I would be wary of telling people who need to be able to write things for school or work to emulate professional writers. People who make a living writing not only write well, they tend to be able to write well quickly. When a pro revises, he is working far above the level of spelling and grammar. Those are automatic for him. He is working on structure, style, or, in the case of fiction, on even higher-level abstractions such as conflict and character.
Processes vary among writers; I can only talk about my own in any detail. I have been a technical writer for nearly two decades now. I tend to do between one and three revision passes for most pieces, and sometimes as few as none. I have always written generally correctly-spelled, grammatical first drafts, starting when I was in school. I was that kid you hated who wrote his term paper the night before it was due and got an A on it. In my professional life, some of my first drafts have been published because I was on a very tight deadline and simply didn't have time to do even a single revision. Those pieces were far from my best work, but the words were generally spelled right and the subjects and the verbs mostly agreed, so they weren't a complete professional embarrassment.
When I write, I think in sort of Platonic, ideal sentences that appear fully formed in my mind. They are already grammatical and correctly spelled, so the only really hard part is to transfer them to the word processor without making any errors. This requires no more than sustained attention to the task at hand. (If I don't pay enough attention, I do things like drop words, or misspell them by using the wrong hand to type a letter.) After I've finished, I may do a revision pass to improve the organization and style a bit (and catch the inevitable brain-to-keyboard misfires) before I call it a "first draft" and send it to the client. Additional revisions are mainly to implement changes requested by the client. Usually it takes a couple of these at most.
It is true that most people can eventually produce decent prose with enough revision. So the "don't worry about the spelling and grammar, fix it later" is a useful strategy for someone who needs to do the occasional bit of writing for school or work. But it is by nature not a technique that a professional would use; it is far too basic. I know that if I had to write that way, I'd be in some other line of work. The flip side of this, of course, is that the casual writer who doesn't know where to start probably shouldn't try to emulate full-time professional writers because his skills simply aren't pro-level. (Which is nothing to be ashamed of. All of us have more things we can't do at a professional level than things we can. I take my car to a mechanic and I leave the opera singing to others.)
The best advice I can give for someone using this technique is to pay attention to the mistakes you are correcting when you do your revisions. Take notes if necessary. The next time you have something to write, review what you learned try not to make the same mistakes again. Pay attention when you read, too. Read stuff like Harper's and The New Yorker and try to figure out what makes that Malcolm Gladwell piece on diapers so damn compelling. You can learn a lot just by paying attention to good writing. You won't just notice these things automatically until you get yourself in the habit. Over time, and with a lot of practice and some guidance from others, your writing will probably improve. It may take more or less time for you than for others, but it's worth it either way. Writing is a useful skill to have and is a competitive advantage in nearly any career.
Apple doesn't have to keep hackers from cracking the TPM. They know that the number of people who are willing to run a machine that has a good chance of not booting the next time you install a software update is fairly small and not really a threat to their market. All they need to do is make sure the hackers will need a few weeks to crack most of the updates.
Plus, of course, using TPM makes hacking the OS to run on generic hardware "circumvention of copy protection" and thus illegal under the DMCA.
Re:The favourite of GNU people everywhere...
on
Cars that Can't Crash?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Dodge Ram. It's not a truck, it's what you do if you're stuck in a pen with a horny male sheep.
I believe that in most sufferers, SAD is actually alleviated better by having more light in the morning. Otherwise people have trouble getting up and going.
Is the "File" menu for "Safari" and "Activity Monitor" in the same location on the screen? No!
This is one of the good things that Unsanity's FruitMenu does for you: it can be configured to change the application menu from text to an icon. Bam, your File/Edit menus line up the same way in every app. That's probably worth $10 to me right there. The fact that it also allows me to customize the Apple menu and context menu is just gravy.
(Some people don't care for "haxies" but they're not much different in principle than Rentzsch's mach_ineject and mach_override, and I've never had a problem with FruitMenu. Still, Apple should offer the icon thing as an option.)
Funny, the Apple used the same trick of recalibrating by moving the head outward (not inward) until it hit the stopper at the end of the track. That was what caused the distinctive "chug-chug-chug" sounds the Apple drives made at startup as well as the grinding sound that preceded an I/O error. The difference in sound was caused by the timing: the boot sequence moved the head more slowly.
Strangely enough, Apple did not have any serious issues with the reliability of their floppy drives. It is my understanding that this was a more-or-less standard way of recalibrating the drive when you didn't know what track the head was already on. I'm surprised there were issues with this on the C64 drives.
If you want a laptop-style keyboard for your desktop machine, try the MacAlly IceKey. Should work on Windows boxen with USB, although the Alt/Windows keys will likely be switched. A friend who bought one at Macworld says it feels like a really good laptop keyboard.
Personal favorites like Card, Egan, Stephenson, and Gaiman have already been mentioned, so I thought I'd mention some of my favorite discoveries from the last year or so.
Karl Schroeder's "Ventus" and "Permanence" -- very inventive space opera type stuff. "Ventus" features a planet whose terraforming AIs went horribly wrong, sending the human society back to carts and buggies while being surrounded by nanotech. "Permanence" features novel ideas like the NeoShinto religion (whose practicioners are assisted by an illegal AI device) and the idea of a slower-than-light culture dependent on "cycler" ships that orbit every few decades among the brown dwarfs.
Wen Spencer's "Alien Taste" and "Tainted Trail" -- SF detective stories featuring a tracker who turns out to be an alien. The premise sounds goofy, but the books are fast-paced and a LOT of fun. Spencer keeps pulling surprises out of the idea.
Tony Daniel's "Metaplanetary" -- There are enough intriguing ideas in this book for three novels. Vast systems of cables that connect the planets of the solar system. Ships that used to be people. People who fall in love with AIs and have children with them. A mad dictator who puts AIs into what amounts to a digital concentration camp. The only major problem is that this is the first volume of a series but doesn't say so on the cover, which leads to a case of "plottus interruptus" at the end.
Catherine Asaro's works -- She gets pegged as a romance/SF hybrid writer, and in fact there are a somewhat ridiculous number of people falling in love in a fairly predictable fashion in her books, but she's also a physicist, and there's enough hard speculative science in her "Skolian Empire" space opera series earn her actual geek cred. She also does very good female characters, which are something of a rarity in SF. In particular I really liked her first couple of "Skolian Empire" books ("Primary Inversion" and "Catch the Lightning"). She's also done a couple of fun adventures involving AI and robotics that reminded me a little of Asimov, except with more realistic characters.
Actually, LocalTalk used regular serial-style cables. The phone line adapters were a third-party product (Farallon's if I remember correctly) and were not intended for using in-place phone wiring, as this was not terminated properly. Rather the goal was simply cost savings, as phone cables were a lot cheaper than Apple LocalTalk cables.
Go here. Not only do they have a lot of interesting shows for various styles of music you might not be familiar with from rockabilly to reggae, they stream in three different formats, they have a playlist page that's updated in real-time, and they keep two weeks' worth of archives of all their broadcasts.
If the state of Oregon really wanted to impose a tax based on miles driven, they can simply use the odometer, checking this reading at the same time they do emissions testing every year or two. Sure you can roll back an odometer, but that's already illegal, and probably more difficult than blocking GPS, especially in newer cars. (I have no idea how one could roll back the digital odo in a 2003 Jetta, for instance.)
If you are not already in the intersection, and the light turns yellow, you are to stop. That's what the yellow light means. It doesn't mean "here comes a red," it means "stop if you're not already in the intersection." Yes, this means you should get a ticket if the light turns yellow and you don't stop.
At least that's what it means in every state I've driven in except, it appears, Oregon. If the state of Oregon wants to fix this oversight on their part and bring their traffic rules more in line with the rest of the country, more power to 'em.
I remember reading magazine articles about this amazing new concept called "shareware" back in the 1980s. The reason small developers started doing it was because advertising and distribution were VERY expenses. Shareware moved the cost of media (a couple bucks per floppy disk!) into the hands of users of your software. In other words, if you had a good product, people would give copies to their friends because they wanted to be seen as the source of cool stuff, and they would even pay for the media to make the copies! (Or their friends would; it was all the same to the developer.) There were not very many of these shareware gurus, but there was one in every user group, which, you'll remember, was how computer enthusiasts found out about cool new stuff before the Internet.
Today, the guy who has all the shareware doesn't get cool points anymore, since any moron can go to Tucows or VersionTracker and find all the same stuff. In other words, the social factors that made shareware work in the early days have largely disappeared thanks to the Internet. Except for certain very specific types of products, shareware just doesn't work in the Internet era, just like user groups don't work anymore either. The shareware concept was a meme with a brief window of opportunity, which is now closed.
The solution will probably be micropayments and software subscriptions for people who need support, and free software for those who don't.
There are plenty of non-school opportunities for kids to "learn to deal with people." Just because you homeschool them doesn't mean you don't let them play with other kids in the neighborhood. And there's scouts, church, Little League (for the athletically-inclined geeks), and more.
What you'll learn about people in a public school is that most people are stupid and cruel. Which is, probably, true, but do you really want to be teaching your kids such cynicism day in and day out?
Thirteen years later, I still remember: our senior English class took parts in a reading of Moliere's "The Misanthrope." I managed to nab the title role. Everyone seemed impressed with the passion I brought to my reading. It was almost, one girl said to me, as if I felt the same way. Well, DUH!
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I would be wary of telling people who need to be able to write things for school or work to emulate professional writers. People who make a living writing not only write well, they tend to be able to write well quickly. When a pro revises, he is working far above the level of spelling and grammar. Those are automatic for him. He is working on structure, style, or, in the case of fiction, on even higher-level abstractions such as conflict and character.
Processes vary among writers; I can only talk about my own in any detail. I have been a technical writer for nearly two decades now. I tend to do between one and three revision passes for most pieces, and sometimes as few as none. I have always written generally correctly-spelled, grammatical first drafts, starting when I was in school. I was that kid you hated who wrote his term paper the night before it was due and got an A on it. In my professional life, some of my first drafts have been published because I was on a very tight deadline and simply didn't have time to do even a single revision. Those pieces were far from my best work, but the words were generally spelled right and the subjects and the verbs mostly agreed, so they weren't a complete professional embarrassment.
When I write, I think in sort of Platonic, ideal sentences that appear fully formed in my mind. They are already grammatical and correctly spelled, so the only really hard part is to transfer them to the word processor without making any errors. This requires no more than sustained attention to the task at hand. (If I don't pay enough attention, I do things like drop words, or misspell them by using the wrong hand to type a letter.) After I've finished, I may do a revision pass to improve the organization and style a bit (and catch the inevitable brain-to-keyboard misfires) before I call it a "first draft" and send it to the client. Additional revisions are mainly to implement changes requested by the client. Usually it takes a couple of these at most.
It is true that most people can eventually produce decent prose with enough revision. So the "don't worry about the spelling and grammar, fix it later" is a useful strategy for someone who needs to do the occasional bit of writing for school or work. But it is by nature not a technique that a professional would use; it is far too basic. I know that if I had to write that way, I'd be in some other line of work. The flip side of this, of course, is that the casual writer who doesn't know where to start probably shouldn't try to emulate full-time professional writers because his skills simply aren't pro-level. (Which is nothing to be ashamed of. All of us have more things we can't do at a professional level than things we can. I take my car to a mechanic and I leave the opera singing to others.)
The best advice I can give for someone using this technique is to pay attention to the mistakes you are correcting when you do your revisions. Take notes if necessary. The next time you have something to write, review what you learned try not to make the same mistakes again. Pay attention when you read, too. Read stuff like Harper's and The New Yorker and try to figure out what makes that Malcolm Gladwell piece on diapers so damn compelling. You can learn a lot just by paying attention to good writing. You won't just notice these things automatically until you get yourself in the habit. Over time, and with a lot of practice and some guidance from others, your writing will probably improve. It may take more or less time for you than for others, but it's worth it either way. Writing is a useful skill to have and is a competitive advantage in nearly any career.
Apple doesn't have to keep hackers from cracking the TPM. They know that the number of people who are willing to run a machine that has a good chance of not booting the next time you install a software update is fairly small and not really a threat to their market. All they need to do is make sure the hackers will need a few weeks to crack most of the updates.
Plus, of course, using TPM makes hacking the OS to run on generic hardware "circumvention of copy protection" and thus illegal under the DMCA.
Dodge Ram. It's not a truck, it's what you do if you're stuck in a pen with a horny male sheep.
I believe that in most sufferers, SAD is actually alleviated better by having more light in the morning. Otherwise people have trouble getting up and going.
Is the "File" menu for "Safari" and "Activity Monitor" in the same location on the screen? No!
This is one of the good things that Unsanity's FruitMenu does for you: it can be configured to change the application menu from text to an icon. Bam, your File/Edit menus line up the same way in every app. That's probably worth $10 to me right there. The fact that it also allows me to customize the Apple menu and context menu is just gravy.
(Some people don't care for "haxies" but they're not much different in principle than Rentzsch's mach_ineject and mach_override, and I've never had a problem with FruitMenu. Still, Apple should offer the icon thing as an option.)
The canonical example along those lines is allegedly from a soldier whose weapon has jammed. "Fuck! Fucking fucker's fucking fucked!"
That's Greg Bear who wrote Blood Music. And there's no "s" at the end of the title of Distraction.
Furthermore, I've never met her, but I'm sure Teresa Nielsen Hayden's thuggery is quite competent.
Funny, the Apple used the same trick of recalibrating by moving the head outward (not inward) until it hit the stopper at the end of the track. That was what caused the distinctive "chug-chug-chug" sounds the Apple drives made at startup as well as the grinding sound that preceded an I/O error. The difference in sound was caused by the timing: the boot sequence moved the head more slowly.
Strangely enough, Apple did not have any serious issues with the reliability of their floppy drives. It is my understanding that this was a more-or-less standard way of recalibrating the drive when you didn't know what track the head was already on. I'm surprised there were issues with this on the C64 drives.
Also, the punch line is "Do you want two nines or three sixes?"
If you want a laptop-style keyboard for your desktop machine, try the MacAlly IceKey. Should work on Windows boxen with USB, although the Alt/Windows keys will likely be switched. A friend who bought one at Macworld says it feels like a really good laptop keyboard.
Personal favorites like Card, Egan, Stephenson, and Gaiman have already been mentioned, so I thought I'd mention some of my favorite discoveries from the last year or so.
Karl Schroeder's "Ventus" and "Permanence" -- very inventive space opera type stuff. "Ventus" features a planet whose terraforming AIs went horribly wrong, sending the human society back to carts and buggies while being surrounded by nanotech. "Permanence" features novel ideas like the NeoShinto religion (whose practicioners are assisted by an illegal AI device) and the idea of a slower-than-light culture dependent on "cycler" ships that orbit every few decades among the brown dwarfs.
Wen Spencer's "Alien Taste" and "Tainted Trail" -- SF detective stories featuring a tracker who turns out to be an alien. The premise sounds goofy, but the books are fast-paced and a LOT of fun. Spencer keeps pulling surprises out of the idea.
Tony Daniel's "Metaplanetary" -- There are enough intriguing ideas in this book for three novels. Vast systems of cables that connect the planets of the solar system. Ships that used to be people. People who fall in love with AIs and have children with them. A mad dictator who puts AIs into what amounts to a digital concentration camp. The only major problem is that this is the first volume of a series but doesn't say so on the cover, which leads to a case of "plottus interruptus" at the end.
Catherine Asaro's works -- She gets pegged as a romance/SF hybrid writer, and in fact there are a somewhat ridiculous number of people falling in love in a fairly predictable fashion in her books, but she's also a physicist, and there's enough hard speculative science in her "Skolian Empire" space opera series earn her actual geek cred. She also does very good female characters, which are something of a rarity in SF. In particular I really liked her first couple of "Skolian Empire" books ("Primary Inversion" and "Catch the Lightning"). She's also done a couple of fun adventures involving AI and robotics that reminded me a little of Asimov, except with more realistic characters.
Actually, LocalTalk used regular serial-style cables. The phone line adapters were a third-party product (Farallon's if I remember correctly) and were not intended for using in-place phone wiring, as this was not terminated properly. Rather the goal was simply cost savings, as phone cables were a lot cheaper than Apple LocalTalk cables.
Go here. Not only do they have a lot of interesting shows for various styles of music you might not be familiar with from rockabilly to reggae, they stream in three different formats, they have a playlist page that's updated in real-time, and they keep two weeks' worth of archives of all their broadcasts.
If the state of Oregon really wanted to impose a tax based on miles driven, they can simply use the odometer, checking this reading at the same time they do emissions testing every year or two. Sure you can roll back an odometer, but that's already illegal, and probably more difficult than blocking GPS, especially in newer cars. (I have no idea how one could roll back the digital odo in a 2003 Jetta, for instance.)
If you are not already in the intersection, and the light turns yellow, you are to stop. That's what the yellow light means. It doesn't mean "here comes a red," it means "stop if you're not already in the intersection." Yes, this means you should get a ticket if the light turns yellow and you don't stop.
At least that's what it means in every state I've driven in except, it appears, Oregon. If the state of Oregon wants to fix this oversight on their part and bring their traffic rules more in line with the rest of the country, more power to 'em.
Alton Brown is a campaign to educate pople about what they eat. Although, I guess, not in the same way.
I remember reading magazine articles about this amazing new concept called "shareware" back in the 1980s. The reason small developers started doing it was because advertising and distribution were VERY expenses. Shareware moved the cost of media (a couple bucks per floppy disk!) into the hands of users of your software. In other words, if you had a good product, people would give copies to their friends because they wanted to be seen as the source of cool stuff, and they would even pay for the media to make the copies! (Or their friends would; it was all the same to the developer.) There were not very many of these shareware gurus, but there was one in every user group, which, you'll remember, was how computer enthusiasts found out about cool new stuff before the Internet.
Today, the guy who has all the shareware doesn't get cool points anymore, since any moron can go to Tucows or VersionTracker and find all the same stuff. In other words, the social factors that made shareware work in the early days have largely disappeared thanks to the Internet. Except for certain very specific types of products, shareware just doesn't work in the Internet era, just like user groups don't work anymore either. The shareware concept was a meme with a brief window of opportunity, which is now closed.
The solution will probably be micropayments and software subscriptions for people who need support, and free software for those who don't.
There are plenty of non-school opportunities for kids to "learn to deal with people." Just because you homeschool them doesn't mean you don't let them play with other kids in the neighborhood. And there's scouts, church, Little League (for the athletically-inclined geeks), and more.
What you'll learn about people in a public school is that most people are stupid and cruel. Which is, probably, true, but do you really want to be teaching your kids such cynicism day in and day out?
Thirteen years later, I still remember: our senior English class took parts in a reading of Moliere's "The Misanthrope." I managed to nab the title role. Everyone seemed impressed with the passion I brought to my reading. It was almost, one girl said to me, as if I felt the same way. Well, DUH!
-- Jerry
Which would mean the sequence should go:
foo, bar, mitzvah...