Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:80% Slower? (Score 1) 161

There are plenty of examples of both usages of slower, showing that it is ambiguous across popular usage. For example, there's a whole 800% slower "genre" on Youtube where songs are played at 1/8 of their original speed. When popular usage is so sloppy, it's better to avoid the phrasing altogether in favor of something precise instead.

Comment Re:Don't be so hard on him... (Score 1) 323

In your interview process, ask obscure low-level architecture questions, like "What is a trap?" or "What does the BEQ/JEQ/JE opcode do?" These questions will rule out anybody who hasn't ever worked with any form of assembly language.

No, it will just make you a trivia-based interviewer. You need to be a serious authority on every aspect of a thing before you can create a comprehensive question like that. These two both have problems. I can tell how old you are from how you asked them.

The i386 processors that are all many people use now call those interrupts, not traps. And there are over 30 branch instructions in that set. JE is one of them, but I wouldn't expect people with only a small amount of assembly language background to remember that particular combination. You can easily write non-trivial 386 programs and never use JE.

This is not that hard: ask "have you ever written anything in assembly language?", and if they say yes, ask how it worked. No opcode trivia is necessary.

Comment Re:Web Developer/Public-Private Key? (Score 1) 809

Web development now is all about plugging components together as quickly as possible to ship code. Anyone who pauses to try and actually learn how things work is at a disadvantage. While you're doing that, your competitors have already shipped something that worked well enough for people to use it.

Also, there's little sense really digging into things like libraries when they change so quickly. I'm doing this project right now that's all Go based. People who did a deep dive into learning how their previous tools are again regretting that.

Comment Re:Excel file (Score 1) 809

See office password protection. The encryption of Excel version before 2007 was laughably weak. The last such file I had to crack took minutes. And that's still what you get if you use the older file formats.

The encryption starting with Office 2007 is as strong as your password. It's still possible to break weak ones, but you need to apply a fair amount of brute force. Here's a typical cracking program. The way it advertises support for multiple cores and GPU acceleration is a clue it's not trivial to crack.

Comment Re:CIDR addresses (Score 1) 809

But the question was how to compute the range of addresses it allows. Knowing the subnet mask isn't enough to do that. You also need to know the rules for what numbers you can't use in each subnet block. Not even all the calculators out there get this right. The first hit I got back from searching for one didn't; here's one that does. For the example here, "Usable IPs = 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.254".

Comment Re:Unfortunately... (Score 1) 190

Even a hardware failure can be automatically migrated away from before it takes down the server and fixed without any down time.

The history of automatic fail-over software says that when you add some, in addition to the old issues you now have bugs in the fail-over software as a new problem.

Comment Re:Not so. (Score 1) 190

I work on nothing but open-source based PostgreSQL servers for living, effecively competing against EnterpriseDB. All of the Oracle migrations I've done convert their PL/SQL code to PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL instead. There's always some amount of application and process refactoring when you're moving to another database; this gets wrapped into that. I do a few training classes each year on the quirks of PL/pgSQL, and most companies don't do anything so complicated in there that they can't move things over.

It's often not even the biggest single migration hurdle, and despite their marketing claims EnterpriseDB doesn't help at all with the rest of them. The ugliest single conversion I've been involved in was an app where some developer loved CONNECT BY statements. My company at the time had to write a whole QA suite to make sure the replacements for those queries gave the same results in Postgres as the Oracle version.

Slashdot Top Deals

The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

Working...