I remember a few years ago the saving interests in Australia was around 8% plus. That was risk-free rate, if you take a bit more risk on other financial products, 10% might be achievable. Not feasible for 20 years though.
I don't know the history of Australian interest rates but the only time US interest rates were at that level was during the inflationary times of the 70's.
This link says current interest rates are 3.5%. [1]
Just to point out: these days you don't have to use the dosbox/qbasic combo in order to have a qbasic-compatible environment. There is an open-source implementation called qb64 that is both qbasic compatible and cross-platform (Windows, Linux and Mac).
Also, in qbasic, line number is optional. With SUB and FUNCTION, you can actually do structured programming like what other programming languages such as Pascal does.
There's a pretty big difference in China sending a couple of warships to the gulf and USSR setting up a nuclear missile base with missiles pointed at the US on Cuba.
Nuclear missles or "90000 tons of diplomacy" are both certain kinds of deterrence, nothing more, nothing less. If US does not have those carrier combat groups, China wouldn't care either.
I'm going to sound like an apologist, but the Cold War nuclear miltary-political calculus was very different pre-ICMB+MAD on both sides of the Soviet-US split.
SLBMs were just being developed in the early 60s, and so Cuban-based missiles represented a novel, more credible first-strike threat given distance (~20 minutes flight time).
You can still do QBasic though. There is an open-sourced implementation called QB64 [1]. QB64 is also cross-platform that can run on Windows/Linux/Mac/Android.
Wow, amazing! Though it does seem a bit creepy to me, as the stories in old sci-fi novels, where a big corporation X built and operated a robot army taking over the governments and ruling the world, tend to become reality at a increasingly fast pace.
We didn't really. They, respectively, didn't finish the entire test, over-engineered a few of the other questions and failed the comprehension test (we test the ability to understand requirements as well).
The thing is clearly marked "pragmatic solutions" rather than most interesting as well.
>>1 person wrote a proper state machine driven parser that worked.
Look, the fact is, based on the replies below, this guy is probably better off working somewhere else.
Not to go off on this particular person, the preoccupation with "Library Knowledge(tm)" in the enterprise (so, Java) world has become an epidemic. I have seen libraries used for all the wrong reasons, pulling in great gobs of someone elses code to do a bloody string copy!
Damn, you are hiring coders. Let them fricken code, for God's sake.
Please, I know all of the counter arguments (I've been harangued by them for years), but I really think that there is a middle ground here. Some things are truly worth bringing into a project via library. Big things, things that are really hard things that you may not have the staff to handle. But if we are afraid to let coders code some stuff, even trivial stuff, then we have killed the one true joy that we had in the first place: coding!
One thing to remember about libraries is that they have bugs too! Just because someones got an apache page, doesn't mean that there are no bugs in there lurking. You WILL most probably need to understand the problem/solution well enough to use the library in the first place.
We pay people for robust solutions, not to write code. It's a whole lot more complicated than "just programming". In fact we'd rather they wrote less code and did more thinking.
Experienced engineers will trade off a COTS solution against build. Inexperienced engineers will machine 2000 M3x12 screws by hand.
Just because you're an engineer doesn't mean we want you to sit in front of a lathe/mill all day.
Libraries wouldn't exist if we didn't want to reuse work. With respect to more bugs in libraries, this is rarely the case for established products. In fact by writing our own code with similar intent will almost certainly incur more test effort, more odd edge cases and more $$$.
Final point: I wrote some code a few years ago in Java that spoke to .doc files, databases, a SOAP API and a service bus. It was (excluding blank lines and bracketed lines) 2900 lines of code with 850 unit tests. It handles over a million insurance contracts a year. This would have not been possible if I'd written ANY component myself.
I was paid to solve the problem, not write those libraries again.
In my mind the bigger issue is that something like CSV parsing is so common, and so old that it just should be part of every higher level language's standard library these days, as common as split() is. That way people learning the language learn that you just do it with the library and get on with it.
(I agree with the rest, anybody can more or less learn their way around a library with a little time, but learning to actually code well is a much more valuable skill and much more rare).
I thought for coding tests implementations are supposed to be done from scratch on. Or at least the guy who wrote the working parser should be on top of the list.
Not really. We want people to solve the problem, not invent something that needs maintenance. In some cases, from scratch is important, but for most it's not.
No we don't want competent people showboating and pissing cash up the wall reinventing wheels that have a high maintenance cost because it's fun.
We hire engineers.
An analogy: would you hire the electrical engineer who knocks up an ASIC for every task or the one who designs in a COTS part for a predictable unit cost and manufacturing lead time?
Palm's Treo series were pretty good smartphones back then. Though some braindead CEOs split the company into one hardware and one software company, while neither had the sufficient resources to put a new generation of smartphone OS through.
Not surprised. He has been bashing China for a while, which is the trending topic in the mainstream media anyway. Though I do wish some of the media agencies strike out of the group-thinking, and examine what NASA has been up to for the past decade, and what needs to be improved in terms of space exploration.
I haven't seen any trend of bashing China, unless of course reporting honestly is bashing.
NASA, despite its huge budget cuts, in the last decade has operated three rovers on Mars, landed one new one (via spectacular jet crane awesomeness). They've built new types of rockets, taken pictures of the universe, continued to do valuable research in science and space. Continued to be a major contributor to the ISS. And much much more.
I think the real question here is, where have you been for the last decade?
I haven't seen any trend of bashing China, unless of course reporting honestly is bashing.
Well, this is a bit subjective, in my book selective reporting that focuses on negativity is bashing.
I am all for more budgets for NASA. Quite frankly, I don't follow NASA's missions very often. For the past decade I did hear from time to time that NASA sent rovers to some planets. Meanwhile, I kept hearing the flip-flop stories about the water on Mars. It gave me impression that NASA either went hugely under-budget on their Mars' missions or they spread themselves too thin. That was my point (admittedly I may need to soften my tone in my comment). Not sure if NASA had a vision problem, in my opinion, it may have made more impact and (hopefully) got more funding if they narrowed down their scope of missions and obtained more decisive results.
The flip-flop comes from mainstream media interpretation of the science, usually not from the people that are part of the missions. Even the "science journalists" that are attached to bigger missions frequently dramatize findings in order to "make it a compelling story" (source: one of my exes was such a journalist.)
> either went hugely under-budget on their Mars' missions or they spread themselves too thin
I think that is a misread of the situation; the lack of a consistent narrative and publicity across NASA and its missions has more to do with the organizational structure of the PR and public education/outreach within NASA than the science or the mission management itself.
the US, english-speaking media tends to only point out extremely good, and extreme bad things about china.
this paints a really extreme (go figure) picture of china. some people think it's the most amazing place on earth and some people think it's some kind of post apocalyptic hellscape.
as always, the truth can be found by actually going there, something most people with very strong opinions about china have never done and probably never will do, in all likelihood
