[Ffmpeg-cvslog] r5941 - trunk/doc/soc.txt

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 05:51:53PM +0100, Robert Swain wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> >On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 11:37:06AM +0200, Luca Barbato wrote:
> >[...]
> >>>+ Screen the students better regarding their commitments during the
> >>>summer and skills.
> >
> >fully agree, maybe a few questions to check their knowledge of C would
> >be nice before accepting them, that should be done realtime (IRC) to make
> >cheating a little harder
> >some questions about things like !!x, big/little endian, various pointers 
> >to
> >pointers, int32_t vs int, relative speed of * + & % /, 
> >difference of ++i vs. i++, differnt precission of float vs. double, 
> >security
> >issues about checkung input, malloc(x*y) integer overflows, ...
> >ability to work with diff/patch/svn, ...
> 
> I didn't/don't know some of these things though I could have given an 
> educated guess. I don't think it's reasonable to reject someone for not 
> knowing them especially as they're easy to learn just by reading a couple 
> of things or looking at a table. Having just read that list I've learned a 
> couple of things I should think about and check when writing stuff. Maybe 
> I'm biased in this opinion but I don't think not knowing such things is 
> sufficient grounds to write someone off if they're interested and 
> enthusiastic about their work.

if you have more people who want to work than people google is willing to pay,
then you must select a subset of them and asking them question about C,
optimizations, ... is one way to select such a subset of students
if the number of students is <= the number google is willing to pay then
of course should we accept everyone ...

and the idea is not that this is a silly test for which you should sit down
a week before and memorize a few things but rather a way to predict how
good the final code will be, of course sitting down a week and learning
stuff will have some effect on the quality of the final code but memorizing 
stuff is easier then actually being able to apply that knowledge
maybe we should give students a small exercise before the next SOC instead of
some questions about C, maybe something like a messy piece of code which they
then should cleanup and a buggy piece of code where they should find the bugs

the big problem with any test though will be that some people will be nervous
and will perform worse then they would if they are not nervous ...

an alternative would be maybe that we could ask every student to show us some
program (s)he wrote ...

[...]

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

In the past you could go to a library and read, borrow or copy any book
Today you'd get arrested for mere telling someone where the library is