treat that as binary 1. This means that you could encode the simple act of what particles change into a form of data transfer. If you expand this out to 8 pairs of entangled pairs, you could surely transmit a byte using this mechanism.
I assume there is some difficulty in causing state change simultaneously so it may be that your measuring equipment would define simultaneous change between two pairs as something a bit loser than absolutely instantaneously such as both changing with 10^-100 seconds (I made up that number) or whatever. I assume also that things could still go wrong, what if they just happen to "change" to the same state they were already in giving the appearance of no change if that's a think that can happen, but at that point it's no big deal, at that point you're simply at the point where you can apply the well established field of coding theory to create meaningful data transfer.
Does that makes sense? As I say I don't know the first thing about quantum mechanics, but I do get data encoding and coding theory, and it seems to me that if you can simply measure the fact something has changed, even if not necessarily what it's changed to, then that is already enough to create a meaningful data transfer scheme.
I'm sure that the act of encoding into binary means we lose some of the potential benefits of quantum physics given that we can already punt binary round the globe at the speed of light through fibre cable anyway and from what little I do know the perceived benefit of quantum computing would be in being able to measure spin because you're then not limited to the mere two states of binary, but this would still at least allow for instantaneous uninterceptable wireless data transfer anywhere in the world (universe?) wouldn't it?
You need to look at why they can't find a job, if unemployment is at 2.2%, 6%, 10% or whatever in their sector then why can't they compete when it comes to getting interviews or in interviews?
People are pretty much never willing to accept when they are in the bottom 2.2%, 6%, 10% or whatever, and that's the fundamental problem they face.
If we're still talking about software development here and your friends still can't find a job even when unemployment in that sector is down to 2.2% then you need to simply start to accept that your friends aren't as competent or have skills as relevant as you or they think.
"Why must it be a "who?" In some places, the owner of the Internet service is liable for the use of it, in which case it does uniquely identify the responsible party, even if that responsible party did not do the act in question."
You've completely and utterly dodged the question here, I'll assume that's because you misunderstood or misread the situation, rather than simply because you don't want to admit to being wrong and will explain it again. If an IP is assigned to one system by a DHCP server, let's call it system A and the logs show it as being assigned as such, but in practice it's being routed to another system which we'll call system B, then which one does it "uniquely" identify? The DHCP assignment logs say it identifies A, but the router is passing data to and from B, which is correct? This isn't unique identification as it's subjective as to which source you check as to what it identifies.
"In practice, neither service will work, and the "crime" would not have taken place. You might as well have said "What happens if aliens come down from space and alter the ISP's logs?""
This is completely false, if you think either of these scenarios would stop both systems working then you clearly have very little networking experience. Things like IP conflicts do not tend to cause both systems to fail, only one, and the outcome of that is mostly determined by the ARP records stored on switches and routers on the network, something that's often not recoverable after the fact.