RandomOpinion

Depends on your definition of "with professionals". Existing outplacement services like Lee Hecht Harrison offer in-person sessions with coaches who can practice behavioral questions in a mock interview scenario.

They aren't able to do technical questions because they serve a broad audience but practicing HackerRank questions on a whiteboard or a notepad is close enough.

> On the other hand, I'm reminded of the arguments against emacs using 8 MEGS of memory and how terrible that is.

Yeah, but back then Moore's Law was running full steam and we were getting tremendous advances in processor and memory performance every year. Now that era has ended; what processor performance we have today is likely to remain more or less the same for the foreseeable future, barring a miracle from the chipmakers.

It's time to stop pissing away performance by using inefficient software stacks and web technologies are a big, juicy target for cleanup.

Amen to this. I would be much more inclined to try Sudden Coffee out if there were an option for a one-time purchase, especially if registration were not required (I really don't want to deal with yet another password).

As a side question: what's the shelf life of Sudden?

> Sadly, at no point in the interview is the question asked in the headline answered.

I beg to differ. He touches on problems with the post-secondary education system, increasing hostility from the public against the elite, the collapse of journalism, and failure of experts to engage the public as parts of his answer to that question.

> Intellectual humility doesnt get grants though.

Amen. In industry, intellectual humility doesn't help get promotions or get hired either.

> How does this perform in adverse weather conditions?

One could ask the very same thing about WWI era aircraft. Look at where we are today.

Presumably there would other defense systems to fall back on during adverse weather. Even if this first-generation laser system worked well only on days where it wasn't raining, that would still represent an enormous cost savings.

15 hours is just the minimum that Texas chose to require for continued licensure. I'd be rather surprised if successful PEs didn't spend as much time in independent study as successful software developers.

> Is this expectation that you're always on the learning treadmill an issue for other professions like doctors and lawyers?

Of course. A certain minimum is even required by law for licensure for some professions.

"For dedicated professional engineers, earning a PE license is just the beginning. Many state licensing boards require that PEs maintain and improve their skills through continuing education courses and other opportunities for professional development."

https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/maintaining-license

"Continuing legal education (CLE), also known as mandatory or minimum continuing legal education (MCLE) or, in some jurisdictions outside the United States, as continuing professional development, consists of professional education for attorneys that takes place after their initial admission to the bar. Within the United States, U.S. attorneys in many states and territories must complete certain required CLE in order to maintain their U.S. licenses to practice law."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_legal_education

"Almost all states require some amount of continuing professional development education and training be completed by teachers to maintain their licenses. Specific requirements for license renewal vary greatly from state to state, and are often quite complex."

http://www.teachtomorrow.org/continuing-education-for-teache...

"More than 40 jurisdictions require that architects complete continuing education to update their professional skills to renew their license while additional states are considering such requirements."

http://www.ncarb.org/Continuing-Education/Continuing-Educati...

DeWalt Technicians' fingerless gloves are fairly good. They're not insulated per se but are reasonably thick work gloves that happen to be fingerless. I've used them at work in offices that were cold and typing with them is fine.

https://www.amazon.com/DPG230L-Technicians-Fingerless-Synthe...

What's your point? The article is about how to make existing Windows UWP apps work on mobile form factor displays and devices. It doesn't sell anything or attempt to persuade people to port their apps to Windows.

Grab Nemeth, et al's "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" from your favorite online bookseller and work through each chapter. That'll get you basic fluency with the Unix command line and common administration tasks.

Beyond that, what you need to know really depends on the tech stack of the company you're planning to work for. I'd suggest at least working through the tutorials on how to set up and configure Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and the JRE enough to get a simple web site up and running.

Good luck.

> He was famously into management by fear.

The article you linked to says precisely the opposite and is more in line with the blog post. LeMay made it clear that results were expected and got them.

Donald Knuth did say once that he's not much of a fan of unit tests. See his answer to the second question of his interview at: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

Then again, there are probably less than a dozen people at his level of ability on the entire planet so unit tests will be part of our lives for the foreseeable future.

>The relationship between the two roles would be much better without "I'm better than you" or "you can't do what I do, so you test" attitudes. Both sides, and the organization, profit when we work together with respect and appreciation.

The relative pay scale for a developer and tester with equivalent education and coding experience already speaks volumes about how deep that respect goes. Also, note who gets laid off first when the budget gets tight.

Since we're talking about various X-ism's today, your prejudice against nurses and test engineers is showing.

(Seriously, I'm starting to wonder if I should give up the QA profession for good, even though I prefer it to being a developer.)

> I'm not referring to that type of support; this is merely support for the base platform. I'm referring to the entire ecosystem of Microsoft products, of which you'll find most are x86 only.

Windows Server comes with IIS and other services that would normally have been provided in a Linux environment by the Linux ecosystem. Also, as the article notes, SQL Server and Visual Studio were supported on Itanium as well.

As Itanium only succeeded as a server product, there's no business reason for Microsoft to have ported their desktop applications to it.

> Potentially capable; their support for non-x86 has always fallen short.

"Microsoft will continue to provide mainstream support for Itanium-based systems until July 2013, and extended support until July 2018." -- http://www.computerworld.com/article/2516742/computer-hardwa...

Itanium came out in 2001 and the above article is from 2010, so that would be about 9 years of product releases and 17 years of support overall.

And, frankly, there's no money to be made off of supporting all those miscellaneous architectures so Microsoft has no reason to bother.

So, basically, somebody who never uses a web browser? 404 and 500 should be familiar just from browsing the web for more than a few weeks.

If you're 40, you have ( or should have) nearly a couple of decades of hard-won experience in building software, working within organizations to get things done, and subject matter expertise in the types of projects you worked on [0]. That should show up both in your resume / work history and in the more challenging projects you're able to take on.

Don't try to compete with younger people based on number of hours or cost; that is a game you are guaranteed to lose.

[0] Conversely, if you don't have those things, now is the time to start stepping up to the plate and acquiring them. The best of the younger people you are competing with are already working hard at doing so.

Doctors, lawyers, and engineers have other forces regulating their competence. In addition to licensing, they also bear personal liability for malpractice. As a result, malpractice claims that stick in those fields is significant news because it's relatively uncommon.

If it were possible to sue a software developer to recover their salary and for damages done, you'd better believe that nearly all (though not all) of the people who are rather less than qualified would be out of the profession.

The crowdfunded Open-V implementation of RISC V comes to mind.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v

However, it doesn't look like they're going to come remotely close to hitting their funding goal. Fabricating chips is expensive.

How so? The OEMs want to make hardware that runs Windows. Microsoft provides a specification[0] and certification suites[1] that defines what "Windows-compatible" means, which OEMs then follow. Nothing coercive about that.

There is no open standard that defines what a PC is. Linux and other operating systems are piggybacking on the Windows PC standard. If they want OEMs to manufacture hardware to their standards, they'll have to create their own "Linux-compatible" specification and persuade OEMs to follow it.

[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/hardware/commercialize/de...

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn...

There's Visionect's 32" e-ink display ($3599 for the dev kit or $4699 if you want the color version): https://www.visionect.com/product/development-kit-with-grays...

There isn't any technological limitation as far as I know; it's just that e-ink displays are hideously expensive to make.

>Many people think floating point numbers are magically precise.

Even worse, it kicks in earlier than one might naively think. People are often surprised to hear a value as simple as 0.1 has no matching floating point representation.

(For those interested, http://www.exploringbinary.com/why-0-point-1-does-not-exist-... has a nicely illustrated explanation.)

>When looking at the advancements in GPUs these days, where are the improvements coming from?

A considerable chunk of it is process improvements. Take a look at the chart at http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-gpu-analysis/ that's about halfway down. nVidia's current generation GPUs are at 16nm. For comparison, Intel is at 14nm for their processors (though their 14nm process is better than most other chipmakers 14nm process) and hopes to start delivering 10nm this year, a year or so later than planned. So nVidia has a couple more process bumps to go, whenever they become affordable, and then they hit the wall like everyone else and have to focus mainly on architectural improvements for further performance gain.

That story about Einstein doesn't illustrate what you think it does. Einstein was a theoretical physicist, not an experimental physicist; there's no reason for him to have known the precise value. However, you can bet that Einstein knew the theory quite thoroughly (review his writings if you believe otherwise) and would have been rather less than impressed by anyone calling themselves a physicist who did not.

And aside from that, let's face it, none of us here are Einsteins.

>Just to confirm, is this a smart-phone based spectrometer? (Why don't they use that term?)

Spectrometers generally produce a single spectrum from a light source.

A hyperspectral imager produces a spectrum for each pixel in the image. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging

Another paper from 2013 also touched on cosmic radiation as a cause when attempting to quantify differences in transient error rates in memory based on the location of the machine.

From the PC World writeup (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2066220/sc13-elevation-plays-... ): "In a field study of two high-performance computers, the researchers found that L2 and L3 caches had more transient errors on the supercomputer located at a higher altitude, compared with the one closer to sea level. They attributed the disparity largely to lower air pressure and higher cosmic ray-induced neutron strikes."

The paper itself: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2503210.2503257 One can find copies of the paper online simply by searching for its title.

Both the that and the phys.org article are a good reminder that the unconscious assumption that many software developers hold that the hardware is 100% reliable and deterministic is not (and never was) true.

I think part of the article that's getting glossed over is:

"A refrigerated egg, no matter the source, will be good for four or five weeks. Unrefrigerated eggs are best used within a week, though they may be fine for two."

So, one would want to refrigerate eggs (washed or unwashed) anyway if they're not all going to be used immediately.

>Edit:also , they mentioned an ncfet transistor for general use.since this transistor remember his state, you may not have to power it in sleep mode(whole circuit or partial), and thus could get zero leakage current!

Um, no, that's not the point of the NC FET. The "negative capacitance" aspect of the ferroelectric material means that the NC FET can switch on or off faster, reducing power wasted in the switching process, and therefore allow chips to run cooler.

See https://phys.org/news/2011-09-ferroelectrics-pave-ultra-low-... for a general explanation or https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-... for a technical explanation.