Dilbert - crappy chain emails

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Microsoft Interview Questions

Wicked interview questions from http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/default.aspx?content=question.htm

Riddles

• Why is a manhole cover round?
• How many cars are there in the USA? (A popular variant is "How many gas stations are there in the USA?")
• How many manhole covers are there in the USA?
• You've got someone working for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. The gold bar is segmented into seven connected pieces. You must give them a piece of gold at the end of every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do you pay your worker?
• One train leaves Los Angeles at 15mph heading for New York. Another train leaves from New York at 20mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at 25mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?
• Imagine a disk spinning like a record player turn table. Half of the disk is black and the other is white. Assume you have an unlimited number of color sensors. How many sensors would you have to place around the disk to determine the direction the disk is spinning? Where would they be placed?
• Imagine an analog clock set to 12 o'clock. Note that the hour and minute hands overlap. How many times each day do both the hour and minute hands overlap? How would you determine the exact times of the day that this occurs?
• You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random, and then a marble will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how can you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds of getting a red marble using your scheme?
• Pairs of primes separated by a single number are called prime pairs. Examples are 17 and 19. Prove that the number between a prime pair is always divisible by 6 (assuming both numbers in the pair are greater than 6). Now prove that there are no 'prime triples.'
• There is a room with a door (closed) and three light bulbs. Outside the room there are three switches, connected to the bulbs. You may manipulate the switches as you wish, but once you open the door you can't change them. Identify each switch with its bulb.
• Suppose you had 8 billiard balls, and one of them was slightly heavier, but the only way to tell was by putting it on a scale against another. What's the fewest number of times you'd have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
• Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror, facing it. Raise your left hand. Raise your right hand. Look at your reflection. When you raise your left hand your reflection raises what appears to be his right hand. But when you tilt your head up, your reflection does too, and does not appear to tilt his/her head down. Why is it that the mirror appears to reverse left and right, but not up and down?
• You have 4 jars of pills. Each pill is a certain weight, except for contaminated pills contained in one jar, where each pill is weight + 1. How could you tell which jar had the contaminated pills in just one measurement?
• The SF Chronicle has a word game where all the letters are scrambled up and you have to figure out what the word is. Imagine that a scrambled word is 5 characters long:
1. How many possible solutions are there?
2. What if we know which 5 letters are being used?
3. Develop an algorithm to solve the word.
• There are 4 women who want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have 17 minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time. Any party who crosses, either 1 or 2 people, must have the flashlight with them. The flashlight must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each woman walks at a different speed. A pair must walk together at the rate of the slower woman's pace.

  Woman 1: 1 minute to cross
  Woman 2: 2 minutes to cross
  Woman 3: 5 minutes to cross
  Woman 4: 10 minutes to cross
  

  For example if Woman 1 and Woman 4 walk across first, 10 minutes have elapsed when they get to the other side of the bridge. If Woman 4 then returns with the flashlight, a total of 20 minutes have passed and you have failed the mission. What is the order required to get all women across in 17 minutes? Now, what's the other way?

• If you had an infinite supply of water and a 5 quart and 3 quart pail, how would you measure exactly 4 quarts?
• You have a bucket of jelly beans. Some are red, some are blue, and some green. With your eyes closed, pick out 2 of a like color. How many do you have to grab to be sure you have 2 of the same?
• If you have two buckets, one with red paint and the other with blue paint, and you take one cup from the blue bucket and poor it into the red bucket. Then you take one cup from the red bucket and poor it into the blue bucket. Which bucket has the highest ratio between red and blue? Prove it mathematically.

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Algorithms

• What's the difference between a linked list and an array?
• Implement a linked list. Why did you pick the method you did?
• Implement an algorithm to sort a linked list. Why did you pick the method you did? Now do it in O(n) time.
• Describe advantages and disadvantages of the various stock sorting algorithms.
• Implement an algorithm to reverse a linked list. Now do it without recursion.
• Implement an algorithm to insert a node into a circular linked list without traversing it.
• Implement an algorithm to sort an array. Why did you pick the method you did?
• Implement an algorithm to do wild card string matching.
• Implement strstr() (or some other string library function).
• Reverse a string. Optimize for speed. Optimize for space.
• Reverse the words in a sentence, i.e. "My name is Chris" becomes "Chris is name My." Optimize for speed. Optimize for space.
• Find a substring. Optimize for speed. Optimize for space.
• Compare two strings using O(n) time with constant space.
• Suppose you have an array of 1001 integers. The integers are in random order, but you know each of the integers is between 1 and 1000 (inclusive). In addition, each number appears only once in the array, except for one number, which occurs twice. Assume that you can access each element of the array only once. Describe an algorithm to find the repeated number. If you used auxiliary storage in your algorithm, can you find an algorithm that does not require it?
• Count the number of set bits in a number. Now optimize for speed. Now optimize for size.
• Multiple by 8 without using multiplication or addition. Now do the same with 7.
• Add numbers in base n (not any of the popular ones like 10, 16, 8 or 2 -- I hear that Charles Simonyi, the inventor of Hungarian Notation, favors -2 when asking this question).
• Write routines to read and write a bounded buffer.
• Write routines to manage a heap using an existing array.
• Implement an algorithm to take an array and return one with only unique elements in it.
• Implement an algorithm that takes two strings as input, and returns the intersection of the two, with each letter represented at most once. Now speed it up. Now test it.
• Implement an algorithm to print out all files below a given root node.
• Given that you are receiving samples from an instrument at a constant rate, and you have constant storage space, how would you design a storage algorithm that would allow me to get a representative readout of data, no matter when I looked at it? In other words, representative of the behavior of the system to date.
• How would you find a cycle in a linked list?
• Give me an algorithm to shuffle a deck of cards, given that the cards are stored in an array of ints.
• The following asm block performs a common math function, what is it?

  cwd xor ax, dx sub ax, dx

• Imagine this scenario:
  I/O completion ports are communictaions ports which take handles to files, sockets, or any other I/O. When a Read or Write is submitted to them, they cache the data (if necessary), and attempt to take the request to completion. Upon error or completion, they call a user-supplied function to let the users application know that that particular request has completed. They work asynchronously, and can process an unlimited number of simultaneous requests.
  Design the implementation and thread models for I/O completion ports. Remember to take into account multi-processor machines.
• Write a function that takes in a string parameter and checks to see whether or not it is an integer, and if it is then return the integer value.
• Write a function to print all of the permutations of a string.
• Implement malloc.
• Write a function to print the Fibonacci numbers.
• Write a function to copy two strings, A and B. The last few bytes of string A overlap the first few bytes of string B.
• How would you write qsort?
• How would you print out the data in a binary tree, level by level, starting at the top?

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Applications

• How can computer technology be integrated in an elevator system for a hundred story office building? How do you optimize for availability? How would variation of traffic over a typical work week or floor or time of day affect this?
• How would you implement copy-protection on a control which can be embedded in a document and duplicated readily via the Internet?
• Define a user interface for indenting selected text in a Word document. Consider selections ranging from a single sentence up through selections of several pages. Consider selections not currently visible or only partially visible. What are the states of the new UI controls? How will the user know what the controls are for and when to use them?
• How would you redesign an ATM?
• Suppose we wanted to run a microwave oven from the computer. What kind of software would you write to do this?
• What is the difference between an Ethernet Address and an IP address?
• How would you design a coffee-machine for an automobile.
• If you could add any feature to Microsoft Word, what would it be?
• How would you go about building a keyboard for 1-handed users?
• How would you build an alarm clock for deaf people?

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Thinkers

• How are M&Ms made?
• If you had a clock with lots of moving mechanical parts, you took it apart piece by piece without keeping track of the method of how it was disassembled, then you put it back together and discovered that 3 important parts were not included; how would you go about reassembling the clock?
• If you had to learn a new computer language, how would you go about doing it?
• You have been assigned to design Bill Gates bathroom. Naturally, cost is not a consideration. You may not speak to Bill.
• What was the hardest question asked of you so far today?
• If MS told you we were willing to invest $5 million in a start up of your choice, what business would you start? Why?
• If you could gather all of the computer manufacturers in the world together into one room and then tell them one thing that they would be compelled to do, what would it be?
• Explain a scenario for testing a salt shaker.
• If you are going to receive an award in 5 years, what is it for and who is the audience?
• How would you explain how to use Microsoft Excel to your grandma?
• Why is it that when you turn on the hot water in any hotel, for example, the hot water comes pouring out almost instantaneously?
• Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
• Suppose you go home, enter your house/apartment, hit the light switch, and nothing happens - no light floods the room. What exactly, in order, are the steps you would take in determining what the problem was?
• Interviewer hands you a black pen and says nothing but "This pen is red."

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Copying contacts from old phone to your Android phone such as Motorola Milestone

Before reading this make sure you imported your contacts from your old phone to microsoft outlook. To see how to do it please refer to your phone manual/website.

Export Outlook Contacts and Upload to your Gmail Account

You can export your Outlook Contacts as a Comma Separated Values (.csv) file and then import your contacts into your Gmail account.

Step 1: Create .csv file:

1. In Outlook, on the File menu, click Import and Export
2. Click Export to a file, and then click Next
3. Click Comma Separated Values (Windows), and then click Next
4. In the folder list, click the Contacts folder, and then click Next
5. Browse to the folder where you want to save the contacts as a .csv file
6. Type a name for the exported file, and then click OK
7. Click Next
8. Click Finish

Step 2: Import Contacts into Google Gmail:

1. Log on to Gmail, and then click Contacts at the top of the page
2. The Contacts list opens in a new window
3. Click Import Contacts
4. Click Browse, and then navigate to the .csv file that you created in the "Export Outlook Contacts" section of this article
5. Select the file, and then click Import Contacts
6. After your contacts are imported, a dialog box appears and displays the total number of contacts imported

Step 3: Import to your phone:

1. On your phone, from the Home screen, press the Menu key
2. Touch Settings
3. Touch Accounts & sync
4. Check Auto-Sync
5. Your phone will now sync and transfer your contacts from Gmail to your phone

Notes:

• Outlook Contacts without an e-mail address are not imported.
• Outlook distribution lists are not imported. Gmail does not support distribution lists.
• If an Outlook Contact that matches an existing Gmail contact is imported, your Outlook Contact information replaces the Gmail contact.

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Motorola Milestone review

The definitive Motorola Milestone review

While Motorola might have been feeling pretty happy about actually releasing a phone again in the Dext, it clearly wasn't the handset to re-launch the brand. So step forward the Milestone (Droid to our US users), the latest Android phone - but can it be Moto's greatest?

The first thing you'll notice about the Motorola Milestone is the build quality - compare it to some Android phones out there and you'll feel that it's much better than the plasticky options available from some companies (including itself - the Dext had an element of low quality about it).

The phone is noticeably thinner than before, coming in at just 13.7mm thick, which is impressive when you realise that it packs a full QWERTY keyboard into that frame as well. Along with the sleek design, the phone has a decent weight about it - to us it hits the sweet spot of not being too heavy, but weighty enough to add premium aura to the device.

The decision to use gold decal is a little suspect though - it harks back to the teeth-grindingly frustrating days of the D&G-branded Motorola Razr that didn't add anything except too much gold to the device. However, it does feel a little retro '80s... we assume that's what the kids are into these days.

But this phone is meant to be so much more than that - it's been particularly heralded over in the US as the best Android phone thus far, being the fastest, most up-to-date and agile device yet from the Google crowd.

To that end, it has the latest version of Android (2.0) as well as a nice 3.7-inch screen to boot. The display is easily the rival of the HTC Hero, being a slick and responsive capacitive effort with very little slow down when navigating through the Milestone.

Motorola's new handset is a pretty basic affair when you're looking from the front, with the four touch sensitive buttons the only notion that it's a phone. They're a little hieroglyphic-like in design, but that's something we're seeing a fair amount of these days, and we guess they work well when illuminated for touch-sensitive use.

The first thing a lot of people will notice when using the Milestone is the lip at the bottom - and we're jiggered if we can work out what that's for. When sliding the QWERTY keyboard open, it's quickly obvious that this gets in the way of typing when holding the device in two hands, so what Motorola is doing there we don't know - we can only assume there's some important hardware squashed in there.

However, we'd rather that Motorola had just made the Milestone a little bit thicker rather than adding on this extra chunk - it's a big, big downside for the phone and we can imagine it putting a lot of people off buying the device.

The QWERTY keyboard is a little cramped - think somewhere between theNokia N900 (spacious) and the Palm Pre (cramped). Others we asked to test the phone all said the keys were well spaced enough to hit, but the lip got in the way of easy handling and therefore typing.

The slide out action of the keyboard is pleasing, and once again continues the premium feel - there's a nice click when fully extended. We're also pleased to see a D-Pad and select key included - while touchscreens might be great for video and the internet, they can be very fiddly when trying to edit text, and the D-Pad is a godsend in this case.

The outside of the phone is filled with your average buttons, with the 3.5mm headphone jack nicely flush with the chassis, and the power/lock key right next to it. This latter button is a little hard to hit, being located behind part of the screen, but you do get used to it over time.

Overall, the build quality is good enough, but very likely to polarise tastes - it's very industrial-looking, and the use of gold is a little bit of a gamble in our eyes, but at least all the bits we were looking for are present and correct.

In the box

Motorola has been obvious with its bundled gifts - an eco-friendly power cable is included, as well as a microUSB charger. There's an 8GB microSD card included too, with all the Motonav software on board as well as a nice place to keep all your media and suchlike.

As you might imagine, a pair of basic headphones which double as a hands free kit are included in the box - unless you're desperate to talk using a wire we can't imagine that you'll be using these too much as we'd advise using your own buds wherever possible.

Next Page: Motorola Milestone: Interface

(Reviewed by Gareth Beavis - TechRadar )

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My portfolio website

Hi all,

I've finally built my own portfolio website for career purposes.

Feel free to check it out:

http://www.wix.com/karimjono/karimj

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