rdrimmie

Yes, it's just a joke, but while it's a moderately entertaining implementation of the FrustrateTheInterviewer response pattern it's really not especially unique or noteworthy.

There's probably elements of his personality that aren't being relayed properly, and I definitely agree that personality a key elements for a hire.

But your presentation of this story suggests astonishment that someone coming to you for the honour of a job on your wonderful team would have the nerve to care a lot about the environment in which he was working.

The example questions you bring up seem like perfectly reasonable questions to me and I'd be loathe to work somewhere where the manager didn't want to answer them. You'd maybe be surprised by how many places don't use source control at all, or don't have any kind of development methodology, let alone Agile.

I'm curious how quickly most users become frequent Twitter users. My own ramping up process went something along the lines of:

Year 0: Made an account, was almost never on the site. Year 1: Started paying a bit more attention, used twitter.com primarily, posted statuses and built up followers Year 2 (present): Basically always have a desktop twitter client open, tweet once or twice a day or so and in rare circumstances spam my followers with conference or *Camp type event updates.

I will be quite interested in seeing whether or not the impact of being on the Suggested User List is felt in a year or two as those new users start coming into their Twitter own.

But does anyone actually dismiss Augmented Reality as a toy? Current implementations are generally at a toy level, but isn't the concept of obvious benefit?

I _am_ obese and I don't buy it either. I've lost 40 pounds over the past 3 years following a scaled down version of the exact same plan as in the post. And I've gained 5 back over the past 3 months by being lax.

There are many people who do have legitimate health problems that cause obesity, sure. But the vast majority of us fat folk (I still hover around 280) eat too much and move too little.

I'm a moderately regular (though infrequent) stack overflow user, and I think it's great. I am perhaps biased because some of the work I do is supported by affiliate advertising (though at this point not very much!). And our affiliate links aren't munged onto user-contributed content.

Anyway, aside from my bias, I think it's great in part because it makes Stack Overflow money and I Think they deserve that, and in part because it has zero impact on the content the user contributed. It was already a link to Amazon. If anyone follows that link, Amazon is likely to profit and the only reason anyone would follow that link is because it's on Stack Overflow.

I'm not sure how I feel about users adding their own affiliations, since in that case they might be taking advantage of Stack Overflow's traffic. I'm also not sure how I then feel about Stack Overflow replacing existing affiliate links with their own (and I don't know how they are handling that situation anyway).

It definitely seems a grey area, but I think in this particular case SO is not abusing their users.

I am pretty sure this is a recommendation from Code Complete, too. It's full of great tips like this. If you haven't, you should definitely check it out.

I think you can absolutely ask the interviewer to write some code. Right after you show them yours.

I'm in agreement with everything except that it's not a matter of focusing on the company's needs. If you're sending resumes to 15 companies a day you aren't even focusing on your own needs.

Figure out who you want to work for and then figure out how to communicate with someone there who is going to want to hire you.

Regarding item 1, in the real world analogy of getting seed money an entrepreneur certainly isn't limited to only using that seed money. They can use their credit cards or their house or their own equipment or anything else.

The point of the exercise quite explicitly was to teach people to look past constraints that do not exist, like the $5 limitation you're getting stuck on. There was no restriction on using outside materials, that is a constraint you created on your own due to your interpretation of the presentation.

3) You're also assuming that the students didn't benefit from being introduced to the presenting company. Another poster mentions that it was Frog Design, and if that's the case then it was probably to the benefit of the students as well; Frog Design's a good company.

Apple promotes the distinction between Macs and PCs in its extremely successful advertising campaign. Anyone who doesn't understand the difference is either ignorant of current computing culture or being willfully obtuse.

So here's my problem with this: How much of the fun is predicated on the novelty of the situation? After a week, how many people on their morning commute are loving those stairs? After a month?

Fun benefits tremendously from novelty, but genuine fun has long-term value, too.

I wish decrying popular things as fads was just a fad

The article includes a quote "never take software advice from a bug tracking system salesman", and I think the same entertaining aphorism holds true for methodology consultants.

Both have too much invested in you listening to their advice.

Image curls and embedded audio players are essential? These effects are modern-day animated under construction gifs.

If the article is accurate, then the device itself claimed that it supported on-device encryption when it communicated with Exchange.

I don't know about the marketing materials, but for the past year, the software itself has made the claim.

Agreed. What possible reason is there to link to a post that itself is just a link? Link to the source.

Remember too that Franklin lived about 100 years before Daylight Savings Time, not to mention however long before household electricity was common. Getting to sleep at 10 was probably easier when it was too dark to do anything.

Because we're in a forum full of IT people, not farmers.

I guarantee you there are places (on the Internet and in real life) where farmers are talking about the flaws of any number of software and hardware. This just isn't one of them.

Well, part of your wish is coming true. Apple's announcing an average time-to-approval for developers. Which is a very small step.

(http://www.tuaw.com/2009/08/01/apple-adds-queue-time-contact...)

This is true, but stinkers like .mac and using the iTunes store for App developers still make it through in a place where the standards are much higher.

I think it's a walled garden argument. Twitter wants to control the firehose, which is like the wall?

The post isn't about evilness (and in fact Dash has frequently defended Microsoft, as he states). The post is about a corporate entity growing past the point where the internal concept of 'self' that its staff has differs largely from the external concept of its identity that the public has.

I don't think he created it, he selected the best performers of an apparently existing species and bred them.

It's hard for us to guess, but the Vogel has several other titles that have been available online for a number of years so I bet he can make a reasonably strong prediction.

I would be very surprised if Geneforge 1 (which I don't think is his earliest title, but is several years old) hasn't sold more than 5 copies this year. The tail for his products is very long. Pretty flat I'd guess, but very long and since they're distributed digitally there's no reason not to keep them available, gradually dropping prices or making bundles available. Once 5 is released he could sell a "box set of the entire series" and spike sales of the old titles again.

It definitely won't hurt to encourage people to buy more hardware, but the hardware doesn't matter nearly as much as the content. Kindle being a universal eBook manager type software brand is far more valuable to Amazon than keeping the books exclusive to the hardware.

I have two unused copies of XP Home sitting around unused because I could not find installation media. I was able to torrent a copy in under 30 minutes, but unfortunately the way it was hacked breaks the key authentication so I can't use it to register my legitimate key.

Several hours ago I could have been up and running with a working but hacked version. Now I am just frustrated and irritating everyone I know with calls searching for XP Home media. Turns out everyone I know has Pro.

I was already planning on dual-booting Ubuntu (the XP install is only for games because I am too lazy to play with WINE), so I guess now it's .5 and 1.5?

This is something I don't understand about these sorts of grid systems. Isn't using specific classes for the divs of the grid in the HTML just as difficult for maintenance purposes as using a table? You're defining specific rows and columns and because you're doing so with class names, that layout information is in the HTML and not the CSS.

The point of using CSS for layout is to have the markup be relevant to the content of the document, not for it to be relevant to the styling. Just as having class names like "blueText" or "thickBorder" is injecting style information into the HTML, so is having class names like 'g80' or 'g940' or whatever.

Agreed. Just as with consoles, 'Next Gen' is now current gen, so the quaifier is no longer necessary.

I think it depends a bit on how relevant community is to your application. If there's a community of users that is built up naturally by using your app (like there is at say Stack Overflow, which uses UserVoice) then you'll want to provide a place for the community to talk about features.

If your various users are generally unaware of each other, then I think that having a place for them to send you suggestions is fine.

My general thought is that building a system to handle suggestions before you have any is mildly premature. Provide an obvious way for users to send suggestions - a form or a prominent email address is usually fine - but wait until the flood of suggestions becomes a problem before solving it.