[Shameless Plug] A New Book

Knuth has always offered a bounty of $2.56 for errors found in his books. But I think most people frame the check rather than cash it. I know I would...

Regards, -=Dave

Jerry,

I always remember Xerex as being a type of antifreeze.

Clay

No, dot deliberate at all. I habe a code.

Jerry

So it was! For trademark purposes, is Xerex the same as XereX? The 'xer' for "dry" is necessary. Otherwise is could have been xorox. Oh, well!

Jerry

As a matter of principle, please preserve the attributions for material you quote.

... snip ...

I am not overly impressed. In the same time period we were servicing something in the range of 30 to 40 terminals with a single HP3000, not to mention several i/o processes fed by and to my embedded machines. I must admit most of the users were hooked into a single data base process, and as a rule no more than 4 to 6 were doing program development and other CPU intensive things.

The HP3000 is/was a 16 bit stack oriented machine. Todays Pentia are spending all their time drawing filthy pictures :-) Feed them a decent text oriented OS and reasonable i/o ports, especially ones that don't create an interrupt per character, and they should do very well.

I think that was Zerex.

(snipped)

Hi Jim,

interesting. I'm gonna guess that the typical new textbook has 40-100 errors that should be corrected.

So you're talkin' a fair amount of money there.

EBCDIC, BAUDOT, HOLLERITH or ASCII

I seem to remember something about setting the buffer length differently and getting significantly faster results -- but that makes the story much less interesting.

That was a good course -- the guy ping-ponged between starting companies and teaching, so his course was solidly grounded in reality. He had _lots_ of stories about wide-eyed technical innocence running smack into hard engineering realities.

Why leave out RT-11?

And since this is far OT -- any TECO fans [that almost came as fanatics] out there. In early 70's I worked in Maynard [ML5-5 to be exact]. Came in one Saturday to finish up a 2 page report using TECO on a KL-10 system that during week handled major portion of DEC's production control. Misplaced a ";" IIRCC thus copying file to itself ;[

Got thrown off system by upper level supervisor program that someone with my permissions should not have even new knew existed. However many scratch disks there were, I attempted to fill them all. A systems expert acquaitence told be I had managed to skip 2-3 levels of protection. Gee, wonder why DEC tried vainly to discourage use of that program -- you could do just about anything in it.

But shouldn't that come out of the publisher's cut? After all, what are editors for? ;]

Yes, and a google search on Xerex turns up some marginally interesting links, none of which is antifreeze. ;-) Zerex is, in fact, antifreeze.

Cheers! Rich

Twenty-five bucke!!!????!?!? Geez, I'd proof the whole thing for ten bucks a typo! ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Rich, Looks like you are a cheap date ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Actually I found quite a few google links to antifreeze with the apparently misspelled Xerex in place of Zerex. Regardless of the spelling the pronuciation is the same and companies likely would not want to have their product confused for another with a similar name.

Clay

What else is new?

(snipped)

Hi Rich,

ah but no magazine editor or book editor that I know of is capable of detecting technical errors, for example in an equation. They're not skilled in all aspects of every engineering topic (no one is). So the editors are expecting that the content of a magazine article, or a technical book, is correct. It's up to the author to make sure the material is correct.

The problem is: once an author writes some technical material that author is the *LEAST* reliable person on the planet Earth to find mistakes in that material. I'm sure you know that. So, ... finding a competent person to review technical writing is **VERY** important. The problem is: reviewing tech material in a thorough way is painful, unpleasant, and yields almost no reward. So it's a royal pain to ask reviewers to carefully review your writing and then tell those reviewers that, by the way, there's no reward for their efforts.

See Ya', [-Rick-]

Yeah, well, so was Cinderella!

Cheers! Rich