Agreed. The "white board problem solving" technique is heavily biased towards candidates who "prepare" for interviews and who, in the course of their "preparation" happen to have come across the problem before. As an interview technique, I wouldn't give it much credit.

I'm afraid I have to agree. I haven't developed anything open source/created a savvy personal website/got a bunch of awesome projects to show either, but that doesn't mean that I'm bad or incompetent or *not good enough* to program. I taught myself C, have a fair amount of experience in C++ (company internship), know the ins and outs of matlab as a result of my EE major and taught myself some of the basics of writing shell scripts from an old Kernighan textbook that I found lying around once I started experimenting with linux. For instance, as part of a localisation project, I had to grab RSSI values from a bunch of wireless routers and I found that a simple shell script did the trick, rather than figuring out what software to buy and install on a windows system. The point that I'm trying to make is that there are lots of competent programmers (I'm not claiming to be great, simply competent) out there who simply cannot be dismissed purely on the basis of not having anything *great* to their credit.

I agree with gr8_phk. You've shown initiative. As an EE major who's more into programming than electronics, I can relate. Like you, I'm quite confused about what to do, given that I'm more into CS on the one hand, but I lack a *formal* degree and specialized knowledge of stuff like Java, for instance. I've done a lot of work in C++ during an internship (luckily, the company, a German one, for some reason gave me an interface building project despite my major) and I found it to be very much to my liking. I'm pretty sure that I'd be able to grasp the essentials of any programming language on the job, (hope that's not interpreted as arrogance) and I think that you're on the right path.

The guys at KDE aren't really known for coming up with the best names, but get your facts straight. KDE has been naming their apps with Ks right from KDE's inception. It's not a clone of an Apple meme.

same as subject

Best sig I've seen in a while

Haha. I remember that episode!

I have to agree. I was forced to use InDesign (CS5) to design my college yearbook (250 odd pages) because Scribus didn't have any decent themes that I could find (the community doesn't seem very active, at least at providing themes). "Scribus coming along nicely" is hardly how I'd put it. To be fair though, I am spending some time on making my own master pages with Scribus now. I just didn't have the time when I was designing the yearbook, needed to publish it quickly, so I settled for Indesign (shudder!). For the smaller magazines that I design, I use GIMP + the shell (GIMP has improved considerably, in terms of layout of the UI, and the community support in terms of tutorial base and brushes/patterns/scripts available is absolutely fantastic!)

From the Article: What is truly exciting, he says, is "if you can make such sensors on paper, you can make them on stretchable, biocompatible substrates like silicone, and then you can mimic the properties of skin." This is indeed truly exciting. I can now complete my bot. Hey where'd all the rest of the silicone go?

Total agreement.

I'm Indian. I wasn't a registered member of slashdot for a long time, due to sheer laziness. I registered only a few months ago. But I've been reading slash for over 6 years now. It no longer surprises me that whenever there's an article about Indian technology, the comments section degenerates into Bangalore bashing and India bashing. I absolutely love the articles posted on this site. This site makes my day in more ways than one. I just wish people wouldn't make sweeping generalizations without much knowledge of what they're professing to know. Saying that Indians lack innovation in any field is utter crap, and you know it. It's true that a huge percentage of our population is below the poverty line. So what's your point? How is that related to innovation? Your post is just an outlet for your hatred of some Indians in your office.

Banks do not keep money. That's probably what you're missing. Banks make money by loaning out cash to companies (this is where the lion's share goes) and to people who need it. They charge them an interest rate that is higher than the interest rate that they pay out on deposits. This difference in interest rates is what contributes to banks earnings. Banks do have to store a percentage of depositors' money with the Central bank (the percentage varies from country to country and is called Cash Reserve Ratio), but the percentage is usually only around 20% or less. In a nutshell, banks don't keep money. That's a wrong notion.

To quote the original article "Because Tsubame uses a KVM hypervisor and various cloud-like provisioning tools, it can run both Windows and Linux at the same time on different nodes, and offer users various types of processing configurations." As one of the commentors on the original article pointed out, KVM is virtual machine software designed for linux, so is this benchmark comparing the performance of linux and windows virtual machines (running on a linux host), rather than comparing the performance of linux and windows directly? Or is this comment relevant only in the sense that Tsubame is currently running KVM and totally irrelevant in the context of the testing performed?

Yippee! No more dehydrated rations. Say hello to space curry!

sounds like rather clouded judgement to me