Slashdot Mirror

http://technical-writing.dionysius.com/resources/CSS-2.0.pdf

Helped me through many a "what's that called again?" session.

Link updated because both original links were dead.

1. Download the PowerPointViewer.exe from the link in the article.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en
2. Open a DOS window, go to where the PowerPointViewer.exe file is, and create a directory called test.
3. Type the command "PowerPointViewer /extract:complete-path-to-test-folder"
4. Using WinRAR, look into the CAB file and extract all font files.

If you're too lazy to do that, try this link:

http://technical-writing.dionysius.com/resources/vista-fonts.zip

They look beautiful on my current monitor, and are a big improvement. All hail the new better standard.

You get up groggy, haven't had enough sleep. The shower knobs are stiff. The sink knobs are too far from where you stand, so you bend over. Your bed isn't firm enough, so pushing off is a struggle. The doorknob on the way out is stiff and the door spring-loaded, so you stop it with your hand.

At work, your pen is the wrong size for your hand. Your water is too far and too low. The elevator buttons are stiff, and you can't tell when the ATM buttons (membrane keyboard) have triggered.

Many of our everyday objects are bad designs. We can fix them, with some patience and an insightful technical writer or user interface designer or interaction designer on the scene.

First, thanks for a great site. I read something about "20 hour days" keeping the site afloat, and I believe it was required. For those of us who enjoy it daily (along with Dwight Silverman's column) it can be a real lifeline, especially when work is ultra-boring.

Just a few questions:

1. You oversaw the "internet revolution." Beyond Al Gore inventing it, beyond the dot-com hype, beyond the spam and the sockpuppets, what do you think is the future of networked communication? Is it the cloud OS and social networking, or are we rounding another bend?

2. You've mentioned liking Postgres DBs. What other underrated hardware and software do you enjoy and employ on a regular basis?

3. What emergent technologies do you watch?

4. In the Wired interview, you mention a balance between wise crowd tendencies and dumb crowd tendencies:

"When you're building a system like this you're balancing the wisdom of the crowds versus the tyranny of the mob. Sometimes a crowd is really smart, but some things don't work so well by committee. Crowds work when you have a tightly knit group of people with similar interests, but when you have a loosely knit community you get 'Man Gets Hit in Crotch With Football.'"

What have you learned is the balance of this duality? For all of its attempts to be crowd-wisdom propelled, Slashdot does lean on the theory of exceptional individuals, because it has picked editors to filter what makes it to the front page, which cuts down on the "site-rhymes-with-bigg" tendency to put rosy garbage on the front page. Are you satisfied with the balance of your responses to whatever psychological fulcrum keeps a crowd wise and not mobbish?

5. What if any fiction authors do you enjoy?

6. I'm a technical writer, and am curious what you think about the current state of software and hardware documentation. Is it getting better? What are its common failings? Does anyone read it? Will single-sourcing (documentation that appears in print, online help, web sites, flash cards and text messages but uses the same text) change documentation's effectiveness radically?

7. In the CNET article, you talk about Slashdot as a community.

"But to some of our readers, it's a community that's here to discuss issues that are relevant to this community. There is a lot of value. The bulk of our content comes from other people. There are 6,000 or 7,000 comments on a busy day that other people write and just a dozen stories of just a paragraph or two that we actually generate, that are ours."

As you started out in BBSs, you probably had a prexisting idea of this being important to a resource on technology. Why do you think this is?

8. In the same interview, you talk about the ability of low-tech websites to take on big roles:

"I think that it really comes down to the content. If you have content people want, they will tolerate a system that is inferior. Now our system is solid, but back in the day, it wasn't. Look at eBay: That system is the most hodgepodge and clumsy user interface that you will ever find. People use it because it was first and it worked."

In the world of advertising, people call this branding. What do you think Slashdot's brand represents, and is it something IT workers will always have in common?

9. In the Network Administrator interview, you compare Slashdot to bulletin board systems favorably.

"Strangely not that far. It's all just a matter of scale. At some level it's all identical."

You mean in twenty years, not much has changed except the technology? I'd like to hear more on this if you find it compelling.

10.

is that why your website looks like shit?