A Software Engineer's Diary...

An American science writer is set to release a book, in which he enlists all sorts of tricky questions, riddles and several devious interviewing techniques that would enable one to land a job at Google, as well as possibly anywhere in the United States. William Poundstone, author of the new book, "Are you Smart Enough To Work At Google?" says that interviewers while recruiting today ask more bizarre and vague questions such as 'Can you swim faster in water or in syrup?' or 'How would you weigh your head?' than normal questions pertaining to the job. And therefore, with his book, he is ready to answer 'Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You Need to Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy,' as the book's subtitle read, ABC News reports. The reason Poundstone says he's offering this guide is because firstly "there are more people than there are jobs and a p...

Marissa Mayer is giving everyone at Yahoo an iPhone 5, reports Nicholas Carlson: New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just sent an email to all of Yahoo's full time and part time employees in the US, promising them a new Apple, Samsung, Nokia, or HTC smartphone. "People are happy," says a source at the company. But here's a buried lede: Yahoo is also going to discontinue IT support for Blackberry phones. The first momentary, blurting sucking noise from the drain around which RIM circles.

PUZZ LES 1.Complete the given series by finding the missing term.               2, 12, 36, 80, 150, ? 2.   What number comes next in this sequence:      18   3   9   5    14   3   == 3. If a clock takes 5 seconds to strike 5 O’clock, then find the time it takes to strike 11 O’clock? 4. Mohit has Rs 1.15 in his pocket in 6 coins. When asked for a change he couldn’t give change for a rupee, half a rupee , quarter rupee or five paisa. Which 6 coins did he have?  5. The following relation exists 539 = 48 865 = 46 726 = 44 945 = y What is the value of y? 6.Mrs. Chawla, an artist had a passion for sketch pens. Although she has a huge collection of sketch pens of different colours, but she uses only three sketch pens of different colours. For her official work, she takes sometimes one, two or occasionally all three sketch pens of diffe...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg might need to talk more often. A 30-minute appearance at a technology industry conference earlier this week has translated into $6.785 billion in additional market valuation for his company. Facebook shares finished Friday's regular trading session up 6.2 percent at $22 as Wall Street's confidence in the company continued to improve in the wake of the 28-year-old CEO's first public appearance since a rocky initial public offering in May. The social networking company's progress introducing a new advertising service that gives marketers improved ways to reach consumers on Facebook also helped bolster its shares, analysts said. "People are starting to feel a little more comfortable," said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst with Sterne, Agree & Leach. Zuckerberg's comments, in which he highlighted mobile business progress, suggested Facebook could enter the search market and expressed confidence in future money-making pros...

Web giant eBay has unveiled a new logo for its website, which has  striking similarities with its old one and also with Google's iconic homepage logo. The auction and shopping site has had the same logo since the 1990s, but the redesigned logo looks like little more than a flattened-out version of the old. The logo was revealed by company president Devin Wenig, who said the move reflected a shift away from auctions and collectibles toward full-priced, buy-it-now merchandise. "The eBay logo is known the world over, so changing it was not a decision made lightly. The time felt right," the Daily Mail quoted Wenig, as writing in a letter to the employees. eBay is focusing more on new, fixed-priced sales as it tries to compete better with Amazon.com, which has been growing faster. "It's eBay today: a global online marketplace that offers a cleaner, more contemporary and consistent experience," Wenig wrote. "Auction-style listings, used goods...

A customer in Shenzhen, China, took a brand new laptop out of its box and booted it up for the first time. But as the screen lit up, the computer began taking on a life of its own. The machine, triggered by a virus hidden in its hard drive, began searching across the internet for another computer.  The laptop, supposedly in pristine, super-fast, direct-from-the-factory condition, had instantly become part of an illegal, global network capable of attacking websites, looting bank accounts and stealing personal data.  For years, online investigators have warned consumers about the dangers of opening or downloading files emailed to them from unknown or suspicious sources. Now, they say malicious software and computer code could be lurking on computers before the bubble wrap even comes off.  The shopper in this case was part of a team of Microsoft researchers in China investigating the sale of counterfeit software. They suddenly had been introduced to a m...

Apple today began taking pre-orders for the recently launched iPhone 5, the latest iteration of its iconic smartphone. Within a few hours, the Apple Store website showed shipping time of two weeks for all variants of the device -- 16, 32 and 64GB. As with all iPhone launches, Apple has received a tremendous response for the recently unveiled device. The first lot of all-new iPhone 5 will be shipped on September 21, while the devices being sold at the time of writing this story were scheduled to be delivered on September 28, a week later. Apple has also put two devices-per-user limit on its online store. When pre-booking for iPhone 5 started, many buyers encountered problems on the website, such as store under maintenance message, reported CNET. The overwhelming online sales response indicates that those who choose to buy iPhone 5 from Apple stores and carriers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint should gear up for long lines and hours of waiting. Apple iPhone 5 fea...

Google has announced the release of the Course Builder project, taking online learning down an open-source road. The project enables you to make your own learning resources, complete with scheduled activities and lessons. All you need is some skill with HTML and JavaScript. In July, Research at Google ran a large open online course,  Power Searching with Google . The course was successful, with 155,000 registered students. "Through this experiment, we learned that Google technologies can help bring education to a global audience. So we packaged up the technology we used to build Power Searching and are providing it as an open source project called Course Builder," the company explained in a blog post. Stanford University, Indiana University, UC San Diego, Saylor.org, LearningByGivingFoundation.org, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and a group of universities in Spain led by Universia, CRUE, and Banco Santander-Universidades are planning to use thi...

Google Inc has bought startup VirusTotal, picking up a fledgling but widely used cybersecurity player in a move that could beef up protection for its Internet services. The acquisition of VirusTotal, which aggregates warnings on submitted files and websites from most antivirus solutions, including Intel Corp's McAfee andSymantec Corp , could significantly shore up the search giant's ability to weed out infectious content from Gmail, social network Google+ and even the pages it shows search users. VirusTotal operates by accepting requests for virus checks, running every available protection software on the questioned document or pages, then distributing the results to security vendors. Because those results include the documents and websites submitted, the service is considered a valuable source of information by the security industry about new threats and potential targets. On Friday, the cybersecurity operator stressed that..

ATRENTA Placement written paper and interview questions Section 1: Programming: 1) How would you interchange the value stored in two variables without using a temporary variable. 2) One question based on the padding used in structures, where the the structure in the question had one char, one int and one float in different order and hence the size of structure and the pointer variables to these structures was asked. 3) Simple questions on strings.. (2 such questions, make sure you play around with pointers and strings). 4) Program to find mirror image of a tree. 5) Implementation of Stack. 6) Some simple questions picked up straight from ‘crack_the_interview’ pdf.. 7) Hashing (Interview) Section 2: Digital Circuits and Systems: 1) Make a 5:1 MUX USING 4 2:1 MUXs.. 2) How many MUXs would be required to make any general n:1 MUX and hence 7:1 MUX? 3) Counter decoding.. Where a counter circuit (using gates and FFs is given) and you are required to decode the circuit an...