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Comment Call the wahaaaamulance (Score 1) 241

Wow. This guy reminds me of an intern that we tried to hire a few companies ago. Smart kid, finally finished school and the decided that the world owed "him". He tried to get us to change our benefit policy to suit his needs more amongst other demands. Needless to say we passed on him. Seems he had a hard time finding a job for a few months as well...

Seriously, Facebook does not work for you and with the popularity of Facebook this type of behaviour is not unheard of. I have worked at places where it has taken up to 6 months to hire a person due to the interviews, background checks, etc. Recruiters often have hundreds of positions on the go, so expecting personalized attention for each candidate is unlikely unless it is for a high profile position. Oh, and they didn't stick to your schedule? So sorry! Sometimes things don't work out, and both sides have to be flexible. Also expecting Facebook to be flexible when they gave you three months to create an opening is asinine!

While I am tempted to go after him for the BS he felt regarding not being prepared because they changed the interview schedule, etc, I can only hope that Facebook reads his post and puts him on a DNH (do not hire) list. Such high expectations for a simple development position at a large organization like Facebook is insane. This is a classic example of why IT people are viewed as either basement dwellers, anti-social individuals or people who are tripping over their own egos. Come on, it is a development job at a big name company. We have seen hundreds of these stories, both good and bad, over the years from a bunch of other orgs.

So you had a bad interview. Most of us have had at least one in our careers. Get over it. Learn from your mistakes and move on. Oh and dear Slashdot editors? C'mon, we really do expect better.

Space

Dying Star Weaves a Trillion-Mile-Wide Spiral In the Sky 46

The Bad Astronomer writes "Using the newly-commissioned ALMA radio observatory, astronomers have taken detailed images of one of the most amazing objects in the sky: the red giant R Sculptoris (abstract). As the star dies, it undergoes gigantic seizures beneath its surface that blast out waves of gas and dust from the surface. These normally expand into a spherical shell, but the presence of a nearby companion star changes things. The combined orbits of the two stars fling out the material like a garden sprinkler, forming enormous and incredibly beautiful spiral arms. Measuring the size and shape of the spiral shows the last eruption was 1800 years ago, lasted for nearly two centuries, and expelled enough material to make a thousand earths."

Comment Re:Wake me up when the Scala comparison is done (Score 1) 238

I honestly wouldn't let that hold you back. It's almost as bad, if only because you don't control how the resulting Java code looks, and the mapping from the Java code back to your original code may be difficult. :-) I'd rather see the Eclipse foundation step up and help make Scala a first-class language in Eclipse rather than letting Typesafe struggle to do it on their own.

Comment Wake me up when the Scala comparison is done (Score 1) 238

Seriously, this smells so much of Scala it isn't even funny. I'm all for another great language on the JVM, but how is this different from Scala? A lot of the concepts are the same, and the syntax is likewise quite similar. Combine this with other Scala knock-offs like what JetBrains was doing and it's just sad.

People keep talking about how Oracle is killing Java, yet this NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome that's plaguing the non-Java world is just as bad if not worse. Let's rally behind Scala, fix it up as you see fit, and get some great tooling behind it. That seems to be the biggest issue with Scala to date. IntelliJ is nice, but I like Eclipse, and that just sucks even with the recent push.

Comment Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong - it will have email (Score 1) 163

They did this time, unfortunately. It was eWeek that actually says that BBM == enterprise email.

"...revealed that the new version will not contain the long-awaited BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application, which would allow Playbook users to access BlackBerry email without hooking up to a BlackBerry phone."

Music

Submission + - Indie Music the Real Killer for Major Labels? (queru.com) 1

Eugenia Loli writes: "After Slashdot reported on the news that music execs now blame streaming for lost revenue, I did some digging about the state of the music industry. Except the known culprits (piracy, free streaming, lack of music and business innovation, financial crisis), I found that the rise of indie music in the mainstream might be more of a cause than previously thought. In the past few weeks, 80% of Rolling Stone magazine album reviews are about indie acts, while in the '90s there was only a single indie band that got reviews (Pavement), and in the beginning of the last decade there were just about 2-3 such reviews per year. But something clicked towards the second part of the decade, and especially after 2009, there's a surge in the press pushing consumers towards indie purchases. Maybe when RIAA complains to the Government about their failing revenue and asks for stricter laws, they should show a more complete picture of music sales, rather than the sales of just a few [ex-]major labels."

Comment Re:Which one is the detector? (Score 1) 410

For that matter, it isn't possible for you or I to know if we are real biological beings or if we're some simulation in some gigantic computer somewhere. Indeed, even our perception of the nature of space and time could be nothing more than the result of a bunch of 14-dimensional beings saying "gee, what would life be like if there were only three dimensions of space - what if we go ahead and create a 3D world and stick a bunch of AIs in it?"

Seems like you've been reading Descartes or watching eXistenZ or The Thirteenth Floor.

Comment Useless if you're no in the US (Score 1) 542

Up here in the great white north we are still left out in the cold wrt eBook readers. Even the Kindle isn't shipping here yet (assuming I would want one, which I don't because of their damn kill switch). So I have an impromptu "Ask Slashdot" question. Does anyone know of a decent eBook reader that isn't DRM crippled that can display PDFs? And I'm looking for real owners, not responses from people who have read a spec on a website somewhere.

Privacy

Submission + - Canada Privacy Commish Rules Facebook Violates Law

An anonymous reader writes: The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has ruled that Facebook is violating Canadian law. A summary of the decision notes that key areas of violation include third-party applications, account deactivation, and the use of the personal information of non-users. The Privacy Commissioner may go to Canadian court to enforce the finding if Facebook refuses to implement suggested changes.

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