My position is that the qualification is meaningless. I can think of no job which does not have a specific skill-set requirement, from cleaning windows to CPU design. Different skills, for sure, but skills nonetheless.

My comment was therefore aimed at the age-related aspect of the conversation.

Just started a new job in Apple R&D. I'm 44.

No company will hire you if you don't have the skills they want, but I'm hardly the oldest person in my (fairly small) group; likewise in general on the floor around me. That's not to say there aren't younger people around - of course there are, it's just that age doesn't appear to be any sort of criteria.

I live in CA. 4 years ago I installed a $70k ($50k after rebates) 8kW solar system on my roof and my garage's roof.

Prior to solar, my original electricity bill peaked at ~$1100/month, more commonly about $600. This is due mainly to my own choices, no doubt, but still that's what we are dealing with - in Summer, the AC is on quite a bit (it's been 106F this last week) and the pool pump needs to run 8 hours a day for good cleaning. There's also the 2 pond pumps which run 24/7 and the reef tank pumps which also run 24/7. Add in a baby (so lots of washing-machine and dryer activity) and it adds up...

After the solar installation, my bill peaks at ~$100, more commonly about $50. This gives me an average saving of ~$8500 per year, and if you divide $55k by $8.5k you get 5.88 years to pay for itself. By some definitions that's 5 years...

In terms of cost, certainly the main issue is that I consume a lot of electricity. I'm happier now that most of that comes gratis from the sun, but also partly it's California's (or at least PG&E's) electricity pricing which ranges in tiers (the below taken from www.pge.com)

$0.1323 ... baseline
$0.1504 ... 101% -> 130% of baseline
$0.3111 ... 131% -> 200% of baseline
$0.3511 ... 200% -> 300% of baseline
$0.3514 ... 301%+

My baseline is set at 7.5 kWh per day (or ~225 kWh/month) , and I consume about 40kWh per day on a "good" (no AC, pool closed) day (pumping water is energy-intensive...). For me at least, the maths works out. When you're looking at individual cases, using average numbers is not such a great idea...

Simon

I have never seen a complete and unambiguous requirement for any real piece of software, and I would wager no other software engineer has either.

I wonder why my experience differs from yours - I have found almost all the applications I use (Firefox, PuTTY, Visual Studio, MS Office, TortoiseSVN) work fine with a simple 200% scaling in Windows 7. I agree that Remote Desktop is a pain.

Vista reverts to "fractional scaling", where it simply does a bilinear upscale of the application window, resulting in a blurry, god-awful mess where nothing was rendered natively.

I have to say I've never seen this on either XP or Win7. Perhaps it helps to have exactly 200% scaling so everything can be enlarged exactly. But as far as I can see, programs that aren't scaling aware (such as the command prompt window) are just rendered unscaled. Maybe it is because I have Aero turned off.

I've just gone through interviews at Google and Apple.

At Google, I was asked mainly theoretical questions - big-O, maths/stats, etc. And one "real" architecture/design question at the end. There were 5 interviewers and maybe 7 questions, sometimes 2 per interviewer but usually just 1 that lasted the whole hour. According to my recruiter before the decision, it was maybe 50/50 that I'd get an offer, and I did very well on the real-system design question (by inference, not so well on the others :). I didn't get the job.

At Apple, I had a seven-hour interview with seven interviewers. There were many many questions, far too many to easily remember categories, but they were all focussed on things I might end up doing, or problems that I might end up encountering. I got the job. I guess I do better with "real world" issues than the "consider two sets of numbers, one is ... the other is ...) type.

I have the self-confidence^W^W arrogance to believe I'm an asset to pretty much any company out there, but interview processes are nothing more than a gamble. Sure you can weed out the obvious under-qualified applicants, but frankly (unless the candidate is lying, and in the US that's a real no-no, in the UK padding your CV seems to be sort of expected...) that sort of candidate ought to have been pre-vetoed by the recruiter before getting to the interview.

I've yet to see the interview that guarantees a good candidate will do well. It's all about preparation: can you implement quicksort or mergesort right now, without looking it up ? The algorithm takes about 20 lines of code... Some interviews will require you to have knowledge like that; others are more concerned with how you collaborate with other candidates; still others are concerned with your code quality (I've seen a co-interviewer downmark a candidate for missing a ; at the end of a coding line. I wasn't impressed ... by the co-interviewer. But that's another story); still others are ... you get my point. Whether you do well or not can depend more on the cross-intersectional area of the interviewers style and your own credo than any knowledge you may or may not have.

So go in there expecting to be surprised, prepare what you can, be prepared to do wacky things to please "the man" interviewing you. For a good candidate, over a large number of interviews, you'll do well. The problem is that we often want a specific job, and we get depressed by the first dozen or so failed interviews. There's nothing more you can do than pick yourself up and try again. It's instructive to note that second-interviews at companies often go better than first-interviews, possibly because you're forewarned about the style a bit more, and therefore a bit better prepared...

Not true. Windows can quite easily double resolution - just set your font size to 200% in Control Panel. Everything comes out twice as big but fonts are smoother. This has worked since Windows XP at least. I run it this way on a 3840x2400 monitor, so the effective desktop size is "1900x1200".

Its completely broken with perfectly legitimate local DNS URLs.

Can you give an example of a 'perfectly legitimate URL' that doesn't work? (Hint: all URLs begin with a scheme such as http: or file:)

In my first year at college, I pushed a friend (by accident) through a plate glass window. The college authorities fined me £50 and asked me to be more careful. [friend] was taken to hospital, lost a small slice of an ear IIRC but was otherwise ok.

We were sitting in the college bar, pretty drunk, and there were these thick radiators that ran along the windows which people sat on. [friend] had slid down between the radiator and the plate glass (10' x 10') window, and I thought it'd be a fine idea to get him stuck down there, so pushed him down as hard as I could...

Plate glass windows make a lot of noise when they break...

I do remember grabbing hold of him and pulling him back as soon as it happened, which may be why he still talks to me :) It may also be why he didn't get a sheet of glass through his neck, Exorcist-style.

The dean in charge of my hall-of-residence was particularly scathing when he found out I was studying physics at the time, various comments about the fragility of glass were made, but his (and the college's) attitude was "shit happens around students". The fine was their way of saying "don't be a dick, again".

Of course, this was the UK, not the US. I also wrote a networked virus without ending up in jail...

People repeat this meme that desktop OSes don't support high resolution displays, but it's not really true. At work I have Windows 7 and several 3840x2400 displays; just setting 200% font size works fine in all the applications I use.

Well, yeah, surely 4000x4000 is 4k (like IMAX), and 3840x2160 is only about 2k measured conservatively.

"Riddle me this: what is it that is always coming, but never arrives?"

So you have your nicely written function of type int -> int, but now you want to add some trace statements while it executes, but you can't because it is purely functional. Then someone helpfully suggests monads. Now all you have to do is rewrite it to be of type int -> IO int, and rewrite all of the calling functions to be of monadic type too, and so on all the way up to the top level of the program...

The fundamental problem is that you need some way to separate the program itself (which is purely functional) from whatever scaffolding and diagnostic code you put in to help test and debug it. In imperative languages you can happily mix the two together but in pure functional programming you can't, and the language environment has to provide explicit support for trace messages and the like.