What do Windows people do when they need to rsync stuff? How do they version control their configuration? How do you "grep" with no external utilities installed? What's the equivalent of lsof? How do Windows machines handle the split between 32bit and 64bit code? What's the equivalent of LD_LIBRARY_PATH? Do you really have to point and click for everything? Is there a command line equivalent of "su"? You'll be able to tell if the answers are smart. Literally, treat interviews as "tell me how people actually run Windows on a real scale because I'm green with it and if I tried to do it I'd go mental... I'm honestly interested" and you'll quickly figure out who knows what the hell they're talking about and perhaps learn something along the way.

At least that part was interesting. I'm sure there's loads of radio driven digital equipment out there that has been designed under the assumption that the radio is proprietary and therefore the other side is almost certainly going to behave properly.

The world will not end.

"We're sorry, due to a pricing error, we are unable to honor the price you were quoted on xx/xx/xx for xxxx priced at $xx.xx. Your payment has been refunded and the transaction has been reversed. Again, we apologize for the issue and any inconvenience it may have caused.

Sincerely,

Some Random Amazon Marketplace Seller"

don't you know that apple holds worldwide process patents on pushing out software updates that cripple shipped software and devices?

Making a car that can accelerate faster, we're going to deploy a massive network of autonomous motorcycles. When you step on the accelerator, the closest motorcycle will be dispatched with mind bending speed, your seat will be flung aboard in a feat of mechanical engineering never seen before, the motorcycle will accelerate to full speed faster and when the car catches up you'll be flung back. ...and I gotta be honest, the only real reason why Adobe would be interested in moving towards some kind of SaaS model would be because they basically get unbreakable DRM for free.

Lets not have government agencies get in the habit of piping music into public spaces! Can we? Really? I don't care what the reason is, it's just way too creepy eastern-blocish for me...

Ten years ago by a company called Liberate Technologies. (The company that Larry Ellison's NC morphed into) Their application area was set-top boxes and they built a number of embedded software stacks that were Netscape (licensed) and Mozilla (OSS) based (Browser sitting on Linux or vxWorks) that booted straight into the browser where everything lived in the browser. (the whole UI was HTML/Javascript/Flash, and all interaction with the underlying hardware was done through a Javascript API). There was no native code, everything was the browser.

But then nobody really cared about iTV, the company folded and I think the remaining shell company got into the trucking business (no joke).

You're looking at this the wrong way... You have obviously done the right thing by taking the initiative in the first place, but now, I hate to say, your attitude is all wrong.

Here's how it works:

1) You get some job
2) You "beast" it. That is... you do what you're asked very well and you take the initiative to use the extra skills you have to wow everyone by changing everything
3) You ensure that it is known that you are responsible for your work
4a) They offer you a payrise or more responsibility and pay
4b) They don't, you stick it on your resume and you get a better job somewhere else with a beamingly positive reference

Do the right thing, make sure there are no problems of attribution and it will pay off in the end. Do not crap up your reputation by trying to strongarm more money out of them upfront. Keep a good attitude and it will pay off in the end. If I had tried to extract extra pay for going above and beyond every time I did so in my career, I can all but guarantee I would not have done as well as I have.

Do interesting stuff, be unbelievably useful. The money will follow, it always does.

I'm always amused by the comment sections on stories that get linked by Drudge. It's like a freakin' firehose that sprays misspelled conspiracy theories about illegal space alien Obama clones that maraud across the countryside in the thick of night, eating babies and freedom while dropping turds of poisonous socialism that are festering with job eating worms.

I'd wager that most mobiles from the pre-smartphone era also maintain some kind of tower cache. I'd also wager that at least one of them also has some kind of bug where old cache entries live for way longer than they should.

fprintf("Regret: %f\n",test_error);

Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft has turned incredibly aggressive (yes, even compared to the past) and has been playing a bit dirty with respect to phone stuff? First, an ex-Microsoft guy takes over at Nokia where he, surprise surprise, decides to implement a massive seachange in mobile strategy that includes dumping an existing effort in which millions had been invested and instead jumping into bed with Microsoft. Then some lawyer with close ties to Microsoft comes out with some preposterous claim about how using Linux kernel headers entails the derivative works provision of the GPL, thus creating "serious legal problems" for Android.

Who knows for sure, but it sure does smell like some kind of desperate business strategy. Which I guess makes sense, since mobile seems to be the way things are going and they've flailed so hard in that space...

I really can't help but wonder how much of this insanity is being driven by the display manufacturers who keep squashing vertical space right on out of computer displays.

the people who built it failed to do their jobs correctly. if there's one thing i can't stand, it's when technology is done wrong by people who don't know what they're doing, then foistered upon others by a heavy hand of management. if the system doesn't make the controllers happy, it's wrong. they're not whiney users... the system sucks.