I was completely pleasant with the woman, we joked about the questions in fact. The simple fact was they had a stupid call screen process straight out the egotistical dot.com days, which showed much about the types of "engineers" they like to bring in.

Thanks for assuming that I was an ass thought. :)

Recently I decided to move from contracting to full time work as the job market is balls here in the Bay currently for Contracts. Twitter was one of the companies which I applied and I had the pleasure of having a "phone screen" with them for a senior unix position. Here's what this screen was, a basic unix question, that any lunix user could get. A more intermediate type question that could trick some people. And finally their *BIG SCREEN* a tricky question that was based on esoteric knowledge that had absolutely nothing to do with one's ability to perform the job.

The person calling me was just reading these off a list, she didn't know why they were picked and was only able to write down the answers. Here's the hilarious part, I informed her that the question was silly and there's no reason anyone should really care about this sort of information except in extreme situations. That this was the question that lead me to believe they had a culture of primadonnas. She diligently wrote all this down, in case they still wanted to talk to me.

But here's the REAL kicker, their stupid asinine esoteric question? Was wrong. They had the phrasing wrong... what they were asking and looking for in an answer were not the same things. Being a pedantic asshole, in my followup to tell them what I thought of their process I pointed this out. Never heard anything back ;) Wonder if they have fixed their question yet?

There's nothing that says the data was stored on any publicly accessible server. What is said is that there was a code insertion that could have been used to transfer data out. The attackers probably patched into whatever lame backend system they were using for these transactions and added a little bit of code to simply copy the details out to a URL/irc bot somewhere. Cases like these typically involve some inside help or an ex-employee.

This isn't about file storage.

This is the second time in this thread you have misrepresented what is happening. Why don't you learn about it some before spouting off again; damn late ass comers to slashdot.

"instead of reading directly out of iTunes"

The music files in question are all stored, unencrypted on the file system referenced in the XML file. If you are already parsing the file and already have a means for copying files back and forth to the device (which the Pre does) why would you use iTunes in the first place? In addition the XML file is again, just a flat file which is unencrypted on the FS. There's absolutely no need to go through iTunes for this unless you were feeling either Lazy, Too Smart for your own good, or looking to pick a fight with Apple.

Well yes, TCL (expect) is probably some of the worst legacy 3rd party code ever to maintain. The crap makes perl code written by drunk and/or high sysadmins at 3 in the morning look absolutely beautiful by comparison.

Thanks for posting this, most slashdotters don't understand this point. They can't properly empathize with other age groups to see their directions and intent.

Way to post without bothering to invest even one moment in the source material.

Sentient is a loaded word, it doesn't really mean what most people associate to it. By definition any thing that reacts to a given stimulus could be argued to be sentient given that experiencing a "sensation" must happen to cause the reaction. Most people believe sentient includes the concept of self awareness, it doesn't and this is a fine distinction to remember.

"It's not so bad really when you consider that the slow ass systems that geezer put in us folk 6k years ago make you unable to actually live in something approaching a real time. Hell, don't matter if it is all predetermined anyhoo since cain't tell the difference," spoke the stranger. Spitting on the ground he turned and walked away, but not before one last jab, "really it is the turtles that will get you. them damn turtles go all the way down."

I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity.

We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail. We can model other experiments based upon our expectations of the way it works. But when we get down to the tiny details and questions... we have no idea exactly HOW it works.

The modern brain chemical industry is this way. Sure we know it is hitting up the "5HT" receptors but as to why that actually causes some effects in some and differing effects in others... well... uh... yeah.

"Oh you want support for a database product on commodity hardware? Well we have this little MySQL thing you can use.

Oh you want to continue to run Oracle? Well that is now only supported on our new line of SPARC hardware."

Oracle can now (and will) sell you the entire database from sand to sql results at whatever price they deem acceptable to themselves this quarter. You thought license costs were crazy before? Well now they come with official hardware and support contracts for the box.

Winning a roguelike is much like the first time you beat your chess teacher or parents in any game that required a bit of logic or skill. It's something you remember. One of the few digital bits that I make sure survives all of my data migrations from machine to machine is a copy of the output of my first ascension in Nethack.

Date: 1997/06/12
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More--
The voice of Odin booms out: "Congratulations, mortal!"--More--
"In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"--More--
You ascend to the status of Demigoddess...--More--

The scary/awesome part is I still remember more about the last level in that ascension than I do large parts of my childhood schooling.

Frees up a lot of resources?

These days the cpu/memory used by the likes of nethack are somewhat laughable. However when nethack was *the game* to run on college unix workstations it wasn't that far behind emacs in being forbidden on many campuses simply because of the cpu and memory gobbled up. Since each instance was completely separate, a few students playing at the same time could cripple your average sun server (SunOS forever). Nethack compiles were also notorious for taking nearly as long as building your own copy of X.

Zeno Clash is an interesting take on the fighting genre as it is entirely first person and done in the HL2 engine (it appears). There are some weapons but using them is intentionally clunky as to push the fighting control. While the game oozes with style and has an absolutely outstanding new world filled with things you have never seen before... I can't help but feel the game just doesn't work for two reasons.

First) The control with the keyboard sometimes borders on frustrating. All the keys make sense and the placement seems logical but as they game moves quite fast in sections you really feel limited compared to a traditional fighter. Perhaps with a joypad it works more smoothly?

Second) The difficulty ramp is insane. You'll find yourself getting past the first encounter easily enough as it is there to introduce the game to you. However very early on you encounter a battle that is easily 10 times harder... we are talking like 5 minutes later here. You don't get a chance to get really used to the engine and as it is pretty easy to die when fighting multiple foes because of the first person perspective (you can't easily tell where everyone is or damage is coming from) it can just be... frustrating and one must really want to play to get over this hump.

Fortunately each of these issues is fixable and I'd expect a patch or the next iteration to play much better.