In general - never *ever* filter someone out on one part of the interview. Except... if they go silent - instant fail. if they say to me - sorry, I can't think right now / could i have 5 minutes alone / could i get back to you later et cetera, not such a bad response. Going silent - always bad. If someone doesn't understand, doesn't know, needs help, and they don't tell me - then they don't fit on my team. Maybe they are great at their job, maybe they are awesome at some things, too bad, just too big a risk I'm afraid. BUT - that is because of my personality as much as theirs - I need people who will point out when they have a problem. Interviews aren't just about the candidate, they are about my team, the project they will be going to, the people they will be working with and me (assuming I will be managing them).

Most of the people who use them (myself included), seem to apply this logic. Maybe when people hear of puzzles being used in interviewers they just don't get that?

But the idea isn't to get an answer - and I am very up front that I don't care about the answer, and I already know it anyway. What I do want to see is how someone approaches a problem that they don't know how to solve. I had one candidate ask me the answer, I already know it after all - immediately top of my hiring list, and she was an awesome hire. Another asked if they could use google on their phone - again a pretty much perfect answer. The puzzle is completely irrelevant, the ability to question, put forward ideas and not just say 'I don't know' or, even worse, go completely silent and get embarrassed that you don't know, is pretty fucking critical. IMHO.

I also look at samples of previous work, and we make all candidates carry out real world tasks along side us.

My Father died (very) recently, after a relatively short time of being unwell (2 months). As a family we knew his wishes if he were to be in an effectively unrecoverable state - that he would prefer to not be put through agony just to go through futile care. His surgical team did everything they could for him, but knowing his and his families wish seemed confident in talking to us at the point where they could continue to carry out surgical work, but they felt there was no possibility of his ever recovering. We made, i think, a rational decision.

It was not easy, knowing wishes and discussing them with siblings and then our Mother and my Fathers siblings (large, close family), knowing when the treatment became futile, watching him die that last day - it was pretty much the fucking hardest thing I think I will ever do. But it *was* the better thing ultimately.

So - if people forgo futile treatment to spend time with family and to make the most of the time that remains then I would like to figuratively shake their hand for showing such a vast amount of bravery and *character*.

Very true, but surely the point stands - if they just wanted to seel ebooks they'd have gone with at least their own and others (epub), if not just jumping on what is rapidly becoming the standard (epub).

Presumably you didn't even read the article, or think too much about the summary. This is NOT about a tax to support artists, it is the cost the ISP's will have in putting measures in place - and those costs will be borne by their customers.

Maybe you are taking it too it's logical conclusion (if this stops filesharing in the UK, then how much of the extra revenue will artists see). So maybe I am being harsh, in which case sorry. But I don't think that is the case.

Amazon are actually losing money on most of their $9.99 books (at least for the ones that are selling at the same time as hardbacks). They get them at the same price as the hardback, which is around $12.

I think Amazon are doing some bad things at the moment, but they are not driving the price up, they are making a loss to drive it down.

This is pretty much obviously not true. If it were then they would sell ebooks in a format that any other reader could use (pretty much ePub, at this point).

They don't, they use a proprietary format that no one else is able to use. Thus I assume that they are not *just* after selling electronic copies of books.

I don't remember the exact time line that the Kindle was released. I think that Sony hadn't yet started to move to ePub, and nor had many others. In which case they should have stuck to ereader or mobipocket. They even own one of those (I always forget which),

I had a similar idea, and did some initial work on it. Then along came the Netflix challenge, and I realised I was a) also lazy and b) didn't have anywhere near enough knowledge in the field. It seems a reasonable idea. Get people to review anything, align the users likes with others, then make recommendations. If it were that easy, surely someone would already be doing it...

Pretty much what I do. I try to be last to leave (and often first to arrive). Not some macho shit, just that if I expect my team to be in, I'll be in, I won't ask them to work hours I'm not willing to work. And if there isn't anything for me to do, yeah, I'm the tea boy. Weekends, I always go get lunch if we're in.

I wasn't blaming Microsoft, only stating the problem. However, bundling IE with Windows and giving it the dominant marketshare, and breaking as many standards as they did, exacerbated the problem. If IE was mostly compliant, I really wouldn't care -- let people use IE, I'll develop on Firefox, and things will mostly work.

Compare this to standards which actually work -- I hit "print to PDF" or "save as PDF" on Linux, in a browser or an OpenOffice document, open it on Acrobat Reader on Windows, and it works. Take any PDF from the Internet, open it in Okular on Linux, and it works. People who know will tell you ways in which Adobe may have broken the standard, but they generally work. Contrast this to having to test in every browser, and run it through the w3c validator...

zip is a standard, which is probably why it's used as the container format for everything from Chrome extensions to ODF documents to id software games.

Now, are other compression formats warranted? Sure, but the one that's most visibly included with Windows is zip, and it's interoperable.

And I don't have a problem with that.

My problem isn't that IE has huge marketshare -- I don't like it, but I can live with it. My problem is that IE has huge marketshare and consistently breaks shit, and I as a web developer have to spend something like 25% of my time supporting it.

Contrast with zip -- I can use the zip commandline tool on Linux, or the Rubyzip library in Ruby, or WinZip on Windows, etc, etc, and they'll all open just fine with "Compressed Folder" on Windows.

Do you see the difference? Microsoft actually got the zip support right.

If you're being serious, you're a moron. If you're being sarcastic, you made my point for me -- what, exactly, does RedHat have a monopoly on?

It's a bit like accusing Apple of abusing their monopoly on desktop computers. Why does nobody care that Safari is the default browser on OS X? Simple: Apple doesn't have the monopoly. Microsoft does, which means they have to play by different rules.

Only if RedHat were actually abusing their monopoly. Even then, I'd only care if they were doing so in a way that actually breaks standards. They want to include Gimp? Fine. They want to include a version of Gimp that makes PNGs that no one else can read? Fuck 'em.

Indeed, Ubuntu solves this by making that choice for you. However, this is mitigated by several facts:

• You can replace Gnome with KDE, and Ubuntu has never claimed otherwise. You may be able to remove IE now, but Microsoft certainly tried to prevent it, to claim it was impossible.
• Kubuntu exists. Where can I download a Firefox-only Windows?
• Neither Ubuntu nor Kubuntu is a monopoly.
• Gnome and KDE actually cooperate on standards, improving both.
• Gnome programs work in KDE, and vice versa.

And so on -- all of which aren't true of browsers. Also, Gnome and KDE both have decent market share of the small market of Linux desktop environments...

And maybe I'm hanging out in the wrong forums, but I don't see Gnome/KDE flamewars... ever. I've flamed against KDE myself, but I use it, and that was about how they handled KDE4 -- nowhere in that discussion was it a Gnome-vs-KDE thing.

Now, you've made perhaps one good point:

Well, yeah, we do kind of have to figure out what actually applies to the situation. Telling Microsoft to simply abandon IE would probably be too harsh. Actually splitting the company up didn't work, or was rejected for whatever reason -- and likely wouldn't help.

The random ballot, as ludicrous as it sounds, is likely to do two things -- it will probably actually improve the use of alternate browsers in the EU, which is the point, and it won't favor one browser over another. It certainly won't harm users, and it seems really unlikely that it'd spread to other applications, making this somewhat of a storm in a teapot.

Now, you may be right in that, without actually hearing all of the discussion that went into this decision, it may be a bad precedent and it may be repeated ad-absurdum as you've described. And if that happens, I'll pull up my post here, and explain why it made sense for browsers, and why it doesn't make sense for whatever ludicrous example people try to apply it to.

A oneline that had multiple revision should be completely rewritten, because if you manage to get multiple changes in one line it surely is a mess... somwhere.

That makes me think of comparisons to sentence and paragraph structure. A sentence should enough words to express one thought, a paragraph enough sentences to express one idea. There are legitimate reasons to vary from those requirements at times, but in general it will improve your writing to adhere to those concepts. A lot of unreadable prose is generated by people that don't understand the function of paragraphs.

An obvious analog is lines of code and function blocks. I write what many of you would probably consider verbose code, because I prefer a line of code to always do just one thing. I'll increment x on one line and set y=x on another line, if those are (in an abstract sense) two unrelated operations. It feels conceptually cleaner to me to keep each logical step separate.

A one-liner seems to me to be reminiscent of one of those eighty-word sentences that you will read in a EULA... that are grammatically correct, legally precise, meticulously crafted, performs their function well, and yet is unreadable by a normal human. The lawyer that writes a sentence like that probably feels the same sense of pride that a programmer feels when they replace a twelve-line function with one clever one-liner.

Are you a web developer?

Much like they "don't give a shit" about driving SUVs, getting their PCs filled up with spyware constantly (and then buying a new, "faster" computer that only feels faster because it's clean)...

Of course, Firefox has been winning by actually being a better product, largely winning users with extensions. But most users, when it's actually explained to them what they're doing, are willing to use an alternate browser if it makes my job easier, as long as it doesn't make things worse for them.

Which is generally what happens now -- except it's also going to work faster on other browsers. Unless something's changed recently, IE still comes in dead-last in performance.

And all of them except IE support the standards, in general, better than IE. When flaws are pointed out with the Acid tests, all of them fix these flaws faster than IE.

I can build a website in Firefox, and have it work in Opera, Konqueror, Chrome, Safari, Galeon, Epiphany, iCab, every browser, and have it break in IE, taking several hours a week -- on a good week -- to fix.

But if you read my post, you'd know that:

Again, I have to ask, are you actually a web developer?

No, I'm upset because IE, and IE6 in particular, actually severely increases the amount of time I have to spend building a website. It makes my job harder, and the job of pretty much any web developer. It means I have to actually reboot, or fire up a virtual machine, because you know there's going to be something different.

I realize I have to test in every browser anyway, if I'm going to be diligent. Yes, I sometimes find minor differences between them, but nothing like, oh, the difference between the standard box model and IE's box model.

Perhaps I should've said "sane and informed" -- does she actively disagree with me, or does she just not have an opinion at all?

I also said, enough sane people, so your anecdote fails.

Also, it's been awhile since I checked, but I bet my grandma uses Firefox.

I didn't ask how it works. I know how it works. I asked how it should work.

Yes, and if you actually read my original post, you'd know why.

There's a high barrier of entry, which is in itself a problem. And then there's actually abuse of monopoly.

Without bothering to register or sign in, thus limiting effective moderation, and making it difficult to carry on a conversation.

That'd be more impressive if you actually saw it -- maybe developed some reading comprehension.

Some studies drop people that die before a certain age to give a better estimate of what the populace would look like.