The English C5 was a plastic electric car.
on
Segway HT Starts Selling
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The English C5 was a plastic electric car. The design ignored the fact that plastic develops cracks when flexed often. It was quirky in the English tradition. It died immediately after introduction.
What happens when you crash into something, or when there is a computer failure, and the Segway stops working? Why is it that no one mentions the word death?
For more than 20 years, as a hobby, I've been helping friends re-write their
resumes. I've noticed that one factor that affects the hiring of excellent
students is that their resumes usually don't communicate clearly.
People are told that resumes should be only one page. That's not true. When
you write any advertisement, you should write as much as you have to say. When
you finish telling the entire story, stop writing. This advice is from the
famous ad man David Ogilvy, who wrote Confessions of an Advertising
Man, an excellent book that is, as you would guess, easy to read. Any
library should have it.
It took maybe 10 hours to develop the information. I spent the time because I
am a friend. It is easy to understand that a prospective employer would not
spend 10 hours getting to know every person who sends a resume.
Notice that the original resume looks like the resume of thousands of recent
journalism graduates. The improved resume is an advertisement that gives a
complete picture of the person being advertised. The original expects the
reader to do the work. The improved version gives as much as possible and asks
as little as possible from the reader.
Like the friend in the example, many students have a lot of relevant
experiences.
The book Executive Jobs
Unlimited is old, but includes a lot of information that is relevant
to anyone's effort to write a job-getting advertisement. Most libraries have
this book.
A lot of the problems in getting a job are caused by the inexperience and
ignorance of the employers. Employers are often no better than applicants at
communicating. They often ask for qualities expressed by buzzwords. Often what an employer really wants is very different from what is communicated. Imagine the confusion when both the applicant and the prospective employer communicate poorly.
The most difficult kind of writing is writing an advertisement. The most difficult kind of advertisement to write is an advertisement for a person. The most difficult person about whom to write is yourself. Get help if you can. Write biographies of yourself, so that you will have information to use in the job-getting advertisement. Most people have difficulty believing they are as good as they really are, I've found.
If you are interested, it is okay to mirror the resumes, but the mirror must
include a link to this original Slashdot comment.
I think you are missing the point. The supplier of an operating system is in a position of trust. Microsoft did not publish the changes and ask for public comment. Instead, Microsoft invented a new protocol and designed numerous ways of connecting that are not documented. How do we know if there are vulnerabilities?
Microsoft has shown itself not to be a team player.
The software being discussed seems to be EveryAuction. Is that correct? (Hahnfeld's email address is listed at the beginning of the Slashdot story as matth@everysoft.com.)
From the Slashdot story: "Microsoft bashing aside..."
This kind of talk is nonsense! When someone says "Microsoft bashing", they are
in effect apologizing for saying something negative about Microsoft.
Apologizing is ridiculous. There are many negative things that can be honestly
said about Microsoft. Apologizing by using the word "bashing" in the same
paragraph as a legitimate complaint weakens the complaint, especially with
people who are not technically knowledgeable.
The article contains only a small number of the legitimate complaints about
Microsoft. I know because I wrote the article in my spare time, and there are
many, many issues I have not had time to document.
Who kept Kevin Mitnick in prison? Who allows Microsoft to be abusive? It's us. It is technically knowledgeable people who allow these abuses. We could be
effective in our complaints. Instead, we accept a double standard in which
illogical people are allowed to be illogical, but we must be completely
logical or we would lose our jobs.
If you are sure of a problem, be effective in talking about it! Get your
thoughts in order. Make your communication clear. Get the job done! Write an
advisory letter to a government leader. Mention your ideas everywhere a lot of people
are listening.
If you prevent Microsoft from being abusive, you are being charitable toward
Microsoft. The company has a self-destructive side; preventing Microsoft
from being abusive helps you and I personally, helps the world, and helps
Microsoft. Remember, Microsoft's abusiveness causes all technically knowledgeable people
to look bad to those who are not technically knowledgeable. Those with no
technical knowledge are not qualified to sort out the details. We all suffer.
If you know better than the people around you, that makes you the leader! Don't accept foolishness. Don't accept implied criticism; make the speaker state his or her opinions openly. Don't accept the terms "nerd" or "geek". Those terms are used by illogical people to weaken the power of the people who are knowledgeable.
"A small, but vocal, contingent even argues that tin is superior, but they are held by most to be the lunatic fringe of Foil Deflector Beanie science. I would advise people wishing to build a Deflector Beanie to stick with aluminum whenever possible since it is a proven technology."
That is an amazing link! Someone who is a good writer has put a huge amount of time into documenting nonsense. And it says that the site is rated Cranky by Crank.net
Yahoo DOES have free POP3 access. Yahoo is like American pharmaceutical companies. They push American customers to the wall, but sell for reasonable prices in other countries.
Yes, being a Slashdot editor is a difficult job. Slashdot is popular because of the intelligence of the stories posted. Yes, the editors don't know English very well, and have a negative attitude, but they are also very good at selecting articles people want to read. See other sites for comparison; the content is mediocre, but spelled correctly.
Most people don't realize the strong technical reasons why an organization
would want to consider other operating systems. Here is an article which
gathers facts and links: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
The parent comment is important, but it is easy not to see the importance.
First, see the Tom's Hardware article about RAID (mirroring/striping) controllers referenced in the parent comment: Fast and Secure: A Comparison of Eight RAID Controllers. As is usual for Tom's Hardware, the article is a bit confused. Apparently it was written hastily.
Motherboards now often have integrated mirroring/striping controllers, so the cost is low. Even Intel has a mother board with an integrated mirroring/striping controller now. In a 2-drive system configured as a mirror, the heads of each drive are moved independently to read data more efficiently than a single drive. Read performance is excellent, and write performance the same as a single drive. Since most systems do more reading than writing, the overall performance is excellent.
A mirror is far more reliable, since if one hard drive fails, all the data can be recovered from the other drive, and the system keeps running until the bad drive can be replaced.
In systems in which there are only one or two users, SCSI is slower. SCSI is only faster when there are many simultaneous users accessing storage.
Extreme solutions such as 15,000 RPM drives and SCSI and RAID 5 are appropriate for e-mail servers, but the noise and expense and lower reliability of the single drives doesn't make sense unless the computer is a server of some type.
Hard drives with a high rotational rate are not necessarily faster at providing data than those with a slow rate. The bottleneck is often the time it takes to move the heads, and the time it takes to present the data to the CPU, not the latency of waiting until the data is under the head.
RAID controllers can do striping, or mirroring, or both. When they do both, 4 drives are required, but read performance is high. Having more than one read head and being able to move them separately is very efficient. A 30,000 RPM drive would still have only one head mechanism.
It is good to see other companies entering the market. Promise Technology was one of the first with low-cost mirroring controllers. Promise is, in my experience, an unbelievably backward company. The products work well, but Promise has sold products with poor setup methods for years. For those who remember DOS programs, the Promise setup user interface is like a DOS shareware program written by a novice programmer who is considerably worse than average in user interface design.
Promise Technology is also known for the poor quality of their manuals. (The company says the manuals are being re-written.)
The parent comment is correct. For most applications, a RAID controller with mirroring, or mirroring plus striping, is excellent.
This is correct. Actually, however, suspect that your hardware has developed a bad connection first. Many problems are corrected by pulling every adapter and cable out about 1 millimeter, then pushing it in again. That wipes the contacts clean of oxide.
Quite possibly you didn't see the link. I use the FREE service. I've never paid SpamCop a penny. SpamCop builds a database of spammers, and uses the information to convince ISPs that they need to shut off the spammer.
It works, too. SpamCop has sometimes forwarded replies from ISPs that say that they are deeply sorry and the spammer's account was shut off immediately, sometimes within two hours of the time I received the spam. Nothing undeserved can happen; the ISP examines the logs and discovers the truth of SpamCop's computer analysis.
A secret that should be known by everyone: Many spammers put serial numbers in their spam. When SpamCop forwards the spam to the ISP, the ISP sometimes forwards that to the spammer, as evidence. The spammer recognizes to whom the spam with that serial number was sent. Since they don't want to have other accounts shut off, they remove me from their lists -- very quickly.
Note that SpamCop never discloses my email address to the spammer or the spammer's ISP.
Spammers don't want the grief that comes from messing with people like me who will always forward their spam to SpamCop within a few hours.
There are other services like SpamCop. I'd like to hear about user's experiences with them.
If everyone who used Mozilla sent all their spam to services like SpamCop, we would create a rocky road for spammers. There are spam-friendly ISPs, but SpamCop communicates with the internet backbone providers also, who are unlikely to be spam-friendly.
If Microsoft releases their source code to the Chinese, absolutely for sure, for sure, the source code will be widely distributed, and will be used to make a clone of MS Windows. That's the cultural reality.
Software that only does mail filtering encourages spammers. The technically knowledgeable people don't get spam, so they stop worrying about it.
All mail filters should also use a service like SpamCop, so that the spammers lose their internet service accounts as the spam is filtered.
I send Spamcop all my spam. Spamcop analyzes it automatically and sends a message to the Internet Service Provider. I use the free Reporting only service.
Joe, Pico, and Jed have major shortcomings, I found. Vi and Vim and Emacs have commands that were designed in the days of 9600 baud terminals.
There is a big misunderstanding about "Word Processing". It is two separate processes: 1) Keystroke capture and initial formatting, and 2) Final WYSIWYG formatting. I use Ventura Publisher version 5 for number 2 because Corel made mistakes in the later versions of Ventura Publisher that made Ventura useless to me.
Microsoft Turd ^H^H^H^H^H Word is useless to me because it is so quirky. Also, it doesn't have on-screen kerning (after all the many versions!).
It's amazing. There are hundreds of editors available, but none that finish the job. I wish that all of that work had gone into just a few editors, or only one. It seems that many programmers make an editor or a compiler as part of their self-training. (I wrote a compiler for HP data acquisition equipment.) Very few of those efforts are ever finished.
I really need open source. That way I'm protected from events outside my control. MicroStar International, makers of WordStar, stopped being a competitor when Mr. Rubenstein, the CEO and biggest stockholder, died of a heart attack.
Open source software and world standards are the only answers. Suppose Bill Gates becomes unavailable for some reason? Would anyone else have an interest in the Visual Basic programming language (which is itself programmed in C++)? If not, all those who chose that language would suffer.
I've found that it is not realistic to teach the average user to use Vi or Vim or Emacs. I've had some success in configuring Vim to work with the WordStar/Borland control-key editing commands, but I'm not finished. I'm interested in finding others who want to do this too.
I've never understood when people talk about speed. On an 866 MHz Pentium III with Intel motherboard, loading a new instance of IE just took 3 seconds. Loading a new instance of Mozilla took 2 seconds.
Since Moz has tabs, I don't need to load a new instance. I can load a new tab in under 2 seconds.
It's essential, when running a Windows OS, to have plenty of memory. 256 MB is good for Windows XP. The virtual memory of Windows XP, for example, is very poor quality. Taking info off the hard disk is slow in any OS.
Slashdot discussed personal finance packages. Thoughts: Where does "personal finance" end and business finance begin? Wouldn't it be better just to have one package for all accounting, so that you didn't have to learn more than one? But business accounting software has been difficult to use. Accounting software requires much more learning than word processing software. Learning more than one may reduce the quality of your life, not raise it.
Could your problem be caused partly by hardware? Hevanet.com, the best ISP in Portland, Oregon, USA, uses a special SCSI system run with a special version of NetBSD supplied by a company in Arizona.
Retrieval of mail stresses the filesystem; Hevanet's system is a combination of OS and hardware meant to take the load.
Slashdot Mirror
The English C5 was a plastic electric car. The design ignored the fact that plastic develops cracks when flexed often. It was quirky in the English tradition. It died immediately after introduction.
Funny. Nice description of a car.
What happens when you crash into something, or when there is a computer failure, and the Segway stops working? Why is it that no one mentions the word death?
For more than 20 years, as a hobby, I've been helping friends re-write their resumes. I've noticed that one factor that affects the hiring of excellent students is that their resumes usually don't communicate clearly.
People are told that resumes should be only one page. That's not true. When you write any advertisement, you should write as much as you have to say. When you finish telling the entire story, stop writing. This advice is from the famous ad man David Ogilvy, who wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man , an excellent book that is, as you would guess, easy to read. Any library should have it.
Here are PDF examples of the before and after: Original student resume, with beginning corrections. Draft of improved resume, with formatting quirkiness caused by Microsoft Word. (My friend the student did the re-writing, using my suggestions as a guide. The improved version is current as of yesterday.)
It took maybe 10 hours to develop the information. I spent the time because I am a friend. It is easy to understand that a prospective employer would not spend 10 hours getting to know every person who sends a resume.
Notice that the original resume looks like the resume of thousands of recent journalism graduates. The improved resume is an advertisement that gives a complete picture of the person being advertised. The original expects the reader to do the work. The improved version gives as much as possible and asks as little as possible from the reader.
Like the friend in the example, many students have a lot of relevant experiences.
The book Executive Jobs Unlimited is old, but includes a lot of information that is relevant to anyone's effort to write a job-getting advertisement. Most libraries have this book.
A lot of the problems in getting a job are caused by the inexperience and ignorance of the employers. Employers are often no better than applicants at communicating. They often ask for qualities expressed by buzzwords. Often what an employer really wants is very different from what is communicated. Imagine the confusion when both the applicant and the prospective employer communicate poorly.
The most difficult kind of writing is writing an advertisement. The most difficult kind of advertisement to write is an advertisement for a person. The most difficult person about whom to write is yourself. Get help if you can. Write biographies of yourself, so that you will have information to use in the job-getting advertisement. Most people have difficulty believing they are as good as they really are, I've found.
If you are interested, it is okay to mirror the resumes, but the mirror must include a link to this original Slashdot comment.
I think you are missing the point. The supplier of an operating system is in a position of trust. Microsoft did not publish the changes and ask for public comment. Instead, Microsoft invented a new protocol and designed numerous ways of connecting that are not documented. How do we know if there are vulnerabilities?
Microsoft has shown itself not to be a team player.
The software being discussed seems to be EveryAuction. Is that correct? (Hahnfeld's email address is listed at the beginning of the Slashdot story as matth@everysoft.com.)
From the Slashdot story: "Microsoft bashing aside..."
This kind of talk is nonsense! When someone says "Microsoft bashing", they are in effect apologizing for saying something negative about Microsoft. Apologizing is ridiculous. There are many negative things that can be honestly said about Microsoft. Apologizing by using the word "bashing" in the same paragraph as a legitimate complaint weakens the complaint, especially with people who are not technically knowledgeable.
In his November 15, 2002 Crypto-Gram newsletter, Bruce Schneier says "A well-written analysis of the major security/privacy/stability concerns of Windows XP" about this article: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
(Bruce Schneier wrote major books about computer security: Applied Cryptography and Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World.)
The article contains only a small number of the legitimate complaints about Microsoft. I know because I wrote the article in my spare time, and there are many, many issues I have not had time to document.
Who kept Kevin Mitnick in prison? Who allows Microsoft to be abusive? It's us. It is technically knowledgeable people who allow these abuses. We could be effective in our complaints. Instead, we accept a double standard in which illogical people are allowed to be illogical, but we must be completely logical or we would lose our jobs.
If you are sure of a problem, be effective in talking about it! Get your thoughts in order. Make your communication clear. Get the job done! Write an advisory letter to a government leader. Mention your ideas everywhere a lot of people are listening.
If you prevent Microsoft from being abusive, you are being charitable toward Microsoft. The company has a self-destructive side; preventing Microsoft from being abusive helps you and I personally, helps the world, and helps Microsoft. Remember, Microsoft's abusiveness causes all technically knowledgeable people to look bad to those who are not technically knowledgeable. Those with no technical knowledge are not qualified to sort out the details. We all suffer.
If you know better than the people around you, that makes you the leader! Don't accept foolishness. Don't accept implied criticism; make the speaker state his or her opinions openly. Don't accept the terms "nerd" or "geek". Those terms are used by illogical people to weaken the power of the people who are knowledgeable.
"A small, but vocal, contingent even argues that tin is superior, but they are held by most to be the lunatic fringe of Foil Deflector Beanie science. I would advise people wishing to build a Deflector Beanie to stick with aluminum whenever possible since it is a proven technology."
Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control.
That is an amazing link! Someone who is a good writer has put a huge amount of time into documenting nonsense. And it says that the site is rated Cranky by Crank.net
The internet is an amazing virtual place where every comedian can be heard: Zapato Productions intradimensional -- "Serving the Paranoid Since 1997". It says this web site is a member of the (no doubt prestigious) "Yes, there really IS a VAST Right Wing Conspiracy!" web ring.
Yahoo DOES have free POP3 access. Yahoo is like American pharmaceutical companies. They push American customers to the wall, but sell for reasonable prices in other countries.
Yahoo in other countries has free POP3 access.
Yes, being a Slashdot editor is a difficult job. Slashdot is popular because of the intelligence of the stories posted. Yes, the editors don't know English very well, and have a negative attitude, but they are also very good at selecting articles people want to read. See other sites for comparison; the content is mediocre, but spelled correctly.
Most people don't realize the strong technical reasons why an organization would want to consider other operating systems. Here is an article which gathers facts and links: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
The parent comment is important, but it is easy not to see the importance.
First, see the Tom's Hardware article about RAID (mirroring/striping) controllers referenced in the parent comment: Fast and Secure: A Comparison of Eight RAID Controllers. As is usual for Tom's Hardware, the article is a bit confused. Apparently it was written hastily.
Motherboards now often have integrated mirroring/striping controllers, so the cost is low. Even Intel has a mother board with an integrated mirroring/striping controller now. In a 2-drive system configured as a mirror, the heads of each drive are moved independently to read data more efficiently than a single drive. Read performance is excellent, and write performance the same as a single drive. Since most systems do more reading than writing, the overall performance is excellent.
A mirror is far more reliable, since if one hard drive fails, all the data can be recovered from the other drive, and the system keeps running until the bad drive can be replaced.
In systems in which there are only one or two users, SCSI is slower. SCSI is only faster when there are many simultaneous users accessing storage.
Extreme solutions such as 15,000 RPM drives and SCSI and RAID 5 are appropriate for e-mail servers, but the noise and expense and lower reliability of the single drives doesn't make sense unless the computer is a server of some type.
Hard drives with a high rotational rate are not necessarily faster at providing data than those with a slow rate. The bottleneck is often the time it takes to move the heads, and the time it takes to present the data to the CPU, not the latency of waiting until the data is under the head.
RAID controllers can do striping, or mirroring, or both. When they do both, 4 drives are required, but read performance is high. Having more than one read head and being able to move them separately is very efficient. A 30,000 RPM drive would still have only one head mechanism.
It is good to see other companies entering the market. Promise Technology was one of the first with low-cost mirroring controllers. Promise is, in my experience, an unbelievably backward company. The products work well, but Promise has sold products with poor setup methods for years. For those who remember DOS programs, the Promise setup user interface is like a DOS shareware program written by a novice programmer who is considerably worse than average in user interface design.
Promise Technology is also known for the poor quality of their manuals. (The company says the manuals are being re-written.)
The parent comment is correct. For most applications, a RAID controller with mirroring, or mirroring plus striping, is excellent.
This is correct. Actually, however, suspect that your hardware has developed a bad connection first. Many problems are corrected by pulling every adapter and cable out about 1 millimeter, then pushing it in again. That wipes the contacts clean of oxide.
Somehow it became Slashdot disfunctional culture that helping the discussion was a negative thing to do. Will the negative people rule? I think not.
Quite possibly you didn't see the link. I use the FREE service. I've never paid SpamCop a penny. SpamCop builds a database of spammers, and uses the information to convince ISPs that they need to shut off the spammer.
It works, too. SpamCop has sometimes forwarded replies from ISPs that say that they are deeply sorry and the spammer's account was shut off immediately, sometimes within two hours of the time I received the spam. Nothing undeserved can happen; the ISP examines the logs and discovers the truth of SpamCop's computer analysis.
A secret that should be known by everyone: Many spammers put serial numbers in their spam. When SpamCop forwards the spam to the ISP, the ISP sometimes forwards that to the spammer, as evidence. The spammer recognizes to whom the spam with that serial number was sent. Since they don't want to have other accounts shut off, they remove me from their lists -- very quickly.
Note that SpamCop never discloses my email address to the spammer or the spammer's ISP.
Spammers don't want the grief that comes from messing with people like me who will always forward their spam to SpamCop within a few hours.
There are other services like SpamCop. I'd like to hear about user's experiences with them.
If everyone who used Mozilla sent all their spam to services like SpamCop, we would create a rocky road for spammers. There are spam-friendly ISPs, but SpamCop communicates with the internet backbone providers also, who are unlikely to be spam-friendly.
If Microsoft releases their source code to the Chinese, absolutely for sure, for sure, the source code will be widely distributed, and will be used to make a clone of MS Windows. That's the cultural reality.
Software that only does mail filtering encourages spammers. The technically knowledgeable people don't get spam, so they stop worrying about it.
All mail filters should also use a service like SpamCop, so that the spammers lose their internet service accounts as the spam is filtered.
I send Spamcop all my spam. Spamcop analyzes it automatically and sends a message to the Internet Service Provider. I use the free Reporting only service.
"... Microsoft software and other trojans..."
Well, not trojans, just dependency: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going..
Joe, Pico, and Jed have major shortcomings, I found. Vi and Vim and Emacs have commands that were designed in the days of 9600 baud terminals.
There is a big misunderstanding about "Word Processing". It is two separate processes: 1) Keystroke capture and initial formatting, and 2) Final WYSIWYG formatting. I use Ventura Publisher version 5 for number 2 because Corel made mistakes in the later versions of Ventura Publisher that made Ventura useless to me.
Microsoft Turd ^H^H^H^H^H Word is useless to me because it is so quirky. Also, it doesn't have on-screen kerning (after all the many versions!).
It's amazing. There are hundreds of editors available, but none that finish the job. I wish that all of that work had gone into just a few editors, or only one. It seems that many programmers make an editor or a compiler as part of their self-training. (I wrote a compiler for HP data acquisition equipment.) Very few of those efforts are ever finished.
I really need open source. That way I'm protected from events outside my control. MicroStar International, makers of WordStar, stopped being a competitor when Mr. Rubenstein, the CEO and biggest stockholder, died of a heart attack.
Open source software and world standards are the only answers. Suppose Bill Gates becomes unavailable for some reason? Would anyone else have an interest in the Visual Basic programming language (which is itself programmed in C++)? If not, all those who chose that language would suffer.
I've found that it is not realistic to teach the average user to use Vi or Vim or Emacs. I've had some success in configuring Vim to work with the WordStar/Borland control-key editing commands, but I'm not finished. I'm interested in finding others who want to do this too.
No problems here with Western Digital drives, which have been perfect in recent years.
I've never understood when people talk about speed. On an 866 MHz Pentium III with Intel motherboard, loading a new instance of IE just took 3 seconds. Loading a new instance of Mozilla took 2 seconds.
Since Moz has tabs, I don't need to load a new instance. I can load a new tab in under 2 seconds.
It's essential, when running a Windows OS, to have plenty of memory. 256 MB is good for Windows XP. The virtual memory of Windows XP, for example, is very poor quality. Taking info off the hard disk is slow in any OS.
Make sure your hard disk is defragmented.
I'm very interested in this subject, also. Here are some links:
SQL Ledger Accounting
Hansa Business Solutions
Compiere
Cheap & easy business accounting with Linux
Nola
STFB
Open source Java projects for business and accounting. But... Is Java slow and with non-standard GUIs? A prisoner of Sun politics?
Open Systems Accounting Software
GNU Cash. Impressive.
Slashdot discussed personal finance packages. Thoughts: Where does "personal finance" end and business finance begin? Wouldn't it be better just to have one package for all accounting, so that you didn't have to learn more than one? But business accounting software has been difficult to use. Accounting software requires much more learning than word processing software. Learning more than one may reduce the quality of your life, not raise it.
Could your problem be caused partly by hardware? Hevanet.com, the best ISP in Portland, Oregon, USA, uses a special SCSI system run with a special version of NetBSD supplied by a company in Arizona.
Retrieval of mail stresses the filesystem; Hevanet's system is a combination of OS and hardware meant to take the load.
I agree with 1 and 2. A good test of a joke is if people find it funny. This one people did not find funny.