• evilghost (unregistered) in reply to princeton girl
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    After the interview, the interviewer started wondering about this mysterious "UN-9"... when suddenly it dawned on him - if you're into Roman numerals, that's how you'd pronounce "UNIX" if you've only ever read the word instead of actually discussing it with someone!

     

    Um, it's "Unix" not "UNIX."  It's not an acronym.  If I ever see a resume with it listed as an acronym, I ask them to tell me what it stands for.

    It's either UNIX or Unix. Specifically, UNIX is trademarked.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

    I'm sure you already knew that.

  • Paula Bean (unregistered)

    Well, the interviewed guy is no good. I am brillant in COBRA. It's named after a pet snake but It's like CMO and CMO++ combined. That's what I used to write in Java.NET since I was 14. It is 50% better than many other things put together.
     

  • (cs) in reply to dffg

    dffg:
    No there isnt, and the fact that you think linking to a linux man page proves it is a WTF.

    The only objections I can think of that you (dffg) could possibly have to calling strdup() a part of C all rest on technicalities, such as it's really part of Unix or POSIX or C++ or whatever.  But considering it's mentioned in strings.h, the header file for a standard C library, I find your claim that it's just not part of C to be hard to swallow.  So I'm just going to toss it back to you:

    Dffg, name me a C compiler that doesn't come with an implementation of strdup().

  • Jason (unregistered) in reply to princeton girl
    princeton girl:
    Um, it's "Unix" not "UNIX."  It's not an acronym.  If I ever see a resume with it listed as an acronym, I ask them to tell me what it stands for.
     
     
    Actually, UNIX is the trademarked name, and back when the people who owned that trademark will still relevant, you typically saw the all-caps version used.  Calling all UNIX-like or UNIX-derived OSes "Unix", as is common now, is a little like saying "I googled", or "I xeroxed".
     
    Oddly enough, "UNIX" is actually a kind of pun on "Multics", which *is* an acronym, but isn't written in all-caps, for whatever reason..
     
    Geeky enough to score interview points? =) 
  • Plonk (unregistered) in reply to phelyan
    phelyan:

    Believe it or not this sort of thing is not just limited to pressing buttons. A friend of a friend's customer found that their free version of a well known database driver limited them to a maximum of 20 connections. To upgrade would have cost them a massive $150, so instead they opted to have a scheduled task in windows which every now and again kills database connections which have been idle for more than 1/2 hour.

    This is a company which has an annual turnover close to $1M. 

     

    It's not necessarily the 150 bucks. Mayhaps the red tape is so thick to actually spend the $150 (eg form a committee, write a 100 page business case, get it signed off by 18 people, have it go through 7 change release processes etc, etc) it's easier to kill the connections....

  • badhuman (unregistered) in reply to verisimilidude

    seriously....wtf! 

     

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    ...or PTKFGS?

     http://ptkfgs.ytmnd.com/

     

    Slashdotted from theDailyWTF!!

     Their site is now displaying:

    MYSQL CONNECTION FAILED: [1129] Host 'ytmnd.com' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'
     

  • dwl (unregistered) in reply to themagni
    themagni:
    At my old job we used a PIC10F202 to control a VHF transmitter. It's 2mm x 4 mm and has 750 bytes of Flash and 24 bytes of RAM: http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplgidcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1335&dDocName=en020030Each transmitter required an ID number, from 0-255. There were 10 pulse rates and the option to add a movement swtich. My boss' idea was to have - I kid you not - 255 x 10 x 2 =  5100 versions of the code, each requiring a tweak to the code and a recompile, all saved with names like 10F202_60PPM_ID2_NOMOVE.HEX. The insane part is that he had already started implementing his idea. I made one version of the code and created a GUI for a HEX editor that let the production staff change the parameters by themselves. My boss looked at what I was doing and said, "Wow, that's real computer work right there - just a screen of HEX."We actually had TWO of these boards - one used the 10F202, the other used the 10F206. The 206 has a comparator, so it could be used for a saltwater switch. (There's no point in transmitting if it's underwater.) That's a total of 10,200 versions of the code for these two boards. I brought the number of versions down to two - one for the 206, one for the 202. I would have dropped the 202 completely and used the 206 on both boards, but we had already purchased and started using a reel. This means I decreased our code overhead by 99.98% and saved about 4 weeks of work every month. (Yes, a month of work a month. None of these statements are typos.) It took at least one minute to recompile and save each file, for 10,200 minutes. Divide by 60 and you get 170 hours, or 4.5 weeks at 40hours / week. The damnable thing about it is that it looks like it's impossible, so it looks like my resumé has a big glaring error on it.

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