Comment Re:I can almost imagine it. (Score 2) 530
Guess we know what at least one HR person in the intelligence community was doing while they were at work...
Yeah, I went through the hiring process (last year, didn't get it). The process is extremely long and drawn out - it took 5 months from the initial contact by the recruiter to the final "not at this time, we'll talk in a year" answer. I'll still entertain them if they call back like the recruiter said they would, but it takes months to go through it - and the hurry-up-and-wait can be a real bear to deal with. Plus, given the fact that I would be moving across the country, it's a stress inducer.
Still, all things being equal, I'd love to get a gig there, even though I'm mostly working in Perl these days and they are a Python and C++ shop. Silicon Valley is a hell of a lot nicer than where I live now, and Google takes care of their employees in ways it's hard to take seriously.
Sure, if you want to lug that big thing around. a 3CCD setup in S35 format would be enormous. And cost an insane amount of money.
Even the Sony F65, RED Epic, and the Arri Alexa use single sensors. The 3CCD thing is really a prosumer thing, and a leftover from the olden days of vidicons and other vacuum tube cameras. I'd make a bet that the companies that have produced cameras that Academy award winning cinematographers used on those features know a little bit more than you do...
The higher tiers on Internet service have an appalling cost. You can get lots of bandwidth on FIOS or on Comcast here in Richmond, but you're looking at hundreds of dollars a month. Never mind that the FIOS infrastructure, at least, can handle hundreds of megabits per customer, they're going to continue to charge for bandwidth like it's going out of style.
Plus, even with the decent connection at work, I've run into lots of network congestion issues that keep you from using that bandwidth - literally the only times I've ever been able to saturate our downstream Internet connection is using Bittorrent to pull down Linux ISOs. Everything else is choked off, and we've only got a 20/7 connection.
Now, one of the things about the Google Fiber services is that it's all DHCP right now. There's restrictions on running servers in the service agreement, so there's perilously little you could do to saturate that link (short of Bittorrent to other people on your network), but what it does do is remove a major chokepoint for neighborhood-level networking.
However, there are good things. Offsite backups become retarded-simple, since you are now limited by the streaming capacity of your hard drives. Since you're guaranteed to have a top-notch connection to Youtube, HD videos should play much more reliably. Video conferencing. High speed VPNs to the Amazon VPC infrastructure. The list goes on.
I've done one recently - it also tests memory and grace under pressure. Some people just can't perform well under the gun, and in a high-pressure workplace where you may be dealing with outages that are hitting the tech press within minutes, and the global press within an hour, being ale to not fold under pressure is a critical job skill.
Plus, as my old business computing teacher in high school said, "You will be doing tasks that make no sense on obsolete technology for inscrutable reasons. If you have a problem with any of this, you should probably drop out of this class, since you do not have what it takes to be a programmer in the business world." Dealing with arbitrary requirements is part of working for any large company, and seeing if an applicant will go through with it, or if their ego is going to get in the way, is a useful test.
I just rebuilt our monitoring system on Munin 2.0, which can deal with IPv6. Made life a lot easier, since punching holes in NAT routers and screwball port mappings went away.
Google and Facebook are both running ipv6, and both our office and a chunk of our datacenter are on ipv6 through a he.net tunnel. Wish native ipv6 was available, but Amazon hasn't enabled it for AWS, and the Comcast ipv6 rollout is to consumers, not to business clients.
Um, it's not just that. Me and my friends use FB for organizing social events - parties, performances, etc. The fire performance troupe I'm involved with does most of our organizing on Facebook too - we have jobs, and kids, and school, and live all over the area, so having quick discussions there makes life much easier.
Look, I go to Burning Man. I've seen more people naked than anyone short of a doctor or a nudist tour guide, and I have to say the ban on nudity on Facebook is a good thing. There are creepers out there who post pictures of people having a nude stroll. Without the subject's consent.
Being able to complain about it means that they get taken down.
Facebook is for real life, and some people (myself included) like having an area where there isn't soft-core porn all over the place. See, if I had to deal with that, I'd return fire with some of the better pictures from
Interesting - looks like they're doing a major recruiting push, since I'm in the interview process myself. I'd wanted to move to San Francisco, and saying that to the recruiter kind of surprised them. I don't live in a high-tech city, so the recruiters aren't anywhere near as vigorous, but I'm having the feeling that Google has just about tapped out the talent pool that's available in their local areas, and has sent recruiters after the less well traveled paths.
I wasn't even in the market, but when a company like Google calls, you tend to respond...
Everything from an old system running SCO OpenServer 5 to CentOS 5 and 6, Debian 4 in other legacy systems, Windows XP, Vista, and 7, iOS, Android from 2.2 to 4.0, OSX 10.6 and 10.7.
I do web development, though, as well as embedded systems, so my day job involves a lot of different machines and virtual systems.
Yep. I consciously use this in the videos I shoot. I've found that shooting people dancing with silk streamers or flowing costumes look a lot "cooler" if I crank down the shutter to 1/500 or 1/250 - it gives a hyper-real effect that makes the movement of the cloth really pop, because they're moving so fast that with a standard 1/30 or 1/24 shutter speed, it would be a blur.
People also associate that fast shutter with action sequences, and by switching to that faster shutter, you can enhance the 'dynamism' of a scene with very little additional work. It works horribly for general filming, but as an effect, used sparingly, it's definitely a good technique.
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