They're random people who sell stuff, some might be technological/savvy but since we're dealing with average people here most can't critically think their way out of a paper bag, let alone tell the different between volts and milliwatts. Before I talk to them I audition them, I ask a few quick simple questions I know someone competent should know, if they don't know that's ok, the good ones will say "I don't know, let me get bob.." but if they try and blag their way I simply say "you're wrong, is there someone here that knows about this?" which actually works sometimes. If you can't find anyone competent well then it's time to browse.
Yes, because until you interact with the community and earn points it's hard to make an asshat of yourself. I recommend you watch "Learning from StackOverflow": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
I write for a living and the last time I used cursive was uhhhhnnnnhhh... never? I have (like many people) a 50/50 print/cursive type writing for making notes/etc. but 100% of my real writing is done with a keyboard. Apart from writing thank you notes and nice letters I can't think of a use for cursive as opposed to printing/etc. and a keyboard.
have an investment horizon that is tough because these are projects that will take a good 5 years
But then go on to say:
and while we'd try to have some positive income spin-offs each year from 0 onward, the goal would be to create the kind of environment where we can take off some of the bigger, long-neglected problems.
So immediately you're pushing to have immediate spin offs, with immediate returns which sort of puts pressure on your people (and you only have 10...) to make money fast, er I mean to show immediate results. Good luck with those long term projects. Stuff coming out of IBM's research lab has in some cases taken 10 or 20 years, but resulted in things like hard drives larger than a gigabyte, etc.
Natural gas is easy to deliver (the infrastructure already exists), and you can make extremely small power units (this is a perfect example, personally I was looking at a 5kw unit to power my house but power is reliable enough so why bother). The problem however is that most natural gas in Germany comes from Russia, and every time they are feeling tetchy they have this tendency to turn off the gas (literally). Hope it works out, personally I think the higher up front cost of nuclear is more than offset by the stability it provides (typically you have enough fuel on site for quite some time).
Are the only way to be sure, otherwise the voter cannot verify that what they choose is what got entered into the system. Even if it's an electronic system that prints out a receipt that you can then visually check and deposit would be fine (although personally I prefer the low tech ballot + make an X, it's simple, it's easy to assist blind people, and it's _trivial_ to check, if you have scrutineers from more than one party you're pretty safe (who watches the watchers? the watchers watch themselves because they want to make sure they aren't cheating). This system works for most of the world (including the US until recently). This love with high tech voting is quite scary I think (I especially love the argument that electronic voting is faster when you consider the court cases that have been needed t decide various elections).
... is that there is an undertone of sense of entitlement.
I think you're reading that in yourself. Again, this was a posting describing what we "want", not necessarily what we're expecting or plan to get. Think of it thus: "if you really want to make A possible then doing B, C and D will help significantly. You don't have to do these things to make A possible, but it really helps". Just like putting up a public bug wiki helps if you want people to submit bugs against your software, or having a mailing list if you want people to participate.
If they want to be accessible quickly. If they don't want to be they can make that's ok too. Here's a hint: my post was titled "As a tech writer here's what we want:". Not demand, not expect, but "want". I also want a pony (I just don't want to have to clean up after it), doesn't mean I'm getting one.
Honestly though if the FAQ answers my question (and I somehow missed it, didn't find it, or whatever) then I'd be generally quite happy with an RTFM answer (although that's usually the first thing I try, I write so that people will read my stuff, I assume others write documentation for similar reasons =). One thing to note: they may be looking for an updated answer (some FAQs are atrociously out of date and wrong).I think this can all be summed up by a great quote I just saw:
People that can be discouraged from writing SHOULD be discouraged from writing
Which I actually think is true of any craft that requires a high degree of skill to do right.
Uhmm I don't (and I'm not technically a reporter, more of a writer). I'm not looking for hand holding, I typically do my homework (download software, play with it, read change logs, documentation/etc. But sometimes I have question or want to know things that aren't covered in the documentation (like "what motivated you to make this?" or "where do you see technology X heading in the future"). I would also note that most developers, like pretty much anyone has the option of ignoring requests (for interviews, bug fixes, whatever) or just hitting the delete key, it's not like a reporter will stalk them (in most cases anyways).
Not sure where you get the year of the Linux desktop thing, but I may as well respond. Personally I don't believe in the year of the Linux desktop and think it's a waste of time. I've been running Linux since Slackware 1.0 (floppies... lots of floppies, 53 which you could cram into a 50 box without much damage), and I'm not even using it on my desktop (and I've tried). In other words I've seen "year of the linux desktop" for about a decade now and somehow I don't think this year will be much different. On the server though, heck yeah. I suspect with the way things are going the desktop will become largely irrelevant (smart phones and other appliance type devices, web based apps, computer mediated reality, etc.) and that a lot of servers and "embedded" devices will be running Linux.
I completely disagree. Linux is the archetype David vs. Goliath (aka "challenge") story. What makes it even better is Microsoft itself was once a David playing with Goliath (IBM). Empire creation and decline make for fascinating tales.
On a more recent note there are tons of stories about Linux (hint: there's about a half dozen English language Linux magazines publishing monthly). You have to remember, reporters usually look for stories, stories looking for reporters often mean someone has an axe to grind, which can make for good press sometimes but not always (whistle blower stories being one huge exception, must of us looooove muck raking and outing naughty people). I never have a shortage of stuff to write (my emergency list for Linux related story ideas in case I get writers block or something is about 20 entries, and that took about half an hour to jot down).
I think the real reason the mainstream press doesn't cover Open Source much is they flat out aren't that familiar with it. You tell a reporter that Apple runs on Open Source, or that their favorite website is largely Open Source powered and they'll probably grunt. Remember: these people generally took journalism in college/university, not a tech related degree.
1) Have a sane contact us page. Seriously. Not some web form with a pull down menu to select what this inquiry is related to. But an actual list of functions and associated contact data (email minimally, phone is more corporate and I wouldn't expect that of an open source project). Why email? So I have a record of what I sent, otherwise I have random emails showing up from half remembered projects/vendors. If you make it hard for me to contact you I won't. For many projects that are small having the head guys email address listed works well too.
2) Have a press@ email address, much like abuse@, security@, etc. this is a pretty sane default and leaves very little question as to whom to send email when you're looking for a press contact. It can be a redirect, I don't mind emailing press@ and getting a response from someguy@, if he quotes the subject line I won't have any trouble figuring it out. If you make it hard for me to contact you I won't. It bears repeating.
3) (to the mental image of a sweaty Steve Ballmer acting like a deranged gorilla) "Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines!". If it's a press article for a newspaper the author is lucky if they have 2-3 hours to research this time and get it in. You may want to consider having press@ be an alias to multiple people in different timezones. The quicker you respond the less likely I am to write you out of my article or downplay your role.
4) Don't treat me like a sales prospect or try to sell me stuff I'm not buying, I've got a deadline to meet. Be upfront and honest, most reporters/writers can smell bullshit a mile away (or at least they should be able to, I would say bullshit detection is a core competency for writers/reporters). Perfect example: interesting network traffic analysis product, I contact the vendor, they say it's Windows only I say thanks and move on (article is for Linux Magazine Pro). They don't get any press coverage, but they do get remembered for not wasting my time. The next time I'm writing about network traffic analysis on Windows I'll contact them first since I know they play well with others. Reporters/writers have long memories (we keep notes); if you jerk us around we will never, ever, ever write anything positive about you. Ever.
5) Don't be afraid to go beyond answering our questions a bit, if I was a complete expert in the topic I'm asking you about I wouldnâ(TM)t be emailing you now would I? Interesting back stories, info, related data, this is all golden ("What do you mean you're the only vendor that has a syscall proxy? What the heck is a syscall proxy? Oh.. Oh wow.").
6) I love love love covering projects that make cool/useful/nifty/clever software, especially if "staffed" (for lack of a better term to cover commercial and Open Source) by helpful people who are willing to spend 10 minutes helping me and educating me. You make my life easier, I will appreciate it for a very long time. Social capital is valuable, earning it isn't hard.
"to cancel out any effect from wind" - and any slope, otherwise we'd have people dropping cars off cliffs claiming speed records like nobody's business =).
No-one is selling the darn things (I've yet to see one in a store/cell phone kiosk). That could be part of the problem up here at least. If anyone knows where I can get one (in western Canada) please let me know, I'd love to be proven wrong.
They're looking to support 3 graphics cards per PC
Interesting, I just read the specs on my motherboard which has 4 slots for video cards, granted with 4 slots used it's only 8x (which is ok since I live in 2d land) but with 3 or less in use they're all 16x (well, so it claims), so it would seem that's already covered.
Nuclear powered aircraft carrier, so you've got a pretty good supply of energy there, being able to convert electricity into jet fuel would save them money and reduce the amount of fuel they have to carry (reducing the amount of flammable liquids held in a ship that might get hit by a missile), and could end the need to resupply fuel, all in all very sexy if you're going in to combat.
Do you trust your bank with your money? Even though they don't keep it at your business and you can't stand behind them and watch what they do with it? Your fortune is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Do you trust your pharmacy to give you the correct medication? Even though you dropped the prescription off, will pick it up later and don't know the look of one pill from another? Your life is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Yes, because they are regulated industries and professions, they are well understood (we've been doing banks and pharmacies for many decades), we've worked most of the kinks out. IT/computers/etc. on the other hand is still in it's infancy (and may always remain so due to the rate of change). We're making it up as we go.
Slashdot Mirror
So what about all the other Mr. Blaney's? Or am I missing something about specifically what copyrighted material is being infringed?
Yeah until I plug my cell in via USB or bluetooth to something internet connected and offer free calls in North America via skype or some such.
They're random people who sell stuff, some might be technological/savvy but since we're dealing with average people here most can't critically think their way out of a paper bag, let alone tell the different between volts and milliwatts. Before I talk to them I audition them, I ask a few quick simple questions I know someone competent should know, if they don't know that's ok, the good ones will say "I don't know, let me get bob.." but if they try and blag their way I simply say "you're wrong, is there someone here that knows about this?" which actually works sometimes. If you can't find anyone competent well then it's time to browse.
That's already illegal in most places, it's called driving with undue care and attention (or whatever your local phrase is).
Yes, because until you interact with the community and earn points it's hard to make an asshat of yourself. I recommend you watch "Learning from StackOverflow": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
You get useful answers that actually help.
I write for a living and the last time I used cursive was uhhhhnnnnhhh... never? I have (like many people) a 50/50 print/cursive type writing for making notes/etc. but 100% of my real writing is done with a keyboard. Apart from writing thank you notes and nice letters I can't think of a use for cursive as opposed to printing/etc. and a keyboard.
You contradict yourself:
have an investment horizon that is tough because these are projects that will take a good 5 years
But then go on to say:
and while we'd try to have some positive income spin-offs each year from 0 onward, the goal would be to create the kind of environment where we can take off some of the bigger, long-neglected problems.
So immediately you're pushing to have immediate spin offs, with immediate returns which sort of puts pressure on your people (and you only have 10...) to make money fast, er I mean to show immediate results. Good luck with those long term projects. Stuff coming out of IBM's research lab has in some cases taken 10 or 20 years, but resulted in things like hard drives larger than a gigabyte, etc.
Natural gas is easy to deliver (the infrastructure already exists), and you can make extremely small power units (this is a perfect example, personally I was looking at a 5kw unit to power my house but power is reliable enough so why bother). The problem however is that most natural gas in Germany comes from Russia, and every time they are feeling tetchy they have this tendency to turn off the gas (literally). Hope it works out, personally I think the higher up front cost of nuclear is more than offset by the stability it provides (typically you have enough fuel on site for quite some time).
Are the only way to be sure, otherwise the voter cannot verify that what they choose is what got entered into the system. Even if it's an electronic system that prints out a receipt that you can then visually check and deposit would be fine (although personally I prefer the low tech ballot + make an X, it's simple, it's easy to assist blind people, and it's _trivial_ to check, if you have scrutineers from more than one party you're pretty safe (who watches the watchers? the watchers watch themselves because they want to make sure they aren't cheating). This system works for most of the world (including the US until recently). This love with high tech voting is quite scary I think (I especially love the argument that electronic voting is faster when you consider the court cases that have been needed t decide various elections).
... is that there is an undertone of sense of entitlement.
I think you're reading that in yourself. Again, this was a posting describing what we "want", not necessarily what we're expecting or plan to get. Think of it thus: "if you really want to make A possible then doing B, C and D will help significantly. You don't have to do these things to make A possible, but it really helps". Just like putting up a public bug wiki helps if you want people to submit bugs against your software, or having a mailing list if you want people to participate.
If they want to be accessible quickly. If they don't want to be they can make that's ok too. Here's a hint: my post was titled "As a tech writer here's what we want:". Not demand, not expect, but "want". I also want a pony (I just don't want to have to clean up after it), doesn't mean I'm getting one.
Dare I ask what you find so offensive?
Honestly though if the FAQ answers my question (and I somehow missed it, didn't find it, or whatever) then I'd be generally quite happy with an RTFM answer (although that's usually the first thing I try, I write so that people will read my stuff, I assume others write documentation for similar reasons =). One thing to note: they may be looking for an updated answer (some FAQs are atrociously out of date and wrong).I think this can all be summed up by a great quote I just saw:
People that can be discouraged from writing SHOULD be discouraged from writing
Which I actually think is true of any craft that requires a high degree of skill to do right.
Uhmm I don't (and I'm not technically a reporter, more of a writer). I'm not looking for hand holding, I typically do my homework (download software, play with it, read change logs, documentation/etc. But sometimes I have question or want to know things that aren't covered in the documentation (like "what motivated you to make this?" or "where do you see technology X heading in the future"). I would also note that most developers, like pretty much anyone has the option of ignoring requests (for interviews, bug fixes, whatever) or just hitting the delete key, it's not like a reporter will stalk them (in most cases anyways).
Not sure where you get the year of the Linux desktop thing, but I may as well respond. Personally I don't believe in the year of the Linux desktop and think it's a waste of time. I've been running Linux since Slackware 1.0 (floppies... lots of floppies, 53 which you could cram into a 50 box without much damage), and I'm not even using it on my desktop (and I've tried). In other words I've seen "year of the linux desktop" for about a decade now and somehow I don't think this year will be much different. On the server though, heck yeah. I suspect with the way things are going the desktop will become largely irrelevant (smart phones and other appliance type devices, web based apps, computer mediated reality, etc.) and that a lot of servers and "embedded" devices will be running Linux.
I completely disagree. Linux is the archetype David vs. Goliath (aka "challenge") story. What makes it even better is Microsoft itself was once a David playing with Goliath (IBM). Empire creation and decline make for fascinating tales.
On a more recent note there are tons of stories about Linux (hint: there's about a half dozen English language Linux magazines publishing monthly). You have to remember, reporters usually look for stories, stories looking for reporters often mean someone has an axe to grind, which can make for good press sometimes but not always (whistle blower stories being one huge exception, must of us looooove muck raking and outing naughty people). I never have a shortage of stuff to write (my emergency list for Linux related story ideas in case I get writers block or something is about 20 entries, and that took about half an hour to jot down).
I think the real reason the mainstream press doesn't cover Open Source much is they flat out aren't that familiar with it. You tell a reporter that Apple runs on Open Source, or that their favorite website is largely Open Source powered and they'll probably grunt. Remember: these people generally took journalism in college/university, not a tech related degree.
1) Have a sane contact us page. Seriously. Not some web form with a pull down menu to select what this inquiry is related to. But an actual list of functions and associated contact data (email minimally, phone is more corporate and I wouldn't expect that of an open source project). Why email? So I have a record of what I sent, otherwise I have random emails showing up from half remembered projects/vendors. If you make it hard for me to contact you I won't. For many projects that are small having the head guys email address listed works well too.
2) Have a press@ email address, much like abuse@, security@, etc. this is a pretty sane default and leaves very little question as to whom to send email when you're looking for a press contact. It can be a redirect, I don't mind emailing press@ and getting a response from someguy@, if he quotes the subject line I won't have any trouble figuring it out. If you make it hard for me to contact you I won't. It bears repeating.
3) (to the mental image of a sweaty Steve Ballmer acting like a deranged gorilla) "Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines!". If it's a press article for a newspaper the author is lucky if they have 2-3 hours to research this time and get it in. You may want to consider having press@ be an alias to multiple people in different timezones. The quicker you respond the less likely I am to write you out of my article or downplay your role.
4) Don't treat me like a sales prospect or try to sell me stuff I'm not buying, I've got a deadline to meet. Be upfront and honest, most reporters/writers can smell bullshit a mile away (or at least they should be able to, I would say bullshit detection is a core competency for writers/reporters). Perfect example: interesting network traffic analysis product, I contact the vendor, they say it's Windows only I say thanks and move on (article is for Linux Magazine Pro). They don't get any press coverage, but they do get remembered for not wasting my time. The next time I'm writing about network traffic analysis on Windows I'll contact them first since I know they play well with others. Reporters/writers have long memories (we keep notes); if you jerk us around we will never, ever, ever write anything positive about you. Ever.
5) Don't be afraid to go beyond answering our questions a bit, if I was a complete expert in the topic I'm asking you about I wouldnâ(TM)t be emailing you now would I? Interesting back stories, info, related data, this is all golden ("What do you mean you're the only vendor that has a syscall proxy? What the heck is a syscall proxy? Oh.. Oh wow.").
6) I love love love covering projects that make cool/useful/nifty/clever software, especially if "staffed" (for lack of a better term to cover commercial and Open Source) by helpful people who are willing to spend 10 minutes helping me and educating me. You make my life easier, I will appreciate it for a very long time. Social capital is valuable, earning it isn't hard.
Samba? That's a pretty common file system. But yeah I get what you mean.
"to cancel out any effect from wind" - and any slope, otherwise we'd have people dropping cars off cliffs claiming speed records like nobody's business =).
Nice to know I can get one, but going to Rogers (especially on a three year contract) ain't gonna happen.
No-one is selling the darn things (I've yet to see one in a store/cell phone kiosk). That could be part of the problem up here at least. If anyone knows where I can get one (in western Canada) please let me know, I'd love to be proven wrong.
You think that's interesting check out the port of Hamburg, shipping containers being zipped around on robotic trucks/lifts/etc.
Terminal Automation
They're looking to support 3 graphics cards per PC
Interesting, I just read the specs on my motherboard which has 4 slots for video cards, granted with 4 slots used it's only 8x (which is ok since I live in 2d land) but with 3 or less in use they're all 16x (well, so it claims), so it would seem that's already covered.
Nuclear powered aircraft carrier, so you've got a pretty good supply of energy there, being able to convert electricity into jet fuel would save them money and reduce the amount of fuel they have to carry (reducing the amount of flammable liquids held in a ship that might get hit by a missile), and could end the need to resupply fuel, all in all very sexy if you're going in to combat.
Do you trust your bank with your money? Even though they don't keep it at your business and you can't stand behind them and watch what they do with it? Your fortune is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Do you trust your pharmacy to give you the correct medication? Even though you dropped the prescription off, will pick it up later and don't know the look of one pill from another? Your life is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Yes, because they are regulated industries and professions, they are well understood (we've been doing banks and pharmacies for many decades), we've worked most of the kinks out. IT/computers/etc. on the other hand is still in it's infancy (and may always remain so due to the rate of change). We're making it up as we go.