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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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