Comment Re:They're impossible to fire (Score 1) 593
Where's your citation for that?
Einstein discovered relativity by using educated gut feeling, not experiments.
No. Einstein made use of Maxwell's equations to deduce that the speed of light was constant under all reference frames. The second order PDE equations relating the time variance of the electric field to the spatial variance of the magnetic field has the speed of light as a constant. He didn't have a gut feeling.
My experience with a guy who recently received a MSc from a London university is the following: On his CV he writes that he has a good knowledge in PHP, MySQL and CSS and also passed a Zend exam in PHP 5.0. Based on this he would be a good fit what we are looking for. His final project was a web-based library (as in book-lending) system making use of PHP and MySQL. My colleague and I (who both have ~20 years experience each in IT and software development) took him out and asked some related questions. But to our suprise he hardly knew fcukall. PHP questions: - "What is the difference between " (quotes) and ' (apostrophy) in string assignment?" (which should be quite basic an essential knowledge) Answer:"Uh, I don't know." - "In your library system, you say the username is unique. How do you prevent that two people sign up with the same name at the same time?" (should have a unique key on the username) Answer:"The front-end checks for this." - "Have you heard of SQL injection?" Answer after some seconds of thinking:"Yes, I have used it in my project!" - "In OO, what is inheritance and encapsulation?" (all this OO stuff is for sure part of a Zend PHP 5.0 exam) Answer:"I don't know"
Databases: - "What is a left outer join?" Answer:"Sorry, I don't know" - "What are unique keys and indices?" Answer:"I don't know" - "Do you have any knowledge about Stored Procs?" Answer:"no"
CSS: - "What is the difference between absolute and relative positioning?" Answer:"Sorry, I don't know"
Eventually we ran out if really simple and basic questions. And to us it seems nowadays those MScs fly off the shelf towards everyone who can pay the tuition fees.
I was an intern at a mobile development and web application company. I liked coding when I was in computer science and I can attest that there are people that simply suck with code. My boss was interviewing for a senior developer (I didn't want to be there in the long term as I felt the group was overvalued) and I gave them an interview question "State the difference between a GET request and a POST request" as one interview question. My supervisor liked it. He asked it. Two of the eight people interviewing for the position couldn't answer the question and this was for a internet based company.
without null, I can't imagine what would have been the case for implementing so many programming constructs today. Most languages have some type of isempty() which can b seen as a continuation of null, and I for one wouldn't want to implement any sort of list without it. Programming in assembly, you don't get NULLs (at least not MIPS) and that's one of the difficulties (among many).
I like using the Scala's Option Monad (it's the Maybe Monad in Haskell). Nulls are bad because the compiler can't usually check against them, and sometimes you can't tell if a called function will return NULL as its return value. With the Maybe monad, defined as Maybe q = Just q | None, the compiler will check when Maybe is being passed around and give warnings saying that the None subtype should be handled. It works elegantly to handle issues where sometimes NULL has some semantic meaning but also catches NULL errors at compile time rather than catching NULL errors at run time.
Meh, I prefer a gamepad.
I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.
I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.
You're wrong about the keyboard. It's necessary to have a lot of key buttons available for RTS games so that abilities, stances, formations, and moves can be executed efficiently. I haven't played a console RTS, but console RPS use the shoulder buttons on a gamepad to cycle through weapons usually. If I want weapon 9 and I'm at weapon 5, I should be able to jump to weapon 9 without going through weapon 6-8. The lack of competitive RTS on the consoles should indicate that a keyboard and mouse achieves something that's necessary for some genres to thrive.
. I guess my question is: What are the advantages of a Sun workstation over a PC - on the desktop?
What is this "Sun workstation" of which you speak? There is no such thing. Sun hasn't made or sold desktop SPARC for a couple of years, now.
I thought it was the amount of registers on the Sun processor. With the amount of registers available, more primitive variables didn't need to be swapped into memory and function calls would need to store the outer scope in memory as frequently.
Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots.
