copper

patio11 is indeed the right person to ask that particular question :)

If it helps any, here's my absolute favourite justification that HR gave when I asked why they needed my salary history: it was, apparently, needed to figure out where I would fit in the org chart (you'd think that that was what interviews are supposed to determine, but apparently not.)

Thanks, that's interesting, and seems more in line with what I figured: a lot easier to reason about, and a much cleverer coder than me to do it properly :)

(As an aside, one of the inventors listed on that patent happens to be the person who wrote this article.)

Perhaps the most interesting part, to me, was the goal of making geometric algebra operations computationally efficient. While I'm still reading (and enjoying) the original paper, I must confess an inability to see how it's more efficient than a standard vector representation. Would you have any pointers on that?

Or when you're reading/writing a great deal of numerical data in a file.

Phoenix and Hillsboro probably do the most volume in the US. I wonder what happened to TI's fabs, though.

The reason that they are so centralised is that it costs a shockingly /huge/ amount of money to build and run a new fab. It makes all sorts of business sense to outsource fabrication, particularly when your own chip production volumes are nowhere near enough to keep fab utilisation at close to full.

As for the super-complex chip argument, I'm not sure I buy it. Sure, Intel (and I hope, IBM) still run their own fabs - they almost have to, given the amount of control they require over the processes. However, all fabless semiconductor companies (by definition :) outsource - and that does include a majority of the chips you encounter in your daily life. Most smartphone processors are made in Taiwan, or somewhere close by.

Roughly, they used gps signals to synchronize two accurate clocks, one each at the source and the destination.

For what it's worth, this part of the first paper is pretty accessible - at least, as to how they did it - it's more difficult to poke holes in how accurate it was :)

And, apart from a stray use of new and delete, this looks almost like valid C99 code to me. Not that that diminishes the achievement any, of course. I'd quibble mildly about his choice of compile flags and make some minor stylistic changes to the code (like the tacky transpose :), but I don't think it would affect the benchmark results any.

Given the code used, it looks like it might be straightforward to use openmp rather than pthreads. I'd be interested in seeing how that works out.

But they do: my version of Aurora notifies me when there's a new update that's been downloaded, and if I don't click it then, it updates the next time I start firefox.

That's bad luck - but was there a reason you needed to build your own wm? If you were able to get X and a *dm running, you could just install one of the many prepackaged ones (I go with Xfce, myself), and then edit ~/.xinitrc .

My favourite bit from the (as always, impressive) changelog:

    For additional security, security(8) was rewritten in Perl.

Hm, as a general rule, I'd actually suggest continuing to avoid such packages in general, unless you know that they're what you need: you need to track whether there's been a source code update, whether someone broke the upstream build, whether your current versions of other packages depend on it

(example: x264-git, pretty much requires that you also install libav-git/mplayer-git, and then of course blender doesn't work, and so on. It can become quite messy at times.)

fwiw, aur packages with the -(cvs|hg|git|svn) suffix usually track the development, while the date actually refers to when the build was last updated. Installing the package will actually give you today's date as the version tag. I can see why the confusion happens, though :)

Well, I believe this particular head is the one I've seen most commonly in books[1], and that was quite a long time ago (I wish I could remember if the original Aku-Aku book had pictures.)

[1] http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Moai_Heads.png

I think the fact that they're referred to as Easter Island heads, rather than statues might have had something to do with it :)

More seriously, the iconic pictures of the heads are from Rano Raraku (IIRC), and that is just heads and a bit of neck sticking out of the ground, isn't it?

Honest question: is a strcmp really the best way there is to test for specific kernel modules?

Hm, I've seen some really weird unicode-related corruption hitting files shared between guest and host due to (I assume) different line ending convention. Figuring out what was going on was not fun at all.

When a paper fits into one of the categories arXiv accepts, that's more or less what happens (modulo the cranks who claim to prove Riemann's hypothesis every now and then, but that's a whole different topic :)

The difficulty is that some publishers don't allow you to make pdfs of the final versions of papers freely available. Of course, you can always publish draft versions, which is not entirely a bad thing.

Perhaps as a counterexample: in my day to day work, I write numerical code. Academic papers are still a better influence as compared to stuff that can be found directly on the web. To be fair, given that a lot more academics are making their work available on their websites, and I can see where this situation might reverse in the not-so-distant future.

IME, working with large groups of developers on a correspondingly large project where quality varies widely over different bits of code was the quickest way to learn to be grateful for such little syntactic annoyances that however helped catch bugs (or better, prevent them) quickly.

The problem with compiler warnings is, unless you have a warning-free base build, they're difficult to see. And in turn, a warning-free build more or less depends on the very first developers to have turned the warning flags on while they were checking in stuff like mad trying to get someting to ship.

So, yeah, I could claim that I don't too many such silly mistakes (and that might even be true), but I can both understand and approve of such coding standards.

Well, would this do? http://graphics.pixar.com/library/

Pixar are very, very good at what they do :)

Yes, that is the worst-case example for the set in a crit-bit tree.

Isn't the set supposed to be prefix-free, though?

In practise, I prefer Kazu Yamamoto's cab over cabal-dev, mostly because it leaves the system libs alone, and has the extremely useful uninstall -r.

If it seemed that I was trying to apply my experience to you, I apologize - that wasn't my intention. Keeping salary details secret is usually a valuable form of information asymmetry that HR, in general, try their best to maintain (funnily enough, that was a clause of my NDA.)

Yes, exactly - I only wish someone had explained that to a younger, dumber me back then.

> I feel I'm often at the higher or top end of my employers range, and despite the fact that I legally COULD, I don't really see any value in discussing my pay with a coworker.

Back in the day, I used to work for this place where, you've guessed it, according to the people who did my salary reviews, I was always close to the top end of my employers range. So, yeah, you can imagine how that worked out :)

While it's always possible to get a general impression of what a coworker earns (always assuming it's possible, or legal), it's no substitute for numbers.

That sounds very familiar for some reason.

I must say, though: I've never heard of anyone who was an employee at the last n or so startups similar to yours who actually made money off their options from an exit - though hopefully a certain large recent acquisition beats that average :)

Anyone know how this affects the ArchLinux packages? kernel.org is still the fastest mirror around for them.

Well, it works for me (Arch64/OpenJDK), but then I haven't done much more than work partway through the scala tutorials.

Not that it makes a difference, but I believe R6RS provide first-class environments, too: http://www.r6rs.org/final/html/r6rs-lib/r6rs-lib-Z-H-17.html

Edit: After looking through the Racket docs, I believe I was referring to were its namespaces.