연합뉴스발 대학생들의 일하고 싶은 기업, 누구를 위한 기사인가?

연합뉴스발로 한겨레에 실린 기사를 보면서 언뜻 드는 생각이, 이 통계는 사실 학생들에게는 거의 쓸모가 없는 통계라는 점이었다. 뭐 인크루트라는 회사가 사실 다른 회사들이 주 고객이라는 걸 생각해보면 별 놀랄 일도 아니긴 하지만 대체 이 기사 그리고 통계는 누구에게 도움이 되는가?

일단 일반적인 대학생들의 특정 회사에 대한 의견은 대부분 간접정보들을 바탕으로 한 것이고, 그나마도 다양한 매체를 통해서 "흘려들은" 것들을 바탕으로 한 이미지 중심일 수 밖에 없겠다 - 경영학과 전공에 해당 회사들을 비교연구 정도 해본 학생들만 대상으로 조사를 하지 않았다면 말이다. 그러니 이 통계는 회사들 입장에서 볼때 잠재적인 고용 대상자들(대학 재학생들) 가운데 이미지가 어떤지를 알아낼 수 있는, 그래서 기업내 홍보팀 입장에서는 나름대로 유용한 정보가 되겠다.

그런데, 이 통계를 학생들 입장에서나 일반 소비자들 입장에서 보면, 그닥 쓸모가 없어 보인다. 실제로 진짜 일하기 좋은 기업을 측정한 것이 아니니, 취업하는 사람들 입장에서는 어느 회사를 선택할 지 결정하는 데 별다른 도움이 되지 않고 (뭐, 이 통계에서 순위가 높은 기업은 경쟁률도 높다고 생각할 수 있을테니, 쓸데없이 경쟁률만 높은 회사를 걸러내는 데에나 써먹을 수 있으려나), 일반 소비자들의 관점에서도 해당 회사들을 평가하는 데 하등의 도움이 되지 않는다.

이 기사가 실려서 이익을 보는 곳은 첫째로 인크루트이고 - 회사들과 취업 지망자들(대학생)에게 무료로 널리 홍보할 수 있었으니까 - 둘째로는 순위에 높이 오른 회사들이겠다 - "대학생들의 선망의 대상 1위"라는 제목은 해당 회사에게는 좋은 홍보 재료가 되니까 말이다.

연합뉴스가 홈페이지에 소개에서 "고객의 이익과 국가 발전에 기여하고 있습니다"라고 말할 때 "고객"이 인크루트와 몇몇 대기업만인지 궁금하다.

PS. Sorry for readers who can't read Korean - I guess most blogs are single-language sources, so I haven't seen any RSS reader that supports filtering based on languages. Maybe I should split my blog into two different blogs, one in Korean and one in English.

BIZARRE airplane misshaps -- unbelievable, but true! [photo gallery]

Amazing pictures of airplanes in...various "situations".



read more | digg story

NYT gun death statistics

A very graphic summary of gun-related deaths in the US.

한국, Virginia Tech, 그리고 인종주의

한계레 신문에 게제된 Virginia Tech 참사와 관련된 기사에 달려있는 댓글중에서:

ozzybear (70.XXX.159.240)

2007/04/24 10:26:32 버지니아 사태와 한국인의 반응변화: 1. 사건 발생직후: 역시 폭력적인 나라 미국이야.. (그럼 그렇지...) 2. 범인이 중국인일지 모른다.: 짱개쉐끼들이 그럼 그렇지.. 으이 떼놈들이 남의 나라가서 깽판치네...ㅋㅋ 3. 범인이 한국인이다. : 이그 좆됐다.. 어떻하나 이제 한국인 전부 보복당하겠다. 한국으로 도망가야겠다. 4. 전부 사죄하자.. 무릅꿇고 빌자.. 금식하고 모금하자..

한국을 비꼬는 시각이 다분하긴 하지만, 사실 이 댓글이 이번 "사건"을 단적으로 설명해주는 글이라고 생각한다.

총기 사망사고로는 Columbine 사건 이후 최대의 사고라고는 하지만, 어떤 면에서는 총기 사망 사고는 미국에서 "흔히"있는 일에 불과하다. 많은 사람이 죽었다는 양적인 면에서는 특별하지만, 한 정신병자가 총으로 불특정 다수를 겨냥해서 여러사람을 죽였다는 내용적인 측면에서는 그저 미국에서 한 해 여러건 발생하는 사고중에 하나 였을 뿐이다. 오히려 내용적인 측면에서는 2003년에 있었던 Beltway Sniper 사건이 많은 미국사람에게는 더 깊은 충격을 줬다.

그런 면에서 보면 한국의 이번 사건에 대한 반응은...되려 한국 사람들 속에 있는 인종주의를 드러나게 했다고 본다. "한국"이라는 나라와 그 나라 출신 사람들 모두가 정신병자 한 명 배출한 것에 대해 미안해 해야 한다고 보는 시각은, 한국인들 스스로가 한국인들 전체를 하나의 묶음으로 일괄적으로 보려는 인종주의적인 사고에서 비롯된다고 생각한다. "한국이 같은 일을 당했더라면 어떻게 했을까" 하는 질문에 대한 답이 무서운 것이기에, 한국 사람들은 이렇게 놀라고, 미안해 하며, 용서를 빈다. 한국이 "반성"해야 하는 것은 조승희가 아니라 한 명의 정신병자로 국가와 인종 전체를 쉽게 평가해 버리는 그 단순한 인종주의적인 관점이다.

Drive-by Pharming anyone ?

I find this relatively recent paper (PDF) about a new attack on the home routers interesting. Not only because of the attack itself, but because many other HTTP-based attack is possible from an internal network - imagine a corporate user behind the company firewall loading a Javascript that scans the internal network for a possible victim of HTTP-based attack...

A proof of non-existence of God ?

This book sounds very interesting, to believers of either God or science (or none).

Quote of the day.

The concluding remark from another interesting article at Wired News titled "How Yahoo blew it":

But now we have empirical evidence: At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.

Apple being arrogant ?

After reading Cisco blog and Bloomberg report, I can't believe Apple uses the argument of "first cell phone with iPhone name". A phone is a phone, whether that's based on wireless or wired or cell or VoIP. Would Apple just let purely Ogg-based music player use iPod name, because such a player would be "first Ogg-based music player" ? IANAL, and I know law sometimes has funny implications and consequences, but this has to be BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS that Apple is infrining upon Cisco's trademark.

I'd say this is typical Apple arrogance.

Custom search for compiler and optimization

If you want to search the information about the compiler optimization,
you may want to try http://www.codeopt.com.I've tried a few keywords and it worked reasonably well although I didn't compare it against the regular Google.

IA64, PowerPC and the irony of life

I've never expected to work on Intel's IA64, or never imagined even logging into an IA64 box. Ditto for PowerPC (although slightly less so).

However, I must have incurred some wrath from God (or put your favorite deity here) - otherwise I wouldn't be logged onto an IA64 box and a PowerPC box, trying to bootstrap a branch of gcc on them. Talk about ironies...

Yet another open sourced C compiler

I've just read this article in The Register:

 Sun furthermore re-stated its commitment
to open source Java - something IBM was
particularly vocal in calling for two years ago.
The Java HotSpot micro virtual machine,
the C compiler and the "majority" of
Java Standard Edition (Java SE) will
be open sourced by the end of this year.

Sounds like my former project is finally going to be open-sourced :)

Ever heard of...Encyclopedia of spam ?

One day I came to the office, and found this huge book sitting on the desk of my officemate, with his own name on the cover. Certainly I can not complain I have a boring officemate :) - if you want to know more about this unlikely-to-exist tome, you can read about a rather interesting history of it.

Creative or crazy ?

Naver, and core competency

According to the report, Naver, one of the largest internet portal and search site in South Korea, had a service interruption of almost 6 hours. Well, 6-hour outage is outrageous itself, but that's not why I'm flabbergasted. I just learned from the same news report that Naver is "outsourcing" its IT infrastructure to IBM. And it gets even better. Apparently Naver doesn't take care of their domain either - they "outsource" their DNS management to www.gabia.com.

An internet portal/search site that doesn't know how to take care of its IT infrastructure and domain ? Somebody needs to have a better grip on their core competencies...

At last, Solaris libm source is available

I knew this was coming but finally it happened:

http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/devpro/
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/devpro/downloads/current/

This is arguably one of the best generic implementation of libm that supports C99. Sun's math library folks are, among the best - if you're interested in more detail, try reading Sun's numerical computation guide.

Too bad CDDL vs GPL schism will probably make it not as widely adopted :(

OT: quote of the day

I collect interesting quotes in my diary, and today I added a new one:

...a very rich person should leave his kids
enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.

Who else would say this but Warrent Buffett, the world's second richest man ?
20 years after saying this on an interview with Fortune magazine, he kept his word - here's the article about the estimated $40 billion charitable donation and the conversation with him about it.


You can say that my admiration for Mr. Buffett went up a couple notches today. Maybe it's time for you to pick up some Berkshire Hathaway shares - that is, if you can afford. If you're not familiar with the Berkshire Hathaway share prices, take a look at BRK.A or BRK.B.

Seeing the world in assembly

Most typical programmers, when encountered a buggy behavior in their code, often try to diagnose it assuming the compiler is correct (as least intially). That should be the right approach for most programmers. However, being a compiler writer, I very often look at the assembly and start from there - and that helps me spot problems faster than others.

Today was no different - some user had a problem, and it turned out to be a compiler bug but everybody was trying to diagnose it from the higher-level. Given enough time, I have no doubt they would have found the same problem, but different perspective certainly helps (and saves time too!).

This "seeing-everything-through-assembly" approach is fairly robust (at least you won't get mislead by the compiler errors - IMNSHO "being mislead" is the biggest time killer in any debugging effort) but not fool-proof - sometimes, every once in a while, a hardware bug or a kernel bug can bite you :( Even then, you're well equipped to diagnose such a bug if you're looking at the assembly level.

I know, the assembly programmers are a dying breed - I often hear that nowadays some CS students don't even know the assembly. But let me tell you that it could be very useful to know your assembly (whichever processor you're using). At least that was the case for me today :)

Google Groups and typo

Typo can be embarrasing. Especially when you mistyped your homepage URL, sending people to some squatter site. Worse if you do that in a USENET posting. *sigh*. I cancelled the post but USENET being what it is, it's already too late. (My apology to those of you who clicked that link).

I blame it to Google Groups for not picking up up my signature from the Gmail setting, nor providing any option to have a signature. I haven't figured out the company internal news server, and that's forcing me to use Google Groups instead of my usual client. Google Groups is fine for quick reading and searching, but not for everyday news reader (especially posting part). At least that's the case for me yet.

comp.arch internship anyone ?

Looks like Andy Glew of (now) Intel is looking for an intern (see the comp.arch posting).

If you're a graduate student who's interested in the computer architecture, I'm sure this would be a great opportunity to learn from one of the most interesting processor architects of our time. The profile he's looking for would have fit me perfectly, if I were still a graduate student. Too bad I'm not :)

My last day at the first job

Welcome to Seongbae's blog. Especially welcome to you folks who followed link from my old blog.

Today is 5/18/2006, and it's a very special day for me, cause it is my last day at my first job. Like all good things, my first job finally came to an end. I'm really proud of what I've accomplished, and happy for all things I've learned and all friends I made during that seven years.

Anyway, I don't know what will happen to my old blog at my company's blogging site - probably I'll lose the access although hopefully my postings won't be deleted. Regardless of what happens there, I'll continue to post here from now on.