Warp wrote:
>   Which makes the question maybe a bit unfair: Even if the person does know
> what it is about, if he can't remember it from its name, it will look like
> he doesn't know about that subject at all.

Of course, I can give hints in person. :-)

>   Besides, in which job would it be necessary to know this?

Computer programming. You should know how the system works, what a L1 vs L2 
cache is, etc. If you're writing an OS, you probably should know how page 
tables work.

This whole thing started when I was working with a guy named Kevin. He was 
an OK programmer, but I kept having to bail him out of corners he'd painted 
himself into.  At one point, he had a big complicated way of keeping track 
of where he was in a network protocol, using strings with stars and plus 
signs and zeros and such to track what messages he'd seen and such, and I 
said "why not just use a state machine?"  He said "What's a state machine?"

So the deterministic vs non-deterministic question was the first one on my list.

>   Unicode encodings? Certainly useful to know. Basic SQL knowledge? Can
> become handy sometimes even in jobs not directly related to databses.
> Knowing what a TLB is and how it works? Exactly where do you need to know
> that? It's not like knowing that would change the way you develop programs.

As I said, these are to assess your breadth of knowledge. It's like asking 
someone to write a program to compute prime numbers - you'll never have to 
do that at work either.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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