I happen to work at Google and also happen to know that "brain teasers" aren't used in the interview process for the engineers now.
Go on, apply and come. Don't be scared, interviews are quite pleasant and not confusing at all.
(Obviously, this is just me saying and not an official company statement, blah-blah-blah).
Web Programming is largely a solved problem, and there are already a plethora of options.
Business programming was largely a solved problem, you could choose between COBOL and Ada.
Even if the new language isn't used widely, its features might creep into existing ones and improve them (see MS Research, Haskell and C# 3.0+).
"Huge systems with many virtual machines"? Mainframes are dead, dude. Modern "cloud" computing is all about web UI, and it doesn't need no X server.
I, myself, used remote X rendering one. Not very easy to understand and setup, that one. VNC's much more straightforward (and can reliably work over longer distances too).
Linux still wants to conquer the desktop. Note that the two leading user-oriented Unices out there (OS X/iOs and Android) have both abandoned X. Because X just limits the user experience smoothness, that's a known fact.
AAISP has IPv6. I'm switching to them. Had Virgin before - cheap, fast, but crappy and unreliable.
Yes, ADSL is sooo 200x, but Andrews & Arnold is the most competent ISP from what I've heard.
Gentlemen, would you please bother to supply normal units from now on? Namely l/100 km - this weird "mpg" mumbo-jumbo says nothing to 95% of the world population.
There are three non-metric countries in the world, Myanmar (Burma), Liberia and the United States. In good company, indeed.
Yep. And players are expensive too.
Compare it to significantly cheaper (and somewhat more durable) HD-DVDs. The customers have lost in that war, Sony and Hollywood won - and that victory led them to nowhere.
No wonder that Chinese resurrected HD-DVD as CBHD.
Performant, you say?
Java has almost C-like speed when it comes to numerical computations, that's true.
But what about huge memory overhead? or long startup times?
And, on an unrelated note, I'm totally with the "Ruby is insane, Python's way cleaner" crowd. Syntax must be compact, but strict.
The page encoding is still not UTF-8?
In 2011?
On a geeky website?
ARE YOU KIDDING?
Life without Adblock Pro is horrible, indeed.
I sometimes use browsers different from Firefox, just to remind me how it was. It takes hours to comb my risen hair afterwards.
Learning Python makes a lot of sense.
It's well-designed and organized, and teaches several important lessons - importance of clarity while maintaining brevity; having a standard way to solve standard problems; smart module management; painless introduction to functional and lazy programming.
Most ISP's in Russia already only give you "gray" (i.e. NATted) IP address. "White" one (i.e. the one from global IP space) usually costs extra, about $5/month.
Most users don't seem to care, but for advanced guys that's a bummer.
Mint is much more friendlier to Windows user while retaining most of Ubuntu's goodness.
I've read a certain British book recently: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Warming-Other-Bollocks-Science/dp/1844547183
They have numbers and figures to prove that British rail is FAR, FAR MORE subsidized and far less efficient than the road network. Their explanation seems quite plausible: most of the railway tracks is empty at any given moment, while road is constantly filled with the column of vehicles.
If we take this into account, coaches seem to be much more optimal way of medium-range passenger transportation.
> Half as dense as helium (so twice the lifting power)
Erm, which one did you flunk - math, chemistry or both?
Air has molecular weight of around 29. Helium (He) has 4, hydrogen (H2) has 2. Thus helium produces lift proportional to 29-4=25, and hydrogen - proportional to 29-2=27.
Not twice as much, but merely 8% higher.
Let's hope that UK guys will at least remember to drive on the right side of the road.
Happiness is twin floppies.
