| last updated:01 Dec 2003 19:23 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 30 Nov 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| Stupid specific interview questions | Sun 30 Nov | Wisdom trumps knowledge |
| The candidate says theyve lived their lives in New York City. The interviewer asks: What street is the Empire State Building on? The candidate says they dont know, so the interviewer ends the interview - no hire. So the candidate has never had cause to look up the street address for the Empire State Building. They know how to get there, they know how to get to the observation deck, they know the quickest way to *find out* what street its on. They just never happened to notice its on Fifth Avenue. The next candidate has been to NYC once or twice as a tourist, so of course they looked up the address and can pass your little quiz. My point is - do you really want to hire someone based on the little specific pinpoints of knowledge you can ask in ten minutes? Wouldnt it be better to ask questions to determine how they think? Ask them to solve problems, or how they would go about solving them? Ask them what problems they faced in previous assignments and how they fixed them? In the printf example, if you have a burning need to ask it, if the candidate says no, it wont compile, why not talk them through it? Ask them why they think it wouldnt compile. Ask if they can think of any way it might compile. Or maybe ask yourself if the five minutes it would take to teach the esoterics of the printf statement and string token replacement is really a reason to can an applicant. Philo |
| Sun 30 Nov | Frederic Faure | Besides, how much would it cost to set up a computer, and ask people to debug or write a little proggie within an hour in a language the company asked for? One of the companies I worked for would ask each new hiree to write a NotePad-like aplication using the company's proprietary toolkit within their trial period (3 months), to check their knowledge of C++ and their capacity to learn a new toolkit. Combined with tech interviews with several senior developers, it was obviously a very good way to do things, since only one developer was let go during the two years I was there (and they hired quite a bunch of bodies.) |
| Sun 30 Nov | somebody | The candidate says they have a PhD in mathematics. The interviewer asks: 'What is two plus two?' The candidate says they don't know, so the interviewer ends the interview - no hire. So the candidate has never had cause to memorize the answer to two plus plus. They know how to count on their fingers, they know how to use a calculator. They just never happened to memorize two plus two. |
| Interview Question | Sun 30 Nov | Steve Forest |
| Back during the dot com madness, I used to give technical interviews all of the time. The first thing I would say to Unix/C programmers was: You know, Im a Turbo Pascal/Delphi guy, and I really dont know C much at all. I have a question about printf I was wondering about: Will this compile? printf(There are %d days in February,12); Everyone would say yes, that this would compile. Then I would rewrite the statement and ask: Will this compile? printf(There are %d days in February); Out of maybe 100 people Ive asked that of, perhaps 97 said No, that wont compile. In those cases, I would then spend the next 15 minutes wondering how quickly I could wrap up the interview with the interviewee saving face. (By the way, many of those 97 candidates [I instantly internally rejected] would go on to tell me the wonderousness of Unix/C vs. Windows/Delphi!) This was always for a project that has been around for nearly 13 years that is made up of a Galacticomm BBS (written in DOS/Borland C++), a (now) XP machine running Turbo Pascal and Delphi programs, and a single Netware file server. (This system will probably run for at least another 5 years.) We tried three seperate times to replace this with Solaris/Oracle/Perl/C++/you name it. Failure each time. The latest try was with VB (not even close!) Now that Im involved with additional projects that deal with AIX, Ive decided to add an additional question that I really dont have the answer to (we ran into this on 1 of the Solaris trys): Where does standard out go in a daemon? |
| Sun 30 Nov | TooBadSoSad | In those cases, I would then spend the next 15 minutes wondering how quickly I could wrap up the interview with the interviewee 'saving face' Sad, it is. You are not yet a jedi. For a jedi would have asked what they used as a compiler. Some (Watcom being one), would declare it a compiler error. While it is language legal, that was not your question. This, in the end, is the problem with all these type questions. Much like your last one. Would 'it depends' be an acceptable answer? Would you know if they were right if they did not use your exact phrasing? Would you bet your job, the answer would be the same regardless of the OS? Based on the attitude, I would say the 97 were the lucky ones. |
| Sun 30 Nov | JimmyB | Let me suggest a question, just as usefull: Everyday, people's ability to mischaracterize reality, never ceases to amaze me. Or maybe it does. Please explain the contradiction. You have two minutes. Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968), Strength to Love, 1963 |
| Sun 30 Nov | Insert half smiley here. | Erm... the incorrect printf should always compile. The people who say "no" are incorrect. If your compiler gives you a warning, that's good -- for you. However, the code will still compile. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Insert half smiley here. | D'oh -- I should add, Watcom is incorrect in this situation. It doesn't know what printf you are using. Maybe you have your own, for which %d means something different. It's none of its business -- it should indeed warn, but not fail. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Beth | What did you learn about the candidates by asking this question? |
| Sun 30 Nov | icancyuwudbeshy | Asking someone a technical question isn't to see if they know the answer to your particular question or to trick them in order to boost your own ego, it's meant to see how they code and how they think. A better question or exercise would be to ask the candidate to write strlen in a given amount of time and then question them as to why they did it the way they did. You can obviously tell by the code they write and the answers they give if they know what they are doing and if they are the kind of coder you would want working for you. Questioning them like this helps you to understand them and the way they think about problems while not suggesting that you are superior to them. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Frederic Faure | But then, how smart is it to still develop in C today, unless you have a very good reason to (eg. tight, portable code)? :-) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Sum Dum Gai | gcc will warn about it with suitable warning settings (such as -Wall). If you have warnings as errors, it wont compile. So even with the same compiler, it could depend on what your compiler settings are. |
| Sun 30 Nov | She sells C shells | 'But then, how smart is it to still develop in C today' Pretty smart since C applications represent 80% of commercial application revenue. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Steve Forest | Wow, such angryness! 'It depends' would be a wonderful answer--if only I heard it more often. I had one candidate who supposedly had written a text book on C programming. I asked her to write the classic 'hello world' program. She replied, 'Right now???' with incredularity. She couldn't do it. My point of this 'printf' question is that many people don't get what is REALLY going on under the hood. How can a compiler know that a format string and its 'passed arguments' (for lack of a better term) don't match up in either type or quantity? What if the format string was a variable that you didn't know the value of until runtime??? The few people who 'knew' about this went on to discuss with me about what would happen in what environments if you passed the character string 'fred' instead of a numeric value. They were hired and we invested a lot of money in them. Sorry, but for that project, I wasn't looking to train a newbie. I needed more senior people and was willing to pay for their expertise. Nope, I am not all knowing. But one of the reasons I stuck with Turbo Pascal v7 so long (still use it today!) is that the compiler is very simple and with years of experience with it, I can usually predict what it is going to do (not always true with Delphi!) The base Turbo Pascal command line compiler .exe size is less than 64K. Even at this size, there is WHOLE LOT to learn (Anders Hejlsberg, author of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, & C# is a genius in my opinion.) I still don't know where standard out goes in a daemon. We had one daemon written in C on Solaris where standard out would 'end up in the middle' of the data files we were processing. No apparent rhyme or reason. Just 'in the middle'. |
| Small LAN firewall recommendations? | Sun 30 Nov | Trollumination |
| Dear JOSers, I hate to bother you with something so trivial, but after one too many easily preventable hacker problems at my workplace Ive decided to put a firewall in front of our office LAN. Its about 10 computers, connected to the larger building LAN which, for arcane reasons, is not itself firewalled. My boss is not thrilled with my initial suggestion - finding a junk computer with two ethernet cards, a floppy drive, and nothing else - as I will be leaving soon and he has nobody who wants to maintain a floppy-based Linux system. He believes that firewall software would be a viable solution, but I cannot bring myself to trust the stuff somehow, and would rather have one box to maintain rather than 10 software installations. Therefore we have decided to buy one of those little ready-made firewall boxes for our office. The stores are full of cheap little boxes that do wireless and firewalling, or do NAT and firewalling, and stuff like that, and claim to have friendly user Web interfaces. Theres so many of them, but unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to find out which one would do what I need it to do. I need to firewall (port filtering is mandatory, stateful firewalling would be a nice bonus but isnt necessary), but I dont need wireless and I wont be using NAT - every box inside the firewall has its own IP. The machines inside the firewall need to be able to get IP addresses by DHCP - the firewall cant block them. Id be plugging 10 machines or so into the firewall through a large switch that I already have - so the firewall only needs one port on each side. And a friendly, yet sophisticated Web interface is a must. Any suggestions? I hope not to have to buy some box blindly and then find out that it only does NAT, or it blocks DHCP, or it wont work with more than N machines, or whatever. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Damian | I know this goes against not wanting to do it with Linux, but if his main objection is maintainance, have you looked at www.ipcop.org ? It is a Linux based firewall distro, complete with nice web interface. It does everything you need. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Li-fan Chen | Various companies sells what seems pretty professional looking perimeter firewall appliances. They run for more or less a grand I think. Check Nokia for one that somehow fits CheckPoint in it. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Wayne | We use a Sonicwall and have never had any problems with it. Also, the support is great, if you need it, but it will cost you (not sure how much). |
| Sun 30 Nov | Frederic Faure | If your boss doesn't feel confortable with using anything other than Windows since you'll be leaving soon... what about a basic W2K or XP host running just ISC to act as Internet gateway, and a good software firewall like Kerio 2.1.5? |
| French translation needed... | Sun 30 Nov | Joel Spolsky |
| Can someone tell me how to say this in French? This chapter has not yet been translated to French. You can read the original in English here. Thanks :) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Fredrik Svensson | French is my third language.. but I used the fish to help me. Babelfish that is, and I think it produced an ok text. Sounded good to me, but please do not used it until verified by a native French speaker.. :) 'Ce chapitre n'a pas été encore traduit au Français. Vous pouvez lire l'original en anglais ici.' 'Detta kapitel är ännu inte översatt till Svenska. Orginalkapitlet på engelska kan läsas här' would be the Swedish translation. :) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Joel Spolsky | Merci! As you may have guessed I've only got the first two chapters of UI for Programmers translated to French, and I decided it's better to post what I have than wait until everything is done... |
| Sun 30 Nov | Joel Spolsky | Maybe n'été pas encore? |
| Sun 30 Nov | Pakter | Presque, Fredrik. Native French speaker speaking : 'Ce chapitre n'a pas encore été traduit en français. Vous pouvez lire l'original en anglais ici.' |
| Sun 30 Nov | Joel Spolsky | thanks! Those babelfish type programs often get the prepositions wrong... |
| Sun 30 Nov | Pakter | (By the way, maybe I should submit my French translation of "Rub a dub dub") |
| Sun 30 Nov | Fredrik Svensson | No it should be like above. You use avoir before etre. Traduit is the main verb. Été is passe compose, that requres avior in front. Otherwise you have to pick another form of etre. Oh I saw Pakters note now. Use that.. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Pakter | (But beware of native speakers. They sometimes have awful spelling...) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Joel Spolsky | Done! The first two chapters are now available at http://french.joelonsoftware.com . |
| Sun 30 Nov | Pakter | You meant : "översatt till franska", Fredrik ;-) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Fredrik Svensson | Hehe, no I actually meant 'svenska' (Swedish), since I was hoping for swedish translations.. Then I saw there were already some. http://swedish.joelonsoftware.com/ How come you know Swedish ? Babelfish does not have Swedish.. although that is one of the most important languages of the world. :) But you are correct in that I missused the capitalization. It should have been 'svenska' not 'Svenska' It is the curse of English floating into the native language.. As you point out that you should be aware of nativespeakers spelling.. it is so true. I live in Stuttgart, Germany and that also is something that does not improve my Swedish spelling. Now also german starts to overshadow my french (had 5 years in school). I forget my french, and my german was never good, never studdied before I went here. SO now I am jack of all languages, master of none. I lived in Geneva, been a lot in France but still I need to spend more time keeping it up... I don't want to loose it.. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Pakter | I wish I knew Swedish ! But I've just tried to guess and then ckecked with google, and it seems I was lucky. I only know a tiny subset of Icelandic. (But I happen to be reading Vilhelm Moberg's books - though not in Swedish, of course). |
| Sun 30 Nov | Fredrik Svensson | Yes I bet, too pick up all thouse good looking girls :) Oh, Moberg comes from my part of Sweden. Småland. The stories about some swedes establishing a new life in the US is very good. Since the books are about people and scenery from home, they are extra strong. I have also heard stories of people emigrating although none in my family did. My grandmother had a neighbour that had emigrated when he was young etc.. A nice story about Sweden that will guide you through the whole of Sweden, (used in school earlier as a Swedish geography book) is The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf. A Swedish novelist, who in 1909 became the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I know it exists in French since I gave it away as an birthday present once. Oh, we better end this 'private' thread. I need to get some sleep :) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Stephen Jones | I think "on peut lire" would be better than "vous pouvez lire". The latter smacks of "franglais". |
| Sun 30 Nov | Frederic Faure | Nope. "On" is oral, colloquial, "Vous is more polite, written". Considering this is written, formal documentation, I would recommend using "vous". |
| Sun 30 Nov | FireMode | "Vous" is used in the French translations of JOS articles instead of "On". |
| Dealing with Interruptions | Sun 30 Nov | Programmus Interruptus |
| I have two colleagues who drop into my office every hour or two and want to chat with me for a minute. I believe its part of their socializing program, because they either want to chat about rubbish or the same old subject as yesterday. When Im not doing serious coding, I think its OK and chat with them out of politeness. If Im deep into some hacking, I am just irritated and dont know if I should just blow them off or be the polite collegue and do as they please. What is the best strategy? Right now, I tend to be the grumpy one and brisk them off. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Ori Berger | Close the door when you need to concentrate. Explain it before hand, so they don't start to speculate about why you're closing the door. It works. Really. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Andrew Hurst | Be straight with them. Most people can handle it. (hopefully). Just tell them you're deep into a problem, and you'll have time to talk later. If they get huffy, and can't take it, well then I don't know what to do :) Maybe someone else will have a better answer. Just be polite though, and let them know you're busy. I don't see why they'd mind. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Thomas | I agree with Andrew, be straight with them. Just a simple, 'I'm busy, please come back later unless this is urgent or critical'. If pressed for an explanation, tell them you're deep in the middle of a complex problem and need to focus. If they still don't get it, they are acting like ten-year-olds and it's appropriate to treat them that way. 'Have you ever been working really hard on something complex and had someone interrupt you? And then you get back to what you're doing and you have forgotten where you were? Wasn't that frustrating? Okay, well I need to concentrate to get through what I'm working on here, and being interrupted will break my concentration. I would really appreciate it if you would come back later when I'm finished with this. In fact by then I'll probably be glad of the break. Okay?' -Thomas |
| Sun 30 Nov | Bored Bystander | Another vote for being straight with these co-workers and defining some way to indicate to them that you're off-limits. What's those figures I keep reading that state how many minutes it takes for a programmer to enter 'the zone' and develop the deep concentration needed to do actual, real development work? Something like 45 minutes on average, isn't it? 99% of the management subhuman race is oblivious to this fact, but other programmers should easily 'buy' a clue and be considerate. |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I agree, you're too afraid of offending. You'll probably be surprised how understanding they'll be if you simply tell them from time to time that you're busy and can't be interrupted. If you're still afraid of offending them, drop by their offices/cubicles later that day and ask them what it was they wanted to talk to you about. Maybe suggest going out to a bar after work, or going to lunch. You're not rejecting them, you're doing your job. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Bored Bystander | Heh. Years ago when I worked in an office I had an office-mate who wanted to jabber incessantly when I was deepy focused. One day this guy starts his tirade and I blew him off. Absolute silence immediately follows. I turn around and see a GIGANTIC (3' tall) drawing of a hand giving a middle finger (to me) drawn on the whiteboard. The guy was nowhere to be found. Probably nursing his fifth of Wild Turkey somewhere else in the building at 9:30 AM. So, some people may be 'offended'.... |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | And those people you shouldn't worry about offending, they'd find something they didn't like about you eventually. |
| Learning Unix/Linux | Sun 30 Nov | asofoetida - it is a herb |
| I just joined a new company which is a java/linux shop. Coming from a MS environment I feel like a total moroon when faced with even simple OS related task. Are there sites that has tutorials from a basic level for novices like me? |
| Sun 30 Nov | Matthew Lock | http://www.google.com.au/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=learn+unix |
| Sun 30 Nov | blargle | lots of docs here www.tldp.org download a distribution and have a play ... you could mess about with www.knoppix.org or www.gnoppix.org - just boot from cd - nothing installed to hard drive .. |
| Sun 30 Nov | John Eikenberry | The afore-mentioned www.tldp.org is probably the main source for linux documentation. There is a ton of documentation there including introductory material. Specifically you should probably check out the intro guide and the FAQ: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html http://www.tldp.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/index.html If you like things in book form, Orielly's 'Running Linux' for a good intro text or 'Linux in a Nutshell' as a reference. Hope this helps. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Fredrik Svensson | http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/index.html might help. Otherwise I recomend to install one of your older boxes, a PIII 350 Mhz or something, at home. Then you can use Linux and Windows at the same time. Another thing I noted was that it was as hard to learn linux as windows. Sounds strange right ? I remember when I got my brand new 486 33 Mhz with Windows 3.1 installed. I learnt how to use it with the help of friends. We all worked together found out how things worked. (Yes, highschool time.. ) But hey you also botherd some Windows guy with all the questions you had. I have been on the recieving end of these questions as well, so I know everybody uses this method in some way to learn Windows. The same thing happend at Uni where now on a Cyrix P200 I decided to nuke my windows installation and try Debian. I was lost again, but with other friends I worked out the quirks. If you have no Linux friends, IRC may help, but if you talk to the people at your company they will probably help you through the transision. It will take some time, just like it took time before you got up to speed with windows. Try to start develop under Linux. It is not that hard to get up to speed with a texteditor, and then you will slowly learn things around this area as you need them. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Bella | Wow, you have an opportunity to increase your skillset out to a whole new dimension. Stay after work, and devour some textbooks. Will you be coding Java? You may not need to learn Unix in depth, (but you should anyways) but at least learn about the navigating the filesystem, some of the utilities (grep, find, piping, redirecting, etc) , and writing simple shell scripts. |
| Sun 30 Nov | æøå | Knoppix is a distro that fits on, and boots from, a CD. Could be nice to have a peek before struggling with installations. http://www.knoppix.net/ |
| Sun 30 Nov | fw | Well, although I don't use it much myself, I'd suggest using redhat 9 as a desktop, basically it's simple to use, and use all the redhat-config-* things to do o/s modifications. As for running things in java, get the rpm's for things like ant etc... or whtaever you are using. Then learn how to the enviroment works in a shell (e.g. setting java_home, classpath etc...). Once you need to go down and do specific things, google is your best friend, and places like tldp.org will give you more than enough. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Tom Vu | Install linux or bsd on an old computer (less than $100) and read some howtos on the internet. Also type man man on the command line to see how documentation works. |
| Sun 30 Nov | snotnose | Get the book "Think Unix", by Jon Lasser, $21 at Amazon. A few years back I had to evaluate books for some co-workers in your position, this was the best I found. |
| Sun 30 Nov | anon | If you're a complete newbie to Unix, you may want to check out the Unix for Dummies book. I read it back in college and it really helped give a simple overview of what you need to know to use it day to day. As embarassing as it might be to read a Dummies book, that one is actually a good introduction. Once you've gotten a hang of the basics of Unix, O'Reilly's Unix in a Nutshell is a good reference to the most common Unix commands, and Unix Power Tools has some nice tips and tricks for a more advanced user. If you start out with trying to install a Linux distribution you'll spend more time learning how to install Linux than using it. The best way to learn Unix is to force yourself to use it every day, and ask your coworkers questions when you need to know how to do something specific. Using Linux at home is a good exercise if you've already gotten used to Unix, but I personally wouldn't try that as a first step. |
| Sun 30 Nov | as | I still like Kernighan & Pike's "The Unix Programming Environment", although it's a bit out of date. It gives the best overview of the ideas behind the system I've ever come across, much better IMO than Eric Raymond's latest piece of windbaggery. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Li-fan Chen | An apache pilot, capable of flying the amazing fruit of a multibillion project, can't fly a cessna until he logs enough hours in the simulator or at least attend a course in person. Same vise versa. Linux is no cessna, nor apache, but it looks like you have to log some hours. Get an extra PC (or vmware, blah blah), make it your primary machine, and keep solving every little thing you bump into. Hire a computer science student (the one working in the Sun lab) 2 hours a week to help you resolve any problem you can't seem to figure out. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Bored Bystander | There's another option in learning Linux on your own. A whole bunch of 'virtual root' Linux web hosts have sprung up in the last year. The keyword to look for is 'VPS', virtual private server. With these you basically lease a private instance of Linux over the internet that you can install anything onto, any server, application, etc. You Telnet in for shell access. I am paying $30/mo for 2 gig storage, 20 gig/mo of traffic. I went with this option for some web sites I host myself and I have learned SO much about Linux system administration it's unreal! And you can actually do useful things with such an account, like run your own web services, etc. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Stephen Jones | 'If you start out with trying to install a Linux distribution you'll spend more time learning how to install Linux than using it.' Actually you will spend more time playing tetris or watching TV during the install. A Linux install on standard hardware is the easiest thing out. Probably easier than installing MS Office |
| Sun 30 Nov | Not who you think ... | Get yourself a copy of Gentoo Linux to play with. By the time you get it running you'll know a metric assload of Linux/Unix stuff. It is just about as far from an automated install as you can get. Yet when you are done you have a pretty nice highly customized system. Highly worthwhile. |
| Where do YOU get productivity tips? | Sun 30 Nov | Entrepreneur |
| Ive been working from home (my ISV company) for several years now. ONe of the things I miss about working around other people is spotting the little productive tricks they have. For example: My old boss had ONE notebook in which he took ALL notes, ToDOs, etc. I use that trick and then also put the date on the notebook when I finish, so I can refer back to if if necessary. Any suggestions of how to pick up those tricks? (Feel free to LIST your best 3 or 4 tips below). |
| Sun 30 Nov | John C. | Take a look at the book "Time Tactics of Very Successful People". |
| Sun 30 Nov | JT | One book: Stephen Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." If you still want more, his "First Things First" is a great followup. If you ever, in a lifetime, manage to master the material in those books, then some other sources might be in order, but that's where I'd start (and probably where I'll finish, too). |
| Sun 30 Nov | Matthew Lock | I found these articles really helpful: http://www.dexterity.com/articles/get-more-done.htm http://www.dexterity.com/articles/cultivating-burning-desire.htm http://www.dexterity.com/articles/do-it-now.htm |
| Sun 30 Nov | Tom Vu | I just setup a wiki for myself on my home network. I don't know what the impact on my productivity will be yet but at least everything is in one place. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk/ | Productivity tips? DO BACKUPS! |
| Sun 30 Nov | John C. | Oh yeah, and for a development productivity tip: Invest in a dual-head system. Seriously. Earlier this year I anted up for a pair of 18-inch LCDs, and it's absolutely shocking how much benefit it provides. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Entrepreneur | Yes, dual (or triple!) display is on my list. I'm moving myself, my family (3 kids+wife) 'cross country to Blacksburg, VA this week. More office space at the new house. Covey books are excellent. I'll take a look at the other one. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Jonathan | Entrepreneur, I'm in Blacksburg, VA too. I'm curious why you're moving here. Are you or your wife going to school? What kind of company do you own? You can email me offline if you wish since it really isn't related to this topic. |
| Where to place CVS? | Sat 29 Nov | Kalamazoo |
| In a UNIX box, I have only access to the /tmp folder Will it be okay to place a CVS in the above folder? I am assuming all users can access the shared /tmp . I do not have root access. |
| Sun 30 Nov | scruffie | Considering that /tmp on some machines gets cleared out regularly, that's a bad idea. On my boxes everything in it is removed on reboots. |
| Sun 30 Nov | jhy | Do you have a home directory on this box? Put it in there, and set the permissions accordingly. But I think you'd be best off if you ask your sysadmin to create a designated user & group for it, and to put everyone who needs write access to the repository into that group. |
| Sun 30 Nov | fw | When you login to the machine, type pwd, that should be your home directory, then mkdir cvs, and chown og-rwx cvs, then you can cvs init that directory and let it in use there. /tmp is cleared out allot (sometimes nightly, sometimes just after reboot), so it'd not a good idea to use there. |
| how good a software engineer | Sat 29 Nov | robert |
| How good a software engineer would you be if you could replicate the quality of the clustering done by one of the commercial search engines,and get similar results in a few months of work? Do people think its difficult to do? |
| Sat 29 Nov | Pretty Good | It's easy if you have enough money for all the hardware you'd need to scan the entire net. The real problem would be negotiating license fees with google since their methods are patented. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Google's Pagerank is really "I should have thought of that" brilliant. Not to mention that in order to pull results from a database the size of Alaska in less than a second you'd have to tweak everything, down to the OS, maybe even hardware. Oh yeah, and then server up several billion search results a day. |
| Sat 29 Nov | robert | I have implemented algorithms for clustering on a search engine data set, and results are comparable to some other commercial engines. Do people think that the heuristic algorithms you would use are difficult? |
| Sat 29 Nov | Anon. Coward | Actually the real problem isn't developing the software or buying the hardware. The real problem with re-creating Google would be generating the mindshare to get people to switch. Unless your version is so vastly superior to google as to generate word-of-mouth, you'd have to spend a bazillion dollars on advertising to get people to know about your search engine. |
| Sat 29 Nov | robert | It isn't comepting with google, once you have the 10,000 results google generates, mine groups and clusters the results, and is comparable to other clustering engines of this category, vivisimo, and a couple of others. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Stephen Jones | The thing about Google is that it proves that if something is a lot better, then word of mouth is all that is needed for it to take off. Remember the old days when Yahoo search ruled the roost? Anyway the OP's question is a little like how good a physicist would you be if you thought up the law of gravity again. Once the original guy's done it redoing actual calcuations don't get many genius points. |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Hey, 'any application could be re-written in 45 days' (joke for those of you who read that thread). Google really did have humble roots, if you can write something that 'just works' the way Google does there's no reason it can't take off, or at least get a few corporate clients who need that kind of functionality. As far as taking on Google in 3 months... No way. You'd have to spider the whole internet, and tackle all the problems they've tackled, some things probably took months or years to work out and get to the point where they are. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Dennis Forbes | I don't recall Yahoo search ever ruling the roost. Indeed, for the longest time Yahoo's 'search' was nothing more than searching its own user submitted web 'index'. Before Google I used Excite, which was most definitely the winner at the time, and before that the search engine of choice was AltaVista. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Stephen Jones | The fact that Yahoo's list was done manually meant that it was good. Other search engines often failed because people shamelessly exploited the meta tags. I would say Google took over some time in 2000 to 2001. With Yahoo I would often have to drill down six or seven levels. When I found one search in Google would do the trick I was amazed. Searching used to take up to half an hour. With Google it became more or less one click. |
| Sun 30 Nov | fw | Remember, coming up with software which can do as good as google in one area doesn't mean you can compete, not be a long shot. You have to crawl allot before you become in any way useful, you need a real dataset to work with, which means you need allot of storage, then you have to think about the bandwidth you have available, then failover, then scalability, then indexing etc.... Mind you, best of luck all the same, I often do mini projects e.g. coming up with a system like google, they're just for the sake of learning really... |
| Sun 30 Nov | Alex | Robert, if you have everything else Google has, you can take them on what they don't have: a better query. Their queries are just too simple, when you are doing research you need more power and it's not there. Nested boolean, etc. A complicated, albeit cryptic, powerful query language would definitely win my heart. |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | And punctuation. .net c++ etc. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Roose | Such queries with && and || might be good for you and I, who are programmers. But I've heard that people have examined queries (on alta vista and such), and pretty much no one uses those features. I think Google was smart not to have them. The design decision was that you should be able to get the best results possible without resorting to them. And even though it does seem counterintuitive, I think they were right. There are occasions when I have to do a couple or 3 queries where one could have done, but it doesn't seem to make a big difference. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Roose | In any case, the point was that you're not going to get any market share by adding boolean logic to queries. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Alex | Of course not. If I were Google, I'd definitely not have nested boolean statements. But sometimes I miss them, that's all. Along with EXACT, even case-sensitive, matching like '.net' |
| Reading Times | Sat 29 Nov | Unorganized Twat |
| Im impressed by how many books some of you read. Im not very disciplined about that, and I would love to read more. What tips and advices would you give me. I purchase a stack of books from Amazon 2 months ago I have not opened one yet :-( Ive got a hard time switching the TV and the Internet off and grab my chair for some reading. A Procrastinator Patient |
| Sat 29 Nov | Lou | If you're having a hard time comitting to something, schedule it in your day planner/PIM/etc. Set aside time every day for it and do it every day. Reading to learn new skills and new methodologies is important to a continuing development of your skills, so set time aside and make a firm commitment to it. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | 1 hour on the train to work, 1 hour on the train home from work = approx 500 hours (2 hours * 250 days) of reading a year. 2 hours bike riding 2-3 times a week 6+ months a year = approx 130 hours of listening to books on tape. In the past 10 years since I graduated High School, I've probably had the equivelant of 3 or 4 university degrees. If you drive, consider books on tape/cd/mp3. I don't think Peopleware or Learn C++ in a day and a half comes on tape, but there are thousands of book that do. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Oh, and don't buy a stack of books, just buy 1 or 2 books at a time. Whenever I buy more than a book at a time, especially if they're on the same topic, after I finish the first one my interests have probably changed and I'm not interested in the other book I got. Or if I bought more than two, and start reading one, there's probably a reason I didn't chose the other(s) to read first - I might not have been that interested to begin with. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Cletus | 'In the past 10 years since I graduated High School, I've probably had the equivelant of 3 or 4 university degrees.' I have the same problem. A bunch of books half-started and then I have to reread them because I have forgotten what I initially read. I once bought a book on procrastination, but I never got around to reading it because I kept putting it off :) Is your book purchasing/reading organized around a certain topic(s), i.e Software Engineering, Politics, Philosophy etc, or do you read books at random in whatever interests you have at the moment? Do you read several books on a subject to develop a thorough understanding of a particular subject or do buy one or two books and 'dabble' in various subject matter? |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I tend to read in circles, so to speak. One topic will interest me for a while, and then another, and then another, and then I'll find someone with something new to say on the first topic. More to the point, it's not a topic that interests me, but a writer or book that really has something to say that's new to me. How do you choose what CD's you're going to buy? Sure you might go into the store and say 'I want to buy a dance album, let me sample tracks from some dance CD's,' but you're more likely to find something somewhere - at a friend's house, on the radio, on tv, by recommendation - that just strikes a chord (no pun intended) with you. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Stephen Jones | Before the Internet came round I would spend four or five hours a day reading. If I ran out of newspapers I would read the telephone directory. Don't confuse technical books with 'recreational' reading. Apart from anything else the speed you will read at is vastly different. The 'learn in 24 hours' mean just that - 24 hours, which would be anything from four days to a fortnight, depending on how many hours a day. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Entrepreneur | PICKING BOOKS Any suggestions of good sites to find books to read? I've always thought it would be great to have a self-maintaining website where books are listed by category and people can vote on books. (I know amazon SORT OF has this, but not by category). It took me YEARS to find some good general books on programming (Code Complete, etc.) The best .1% of books are 10x better than the average college professor. (The top 1% of professors are even better :-) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Entrepreneur | BTW, I keep a good book in every bathroom in the house. One of those 3 BRs is my office bathroom. :-) |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I eat lots of veggies and I don't spend that much time in the bathroom.... |
| Sun 30 Nov | John C. | Two things to do: Find time to read in the first place, and read effectively with the time you have. First, find someplace where you can get away from the Internet and the TV, like a local cafe (assuming the noise doesn't bother you, and you don't bring your notebook and WiFi connection to distract you). Or read over lunch, or first thing in the morning, or last thing before you go to bed. Find a quiet bench in a nearby park. On airplanes and trains. Whatever... experiment and figure out what works for you. Second, make sure that when you read, you're really focused. I find that reading with a pencil in hand, making notes in the margins and on the blank pages at the front of the book, etc., really helps me concentrate and avoid speeding up to a point where I'm not really paying attention. Or take notes on your notebook as you go along, if you can resist the temptation to Web surf instead. Read actively. Imagine that after you're done with each chapter, or the entire book, you're going to tell a friend what you learned, or write a review of the book on Amazon. But basically, reading is like physical exercise -- you have to convince yourself this is something worth doing and then Just Do It (sorry Nike). |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | ... and the more you do it the better you get, and the more enjoyable it is. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Cletus | 'But basically, reading is like physical exercise -- you have to convince yourself this is something worth doing and then Just Do It (sorry Nike).' I guess my problem is not that reading isn't important, but the consistency/discipline to finish books. I guess I would agree that I need to develop my reading 'discipline' muscle. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Pat Galea | I have a technique I kludged together from military training techniques (that I read about) and AA. The idea is very simple: one day at a time. Sometimes tackling a really big book can seem quite daunting; how on Earth am I *ever* going to get through all that? So instead, resolve only to complete chapter 1. That's all. You're not comitting yourself to any more than that. Learn it thoroughly, and don't leave it 'til you're *sure* you understand it. Once that's done, move on to the next chapter and resolve to tackle that one to completion. Sometimes you won't complete the book in one contiguous lump. You're tastes will have moved on to something else. But I find that because I haven't pressurised myself to doing the entire thing, I haven't rushed the individual chapters. So what I *have* learned has really sunk in, and it's a lot easier to pick up where I left off when I eventually do get the 'itch' to study it again. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Pat Galea | s/You're tastes/Your tastes/ Obviously I'm suffering from Excessive Apostrophe Syndrome. I do apologise. |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I used to read a book within a book within a book... A large complex book, then in the middle pick up something else, and in the middle of that pick up something else. Then go back to the second book - surprisingly refreshed, and the back to the first book, and the material that seemed dull after 500 pages also seems surprisingly fresh again. I don't really read enough to have those kinds of quirks now though. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Tim Sharrock | re 'Any suggestions of good sites to find books to read?': I find http://www.accu.org/bookreviews/public/ a good place to start for computing related books. Tim |
| POLL : Do you play video Games ? | Sat 29 Nov | Gamerz |
| Do you play video games ? On PC ? Consoles ? |
| Sat 29 Nov | Almost Anonymous | Just purchased a Gamecube. Both for fun and for the nostalgia factor. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Mongo | Never. I have enough trouble as it is getting stuff done. If I let myself play games, I'd be, if you'll forgive the expression, doomed. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | POLL : How Many Of You Guys Are Video Gamers Snacky (45) http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=44704&ixReplies=45 |
| Sat 29 Nov | hoser | Most of JoS is a repeat and I didn't get to vote. Used to. Don't anymore. My wife broke by Age of Empires CD in half. Haven't played a game since. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Dennis Atkins | I don't play any video games. Life is more interesting. Games are for children. |
| Sat 29 Nov | FullNameRequired | occasionally (_very_ occasionally) I settle in for a week with doom, warcraft or something along that route. but thats pretty infrequently these deays, maybe once every year or two (2 years at least since the last one, but now Im thinking about it I might do it again over christmas). mostly though I avoid even owning the games...if I own them Ill play them, and when Im playing them im not working or being nice to my girlfriend or walking the dog :) ( we dont have sky television (pay tv) for the same reason...better tv means Ill watch it more...all bad really..) |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I only have broadcast TV, and in NYC that means all the major networks, what everyone used to watch before Cable & Satellite came along. The games I have tend to be along the adventure/rpg line, and I play them with my girlfriend. Typically if it isn't two player, or a game that's interesting to watch (read: with a strong plot, and not a shoot-em-up) we skim 'em. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Oh, and to answer your question, console only. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Stephen Jones | I used to paly chess with the computer until I upgraded the hardware and decided I wouldn't have a chance :) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Stephen Jones | And while any computer can play chess better than me I have yet to come across a half-way decent Bridge program. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Dennis Forbes | There was an interesting stat in the National Post today (in a techno-toy type section) commenting that the average age of video game players is up to 29, and rising. It really is a world of difference from the classic '13 year old' Sega Genesis player. Having said that, I had my wonderful daughter (first child) at 30, and for the 9 months since have had absolutely no time for anything...so if my situation is common then the stat might not rise too much further... |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | > It really is a world of difference from the classic '13 year old' Sega Genesis player. Um. Really? Isn't the 13 year old Sega Genesis player now around 29? |
| Sun 30 Nov | Li-fan Chen | I was a counter strike addict. Seeing even the mildest display of violence makes my mouse button finger twitch. I don't know about others but when I don't play addictive games like this it gives me a chance to be more productive on my off time. I would say the more time you work on your ventures the more chance fortune will smile on you. |
| Sun 30 Nov | jedidjab79 | >>>Um. Really? Isn't the 13 year old Sega Genesis player now around 29? Yep pretty much :) That's why all the games on mobile phones and GBA are so popular ... our age group all grew up with 2D stuff and want it back again ;) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Ross | About the poll: I play sometimes, PC games (Max Payne) and with old computer emulators. About this : << I don't play any video games. Life is more interesting. Games are for children. Dennis Atkins << I strongly disagree. I guess it's the same with cartoon, some people thinks Futurama, Simpsons, South Park, etc. are cartoon SO they are for children. Absurd. I mean of course there are cartoons/games specially developed for kids, but they are not all the games. It's like toys, you watch tv and see all those toy ads. Then you see your last generation mobile, your last generation digital cam, your MP3/CD player... what are they, if not electronic toys for adult people? I see gaming as an intelectual activity. And I see the taste of game in the esence of intelectual activity. If you enjoy it... then there is some kind of game in it. I can see gaming everywhere. Joking? It's a game about getting surprise with gestual/word expressions. Sport? it's game. Life? It's kind of roleplaying game. Programming? It's a game where you try to get the computer acts as you want. Reading a book? It's a game where you enter in a fiction world and let you go. Cinema? It's a game where you try to feel a story, watching those untrue pictures on a flat screen inside a dark room. |
| Sun 30 Nov | rexguo | As busy as I am (just like everybody else), I make time to play video games. Games stimulate the mind, injects creative juices. It's games that got me into computers and I shouldn't leave that behind. I feel every programmer should play games regularly. Any programmer who tells me that he/she has got no time for games, or that games are boring, is telling me that they've turned into machine-like programmers. |
| Sun 30 Nov | T. Norman | >'Games are for children.' Nowadays, many games are rated as adults-only. Some shops require you to show ID to purchase those games. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Patrik | Flight Sim 2004 is what I play; not really a relaxing game since you have to plan everything to be able to do stuff properly. GTA Vice City is cool also :) |
| Sun 30 Nov | T. Norman | Up until the late 90's I used to play games fairly regularly. But then more and more games started requiring increasingly complex controls, requiring the active use of more and more buttons. I loved the shooters like Doom, Heretic and Duke Nukem3D where all you had to do was run and shoot, with an occasional tap of another button to open a door or change your weapon. Tomb Raider and Quake brought a bit more complexity in the controls, but they were manageable. Then games like Half-Life came along, forcing you to know how to do all sorts of crazy gymnastics with 45 different buttons and 100 different ways to shoot, jump, run and crawl. And you pretty much had to know all those complex controls or you'd die in a second. Joysticks and gamepads started supporting the trend; they would have so many different buttons that you'd almost have to be an octopus to use them. They would even include a training mode so you could learn how to move the man around and shoot without getting killed instantly. But I don't have the patience to spend hours of training before I actually start to play. When gaming becomes so much work, it becomes more frustration than fun. So for the last 3 years or so I rarely played any games. Then I started to realize that I was losing an ability which I believe gaming was helping to enhance, which is the ability to concentrate my attention on one thing for long uninterrupted periods. Playing an action-heavy or real-time strategy game for a couple hours non-stop requires constant focus that is more intense than almost anything else you do in life. But once you can do that without trouble, focusing for a few hours of programming or taking an exam becomes easy. So I've convinced myself to start gaming again. I've started with reviving the old favorites, turning to JDoom and JHeretic (http://www.doomsdayhq.com/) which are graphically enhanced versions of the originals. I'm also planning to resume chess, and I am now looking into some of the better 2-4 year old games that can be found for $10 in bargain bins or on eBay. I recently downloaded the Deus Ex demo (the original), and hopefully it won't require octopus hands for the controls. If you have any others to recommend, please go ahead. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Brad Wilson | I play PC games (primarily Dark Age of Camelot), as well as console games (own all three current-gen consoles). Over my lifetime, I've owned just about every game console ever made. Games are great for your mind. They are an excellent relief from work stress, and the antidote for inert TV watching. |
| Sun 30 Nov | T. Norman | '...and the antidote for inert TV watching.' Exactly. I wondered for a little while where I'm going to find the time for my renewed gaming habits, then I decided I'd just take it out of my TV time. I watch about 15-20 hours a week, so it shouldn't be terribly difficult to take about 5 hours out of that for gaming. |
| Sun 30 Nov | WhatTimeIsItEccles | No, can't see the point of them. I spend my free time doing constructive things and having a life. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Name expired | Hehe.. all the serious people that claim to have a more important life.. it is not mutually exclusive to have a life and enjoy a game now and then.. lighten up. I play Enemy Territory which is a FREE game, based on the Return to the Castle of Wolfenstein. It is a Quake type of game, where you have different classes of people, to accomplish a task. Engineer, Medic, Soldier, Covert op and Field op. You play it online, with/against other armchair soldiers.. ehh people.. So lets open a JoelOnSoftware server.. :)) It helps you to relax, think about something different. Just like running and swimming which I also do when I am pretending to have a real life.. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Gamer | Some games show very good UI. Worth to pay attention to some of the details ... |
| Sun 30 Nov | Me too! | Solitaire, WinMine and if I feel really adventurous, perhaps Spider Solitaire. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Dennis Atkins | OK maybe not for children age wise but for children emotionally and developmentally. Computer games are not sports. Flight simulators? Give me a break. That is NOT more enjoyable than taking my Cessna for a spin, nor is it more enjoyable than hanggliding, another enjoyable pasttime. GTA? Oh sure, you find beating up prostitutes and running over old ladies enjoyable? Well to say you have the mentality of a child would be charitable. You guys need to get a life. A real life. Oh sorry, maybe that's not possible. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Full name: | Insult and ad hominem attacks may win arguments with your loser friends, but not here. You do have friends don't you? I hope you don't spend all your time reading forum topics that you're already not interested in just so you can insult people. |
| Sun 30 Nov | FullNameRequired | 'That is NOT more enjoyable than taking my Cessna for a spin, nor is it more enjoyable than hanggliding, another enjoyable pasttime.'
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| Sun 30 Nov | Tim Lara | I haven't played video games that avidly since the glory days of Nintendo (good old NES), but I would attibute this much more to a lack of free time than to a lack of interest -- I certainly haven't 'grown up' in any other aspect of life. ;) For some reason, though, I never really got into playing games on the PC. I have always preferred consoles. Maybe it's because consoles generally 'just work' after you turn them on, or maybe it's just because consoles are typically set up in a much more comfortable area of the home than PCs are. No matter what you're doing, sitting at a desk just feels more like working than sitting on the couch... |
| Sun 30 Nov | Dennis Atkins | 'Fullname:': 'Not interested in' It's a POLL. A poll isn't much good if you only take one side. As far as going off topic from the poll itself, I am entitled to respond to the slams that are subsequently directed at me. 'Fullname:' as far as 'friends' go, you could stand to get out and make some. It's called real-life, something that g4m3r2 know precious little about from the coziness of your mother's basements. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Dennis Atkins | 'I get my kicks by getting a hold of that chainsaw and hacking into innocent pedestrians, tearing their bodys apart in a wild orgy of blood and gore.', said FNR. This is exactly my point. Get out there and meet real people and maybe you won't find 'enjoyable' the idea of violently slaughtering them, even 'virtually'. Many years ago, people who even thought of such things were considered sickos. Now, for people who naturally would not think of such abominations, we have (colliseum) 'games' to get them fixating and fantasizing about these things. Then we wonder where the Kleboz and Harris' of the world get their ideas. Believe me, real life is a helluva lot more fun. Ever try surfing? Rockclimbing? Off road cycling? Or howabout gardening? Making crafts to enter in the fair and try for a blue ribbon? No, because TV and video games take up all your time since after a long 7 hr day of staring at a CRT posting on JoS and surfing about in the pretext of doing work, you can't wait to get home, fire up the CRT and get busy. Lame lame lame. Look up 'wanker' in the dictionary and there it is, the adult g4M3r. |
| Sun 30 Nov | FullNameRequired | 'Get out there and meet real people and maybe you won't find 'enjoyable' the idea of violently slaughtering them, even 'virtually'.'
LOL.
you are actually quite wrong, the more people I meet the more 'enjoyable' the idea of violently slaughtering them, 'virtually' becomes.
'Believe me, real life is a helluva lot more fun.'
it certainly can be, but sometimes (and I put this idea to you hesitantly) maybe its not _quite_ as much fun as tearing a vibrating chainsaw through the flesh of a virtual cop, watching the blood fly in huge, juicy droplets.
'Ever try surfing? Rockclimbing? Off road cycling? Or howabout gardening? Making crafts to enter in the fair and try for a blue ribbon?'
no, yes, yes, yes, no.
Ive also tried camping, swimming in rivers, hitchhiking across new zealand, hiking over the southern traverse, hiking all sorts of other tracks to the point where Ive forgotten most of their names, kayaking down various rivers, fishing, reading, running my own business...oh, the list goes on...and I love pretty much all of it.
but sometimes, just occasionally, its just more fun to load up a shotgun and tear through a building, blowing the bodies of deformed mutant monsters into small, meaty globlets and watching the gore float softly away.
'No, because TV and video games take up all your time since after a long 7 hr day of staring at a CRT posting on JoS and surfing about in the pretext of doing work, you can't wait to get home, fire up the CRT and get busy.'
umm..what? did you read my earlier posts? if not maybe you should, my gaming time these days is actually pretty rare. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Robert Jacobson | Dennis appears to enjoy making personal attacks on people. Easier just to ignore his rants.... |
| Sun 30 Nov | rexguo | I personally dislike violent games like FPSs and games like GTA. And yes I agree such games have a profound bad effect on a kid's growing mind and soul. However, there're plenty of other games that may still be violent but you actually learn something worthwhile. Look at Ensemble Studio's Age of Empires, Age of Kings and now Age of Mythology. Superbly researched and implemented. How about the Ultima RPG series? The virtue system sure had a lasting effect on me. Not that I'm claiming to be a virtuous person now, but I find myself unconsciously using it as part of my value system. It was truly an education and food for thought each time I played it. On the technical side, anyone remembered how the original Quake pushed the limits of software 3D rendering? Extreme assembly programming anyone? I bet many of you (esp those who bash games) have no idea of pipelining a FDIV with several other ALU instructions, effectively getting the 19-cycle FDIV for free. How about linear-time sorting using the radix sort? Works on floats even! And yes, GUI design. The multitude and variety of design patterns applicable to games UI design is overwhelming when compared to desktop/web UI designs where most are just using standard OS-supplied components. A game development team is also one that truly knows how to work with artists (i.e. non-technical people). I've seen enough communication break-downs between software engineers and graphic designers. Let us also not forget the audio dimension too. BTW, I'm not bashing traditional apps developers, but I feel game developers still don't get the respect and recognition they deserve. Lastly, you think that awesome 3D accelerator/display card sitting in your PC box happened by accident? The games industry made it happen! Be appreciative. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Dennis Atkins | I'm not making personal attacks. I'm trying to lifght a fire under your ass to get oitside and live life rather than be enslaved by a virtual prison of violent thoughts and wasted hours. Strictly because I care about you guys, believe me. I want you to really think about what you are doing with your lives. It's the same routine I'd give people I was concerned about if I found they'd picked up a nasty crystal habit. I'we found that gentle suggestions don't work and pointing out that hours pissed away in the drug dens of cyberspace aren't productive and tehy aren't coming back. Soon, you'll be lying in bed in the old folks home, no one coming to visit you, wondering what happened to your life, with nothing substantial to look back on. Seriously, FNR, you live in freaking New Zealand, one of the best places in the world NOT to be spending it staring at a flickering screen. Millions would love to trade their lives for one in New Zealand and they wouldn't spend it playing video games, which can be done anywhere. If you lived in an inner city rathole and had no hope un life I could understand the games being an attraction. |
| Sun 30 Nov | FullNameRequired | 'I'm trying to lifght a fire under your ass'
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| Sun 30 Nov | T. Norman | Having a job, a life, and playing video games are not three mutually exclusive things. If you don't like them, don't play them. Nuff said. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Robert Jacobson | Well put, T. |
| Sun 30 Nov | as | Oh dear. I live in New Zealand too, and have just bought an Xbox, which is great. I've also just bought a cordless electric mower with edge trimming attachment, which is also great - FNR, you should get down to Mitre 10 and buy one right now. And Dennis, get a grip man. |
| Sun 30 Nov | FullNameRequired | 'FNR, you should get down to Mitre 10 and buy one right now. ' mmm...cordless electric mower with edge trimming attachment....does it have the optional stone washing mechanism? |
| Sun 30 Nov | Motown (an Aussie Dad) | I'm married with children. I haven't had a life for a while ;-) Games are a pleasant diversion and allow me to pretend I can do things that real-life circumstances make difficult, if not impossible. Like fly an F-16 =) |
| Sun 30 Nov | Vince | 'Used to. Don't anymore. My wife broke by Age of Empires CD in half. Haven't played a game since. ' haha. I'll keep this in mind when I finally find a wife. I only play video games if my gamer friends invite me to a Lan party. Playing a game alone just seems kinda boring. |
| Sun 30 Nov | as | 'does it have the optional stone washing mechanism?' Not as such, but you could rotate the edge trimmer to a vertical position and use it to thrash stones clean. I tried using it to remove lichen from my drive, and rather regret doing so, in that it removed a fair amount of drive along with the lichen. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Roose | This article seems especially appropriate now: http://www.theonion.com/onion3604/doesnt_own_television.html |
| Book recommendation for the holidays? | Fri 28 Nov | words of wisdom from a dude in LA |
| Guys/Gals/Aliens: Care to recommend some books for this upcoming holiday season? Doesn t have to be software related. Just wanted to know if I could get my hands on some cool readings. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Canuck | Brining Down The House - Ben Mezrich * Its about 6 MIT students taking Las Vegas for millions. If you like gambling, this is kind of a cool story. How the Universe Got Its Spots - Janna Levin * A discussion about astro/quantum physics. Pretty cool, if you like that kinda stuff Janson Directive - Robert Ludlum * A super spy novel, very entertaining. I just got back from vacation and I picked up several books before I left. These three certainly stood out. |
| Fri 28 Nov | jedidjab79 | I second "Bringing Down The House". Mind you, i'm Canadian too...hmmm..something about gambling? :) |
| Fri 28 Nov | mikrus | Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson! |
| Fri 28 Nov | Dina Sudahay | Take your pick depending on how you feel: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering -- makes the astonishing claim that engineering is a profession that has contributed positively to humanity. Bee Season -- about a little girl who is very good at spelling bees. You'll see. |
| Fri 28 Nov | braid_ged | 'The Nature Of Power - The Essential Noam Chomsky'. A collection of discussions (questions and answers) with Noam Chomsky. I am a very right wing conservative sort of person, respectful of the neccessity of organised control and authority etc etc... But this book had a huge impression on me. Also, I assume you have already read 'Godel Escher Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid'. It is objectively the best book ever written :) Or if you want some inspiration 'In Search Of Excellence', read, amount other stories, about how 15 engineers in a hotel room changed the design of an airoplane from prop to jet in a week, only to then run down to a model shop, buy some wood and build a scale model all before their deadline to present the design to the US Air Force. Braid_Ged |
| Fri 28 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Noam Chomsky is great, but after reading him you might not want to return to work in January... You mean the corporations really are opressing me, and offshoring is a win-win situation because they get cheaper labor in India AND here? Another interesting book is Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. She took $500 and headed to a town or city and took a bottom-of-the-barrel type job and just saw what that lifestyle is like, how well she could survive and so on. She said the most interesting thing was that while she was educated (she's a writer for Harpers) nobody ever told her she was 'too smart for this job.' Godel Escher Bach is definately on my to-read list. So is Bringing Down the House. Another book on my to-read list is Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll. A math teacher turned sysadmin who noticed some suspicious behaviour and helped track down an international hacker. I really enjoyed Sources of Power by Steve Klein about how decisions are made in high pressure situations. He was commissioned by the military to study this, and comes to some interesting conclusions & has some good insights. A great read. I recommend it to everyone. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman is excellent if you're interested in design. A Random Walk Down Wallstreet is a great investment book (I think Joel agrees with me here). Really makes a strong case for buying no load index funds and not trying to beat the dow. |
| Fri 28 Nov | skeptical | You say 'win-win' situation because "they" (they corporations in US and overseas) win. Isn't that a win-lose situation for us individuals? I guess we'll all just buy stocks and get rich while watching TV instead of by designing things. |
| Fri 28 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I meant the corporation wins in two ways. Really it's a lose-lose situation for everyone but them. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Alex Chernavsky | I read Ehrenreich's book ('Nickel and Dimed'). It was OK, but a bit too preachy for my taste. The following book covers some of the same material, but this one is a lot funnier: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812967941/ The book is called, 'A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember', by Iain Levison. I also maintain a page with book reviews. If someone is really, really interested, you can Google my name and find my homepage. |
| Fri 28 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Interesting. I read some extremely right wing reviews of Ehrenreich's book. One guy seemed to have not even read it, another read it and disagreed with about 5% of what she said, but disagreed vehemently with it. I really enjoyed Ehrenreich's book, an interesting glimpse into lower class life from my middle class background. I mentioned it because of the Noam Chomsky recommendation, I think people who like Noam might like this book. I'll check out that Levison book. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Insert half smiley here. | Here are some. I prefer fiction.
Foucalt's Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
I dislike teleological explanations. I liked this book for that reason.
Vitals (Greg Bear)
A cool paranoid sci-fi type book. I read it in one sitting, which I suppose is some kind of recommendation.
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| Fri 28 Nov | Interaction Architect | Barbarians at the Gate : The Fall of RJR Nabisco Fascinating book about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. A bit dated now but one of those books that's hard to put down. |
| Fri 28 Nov | anon | If you're interested at a glimpse of lower class life I seriously recommend "Down and out in Paris and London" by George Orwell. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Insert half smiley here. | As opposed to rereading any book for the first time, I suppose. |
| Fri 28 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Foucault's Pendulum is great, especially if you're into esoteric Christian mythos things, like Templars and Rosecrutians. It also makes you look smart when you read it. Having seen The Name of the Rose, I see a similar theme in Eco's works... But I don't want to spoil the end for you. |
| Sat 29 Nov | words of wisdom from a dude in LA | My attempts to read Foucault's Pendulum failed both times. It's extremely difficult for me to understand what's going on. |
| Sat 29 Nov | skeptical | OK, I'm up with that assessment. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Ram Dass | I too had no success with Foucault's Pendulum There were al the interesting little diagrams in the book - but had no luck following the story :( Another book by the same author - 'Name of the Rose' is pretty good. The movie , with Sean Connery, is excellento. Great visuals. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I admit that, though I loved Foucault's Pendulum, I didn't really 'get' the plot arc the first time through the book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is easier to follow, but I found it rather dry. Chattaqua, to me, was an opportunity to interrupt the plot and ramble on for a while. Though I admit that the end was mind blowing... Not that I remember the end anymore. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Someone wrote a guide to The Name of the Rose, I think it's called "The Key to the Name of the Rose" and I wish someone would do the same for Foucault's Pendulum. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Nick | I loved Foucault's Pendulum. It was difficult to follow in passages but the overall story made it worth trudging through those. Perhaps some of the clarity is lost in the translation from Italian. I read one other of Eco's - The Island of the Day Before. I put it down half way through and never picked it up again. If you like humor, I would recommend any of Carl Hiaasen's books - but his earlier one's are the funniest. Skin Tight and Tourist Season were my favs. |
| Sat 29 Nov | uncronopio | Any books with short stories by Italo Calvino. The Emperor's New Mind by Penrose. I never got Godel, Escher, Bach: I got really bored after 100 pages. |
| Sat 29 Nov | indian programmer | Bhagwad Gita . The great Hindu spiritual book . Will tell you the reason for your existence. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Tim Sullivan | _Trainspotting_, by Irving Welsh. An amazing novel, and signifigantly more in depth than the movie, which really only focused on Rent Boy. The sequel, _Porno_, is also quite good (and a lot more coherent). I felt like I was coming home to old friends when I read it. _The Crow Road_ by Iain Banks. His best book. If you have a strong stomach and a dark streak, his first book, _The Wasp Factory_ is excellent and disturbing. _Natural Capitalism_ by Paul Hawken et al. Inspiring, thought provoking, well researched and well annotated. Proof positive that envronmental solutions are less expensive and more economically efficient than non-enviornmental solutions. If you like children's literature, I am very fond of the _A Series of Unfortunate Events_ books by Lemony Snicket, the first being _A Bad Beginning_. There are something like 15 of them. HTH. |
| Sat 29 Nov | X. J. Scott | Mmm yes, children's literature. - Matilda by Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl - Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis - Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too and Amphigorey Also by Edward Gorey More adult but easy to read: - The Screwtape Letters by C.S.Lewis - The Big Book of the Unexplained ('true' stories of weird happenings illustrated by famous underground cartoonists -- there is an entire 'Big Book' series, all of which are worth the time and money spent and will really educate you on arcane weirdness and trivia) All time favorites: - The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens - Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (or any other anthology of Hawthorne) - Moby Dick - Complete Short Stories, Mark Twain - A New Model of the Universe, P.D. Ouspensky |
| Sat 29 Nov | Mike Swieton | There's always the great Hithchiker's Guide books, by Douglas Adams. Thought the first couple are the best, all of themare quite good. Also quite humorous is Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet (hmm, Ispelled that wrong). Dan Simmon's Illium is extremely, and while it ends relatively well, it does have a concluding sequel planned and not out. Similarly, George R. Martin's series, A Song of Ice and Fire, beginning with A Clash of Kings,is one of the most amazing works of fantasy thatI've read in a very long time. |
| Sat 29 Nov | www.marktaw.com | The HitchHikers Guide is best enjoyed as it was intended to be consumed - The Radio Drama !!!!!!! Then go play the video game on DNA's website. After 4 books written as half hour episodes with rediculous cliffhangers, I was surpised when Mostly Harmless was not only coherent, but had a fairly sophisticated plot involving time travel and continuity and all that. Speaking of children's books, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy was excellent. You'll find this in both the sci-fi/fantasy section and children's section. I listened to the audio dramatization of these and enjoyed them tremendously. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Ged Byrne | Sophies World by Jostein Gardener is an outstanding read. It is really a very effective lesson in the history of philisophical thought barely disguised as a novel. |
| Sat 29 Nov | pietro | Second Iain Banks. He also writes sci-fi under the name Iain M. Banks, 'Player of Games' and 'Excession' are two of my favourites. One of the best. Irving Welsh too, although strangely I've read all his books except 'Trainspotting'. If you like Calvino, Primo Levi's short stories are good too ('Periodic Table' is one favourite collection). He was an Auschwitz survivor, so he has some auto-biographical works too. 'Tartar Steppe' by Dino Buzzati is another good book by an Italian author. Also Baricco, 'Ocean Sea' for example, although I prefer 'City', almost Banks in style. 'Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them' by Al Franken was entertaining, although the politics/people can be hard to follow, not knowing who they all are - perhaps just as well. I'm sure it offends many people, but that's what political satire is for. In science I read many books, at the moment trying to find a good one on consciousness - tried both Pinker's 'How the Mind Works' (a little trite in places but some good explanations of the basics) and Damasio's 'The Feeling of What Happens' (feels like it should be good but very convoluted langauge). Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' is, of course, shallow in the sense he's covering a lot of ground, but a surprisingly good read. Sobel's 'Longitude' stands out. 'Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation' by Judson is a gem with lines like 'Dear Dr. Tatiana, I'm a European praying mantis, and I've noticed I enjoy sex more if I bite my lovers' heads off first. Because when I decapitate them they go into to most thrilling spasms'. There's a serious side to it too. History. Of recent reads Beevor's 'Stalingrad' was good. Robert Grave's 'Goodbye to All That' is good as autobiography/history. Norwich's 'Byzantium' trilogy of books is very well written. Herodotus remains as good as ever (as a story or history?) and Seutonius 'Twelve Caesars'. A short list, so much to read, so little time. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Caught somewhere in time | Read the lyrics, "Caught somewhere in time" by Iron Maiden |
| Sun 30 Nov | www.marktaw.com | Memiors of a Geisha by Arthur Golden was great. So was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by Arthur Berendt. Is someone taking notes? |
| Sun 30 Nov | Ged Byrne | I'll second Pratchett's and Gamen's 'Good Omens.' |
| Sun 30 Nov | Matt Latourette | I have to join in recommending Foucault's Pendulum. Once I started, I couldn't put it down except to go peek out the front window to make sure there weren't any creepy people watching me. That's part of the fun of this book. Eco's work is so well researched and so well written that you get tricked into believing what he's telling you. You get this feeling like you're reading things that you're not supposed to know. It's like you've wandered into some forbidden room in the Vatican's library and found a scroll signed by Jesus in 20 A.D. stating that he paid the Romans 80 pieces of silver and they agreed to crucify Judas Iscariot in his place and keep it a secret. After that, you get the feeling that somebody knows you've seen the document and they're determined to make sure you don't live to tell the tale. More recommendations: The White Plague by Frank Herbert - Unfortunately, it's out of print, but it shouldn't be too hard to find at a used book store. I'm actually surprised they haven't re-released it because of the current hubbub about biological terrorism. This book is probably more relevant now than it was in 1982 when it was published. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky Microserfs by Douglas Coupland Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges - This is a collection of short stories that are full of puzzles, paradoxes, arcana, and philosophical ponderings. If you like Eco, you'll love Borges. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen Onion Girl by Charles de Lint - Fantasy and magic in a modern urban setting. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Crap, it'll be Monday again | I loved Microserfs. Can anyone recommend any other books like it? |
| Sun 30 Nov | Full name: | Ah, Douglas Coupland. If I'm not mistaken, he's the man who coined the terms Brain Candy and Generation X. |
| Sun 30 Nov | GP | I'll second 'Down and out in Paris and London'. Anyway, I would probably recommend anything by George Orwell. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Matt Latourette | 'Ah, Douglas Coupland. If I'm not mistaken, he's the man who coined the terms Brain Candy and Generation X.' Yes. He's quite good at that. He was also the originator of the terms 'McJob' and 'Veal-Fattening Pens.' |
| web filters at work | Fri 28 Nov | tim |
| So Im currently working at a company where myself and 60 other ppl do research on companies. This research is mostly webbased using google to find the requested companys website and many other financial info search engines. So some of us come in today to get some work done and find that there is a webfilter up. I cant check mail at yahoo b/c web based email is filtered. I cant get to many sites b/c they type of site they are is filtered. Im fairly comfident that this will be removed soon when management realizes they just severely hampered our ability to do quick, quality research (yes, the web can be useful). Let me add that we have been more productive in the last month than our companys wildest dreams, so its not as if this is a punishment for bad work. Anyone else ever come up against this (filters hampering your ablility to do quality work)? Just curious. tim |
| Fri 28 Nov | LoveByte | We have fairly lame filtering. www.yahoo.com is blocked anything-but-www.yahoo.com is not DUMB the firewall also does not alow .zip downloading .exe are fine though. again, very dumb!! |
| Fri 28 Nov | Tom Vu | setup a proxy somewhere and go through that. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Bored Bystander | >> setup a proxy somewhere and go through that. Nahhh, you REALLY don't want to do that: Some guy asked about this on the newsgroups: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&th=d9850f32b42164f2&seekm=Stidb.14305%24yD1.1722869%40news20.bellglobal.com&frame=off Then this happened: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&th=f6b6f7a32db20c48&rnum=3 And I read on another board that Tim B. lost his job over this. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Nick | I had this problem too. A company I used to work for made components for medical ultrasound equipment. But many of the ultrasound research sites were blocked because they contained the words "breast" or "vaginal". Luckily the guys in IS were cool and removed the blocks for me when I told them what I needed. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Dennis Atkins | If you were in Los Angeles you should have filed a sexual harrassment suit that you were being forced to work with such sexist terms, demanding that the medical equipment companies remove all the terms from their websites. |
| Fri 28 Nov | www.marktaw.com | ba dum ta. When I was at Large Financial (tm) they had a firewall like this. First was a generic firewall that blocked whatever they told it. Not good enough, when I visted WebX instead of WebEx they didn't block that... Anyway, the 2nd version was a company that specialized in this kind of thing. When you visited a new website, you were allowed to visit, but it logged the visit & sent it to the company. They then determined whether or not it was work related. The problem is Large Financial (tm) had a diverse group of people working for them. Lawyers, programmers, secretaries, executives, writers, marketers, translators. Whose to say what was work related and what wasn't? Yahoo may be off limits, but what about Yahoo Finance? Then they got even worse. You couldn't even open an SSL connection. I guess when you sign up for HotScripts you have to do it from your work e-mail address because you couldn't sign up with Hotmail. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Living dangerously | I did a search on a new VP and one of the links was on what looked like a hot swingers site. When I clicked the link, I found it was blocked. I was waiting for management to ask me to explain why I was trying to access a blocked site: 'I was researching the new VP.' |
| Sun 30 Nov | Li-fan Chen | They should maybe find an in-between that works for everyone. Like block pages that would show words you would see inside major webmails and keywords that show hints you aren't doing work. I am pretty sure if they ban /. or discuss.fogcreek.com you will be just as productive. |
| Sun 30 Nov | davem | Here's a small app that will act as a proxy for your home machine (called 'OfficeSurfer' ;-) http://badblue.com/helpofs.htm If you're worried about being watched (even if you're not restricted - yet), this will help obfuscate your destination URL's and would probably bypass most filtering software... |
| Sun 30 Nov | Li-fan Chen | firewall piercers like OfficeSurfer will work as long as the traffic to it can't be isolated. For example if your home dsl is on dynamic ip, it would be quite troublesome for your office admin to continue to ban the right ip addresses. But if he can infer an ip address range then you are screwed again. |
| Spammers are stupid | Fri 28 Nov | WhatTimeIsItEccles |
| I added Bayesian spam detection to my e-mail reader a few weeks ago as I was getting fed up of all the spam I was receiving. A short-ish while later it was mentioned on Slashdot as well as on here. I am using spamassassin with kmail but I am sure my comments are generic enough to other Bayesian systems and mail readers. With spamassassin, you have to train the filter by giving it both spam and good mail (ham) to chew on and make a database from. In this initial period only the fixed filters are operational but even so the filters were doing an excellent job with no false positives and only about 5% or so of spam getting past the filters. Once the Bayesian side had seen enough spam and ham, then it was enabled and now 100% of my spam is caught with no false positives. I do a quick look at my spam every day before consigning it to the trash, and of course sending it to the Bayesian learning program to enable it to become evern better (!!). Coming back to my main point, the fixed filters were doing a wonderful job alone which would be enough for probably most peoples needs. So it seems to me that the reason that the fixed filters work so well is that spammers are stupid, they leave a large number of tell tales in their spam that shout out that they are spam. If intelligent people were to get involved in spamming then I think we would be in deep shit. The tell tales are not just the message contents but also the headers that they use. Just for illustration heres the report of spamassassin from a random spam I received today. Note that even taking the Bayesian trigger out of the equation still means that is classified as spam. pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- 4.1 FROM_NUM_AT_WEBMAIL From address is webmail, but starts with a number 4.2 DATE_SPAMWARE_Y2K Date header uses unusual Y2K formatting 0.8 PORN_16 BODY: Possible porn - nasty, dirty, little etc. 2.4 FREE_ACCESS BODY: Contains free access with capitals 0.1 HTML_FONTCOLOR_UNKNOWN BODY: HTML font color is unknown to us 0.1 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message 0.3 HTML_FONT_BIG BODY: HTML has a big font 5.4 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100% [score: 1.0000] 0.3 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts 0.6 HTML_FONT_INVISIBLE BODY: HTML font color is same as background 1.0 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04 BODY: HTML: images with 200-400 bytes of words 0.6 MIME_HTML_NO_CHARSET RAW: Message text in HTML without charset 1.9 DATE_IN_FUTURE_03_06 Date: is 3 to 6 hours after Received: date 1.6 MISSING_MIMEOLE Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE 1.0 FORGED_OUTLOOK_HTML Outlook cant send HTML message only 1.0 FORGED_OUTLOOK_TAGS Outlook cant send HTML in this format 1.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts 2.6 FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook 4.2 OBFUSCATING_COMMENT HTML comments which obfuscate text 0.0 UPPERCASE_50_75 message body is 50-75% uppercas |
| Fri 28 Nov | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | There was a profile in the New York Times recently about some former 'big-time' spammer. The guy lived and worked in a beat-up trailer in Florida. I think a bunch of these spammers are simply dopes trying to eek out some kind of living somehow. Can't hold a job and Amway didn't work for them. You know the type. |
| Fri 28 Nov | tapiwa | We can beat spam now, but it shall always be there A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath. -- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 |
| Fri 28 Nov | Rand() % 2 | Quotes are ok every once in a while but after that they become hideously overused. -- A random JOS reader |
| Fri 28 Nov | Bored Bystander | I read somewhere that a lot of SPAM and internet fraud comes out of Boca Raton, FL because that's where shops dealing in telephone-delivered securities fraud were most numerous, and the people who worked in the one field feel very comfortable with SPAM. Most SPAMmers that I've read about seem to be seedy semi-underworld types, not exactly the sort that would belong to Jaycees and would stand up in front of a classroom and tell the kids about bright career prospects in the future... ;-) |
| Fri 28 Nov | Joel Spolsky | The advantage of Bayesian filtering is that you can have keywords which indicate NON-spam. Everybody has different keywords from their life which counterindicate spam. For example very few spammers would send me a message containing the word "CityDesk" so when that appears in a message it's highly likely to be nonspam. |
| Fri 28 Nov | van pelt | I hope spammers don't read this forum... :) |
| Fri 28 Nov | NotASpammer | 'I hope spammers don't read this forum... :)' Don't worry, we don't. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Dennis Atkins | Not all spammers are stupid. I just got a very clever spam today. Last month I met with an artist friend and he asked for my email address, I gave it to him. Now I find I am on his newsletter about his doings. Now this would not be bad even if he spammed me with information about paintings he was selling or new works he wanted to call my attention to on his website. But instead, it starts with a paragraph about the weather at his place and then says 'Speaking of the weather, I recently had an opportunity to try out the new PERMA-DUCK all weather boots, which are available at SPORTY-WORLD.COM for ONLY $49.99 this week ONLY. PermaDuck all weather boots are available in blue green and yellow and are the #1 choice of Arctic explorer Ribyn Donahue.' (details changed to protect the guilty.) The newsletter continued on page after page with a lead in sentence about him fixing his toilet or going for a walk and then some near-non-sequitor leading into a cut-and-paste ad copy that was not in his speaking or writing style for some product completely unrelated to him and his business. Sort of reminded me of those *bad* situations when some stupid friend joins a multi-level marketing cult and then starts to capitalize on the percieved economic value of your friendship. For people like me it backfires for them since I put people who do this stuff on my blacklist and never do business with them. Any one else seeing these sort of stealth spams? |
| Fri 28 Nov | Alex | In Romania companies are very uneducated about the border between one-time email and spam. One company I gave my email to at a trade show, specifically for the purpose of getting some product information for a PDA, then continued spamming me with weird price updates, huge XLS files with pries for wires, connectors etc. One time they sent a mass mail announcing how Mr. X and Mr. Y were retiring from their company and they will all miss them. I fired off an angry email, apparently they removed me. But the thing is, your average just-graduated manager walks into a bookstore, looks up the business section and sees this wonderful book about 'email marketing'. I browsed through the book myself, it has things like 'collect email addresses wherever you can, add them to your list of 'potential clients'.' So '90s. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Alex Chernavsky | The creepiest spam I ever got was this: I received a birthday greeting on my birthday. The spam message was promoting some kind of 'Classmates.com' clone site. The website was registered in the Phillippines. I have no idea how they found out my actual birthday. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Privacy Maven | Well you were born in 1965 or 1966 and that's as far as I got so I have no idea either. Did you ever give your real birthday when signing up for yahoo or such? |
| Sat 29 Nov | Privacy Maven | It's not Oct. 30, 1966, is it? |
| Sat 29 Nov | Privacy Maven | Sorry, it's December 22, 1965. |
| Sat 29 Nov | Alex Chernavsky | Er, no. None of the above. |
| Sun 30 Nov | Li-fan Chen | I think some spammers work like sleeper cells, they may have been infiltrators who have entered large enterprise web farms and made off with lots of personal profiles. The first profile people give away freely is often somewhat nonconsequentials ones like birthday. That's often the very first thing asked in BBS back in the days and more frequently asked by any service restricted to people over 18 (due to violent content or content of an adult nature). And people fork it over pretty freely. Another thing is first name last name. A sleeper cell hacker group could go for years not really sure what to make of this information, until they get hit with the spammer bug, and start spamming people freely. Without coming up with such conspiracies, the average joe data administrator can walk off with millions of personal profiles from any of the mass online marketing clearing houses on a USB memory stick. |
| Private rooms vs. "radical collocation" | Fri 28 Nov | Maciej Kolodziej |
| Recently, after reading a few of Joels articles, I got into discussion with the PM of my current project team about working conditions. It appears that my company is deliberately putting people into open space offices to achieve better communication level. Also, they say that some serious research conducted by many rich companies show that this is the right thing to do. They call it collocation or radical collocation. Actually I came up against some results of such research, eg. http://intel.si.umich.edu/crew/Technical%20reports/Teasley_Covi_Krishnan_Olson_radical_collocation_12_20_00.pdf (the problem is this comparison was between war rooms and cubicles, so its not quite adequate). This is quite the opposite from quiet, private rooms Joel and others are advocating. I wonder if you have some experience in this matter? Which approach is better? |
| Fri 28 Nov | MX | How about this: If you have excellent employees, who tend to be self-motivated, then it's best to have a private office for each. If you have mediocre employees, who would rather slack off when left alone, it is best to put them in 'war rooms', so they know and feel that others are watching what they are doing. |
| Fri 28 Nov | anon | [If you have excellent employees, who tend to be self-motivated, then it's best to have a private office for each. If you have mediocre employees, who would rather slack off when left alone, it is best to put them in 'war rooms', so they know and feel that others are watching what they are doing. ] Hmm. Ok, I'll try not to be offended. The above is a gross generalization, and not a very accurate one at that. If you're doing XP or Scrumm or another agile process, then private offices are probably not the best choice, regardless of how self-motivated your employees are. If you have enough space to support common work areas and smaller, private, personal spaces for employees, that's probably the best way to go. Characterizations like that above are not helpful. I could as easily say that developers who need to cloister themselves in order to think or get work done are inferior to those who can work in a group environment. |
| Fri 28 Nov | mackinac | I saw the article referred to in the OP a few years ago. As noted, their comparison is between a 'warroom' and cubicles. It is not surprizing that there was some improvement. There seems to be a lot of agreement that cubicles are about the worst possible workspace for software development. You can include me among the 'others' who advocate private offices for software developers. I have worked in quite a variety of work spaces: open office spaces, cubicles, quadricles, shared two person offices and private offices with door and window. The private office is superior by far, if it is done right. At least, for the type of development I do (embedded systems, engineering support, satellite comms, scientific data processing) the private office is best. In previous discussions on JoS there was one poster who told us he put his developers in private offices and it was a disaster. Very low productivity. But he was doing game development. This is something I have no experience with. It may require continuous interaction. Private offices are necessary, but not sufficient, for good workspace. Quality requires attention to details. In addition to providing the space, you have to be concerned about noise sources such as HVAC noise, speaker phones, cell phones, paging, etc., and other problems. If you read the Santa Teresa report [see reference in the Bionic Office Examples thread following this one], you will see that developers spend a certain fraction of their time working alone, and another, possibly larger fraction, working in groups. Once you have provided the private offices so developers can get their individual tasks done, you also have to make it easy to interact in small groups. Arranging offices close to each other, making offices large enough so that 2-3 people can meet, having central large meeting rooms, a convenient kitchen, etc. so that meetings as needed are easy is also necessary for a good work space. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Bill Tomlinson | I think that one of the key indicators for success for 'radical collocation' is the nature of the conversations that go on at work. For example, if you're intently concentrating on developing a new feature for the Foo module and you're interrupted from your concentration by a conversation between your co-workers about a nasty bug that has been found in the Foo module, well, that's good. But if the conversation between your co-workers that interrupted you was about who was booted off the latest popular reality show last night, well, that's bad. I think that all the annecdotal evidence about whether 'one big room' works or not comes down to the nature of interruptions in the particular workplaces. In some places, people are focused on the job and most conversations have some productive value, and in other places most conversations have no work value. Unfortunately I don't see any way to measure this. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Philo. | Executives and managers generally have the highest per-hour cost in the company. Anything that improves productivity should be exercised on them first. In other words, if management gets private offices, then it sounds to me like 'radical collocation' is a study trying to justify the results. :-) Now, if you can put *just* the team in a workspace, then you might get some communication benefit. But this is going to mean moving people around a lot or having a very structured team setup. It also means your team communication benefit had best outweigh the complete loss of people to concentrate. Philo |
| Fri 28 Nov | Dina Sudahay | Wow - the study says there was a ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT improvement in productivity! Fred Brooks was wrong, folks -- there IS a silver bullet! |
| Fri 28 Nov | Dennis Atkins | 'I could as easily say that developers who need to cloister themselves in order to think or get work done are inferior to those who can work in a group environment.' You could say that but you wouldn't have any studies to support your statement, whereas there are many studies showing productivity improvements when going from a noisy environment to a quiet one that allows designers to focus. |
| Fri 28 Nov | www.marktaw.com | I read the first page of that report. 1. They couldn't quantify the changes that were related to radical collocation and changes in management methods. 2. How much of this was the Hawthorne effect? They said they studied productivity in new radical collocation situations versus metrics they had from the old way. Well how much of that productivity came from the fact that things had chaned and they were being studied? |
| Sat 29 Nov | mackinac | What is best for executives might not be what's best for developers. SRA International did a study of comparing private offices and cubicles. An article describing the study and its results was published in the Washington Post Business section for October 4, 1999. This article never mentioned Santa Teresa, but the results sounded very much the same. At the end of the study they decided to put the chairman of the board in a cubicle and most other employees in private offices. Managers and executives do spend a lot of time interacting with people, so it does make some sense that they'd be the ones in cubicles. |
| Sat 29 Nov | horse with no name | Just my opinion, but I think that most programmers perform better in a 'collective' environment. I've met a few (very few) superior programmers who would benefit from a private environment. But most are not. Most programmers cloister themselves, often cluelessly writing code without context, that doesn't get unit tested, and properly integrated into the whole project. I'm happy as a clam, 'cause I'm living in my shell. Curiously, none of the bugs the testers write up ever repro for me. Anyhow, my boss would benefit from working in the collective environment. He's often clueless regarding what we stuggle with and seems to wonder why features take so long and what the risk points are. Yup, he lives in an office separate from his staff. |
| Sun 30 Nov | mackinac | Here is a link to a research report that indicates radical colocation might have adverse effects: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan01/noisy.offices.ssl.html |
| Sun 30 Nov | mackinac | And here's an article about the hidden costs of putting people in cubicles: http://www.chacocanyon.com/pointlookout/020417.shtml |
| I need a pay rise | Thu 27 Nov | Afraid to ask |
| Im considered as a star performer in the company I work for. I deliver robust & reliable solution on time (well most of the time anyway!) Ive also written design and programmed core technologies in our internal system. Basically I dont know how to ask for a pay rise, basically Im currently in a position where another company is currently offering me 20% more than what Im earning now. I hate threatening people but do you think that would be considered as unprofessional to tell to my boss give me a pay rise or I resigned (Im not bluffing Im really serious about resigning if I dont get the raised) Or should I just ask him a raise, if he says no, I just tell him as I resigned as Ive just found a better opportunity Please note : that Im extremly happy with the company and the team in general, its just the $money$ which is not as good as the company down the street. Ive got very informal relationships with my boss, but Im not comfortable asking him for more $$$, Ive been working for the same company since 2 years now What would you guys advice me to do ? |
| Thu 27 Nov | Matthew Lock | If I may say so, you sound pretty angry with your current boss. When you give bosses an ultimatum they will protect their egos rather than do what they should. Your boss will probably say 'Okay then go to the other company' rather than give you a pay rise when faced with the 'give me a rise, or a walk' scenario. I would ask for a pay rise without mentioning another company. If you get the rise, great. If not, and you are certain that the other offer is still open accept it and resign from your current company. When your boss asks why you have resigned, you then explain that you had a better offer from another company. There's a chance that your current boss may try to match that offer - then you can take it from there. |
| Thu 27 Nov | Clay Dowling | I would recommend approaching your boss very openly about this. Keeping everything in the open will avoid hard feelings. Approaching your boss about it will be very sensitive though. Unless you handle it properly, it will wound your boss' ego and you'll be all out of options. You should also make sure the other offer is solid, and that you're really interested in working there. You don't want to use this other job as a bargaining chip if it turns out that you'd really hate it there, since it's probably a 50/50 shot that you'll wind up there. |
| Thu 27 Nov | . | As Matthew says, ask for a rise without mentioning your other offer. You will only hurt yourself by mentioning the other offer because it comes across as trying to force your manager's hand. Matthew puts it perfectly. If they cough up, fine, you're happy. If they don't, you know they're not worth staying with and you've got another option lined up. |
| Thu 27 Nov | Matt Conrad | If you want to make the soft pitch, I would at least make some kind of reference to the fact that you're earning less than the market rate. You don't necessarily need to shove the other offer down your boss's throat, but at least let him know that you are aware you have options. The other thing I would do is think out in advance what you're going to do if your boss says no, or tries to stall you (a likely response I would guess). You'll do better in the negotiations if you're prepared. If you're ready to quit over this, you can have that steely gaze during the conversation. If not, you can fold with dignity if the answer is no, and start planning your next move instead. :) |
| Thu 27 Nov | braid_ged | A classic example of how poor people (those who wage slave for others) regard money as something mythical magical and difficult to talk about. Rich people (least those who made their own money) deal with money in a matter of fact unemotional way. 'Hey Eddy, do you have a few minutes for me to talk to you about something' 'sure..' 'in your office.' 'Yeah... I just wanted to talk to you about something, I am a obviously really happy here, I liked working on the wibbly doogle and I'm learning a lot, the people hereare great, Susan's great, Joe's great, But another company has just offered me a job. I know our staff reviews aren't for another 4 months but would really like to sit down and talk to you about how I am going here and what you see happening in the future. The crux of the matter is that I am being offered more money and am not really sure what to do.' Say that calmly, looking him in the eye, I know it's hard. Then.... I bet, being a boss, he simply says 'How much are they offering you ?' because to him it's not a massive emotional dilema, it's a practical matter. Your aim is to get a mini-review really soon where you present all the great stuff you did in the last 6 months, they agree and offer you a smallish raise. braid_ged |
| Fri 28 Nov | who's your daddy? | oh yeah? I need a martini with a b%$*& job!!! |
| Fri 28 Nov | Jim S. | Matthew's advice is sound except for one thing, which may or may not apply to your situation. Most large companies have very strict guidelines about the size of raises they can give. 20% is probably about twice what your manager can give as a normal raise. He will have more leeway in the context of a counter-offer to keep a key employee. If you work for a company with such formal compensation guidelines, then your better off saying pretty much exactly what you've posted here: 'I've done great work here, I've enjoyed it, I've learned a lot from you, I look forward to doing more great work, but opportunity has come knocking and it's a big enough pay differential that I simply cannot turn it down. I really hate to put you in this spot, but can you bump me up 20% so I can continue here without shortchanging my future?' Any manager who doesn't respect that isn't worth working for. He's probably out baselining his salary against the market on a regular basis, too. Nonetheless, managers typically don't have nearly the freedom people think they do and he may not be able to match it. There's other kinds of compensation, though, so be prepared to deal: vacation, training, bonus, company matching of 401k contributions, it's all part of the package for employers. Don't think of it as an ultimatum. Lay your cards on the table with confidence that you've got a damn strong hand. Be flexible. Lastly, a nice place to work in this industry is hard to find these days. Most guys I know wouldn't even blink about giving up 20% to work where they got stuff done and enjoyed it, too. |
| Fri 28 Nov | The Effervescent Elephant | I want a pony. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Gavin van Lelyveld | 20% is a big pay difference. but you can't compare the jobs on salary alone. How will a new job change in light of: 1. The commute 2. The people you work with. Will the new people be 'great to work with'? 3. Will you enjoy the projects you work on. 4. Will you still be learning 5. Minor, tiny things like working hours, dress code, free coffee (or not) Basically you could get 20% more but the place could suck to work for. You might already know the answers to these questions, though. I'm not trying to disaude you from changing jobs just from comparing on salary alone. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Simon Lucy | Umm it doesn't matter if the other company sucks, it doesn't matter if you wouldn't consider working there for gold, girls and goodies. What matters is whether its an equivalent job with equivalent responsibilities because then you can take it as a valuation of your worth in the market. If that's the case then you can take it to your boss, who likely won't be able to meet the 20% but will be able to meet you some way along that line (given its economically feasible). At the same time you talk about other ways of making you feel more comfortable staying there and staving off such head hunting. This might include stock options (though they're waste paper until they're sold), but might have less tangible benefits such as sabbatical leave, greater responsibility or whatever turns you on. Whatever it is, its not a problem. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Mr Jack | Oh, for goodness sake. Go and see your boss. Tell him you want to stay at the company but that £6k (or whatever 20% of your salary is) is a lot of money to turn down and see what he says. The early poster is right, bosses are much more pragmatic when it comes to money. |
| Fri 28 Nov | Ged Byrne | Heres how I, personally, handled a similar situation. Sit the boss down, make sure his nice and comfortable. Tell him how much you enjoy your job, how well you get on with everybody and how fulfilling you find the work. Wait for boss to agree. He should mention how valued you are as a team member. Then tell him you have a problem. Your being head hunted |