Glenn Beck has been known to use this device known as "sarcasm" which tends to escape the Aspergers crowd that runs Slashdot.
Isn't everything he says sarcastic?
I have to admit that the right seems to have a very weird sense of humor these days (assuming Romney really was joking about those airplane windows) that seems to go past us feeble-minded libbies. On the other hand, right wing bloviators do tend to say stupid things in all seriousness and then claim they were being sarcastic when they're called on it. I guess that's why they say everything with a smirk, since this expression is so ambiguous with respect to seriousness.
Pretty much agree with you. Next time, just say that that your two choices are your cable company and your legacy phone company. That's true pretty much everywhere.
"Red Chinese" is kind of a silly term to use these days. When I was a kid, that was how you differentiated the Communist government on the mainland (which we didn't recognize) from the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan (which we no longer recognize but still support militarily!). And although, technically, the mainlanders are still comies and still at war with the Taiwanese, the reality is that the Chinese Communist Party is the biggest capitalist entity on the planet, And they got there, in part, by collaborating with Taiwanese business.
If the U.S. and China ever fight another war, it won't be over whether Mark and Mao are kewler than Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson. It'll be over access to natural resources.
Not all startups invent something brilliant, and it certainly doesn't require to be a genius to get big bucks.
I didn't say genius was required to get big bugs. I said that genius was required to make it a certainty.
From your description, that startup you worked for was a well-run company that managed to build some solid value. Now there's no denying that this is the right way to build a good business. And of course well-run companies have a better chance of winning the fat buyout crapshoot. But the crapshoot is still a crapshoot.
My only point here is that if you focus on winning the crapshoot, you almost certainly won't.But if you focus on building a real future for yourself and your company, then you've got something that's worth having whether you win the crapshoot or not.
It's a familiar story. I worked with a guy who interviewed at a certain small software company back in 1982, and refused their offer because he thought their CEO was an insufferable dork. And of course that dork's name was Bill Gates.
Another bunch I worked with on a skunkworks startup had been with a certain other Big Name back when (this one I have to keep to myself) and just barely missed out at cashing in when they got bought out. The whole point of the startup they had brought me in on was to try and recreate that magic moment they had missed the first time. And of course the startup's product was hopeless, since all it's motivations were the wrong ones.
Which kind of demonstrates the stupidity of the whole approach. I don't mean the obsession with might-have-beens (though that's pretty unhealthy). I mean the obsession with getting rich by being part of The Next Big Thing. Unless you're a fucking genius (and trust me, you're probably not), you're not going to invent something really brilliant, and that's the only sure way of cashing in. Otherwise, you're just rolling the dice. OK, you roll the dice every time you start a business. But to have any hope of succeeding, you have to be focused on the the basics of making your company work, not crapshoot aspects, which are simply beyond your control.
I'm not saying that nobody ever lucks out and gets big bucks. But it's just not something you can plan. If you want to gamble, buy a lottery ticket: the odds in your favor are just as good, and it'll screw up your career a lot less.
I have an interesting relationship with Agile. Such projects tend to be reluctant to hire me as a tech writer. They look at my resume, full of experience at big, bureaucratic organizations like Sun, and also at my gray hairs, and assume I'll never adapt to their more informal methods.
But in fact I find Agile pretty refreshing. I've sat through too many boring, endless meetings and seen too many projects fall victim to politics and Paralysis by Analysis not to see the merits of Agile. It's adaptive, it responds to changing perceptions of what's needed. In short, it's for the real world, not some imaginary universe designed by marketeers and project managers.
Alas, when you throw out all the old-fashioned highly-structured software methodologies, you end up throwing out all the highly structured documentation methodologies (Docbook, DITA, CMS) that evolved to work with them. The documentation tools I've seen in Agile projects (Wikis, Markdown and [shudder] Google Docs) are too primitive to replace them.
All in all, scary and fun. No danger of my job getting boring any time soon.
I have no idea who you're taking about. Nor am I making excuses for anybody. I'm simply attacking the smug assumption that people give in to depression and kill themselves are simply inferior life forms who deserve to die.
I'm not a Christian, but Mathew 7:1 seems appropriate.
Never said that all English majors are technically deficient. And even the majority that are sometimes make good tech writers. But I've known a lot of really bad tech writers who thought their English degrees qualified them to write about anything, There are mental skills in tech writing that are a lot more important than the ability to interpret the metaphors of William Faulkner.
I was making a joke about the fact that commercial softwre projects rarely consider documentation a high priority. If you have an interesing Open Source project that needs a tech writer and dioesn't have the resources to pay one, I'd certainly consider donating a reasonable amount of my time.
I'm appreciative of your positive comments about my profession, but you overstate the contribution of English and journalism types. There are indeed many good tech writers with that background, but there are also English types who drift into it because they can't get work doing anything else, and produce cruddy docs based on too-fancy prose styles and lack of serious interest in technology.
Many good technical writers have technical backgrounds. I myself am a college dropout who wanted to be a computer scientist but didn't have the intellectual chops for it. Others I've known have been retooled scientists, humanities professors, and MBA types. The one constant is that you need the ability to explain complicated ideas simply (for which traditional training in writing doesn't always prepare you), a certain amount of simple curiousity, and the ability to ask the right "stupid" questions.
BTW, anybody needs some APIs documented? User manuals? Installations guides? I get off my current assignment in about a month, If you have an interesing open-source project, I will consider donating some of my time.
As a tech writer, I've been fighting a losing battle against the wiki-docs approach for years. Nobody seems to grasp that Wikis undo a couple decades of progress in writing well-structured, process-driven docs. Confluence even pushes its own wiki as docs tool. Needless to say, documentation is the weak point in Confluence's otherwise excellent products.
The design-by-document approach just isn't going to fly in this age of minimalist organization and agile development.
You need "incentives" to motivate people to do their jobs? I think it's called "pay".
If ordinary workers aren't pulling their share of the load, then the managers are pulling theirs. They need to get out there, talk to people, identify the slackers, and manage them. Talk, cajole, threaten, and (if necessary) fire.
This is Workplace 101. A manager's job is to manage. There are no fancy gimmicks that makes this role unnecessary,
I pretty much agree with you, with a semi-important exception: most landlines are still analog. Of course, the connection becomes digital as soon as reaches the central office, though I'm old enough to remember when most connections analog all the way through.
Doesn't refute the point you're making. Just a small nitpick.
If data is a utility, it's a utility like gas or electricity. Now, yes, you pay for these by the unit. But you also pay a monthly fee ust for the connection. I pay $6/month connection fee for my natural gas, even in the summer when I could survive with it turned off. But of course it's not practical to turn gas on and off. Not a big deal.
I could certainly live with a data "utility" that charged me based on how much data I consumed — provided the fees were reasonable.
Now, the big reason this isn't happening is that it doesn't fit in with the standard corporate business model, where they deliberately keep their fee structure weird so they never lose an opportunity to gouge the consumer. But let's not forget how resistent geeks have been to paying for bandwidth.
Good lord. You have an entire argument about inferior certain people are, and when I point out how your arguments bounce back on you, I'm the one being ad hominem?
If you parse my post a little more carefully, you'll notice I wasn't calling you a Nazi.. I was citing the Nazi's ironically. Subtle concept, I agree, but I'm sure you can grasp if if you concentrate.
Is this more of that "oh no, all lifestyles are perfectly 100% equal, just different" garbage?
No, I don 't think becoming, say, a murderer, is just a "lifestyle choice". I might even concede that society has the right to punish the murderer extremely and permanently.
But that's punishing the murderer for what he does not for what he is. You can't control what people are. Societies that try are commonly known as totalitarian. I assume we're both against that?
Anyway, it's a long way from saying, "A murderer deserves to die", to "a suicide is a loser who has done society a favor". Punishing murderers is about society protecting itself from dangerous people. Discounting the lives of suicides is ignorant, stupid, and expressive of a smug sense of superiority.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Well, yes, actually. Because (and this is the part you're not paying attention to), I'm arguing against people devaluing the lives of other people.
Slashdot Mirror
Glenn Beck has been known to use this device known as "sarcasm" which tends to escape the Aspergers crowd that runs Slashdot.
Isn't everything he says sarcastic?
I have to admit that the right seems to have a very weird sense of humor these days (assuming Romney really was joking about those airplane windows) that seems to go past us feeble-minded libbies. On the other hand, right wing bloviators do tend to say stupid things in all seriousness and then claim they were being sarcastic when they're called on it. I guess that's why they say everything with a smirk, since this expression is so ambiguous with respect to seriousness.
Pretty much agree with you. Next time, just say that that your two choices are your cable company and your legacy phone company. That's true pretty much everywhere.
Not much, but who wants to eat lunch out a vending machine?
"Red Chinese" is kind of a silly term to use these days. When I was a kid, that was how you differentiated the Communist government on the mainland (which we didn't recognize) from the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan (which we no longer recognize but still support militarily!). And although, technically, the mainlanders are still comies and still at war with the Taiwanese, the reality is that the Chinese Communist Party is the biggest capitalist entity on the planet, And they got there, in part, by collaborating with Taiwanese business.
If the U.S. and China ever fight another war, it won't be over whether Mark and Mao are kewler than Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson. It'll be over access to natural resources.
What, you think a 40-employee industrial company can affford a food service contract? And anyway, they asked the guy for IT recommendations.
Absolutely agree. I've used Wikis that way myself. I just think they suck as a writing tool.
Not all startups invent something brilliant, and it certainly doesn't require to be a genius to get big bucks.
I didn't say genius was required to get big bugs. I said that genius was required to make it a certainty.
From your description, that startup you worked for was a well-run company that managed to build some solid value. Now there's no denying that this is the right way to build a good business. And of course well-run companies have a better chance of winning the fat buyout crapshoot. But the crapshoot is still a crapshoot.
My only point here is that if you focus on winning the crapshoot, you almost certainly won't.But if you focus on building a real future for yourself and your company, then you've got something that's worth having whether you win the crapshoot or not.
It's a familiar story. I worked with a guy who interviewed at a certain small software company back in 1982, and refused their offer because he thought their CEO was an insufferable dork. And of course that dork's name was Bill Gates.
Another bunch I worked with on a skunkworks startup had been with a certain other Big Name back when (this one I have to keep to myself) and just barely missed out at cashing in when they got bought out. The whole point of the startup they had brought me in on was to try and recreate that magic moment they had missed the first time. And of course the startup's product was hopeless, since all it's motivations were the wrong ones.
Which kind of demonstrates the stupidity of the whole approach. I don't mean the obsession with might-have-beens (though that's pretty unhealthy). I mean the obsession with getting rich by being part of The Next Big Thing. Unless you're a fucking genius (and trust me, you're probably not), you're not going to invent something really brilliant, and that's the only sure way of cashing in. Otherwise, you're just rolling the dice. OK, you roll the dice every time you start a business. But to have any hope of succeeding, you have to be focused on the the basics of making your company work, not crapshoot aspects, which are simply beyond your control.
I'm not saying that nobody ever lucks out and gets big bucks. But it's just not something you can plan. If you want to gamble, buy a lottery ticket: the odds in your favor are just as good, and it'll screw up your career a lot less.
I have an interesting relationship with Agile. Such projects tend to be reluctant to hire me as a tech writer. They look at my resume, full of experience at big, bureaucratic organizations like Sun, and also at my gray hairs, and assume I'll never adapt to their more informal methods.
But in fact I find Agile pretty refreshing. I've sat through too many boring, endless meetings and seen too many projects fall victim to politics and Paralysis by Analysis not to see the merits of Agile. It's adaptive, it responds to changing perceptions of what's needed. In short, it's for the real world, not some imaginary universe designed by marketeers and project managers.
Alas, when you throw out all the old-fashioned highly-structured software methodologies, you end up throwing out all the highly structured documentation methodologies (Docbook, DITA, CMS) that evolved to work with them. The documentation tools I've seen in Agile projects (Wikis, Markdown and [shudder] Google Docs) are too primitive to replace them.
All in all, scary and fun. No danger of my job getting boring any time soon.
Well, speaking of context, how about paying attention to the context I was actually talking about?
I have no idea who you're taking about. Nor am I making excuses for anybody. I'm simply attacking the smug assumption that people give in to depression and kill themselves are simply inferior life forms who deserve to die.
I'm not a Christian, but Mathew 7:1 seems appropriate.
Never said that all English majors are technically deficient. And even the majority that are sometimes make good tech writers. But I've known a lot of really bad tech writers who thought their English degrees qualified them to write about anything, There are mental skills in tech writing that are a lot more important than the ability to interpret the metaphors of William Faulkner.
I was making a joke about the fact that commercial softwre projects rarely consider documentation a high priority. If you have an interesing Open Source project that needs a tech writer and dioesn't have the resources to pay one, I'd certainly consider donating a reasonable amount of my time.
Fine, I'll write your manual for you. Shall we discuss money?
What, no money for docs? Never mind!
I'm appreciative of your positive comments about my profession, but you overstate the contribution of English and journalism types. There are indeed many good tech writers with that background, but there are also English types who drift into it because they can't get work doing anything else, and produce cruddy docs based on too-fancy prose styles and lack of serious interest in technology.
Many good technical writers have technical backgrounds. I myself am a college dropout who wanted to be a computer scientist but didn't have the intellectual chops for it. Others I've known have been retooled scientists, humanities professors, and MBA types. The one constant is that you need the ability to explain complicated ideas simply (for which traditional training in writing doesn't always prepare you), a certain amount of simple curiousity, and the ability to ask the right "stupid" questions.
BTW, anybody needs some APIs documented? User manuals? Installations guides? I get off my current assignment in about a month, If you have an interesing open-source project, I will consider donating some of my time.
As a tech writer, I've been fighting a losing battle against the wiki-docs approach for years. Nobody seems to grasp that Wikis undo a couple decades of progress in writing well-structured, process-driven docs. Confluence even pushes its own wiki as docs tool. Needless to say, documentation is the weak point in Confluence's otherwise excellent products.
The design-by-document approach just isn't going to fly in this age of minimalist organization and agile development.
It's a perfectly good tagline, one I've used myself many times. Though to be consistent,you should say "it don't exist".
You need "incentives" to motivate people to do their jobs? I think it's called "pay".
If ordinary workers aren't pulling their share of the load, then the managers are pulling theirs. They need to get out there, talk to people, identify the slackers, and manage them. Talk, cajole, threaten, and (if necessary) fire.
This is Workplace 101. A manager's job is to manage. There are no fancy gimmicks that makes this role unnecessary,
No, I'm only average sized.
Voice is data.
I pretty much agree with you, with a semi-important exception: most landlines are still analog. Of course, the connection becomes digital as soon as reaches the central office, though I'm old enough to remember when most connections analog all the way through.
Doesn't refute the point you're making. Just a small nitpick.
If data is a utility, it's a utility like gas or electricity. Now, yes, you pay for these by the unit. But you also pay a monthly fee ust for the connection. I pay $6/month connection fee for my natural gas, even in the summer when I could survive with it turned off. But of course it's not practical to turn gas on and off. Not a big deal.
I could certainly live with a data "utility" that charged me based on how much data I consumed — provided the fees were reasonable.
Now, the big reason this isn't happening is that it doesn't fit in with the standard corporate business model, where they deliberately keep their fee structure weird so they never lose an opportunity to gouge the consumer. But let's not forget how resistent geeks have been to paying for bandwidth.
Good lord. You have an entire argument about inferior certain people are, and when I point out how your arguments bounce back on you, I'm the one being ad hominem?
If you parse my post a little more carefully, you'll notice I wasn't calling you a Nazi.. I was citing the Nazi's ironically. Subtle concept, I agree, but I'm sure you can grasp if if you concentrate.
"I se you can't let go" he says, in an effort t get in the last word
Bored now.
Is this more of that "oh no, all lifestyles are perfectly 100% equal, just different" garbage?
No, I don 't think becoming, say, a murderer, is just a "lifestyle choice". I might even concede that society has the right to punish the murderer extremely and permanently.
But that's punishing the murderer for what he does not for what he is. You can't control what people are. Societies that try are commonly known as totalitarian. I assume we're both against that?
Anyway, it's a long way from saying, "A murderer deserves to die", to "a suicide is a loser who has done society a favor". Punishing murderers is about society protecting itself from dangerous people. Discounting the lives of suicides is ignorant, stupid, and expressive of a smug sense of superiority.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Well, yes, actually. Because (and this is the part you're not paying attention to), I'm arguing against people devaluing the lives of other people.