- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
- Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Other Series
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
No kiddings...
1 = 1 = 0001
2 = 2 = 0010
3 = 3 = 0011
4 = 4 = 0100
5 = 5 = 0101
6 = 6 = 0110
7 = 7 = 0111
8 = 8 = 1000
9 = 9 = 1001
10 = a = 1010
11 = b = 1011
12 = c = 1100
13 = d = 1101
14 = e = 1110
15 = f = 1111
I wrote that out by hand. It doesn't take long, and I can then place it in the "show your work" section of the test, instead of wasting space on the cheat sheet for something that I can derive quickly enough at the test. Come to think of it, I was often at a loss as to what I would put on those cheat sheets. If you know the material it isn't a big deal to derive small tables.
Admin
HEX! I Love HEX. Who doesn't Love HEX. The guy must be a virgin not to like HEX....I would like to have HEX 3, 4 5 times a day...but that would get in the way of the making money thing...I guess I could have HEX for money...but then there's that health thing....
Oh, wait, you mean HEX, base 16, not S...ummm never mind....
PDP/11...pssh
How about PDP 8/e...or even timesharing on 10cts TTY's
Admin
For those people calling "bullshit" - i dunno. Its entirely possible these days to get by knowing just the high level stuff and not have to know any of the basics. I remember about 10 years ago having to explain to a fresh CS graduate what i meant by ANDing two numbers together. I was describing to him how to write a decide driver for an embedded system, but he had never come across the concept of bitwise logical operators on his CS course. The guy was fairly competent once you got past the general n00bness, and familiar with the concept of logical AND, OR etc - but this weird new idea of how to manipulate numbers was news to him.
Admin
'Decide' driver?????? weird typo. I meant DEVICE driver.
Admin
Actually I am calling BS on this one for a variety of reasons. I went to Purdue (not the CS department, but I took the vast majority of my electives as well as a bit of my post-Grad work in that department). You cannot get through the CS program without being exposed to hex. Hell, you get hex covered heavily in one 1st semester class and you need it for two other second semester classes. You will not survive your junior year without it as there are 4 non-elective classes dealing with OS and Compiler theory that hammer hex and binary (both theory and practical).
These are non-elective classes - you might be able to convince a department head to sign off on one or two, opting instead to take other courses. But I cannot imagine anyone in the CS heirarchy signing off on both the OS and Compiler courses. While you do not have to pass these courses with excellent grades - they are required to obtain a degree.
I know very little about the inner workings of their Mechanical Engineering department other than they tend to get dumped on by the Golden Engineering departments (Electrical, Computer, Materials, and Aeronautical). The funny part was that while I was there the Engineering discipline that rated the highest post-Grad scores was the Industrial Engineering - and they seriously were being dumped on in terms of resources.
Now I do not know what is taught at IUPU (Indiana University/Purdue University) or the Purdue Calumet campus - but their Northwest campus is pretty tightly leashed to the whims of the main campus.
After having been through it myself and working others through the process I think it takes about 1-3 years to beat the arrogance of college/university out of someone (more or advanced dregees take longer) until they actually become a productive team member. By then you have knocked off the worst of the rough edges and can have a clear idea if what you find inside is worth keeping.
Admin
Ok, I'll say it...
Halloween = Christmas
Admin
This is not surprising. It was only after I had finished my degree that I realized how much better off I was in the woods. Their programs have simply gotten too large, taught by instructors with minimal skills in English, and the tuition (now uncapped) has gone through the roof. I don't feel bad at all about my choice.
Admin
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>and remember kids, november 25th is international "no spending" day. in fact, it'll be the sixth year in a row that i don't buy anything non-essential between thanksgiving and mid-january.</FONT>
Admin
You mean "Perdue" chicken farms. Got a friend who works at Purdue, and she gives me crap every time I make that mistake.
Admin
Hah, that's pretty amusing. Seems like most any sensor would be capable of registering it when 90% of the surrounding environment is ammonia...Depending on the oxygen composition of the remaining 10%, that mix might even be too rich to burn, though I'm sure its corrosive as hell.
I'm a math retard, no denying it, but even I tend to notice when my figure moves into the impossible. How could 900,000ppm be the LOWER explosive limit of anything? Even O2 will go up before 90%
Admin
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>"furthermore, it's like walking into the supermarket and asking the man loading chicken meat into a half-freezer where the 200,000 ppm milk is."</FONT>
Admin
Having graduated with a CS degree less than two years ago... I'd have to agree with that. It really is quite scary.
To anyone in charge of hiring or interviews, converting decimal, binary, and hex numbers are a good start. I know in my interview I was asked about the difference between early and late binding... I thought that was a fairly decent question; I'm guessing 90%+ wouldn't know the difference. I suppose a question about static methods/variables would be a quick and easy weeding out process as well.
Admin
One too many zeroes, I hope...
Admin
This is not a GUID (or Globally Unique IDentifier).
A GUID is an algorithmically generated number that has a statistically high probability of being unique.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID
However, your question is still a good one regarding GUIDs. Not someone with a CS degree from Purdue?
Admin
WT[A-F]?
Admin
Heh, i wouldn't have known when I started work here. That's because of one thing:
Drak
Admin
Unbelievable.
There is no way that this guy would survive a real engineering job.
Either this expert is lying about his degrees, or the university he went to is up to monkey eggs.
Or maybe he's one of those that cruised thorough varsity, hitching a ride on other people's backs. Trust me, they exist : I know a couple of chemical engineering students in their final year who couldn't tell you the composition of air, but they still pass.
Luckily, these poeple either don't make it as enigineers, or end up in management.
Admin
Great post! Reminds me of an old Dilbert cartoon where they're standing around bragging about their programming skills and one of the characters claimed he wrote an entire DB program using just '0's.
Admin
I have to agree with this. If he went to Purdue for engineering or CS, he knows hex.
Admin
Yeah right, one degree confers omnipotence, so two degrees must R0x0R!!1!!!11!
Admin
There's a reason it's called Pur-don't. :D
Admin
I always thought Perdue was French for "lost". Is that significant?
Admin
Almost as significant as the fact that you didn't read any of the thread!
Admin
1: Ironically, neither have you. I've already posted in this thread before, which you don't seem to have noticed.
2: It's 4 f*cking pages long. It takes somewhere in the region of 3.2 seconds for the first page to fill up. I have quite a lot of time on my hands, not being particularly busy at work at the moment, but not quite so much time that I religiously read every comment.
3: I assume you're trying to imply that somewhere amongst those 4 million-odd posts, someone puts in a sidenote saying "oh, purdue means lost in French". Given the above, you'll excuse me for not spotting it.
Admin
Oh right, the fact that I don't really care who posts implies that I didn't read the entire thread. Also, it's not quite 4 million, and it's certainly nothing an educated individual like you can't handle.
Admin
You read the entire thread? I thought I had a lot of time on my hands!
Also, it's not interesting enough to read a whole thread. No, it's not quite 4 million (I have a tendency to exaggerate slightly), but it's a helluva lot. Add in the time taken to respond, deal with this horrible editor (which in IE7, BTW, appears as a small text box), and the time stacks up. I often just get snapshots, usually trying to track back a specific sub-thread as far as I can to understand what's being said, but a small post not directly connected to other posts will often get missed.
Admin
Astoundingly stupid kid. I actually believe this only because I tutored a senior EE student in second year Physics (No clue why he hadn't taken it yet) and was discussing power in simple circuits. After 15 minutes of excruciating cluelessness on the complex circuitry of a space heater (Power source, resisitor. Resistor gets hot as power dissipated/Wasted.)
The kid finally got it, got a "Eureka" look and proudly proclaimed: "Oh, so if you just reverse the current, you'd get cooling?"
I wish he was kidding...
Consider the stupidity of the average person. Then realize that half of the population is below that. (Don't know who said it first.)
Admin
alumnists??
Admin
My boss has a binary clock in his office. We have discussed using it during interviews, but haven't actually done it. That seems like a better use of time than calculating the numer of gas staions in the county... I think that I will push that one a bit harder in the future, given the response I am seeing here today.
BTW - octal was generally used in machines with an 18 bit architecture. A lot of the older Univac military machines were like that, and even when they went to 32, the octal kind of stuck, even though it was no longer an even digit split. When I was a lad in Navy Fire Controlman A School we had an entire high intenstity week on boolean math and numbering systems - and there are comp sci programs that don't teach it? What a bunch-o-crap.
Admin
Would you really deny someone a job for not having brushed up on their binary? Reminds me of a company that asked questions about String Theory and Trigonometry during a phone screen a few years back. At the time I hadn't cracked a Geometry book in over 5 years and haven't since. I remember thinking that there were many far more practical skills they could require. Admittedly, binary is more practical than the scenario described but still, most people don't use it every day.
Admin
A CompSci graduate not knowing about hex is like a mathematician not knowing about addition.
Addition is only the subtraction of negative numbers, so it's overrated.
Dear Mr President - there are too many mathematical operators these days. Please eliminate three.
PS. I'm not a crackpot.
Admin
Let me count the ways ...
This just from the top of my head. You need hex to use
-- Special or Unicode escaped characters in Java, JavaScript, and C#
-- HTML colors -- yes you could use color names but you limit yourself thay way.
-- Microsoft's famous GUIDs -- yes, you should know what they mean before using them willy-nilly.
-- IP V6 network addresses -- that's where the internet is going
-- Swicth values or numbers on several controlers and embedded systems
-- and so on
I cannot imagine any programming position in which one would not use Hex -- except maybe writing "Hello World" console applications that only use standard ASCII characters.
Pleaaase!!!
Admin
That can be a problem: change the terminology and obsolete an education. What name do you understand binding under?
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Admin
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>oops. 20,000 ppm milk. :)</FONT>
Admin
On my degree (Neuroscience) we could choose 1/3 of the course from any faculty. Having learnt the fundaments of programming at seven, and being OK at 6502 by the age of ten, I did a lot of stuff from the computing courses. One course was in C++ but all marks were for coursework which was in the form of:
you are given a task
You are given some input data
you are told what the output data should be
You write the programme and submit it to the automated marking system which compiles and tests your code and looks through for the presence and absence of certain key words, etc. My first piece of work was rushed (hey, I had some drinking and womanising to do[8-)]) and it worked apart from one character in the output was wrong. I couldn't be arsed to fix it (I mean, how many marks can I lose?) and submitted it anyway. I got 9%. Apparently, 90% of the marks went for getting the right output and the remaining *grabs calculator* ten percent are for style. Anyway, this pissed me off something rotten so I wrote a programme (in Pascal) to generate a C++ that would give the correct output for the given input (using a lookup and storing EVERYTHNIG as consts in the code). Each week, I used my C++ code generator to generate nonsense code that would ALWAYS get me 99% [8-|]
The best bit, IMO, was that style would be penalised if numbers were found in the code anyway other than in a const declaration. So I deliberately littered my code with gems such as
seven = 9.2;
fourteen = -3;
Still, each one earned me 99% and I put in the bare minimum effort
Admin
Obviously the PHB is a brillant guru engineer and manager.
He simply wants you to use a better language, like ruby, or python, or VB....
Admin
I can understand if someone from MIT was a snob, but not Purdue, it wasn't hard getting into the school and it wasn't difficult completing a 4 year ECE program. I'd have to say the engineering curriculums are mediocre at best. I think you're confusing legitimate pomposity for academic insecurity.
Admin
Actually, "nybble" is correct.
Admin
It would seem that no one with a CS degree or any technical cert' involving computers would admit not recognizing a hex' dump...
Is there bull here?..... [ha!]
Admin
"DrCode" (if that is your real name), where in my statement did I say that nybble was incorrect? Answer: I didn't. But you're a moron and can't read for comprehension so let me shove it down your throat. I said that the more common spelling of that word is "nibble." Shall I give you a citation?
How about wikipedia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nybble
[A nibble (or less commonly, nybble) is the...]
Okay tough guy? Gene was misinformed to believe that the concept of a nibble is obscure; his spelling, on the other hand, is obscure.
Don't be so stupid in the future.
Sincerely,
Richard Nixon
Admin
At least he didn't recommend connecting 90 of the 2,000 ppm sensors together... as for his 90% calculation, he probably tried to take the relative density of NH3 and air into account, getting confused over proportion of mass and proportion of number of molecules.
Admin
You need to change your sig to "DICK" Nixon. [6]
Admin
Only if the distribution of stupidity isn't skewed. You meant median... ;-P
Admin
This hurts.
I've once met a year 3 CS student who hadn't even heard of a Turing Machine.
Admin
"Get rid of Hexadecimal? You can't get rid of it. It's just the output of the data. You don't have to convert the data to it, but you certainly can't "get rid of it"[:P]
Admin
Sure you could. You could make conversion to hex illegal, ban all books that explain it and throw people who talk about it in prison or execute them.
You'd have to be running a government, preferably a theocracy, to try and implement that, but it wouldn't be extraordinary - similar things have been done and are being done right now.
Admin
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher, lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves. </FONT>
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>While they were building the fire, Hogen heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: "There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?" </FONT>
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>One of the monks replied: "From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind." </FONT>
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>"Your head must feel very heavy," observed Hogen, "if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind."</FONT>
Admin
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>i'll see you in the trenches / caching dope dreams and scoring wenches / the boxes of the mind flexing parliaments and wrenches / the man in the oversoul with its cross-eyed stenches</FONT>
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>stitch, snitch - a fire in the pylon! / the russian mob is after your nylons! / snap - the bretheren of the 8-ball / i left the crabcake in the west stall</FONT>
<FONT face="Courier New" size=2>yo - get that clock off your ass / i need time for silly seal's backlash / slash! katana through the shelf! / cuttin' holes in you like keebler elves</FONT>
Admin
Hey Todd!
That's scary...
I went to college in the mid-1990's to study electronics and specialized in Communications.
We had an introduction to microcomputers and had to learn to write short programs in Assembly Language. I still remember having to convert lots of things to Hexadecimal and Octogonal number systems.
The biggest life lesson this kid needs to learn is that none of us knows Everything. His ego appears to be a little oversized. Had a few of those sitting next to me while I was in college.
One of my instructors at the end of it all said, "if you take away anything from these past few years, it should be that you should now be able to know how to look to find the answers to whatever problems you come across". And search I did in the first few years since I had no Senior Engineer to guide me in my work. Libraries, fellow technicians, the Internet, I looked everywhere for information to help me find solutions to technical problems.
Everyone around us teaches us something.
Hopefully he'll pick up on that soon.
Good Luck!
Admin
Did it cross anyone's mind (inlcuding the original poster) that the purdue kid could have been screwing with him? I am a "Twenty-Something" working iwth guys my dad's age and i screw with them all the time...they seem to lack sarcasm.
I think the OP has been had. And if i was the engineer and saw this post I would probably die laughing.:D