I went to a resume service a few years ago and it was a decent experience. She had me sit there and give all the details, while she formatted and reworded things to make it more impressive. I've ended up making significant changes since then, and you can look at the current version if you like. It's linked on my user page.
Really the service she provided was to get the thing started. Once that's done, it's easy to make changes to suit a particular situation or your changing experience and skillset.
As I said, I made significant changes to mine, mostly based on conversations with a guy I knew who had worked in HR doing hiring for a major company. Here are his pointers:
Your resume should be one page. It should be highlights, essentially; sort of like a movie trailer; a teaser to get you an interview. The main reason for this is that your resume will be copied and faxed, and in the process additional pages will probably be lost, and it's annoying to have to deal with staples. If you look at mine you will notice that I have seperate documents for contacts and work history, These cover all the stuff that doesn't need to be in your resume, and can be provided to the interviewer if they want it. You might also notice that I put a fair amount of time into making sure the online version of my resume would print as one page (I'm not sure if the current online version will, but it should be close enough that whatever ends up on the second page is unimportant).
Forget fancy colored paper. Again, your resume is going to be copied and faxed, and in the process the color of the paper will either be lost or will interfere with readability. The only person who will see the fancy colored paper is the receptionist you hand it to, and she's probably an after-school temp.
Use at least a 12 point font. Some of these HR folks have to go through hundreds of resumes, and the ones that stand out best are the ones they can read. Again, faxing and copying plays a factor here, especially faxing since it introduces heavy aliasing.
The final thing I have to say is don't beleive all the hype about the tech job market being in the tank. I've been layed off a little more frequently than I would have been in better times, but it's never taken me more than a couple weeks to find a new job, and so far each has been better than the last. There's nothing particularly special about me. I have only a few years of tech experience and no degrees or certifications. I've come to the conclusion that all the people complaining about there being no jobs are a bunch of lazy whiners.
The only way you can release GPL code under an NDA is if you are the origional author of every single line of the code. Otherwise the origional author can invoke the GPL death penalty, removing all your rights to whatever code they wrote, and thus invalidating your NDA.
Since UL obviously isn't the origional author of all, most, or likely even a significant amount, of the code in their distro, their NDA can probably be shot down quite easily.
Do you give the source code for GPL programs to everyone who works for you? Doubt it.
If you have the employees install the software themselves you are legally required to provide them with source if they request it. If you are installing it and they are merely using it, then you aren't distributing it and there is no requirement for you to provide source.
If the customer wants to do that every month, fine by me:-P.
Sure it's fine by you, you aren't the manufacturer who actually has to pay the costs of warranty replacement. Under the system you describe drives would have to cost 2 or 3 times as much just so the manufacturer could cover the cost of all the arbitrary replacements.
I've recieved blank stares from Radio Shack managers when I've asked them about such simple things as vacuum tubes. The Shack is pretty much useless when you need actual information.
However, here are some places I would try:
Grainger(sp?), which was already mentioned in another post, seems to carry a lot of wierd stuff you can't find anywhere else.
McMaster-Carr might be another place to look, for the same reasons as Grainger, and their online catalog is the best I've ever used.
USENET, aka Google Groups. I'm sure there are a few groups dedicated to old amps, and I wouldn't be at all suprised if there were one dedicated to exactly the one you have.
Search for equivalent parts. What things are called changes sometimes. There are various reasons why, but it's fairly common in electronics. You can buy gigantic books that deal only with what parts are equivalent to what based on manufacturer part numbers and such. Given that, you AGX style fuse could easily still be manufactured under a different name. Someone mentioned 8AG, and I wouldn't be at all suprised if there were at least 2 more.
Finally, you could modify the amp, or make an adapter for it, that would accept a fuse type that is easier to find. This is actually what I would probably do (make an adapter, I mean, it's always a shame when people start hacking up old gear). This is not an uncommon thing to do, for instance Groove Tubes sells (or did 10 years ago, anyway) solid state replacements for rectifier tubes since they have become extremely difficult to find (and they're part of the power supply, so it doesn't effect the sound). You may be able to find such a thing for your situation.
First of all, if OS X were FreeBSD, samba support for it would be way past beta by now.
Secondly, FreeBSD doesn't use the Mach kernel, it uses the BSD kernel, although newer versions of Mach are binary compatible with FreeBSD according to the Mach4 homepage.
Lastly, Samba has always been for accessing windows drives over a network. It's a free version of SMB, a protocol developed by MS and IBM for transfering data across a network. It has never been for use with internal drives, and probably never will be, because it is a network protocol.
Mac OS X should be able to see all partition types that FeeBSD can see. Linux too.
I was thinking that, too. I have no experience OS X, of course, but everybody keeps talking about how it's a *nix. It would be pretty lame if something as dumb as support for open file system formats was the thing that killed that notion.
I agree with all of your points except the last one. Throwing stuff away costs money, too. Besides, if you're just going to throw stuff away without testing it, why have the customer send it back at all? And if the customer doesn't have to send it back, or if you aren't testing returns to see if they are actually bad, what's to stop the customer from just calling you up and getting a new HDD every month for no reason? Hello sky-rocketing warranty cost!
The only thing you are correct about, for the forseable future, is the possibility of mass storage becoming solid state. There will always be a reason for there to be a seperation of volatile and non-volatile memory for as long as there are software bugs, in other words; forever. Also, fast memory will always be more expensive than slow memory. That's the reason we have hard drives today, and that's the reason mass (static)storage will continue to be slower than active storage, at least until consumers no longer care about price, in other words; forever.
Once again, the reduction of warranty periods has nothing to do with design or "fitness for purpose". The MTBF numbers are more than ample to show that.
It has everything to do with reduced margins (the amount of money a company actually makes on a sale). IBM got out of the consumer HDD business because the margins are razor thin. Warranties cost money, and the longer the warranty period the more it will cost REGARDLESS OF MTBF. A basic understanding of statistics would explain why that is so.
Basically, if Australia mandates that HDDs must have longer warranty periods in Australia, HDDs will have to be more expensive in Australia. That's the bottom line.
At worst all you have to do is send a replacement drive to everyone who claims - plus a small amount in costs for handling and postage.
Excuse me? You obviously have absolutely no idea what you're talking about!
First, you have the cost of the phone support person, even if they are just there to say "no problem, just send it in, here's the address". That would be absurd, however, since over 90% of the time the problem is that the user doesn't know what they are doing and no amount of part replacement will ever fix that.
Then you have the basic replacement costs, which you mentioned.
Then you have the tech who tests the returned part to see if, and perhaps how, the part is bad. This info is hopefully used by engineering to improve the product. Meanwhile, the part is being refurbished, retested (if it was actually bad), and either sold as a refurbished part or put into customer service stock to send out as replacements.
A warranty return can easily cost the manufacturer 3-10 times the retail price of the part.
And yes, I do work in customer service. I'm one of the techs that tests the RMA'd parts.
A basic knowledge of statistics would show you why you are wrong. The short answer to your rather uninformed accusation is that, regardless of the validity of MTBF ratings, there is a significant cost difference between a 1-year warranty and a 3-year warranty. Please refrain from posting on this topic until you have educated yourself regarding the actual issues involved.
I gave up on usenet a few years ago for the exact same reasons, but I've recently returned and been pleasently suprised. If you are simply a little picky about your groups, I think you'll find they really are as good as they were back in the day. For example, the comp.* groups don't seem to suffer any of the problems you list. I've found little else than intelligent answers from reasonable people in those groups.
The alt.* groups certainly have spam issues, though, but I've always found them to be much less "serious" anyway.
I prefer to respond to the immature "ask google" answers with details about how they completely failed to answer the question, since that is generally the case. It always brightens my day to knock some uppity bitch down a peg or two. My only regret is that I don't have time to get them all!
Hard drives are now a comodity part with razor thin margins (that's why IBM bailed from the consumer market, remember), and waranties cost money. It should be no surprise that all the remaining manufacturers are cutting their warranty period. I very much doubt that it is a reflection on actual drive performance, but rather simply a cost cutting measure.
Honestly, when I can buy a 40G Seagate for $64, so what if it only has a one year warranty. You made backups, right? Toss it and get a new one.
If you have fulfilled your contractual requirements they are required to pay you. I think it's entirely appropriate that you let them know that if they don't, not only will you sue them, but you will also do everything you can to foul the waters with their VC.
It comes down to this: another word for contractor is mercenary. Make it clear to them that you will either get paid or get revenge.
I'm not talking about binary, ASCII, or machine code necessarily, or even hardware design. I'm talking about a basic understanding of how a computer works, a basic understanding of the architecture such as is covered in the first week or so of an Assembly Language class (and apparently no other programming class, as far as I can tell). I'm talking about fetch-decode-execute, a basic understanding of memory/cache/registers... in other words a basic understanding of how the computer does what it does, how the computer "thinks". That understanding, in my experience, makes all the difference between a programmer and a good programmer.
Obviously, someone who doesn't have that understanding is not going to handle ASCII issues or binary file format issues very well, for the same reason that a calculator is useless to someone who doesn't understand basic math. No matter how "intuitive" you make the calculator, you're not going to get past that basic problem.
Last time I checked, works for hire belong to the company - not the employee.
You are correct in the general sense, but only because that's a clause written into most employment contracts. There is no law that says things work that way.
If you have the clout to renegotiate those clauses, as I beleive Dr Simonyi would have had at the time he was hired, It is entirely possible for you to retain the rights to any IP you create.
Nope, GPL covers copyright. Patents fall under completely different rules. The GPL (or similar license) would be totally ineffectual in the patent arena.
My comment was based entirely on the wording of the quote from the article, specifically "intellectual property he developed and patented", which seems to indicate that Simonyi has some claim to ownership of those patents.
I am very much aware of common industry practice. I am equally aware that there is an exception to every rule, a concept you still seem to be struggling with. I was merely trying to present the possibility that this may, in fact, be one of those rare exceptions, a possibility that is not entirely unlikely given someone of Simonyi's calibre.
Perhaps he can strive to make all 3 methods (code, tables, diagrams) interchangable. That way a given developer can use the representation that he/she likes the most without shop-wide mandates.
It will have to be interchangeable at some level. No matter what you do at the highly-abstracted-developement-interface level, the hardware is still procedural. All the fancy tables and relational tools, and all the OOP modules, and all the event driven interfaces, have to be translated into step-by-step machine code eventually or they do exactly nothing.
I'm not saying any of your ideas are bad, but it's important to recognize at some level that all of this stuff is really just window dressing. If it makes things easier for you to understand, great, but it doesn't fundamentally change how things actually get done, and at the end of the day a good programmer still needs to have some understanding of how the machine actually works.
I open Word documents on my Linux desktop all the time, no problem, and have been since I started using OpenOffice in January of this year. Ditto for Excel spreadsheets. I hope I never have a reason to open a PowerPoint file, but from all the accounts I've heard that works just fine, too.
The thing that's slowing Linux's takover of the desktop is the same thing that has historically kept the Mac from taking over the desktop: lack of commercial games.
'Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.'
If they are his patents there's likely very little MS can do about it, except maybe try to sue him into oblivion, which is where the blackmail material would come in handy.
Also, if the patents belong to him, he could just respond to a lawsuit with obscene royalty charges, effectively using MS' own money to fight MS.
If I were MS I'd just let him go and do his thing, and let him try and "compete" in the "free market".
This is apparently not just some photogates, but some sort of black box which sits between the photogates and the PC, which could easily have some proprietary data formats and such. I suspect your technique would work as long as they were then able to decode the data.
My personal approach would be to just get some photogates, wire them up to a parallel cable, and write some simple code like you describe. That seems like it would be a lot easier than trying to deal with somebody elses black box crap.
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I went to a resume service a few years ago and it was a decent experience. She had me sit there and give all the details, while she formatted and reworded things to make it more impressive. I've ended up making significant changes since then, and you can look at the current version if you like. It's linked on my user page.
Really the service she provided was to get the thing started. Once that's done, it's easy to make changes to suit a particular situation or your changing experience and skillset.
As I said, I made significant changes to mine, mostly based on conversations with a guy I knew who had worked in HR doing hiring for a major company. Here are his pointers:
Your resume should be one page. It should be highlights, essentially; sort of like a movie trailer; a teaser to get you an interview. The main reason for this is that your resume will be copied and faxed, and in the process additional pages will probably be lost, and it's annoying to have to deal with staples. If you look at mine you will notice that I have seperate documents for contacts and work history, These cover all the stuff that doesn't need to be in your resume, and can be provided to the interviewer if they want it. You might also notice that I put a fair amount of time into making sure the online version of my resume would print as one page (I'm not sure if the current online version will, but it should be close enough that whatever ends up on the second page is unimportant).
Forget fancy colored paper. Again, your resume is going to be copied and faxed, and in the process the color of the paper will either be lost or will interfere with readability. The only person who will see the fancy colored paper is the receptionist you hand it to, and she's probably an after-school temp.
Use at least a 12 point font. Some of these HR folks have to go through hundreds of resumes, and the ones that stand out best are the ones they can read. Again, faxing and copying plays a factor here, especially faxing since it introduces heavy aliasing.
The final thing I have to say is don't beleive all the hype about the tech job market being in the tank. I've been layed off a little more frequently than I would have been in better times, but it's never taken me more than a couple weeks to find a new job, and so far each has been better than the last. There's nothing particularly special about me. I have only a few years of tech experience and no degrees or certifications. I've come to the conclusion that all the people complaining about there being no jobs are a bunch of lazy whiners.
It is you who are incorrect.
The only way you can release GPL code under an NDA is if you are the origional author of every single line of the code. Otherwise the origional author can invoke the GPL death penalty, removing all your rights to whatever code they wrote, and thus invalidating your NDA.
Since UL obviously isn't the origional author of all, most, or likely even a significant amount, of the code in their distro, their NDA can probably be shot down quite easily.
Do you give the source code for GPL programs to everyone who works for you? Doubt it.
If you have the employees install the software themselves you are legally required to provide them with source if they request it. If you are installing it and they are merely using it, then you aren't distributing it and there is no requirement for you to provide source.
That's the funniest thing I've read in quite a while.
Thanks.
If the customer wants to do that every month, fine by me :-P.
Sure it's fine by you, you aren't the manufacturer who actually has to pay the costs of warranty replacement. Under the system you describe drives would have to cost 2 or 3 times as much just so the manufacturer could cover the cost of all the arbitrary replacements.
I've recieved blank stares from Radio Shack managers when I've asked them about such simple things as vacuum tubes. The Shack is pretty much useless when you need actual information.
However, here are some places I would try:
Grainger(sp?), which was already mentioned in another post, seems to carry a lot of wierd stuff you can't find anywhere else.
McMaster-Carr might be another place to look, for the same reasons as Grainger, and their online catalog is the best I've ever used.
USENET, aka Google Groups. I'm sure there are a few groups dedicated to old amps, and I wouldn't be at all suprised if there were one dedicated to exactly the one you have.
Search for equivalent parts. What things are called changes sometimes. There are various reasons why, but it's fairly common in electronics. You can buy gigantic books that deal only with what parts are equivalent to what based on manufacturer part numbers and such. Given that, you AGX style fuse could easily still be manufactured under a different name. Someone mentioned 8AG, and I wouldn't be at all suprised if there were at least 2 more.
Finally, you could modify the amp, or make an adapter for it, that would accept a fuse type that is easier to find. This is actually what I would probably do (make an adapter, I mean, it's always a shame when people start hacking up old gear). This is not an uncommon thing to do, for instance Groove Tubes sells (or did 10 years ago, anyway) solid state replacements for rectifier tubes since they have become extremely difficult to find (and they're part of the power supply, so it doesn't effect the sound). You may be able to find such a thing for your situation.
First of all, if OS X were FreeBSD, samba support for it would be way past beta by now.
Secondly, FreeBSD doesn't use the Mach kernel, it uses the BSD kernel, although newer versions of Mach are binary compatible with FreeBSD according to the Mach4 homepage.
Lastly, Samba has always been for accessing windows drives over a network. It's a free version of SMB, a protocol developed by MS and IBM for transfering data across a network. It has never been for use with internal drives, and probably never will be, because it is a network protocol.
Mac OS X should be able to see all partition types that FeeBSD can see. Linux too.
I was thinking that, too. I have no experience OS X, of course, but everybody keeps talking about how it's a *nix. It would be pretty lame if something as dumb as support for open file system formats was the thing that killed that notion.
I agree with all of your points except the last one. Throwing stuff away costs money, too. Besides, if you're just going to throw stuff away without testing it, why have the customer send it back at all? And if the customer doesn't have to send it back, or if you aren't testing returns to see if they are actually bad, what's to stop the customer from just calling you up and getting a new HDD every month for no reason? Hello sky-rocketing warranty cost!
The only thing you are correct about, for the forseable future, is the possibility of mass storage becoming solid state. There will always be a reason for there to be a seperation of volatile and non-volatile memory for as long as there are software bugs, in other words; forever. Also, fast memory will always be more expensive than slow memory. That's the reason we have hard drives today, and that's the reason mass (static)storage will continue to be slower than active storage, at least until consumers no longer care about price, in other words; forever.
Once again, the reduction of warranty periods has nothing to do with design or "fitness for purpose". The MTBF numbers are more than ample to show that.
It has everything to do with reduced margins (the amount of money a company actually makes on a sale). IBM got out of the consumer HDD business because the margins are razor thin. Warranties cost money, and the longer the warranty period the more it will cost REGARDLESS OF MTBF. A basic understanding of statistics would explain why that is so.
Basically, if Australia mandates that HDDs must have longer warranty periods in Australia, HDDs will have to be more expensive in Australia. That's the bottom line.
At worst all you have to do is send a replacement drive to everyone who claims - plus a small amount in costs for handling and postage.
Excuse me? You obviously have absolutely no idea what you're talking about!
First, you have the cost of the phone support person, even if they are just there to say "no problem, just send it in, here's the address". That would be absurd, however, since over 90% of the time the problem is that the user doesn't know what they are doing and no amount of part replacement will ever fix that.
Then you have the basic replacement costs, which you mentioned.
Then you have the tech who tests the returned part to see if, and perhaps how, the part is bad. This info is hopefully used by engineering to improve the product. Meanwhile, the part is being refurbished, retested (if it was actually bad), and either sold as a refurbished part or put into customer service stock to send out as replacements.
A warranty return can easily cost the manufacturer 3-10 times the retail price of the part.
And yes, I do work in customer service. I'm one of the techs that tests the RMA'd parts.
A basic knowledge of statistics would show you why you are wrong. The short answer to your rather uninformed accusation is that, regardless of the validity of MTBF ratings, there is a significant cost difference between a 1-year warranty and a 3-year warranty. Please refrain from posting on this topic until you have educated yourself regarding the actual issues involved.
I gave up on usenet a few years ago for the exact same reasons, but I've recently returned and been pleasently suprised. If you are simply a little picky about your groups, I think you'll find they really are as good as they were back in the day. For example, the comp.* groups don't seem to suffer any of the problems you list. I've found little else than intelligent answers from reasonable people in those groups.
The alt.* groups certainly have spam issues, though, but I've always found them to be much less "serious" anyway.
I prefer to respond to the immature "ask google" answers with details about how they completely failed to answer the question, since that is generally the case. It always brightens my day to knock some uppity bitch down a peg or two. My only regret is that I don't have time to get them all!
Hard drives are now a comodity part with razor thin margins (that's why IBM bailed from the consumer market, remember), and waranties cost money. It should be no surprise that all the remaining manufacturers are cutting their warranty period. I very much doubt that it is a reflection on actual drive performance, but rather simply a cost cutting measure.
Honestly, when I can buy a 40G Seagate for $64, so what if it only has a one year warranty. You made backups, right? Toss it and get a new one.
I have to agree.
If you have fulfilled your contractual requirements they are required to pay you. I think it's entirely appropriate that you let them know that if they don't, not only will you sue them, but you will also do everything you can to foul the waters with their VC.
It comes down to this: another word for contractor is mercenary. Make it clear to them that you will either get paid or get revenge.
I'm not talking about binary, ASCII, or machine code necessarily, or even hardware design. I'm talking about a basic understanding of how a computer works, a basic understanding of the architecture such as is covered in the first week or so of an Assembly Language class (and apparently no other programming class, as far as I can tell). I'm talking about fetch-decode-execute, a basic understanding of memory/cache/registers... in other words a basic understanding of how the computer does what it does, how the computer "thinks". That understanding, in my experience, makes all the difference between a programmer and a good programmer.
Obviously, someone who doesn't have that understanding is not going to handle ASCII issues or binary file format issues very well, for the same reason that a calculator is useless to someone who doesn't understand basic math. No matter how "intuitive" you make the calculator, you're not going to get past that basic problem.
Last time I checked, works for hire belong to the company - not the employee.
You are correct in the general sense, but only because that's a clause written into most employment contracts. There is no law that says things work that way.
If you have the clout to renegotiate those clauses, as I beleive Dr Simonyi would have had at the time he was hired, It is entirely possible for you to retain the rights to any IP you create.
Nope, GPL covers copyright. Patents fall under completely different rules. The GPL (or similar license) would be totally ineffectual in the patent arena.
My comment was based entirely on the wording of the quote from the article, specifically "intellectual property he developed and patented", which seems to indicate that Simonyi has some claim to ownership of those patents.
I am very much aware of common industry practice. I am equally aware that there is an exception to every rule, a concept you still seem to be struggling with. I was merely trying to present the possibility that this may, in fact, be one of those rare exceptions, a possibility that is not entirely unlikely given someone of Simonyi's calibre.
Ummm.... Yeah......
Let's just say it took me a while to realize that there might be an economic motivation behind this research...
Perhaps he can strive to make all 3 methods (code, tables, diagrams) interchangable. That way a given developer can use the representation that he/she likes the most without shop-wide mandates.
It will have to be interchangeable at some level. No matter what you do at the highly-abstracted-developement-interface level, the hardware is still procedural. All the fancy tables and relational tools, and all the OOP modules, and all the event driven interfaces, have to be translated into step-by-step machine code eventually or they do exactly nothing.
I'm not saying any of your ideas are bad, but it's important to recognize at some level that all of this stuff is really just window dressing. If it makes things easier for you to understand, great, but it doesn't fundamentally change how things actually get done, and at the end of the day a good programmer still needs to have some understanding of how the machine actually works.
I open Word documents on my Linux desktop all the time, no problem, and have been since I started using OpenOffice in January of this year. Ditto for Excel spreadsheets. I hope I never have a reason to open a PowerPoint file, but from all the accounts I've heard that works just fine, too.
The thing that's slowing Linux's takover of the desktop is the same thing that has historically kept the Mac from taking over the desktop: lack of commercial games.
'Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.'
If they are his patents there's likely very little MS can do about it, except maybe try to sue him into oblivion, which is where the blackmail material would come in handy.
Also, if the patents belong to him, he could just respond to a lawsuit with obscene royalty charges, effectively using MS' own money to fight MS.
If I were MS I'd just let him go and do his thing, and let him try and "compete" in the "free market".
This is apparently not just some photogates, but some sort of black box which sits between the photogates and the PC, which could easily have some proprietary data formats and such. I suspect your technique would work as long as they were then able to decode the data.
My personal approach would be to just get some photogates, wire them up to a parallel cable, and write some simple code like you describe. That seems like it would be a lot easier than trying to deal with somebody elses black box crap.