I actually am a technical writer, and I like it. Now that I have been working in the field for a while, I'm chary about getting involved with F/OSS projects because the F/OSS community in general tends to treat non-programmers as not worth bothering with or listening to, even though a lot of us who'd really like to get involved are working professionals with good track records. I don't need to get treated like shit and ignored on a volunteer project when, if I get treated like shit and ignored in the corporate world, I'm at least drawing a paycheque. (Nothing eats like food, after all.)
I've seen far too much of the attitude around that programmers should write the documentation, because the programmers know the application best (as if that's a particularly good criterion by which to create documentation!), and IME that really only accomplishes two things: It makes your programmers (who'd rather be programming, quelle surprise) cranky, and it pisses off your user base, when the documentation reads like something that has been hacked together by someone who doesn't know the first thing or care a whit about documentation. Brilliant.
Now, if someone were serious about getting technical writing students involved in F/OSS projects, I'd recommend contacting these folks: Cooperative Education and Career Services at the University of Waterloo, and the Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Communication Design programme people. They do co-ops at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in those programmes, and, at least when I was there, seem to be quite open to unconventional project ideas...
I'm taking down names. It's amazing how, when you start poking at who all is behind all these weirdly-named front groups, you find some astonishingly nasty bugs under those rocks.
What I was looking for is answers like yours. The problem with just snarking off and saying I'm "looking for jobs on Slashdot" (I'm not; most of you are not my target market) is that well, most of you are not my target market. On the other hand, a lot of you will know things about places to look that I may not have thought of, which is why I think your comment is really useful and informative, despite what one might call "a slight tone problem." I'm going to be tracking down the science writing organization you mention, not because I do science writing, but because they probably know something that would be useful to me.
As it stands, I'm networked in with the local STC chapter, the local IABC chapter, belong to two technical writers' mailing lists (TECHWR-L and Techshoret), and I am also networked into the local small business community through the London Small Business Centre and Fanshawe College, where I instructed for a term. However, while that gives me an excellent local grounding, it doesn't do much for wider exposure. Since most of my clients are not in the local area at this point, I now need to focus more on expanding my network outward nationally and internationally.
While I find the local exposure has been good for me, it's useful to have concrete examples of stuff I haven't yet found in my wanderings (you folks collectively can and have hit a lot more sites than I), and it's always useful to have different eyes looking at any given problem.
Well, it's Perfessor Multigeek's computer; maybe you should take it up with him. You could say I'm more interested in being Reed and Wright compatible than Mac-compatible at this point. When I start making programmer-type money instead of technical writer type money, maybe I can get a new Mac. *grin*
Yes, technical writing is the steno pool of the 21st Century.
I'm not "picking stitches" anymore, I'm "reverse engineering." I'm not "tailoring" anymore, I'm "setting my preferences," and I'm not "customizing a pattern" anymore, I'm "kernel hacking." Ah. Hmm, now that I can talk about it in 1337 code, I feel a lot better about admitting that I (can) sew!
Let's just say I won't be buying any McCall's patterns for quite awhile. I think I'll stick to Burda. (Burda 0wNz0rZ j00!)
There's where Tolkien falls down: Endless, endless descriptions, many of them without the appropriate points of reference for modern readers. I can't get into Tolkien; he and I have nothing to say to each other. Personally, I don't care if he invented his own languages for LOTR; Marc Okrand did that for Star Trek, and no one considers him to be a genius of fictional linguistics -- and I'm not sure if I'd read fiction by Noam Chomsky, either, and he's one hell of a linguist and a not-bad writer -- did you ever see that paper he wrote where he tap-danced on B. F. Skinner? Whew!
Personally, speaking to the 'hacker' mentality, if you wanted to broaden your reading horizons a bit away from straight techno-fables (as good as those might be), I'd recommend some speculative fiction that deals with "What if?" type questions, specifically along the lines of alternate history:
For instance, Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream asks the question "What if Adolf Hitler hadn't been kicked out of art school and had gone on to a career in commercial illustration, then writing, instead?" Likewise, Spinrad's The Mind Game asks "What if a Scientology-like cult took over Hollywood?" ('Trancendentalism' in the book is a very thinly-disguised Scientology clone. In my more tinfoil-hatted moments I can't help but wonder if The Mind Game is part of the reason Spinrad's been virtually blacklisted in North America!)
Also, Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic novel We asks "What if Communism ruled the world?" (This book makes a nice tryptych with 1984 and Brave New World, by the way.)
For a more technological bent, Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine asks "What if Babbage's Difference Engine had actually worked?" Another similar technologically-inclined fable, Jack Williamson's The Silicon Dagger asks "What if a gang of hard-core Libertarians had the means to create their version of Utopia in the middle of the United States?" Although it's not a terribly good novel, per se, it's certainly thought-provoking.
Books such as these are different from the usual sort of SF which postulates a scenario and the rules in which that scenario works, because they start with known history or events, and extrapolate, either by asking "What would have happened if X happened (instead)?" or "What would have happened if X had not happened (instead)?" It's also fun to do your own thought-experiments along these lines, once you get the knack.:)
Another benefit of these books is that they're mostly older and can be found at most libraries, ergo, for free.:)
...it's a little hard to shock a woman in the testicles, after all. (It'd be almost as hard to shock us in the ovaries, methinks, but that's another kettle of scrod entirely.)
Personally, I think the ultimate anti-theft device for a computer would be a popup holographic simulation of Richard Stallman.
Last I checked, the official USPS abbreviation for that state was HI.
Ok, so it's probably a statistically unlikely problem, but if I can spot it in two seconds flat, it's probably at least somewhat of a concern.
Some of us would also feel dumb writing "Dear..." to our bosses or coworkers.:)
From an ex-retailer's perspective...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
We were selling legitimate products, granted, for a niche market, but we consider ourselves lucky if 1 in 10 people who come by our shop actually buys something. So for this twit to be saying he gets a buy rate of 1 in 100 seems to me to be outrageously high. I would estimate the actual rate is probably more along the lines of 1 in 10 000 000 or so...but then again, I'm not a spammer, so I wouldn't know for sure, and that's one area in which I most emphatically do not want empirical experience!
You may (or not) be thinking of a place near Lewisberry, Pennsylvania
Nope. The parent poster's thinking of Magnetic Hill, NB, which is indeed near Moncton. I've been there, and it's really quite interesting. At the tender age of seven, I intuited that it was an optical illusion when I was there, but my parents explained it anyway.
...but only if you're standing next...
on
Water Flows Uphill
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· Score: 1
...to Dyson's creation, and then perhaps only in...Oh, never mind. Bring me the head of Natalie Portman on a plate of hot grits!
We handle safety documentation for a big company (a very big company), and we have to do quarterly updating of some 60 000 documents, plus update new sites as they come in. Suddenly, page-turning ultra-scanners and super-OCR programs look very interesting to me. All our output has to be in PDF, so something like what you described could be very useful.
I can also think of a few non-work uses for the thing, too. Dare I say, avariciously, "I want one!";)
Isn't there something in US law requiring "due diligence" before attempting to prosecute a suit? Note IANAL, and worse, IANAA (...An American), so I could be wrong, but FindLaw's legal dictionary seems to think so.
In any case, if this means what I think it means in this context, the RIAA sure didn't do it.
(Your head hurt from all these conditionals yet?)
Looks like a Normal Accident to me
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1, Interesting
For those of you not up on your accident theory, a guy named Charles Perrow developed a model in which he proposes that there are always going to be the 2% accidents -- total, unpredictable, catastrophic failures. While most incidents telegraph themselves a mile wide and a mile deep, some are just practically unavoidable.
The other side of the coin is that with something as potentially catastrophic and as politically charged as space exploration, we should be aiming even to try to eliminate as many of those "2% Accidents" as possible, which can be done more or less, but takes a lot of work, with (seemingly) minimal return.
At the very least, we need to find a way to circle his house 24/7 with ice-cream trucks that play "Turkey In The Straw" and other similar abominations off-key until he can't stand it anymore and starts beating his head against a brick wall until his face looks like 5 lbs of raw hamburger. Or we could simply find his e-mail address and/or home contact information and send him a deluge of "gift subscriptions," "free trials," Franklin Mint tawdriness, and other junk, not to mention sending him Slashdot's current existing corpus of spam, and some invasive code that will let us know exactly what he's doing every hour of the day (or something equally horrible like that)...or...or...or...
I'm ethically opposed to cruel and unusual punishment, though, so I say we just off the jerk before he can do any more damage. (At the very least, can we exile him to a nice deserted island somewhere with no Internet connection? Please?!)
When the creator of a work can no longer benefit from that work, not when "doing so would not inflict harm on the creators," then it's ok to have work lapse into the public domain, which is in no way a "seizure," unless of course you consider that any sort of expiry is a "seizure."
I don't know what sort of "modern political theory" says that the good of society NEVER outweighs the good of the individual (but it sounds an awful lot like Libertarianism to me), but that's totally incorrect. The good of society OFTEN outweighs the good of the individual. That's why we have laws against murder and rape; that's why we have public schools and rural electrification initiatives, and yes, that's also why we have copyrights. And you know damn well that copyright expiry isn't an unreasonable seizure of property; that's why there are binding agreements about it -- to make it 'reasonable,' so come off.
If you go back and read the original terms of copyright, you will find that it's much closer to the "limited monopoly" argument put forth by the original poster; ideas don't translate well into the 'property rights' sphere (which is a problem we're always wrestling with here on Slashdot), and your argument suggests the type of reasoning the RI/MPAA uses to justify copy protection in the name of copyright protection.
That's not what it's like at all. It isn't like "being anywhere," even for a moment. Things just are the way they are, and the associations are neutral and not connected to memory. Sorry you'll never understand. It hasn't got a damned thing to do with memory associations or recall; it's got everything to do with cross-interpretations of sensory input. Because I think a certain thing "smells brown" doesn't mean I'm associating it with something -- I may never have smelled anything that smells like that before.
And how do you explain that when I had a tactile input I'd never had before, I perceived it as a fuzzy, electrical fluorescent green sensation? Someone touched me in a way I'd never been touched before (scram, you perverts!), and I saw fluorescent green in a sort of spiky electrical pattern. No memory association there, dude. --shrug-- If you don't have it, you'll never "get" it, so don't even try.
I guess I can't help you there...I don't see graphemes as colours, but I can tell you that spoken foreign languages have different colours than English, and written foreign languages have different textures, at least to me. Then again, I suspect that most synaesthesiacs' experiences are highly individualised.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually am a technical writer, and I like it. Now that I have been working in the field for a while, I'm chary about getting involved with F/OSS projects because the F/OSS community in general tends to treat non-programmers as not worth bothering with or listening to, even though a lot of us who'd really like to get involved are working professionals with good track records. I don't need to get treated like shit and ignored on a volunteer project when, if I get treated like shit and ignored in the corporate world, I'm at least drawing a paycheque. (Nothing eats like food, after all.)
I've seen far too much of the attitude around that programmers should write the documentation, because the programmers know the application best (as if that's a particularly good criterion by which to create documentation!), and IME that really only accomplishes two things: It makes your programmers (who'd rather be programming, quelle surprise) cranky, and it pisses off your user base, when the documentation reads like something that has been hacked together by someone who doesn't know the first thing or care a whit about documentation. Brilliant.
Now, if someone were serious about getting technical writing students involved in F/OSS projects, I'd recommend contacting these folks: Cooperative Education and Career Services at the University of Waterloo, and the Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Communication Design programme people. They do co-ops at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in those programmes, and, at least when I was there, seem to be quite open to unconventional project ideas...
I'm taking down names. It's amazing how, when you start poking at who all is behind all these weirdly-named front groups, you find some astonishingly nasty bugs under those rocks.
Just be glad you don't have to see how the other half lives -- Abort, Retry, Fail?...
Actually, he is kind of cute. Sorry to stab your joke, but I am a known connoisseuse of such things.
I mean my "I". I'm not into bindi.
I'm gonna have to start dotting my eye with a heart! Hee!
What I was looking for is answers like yours. The problem with just snarking off and saying I'm "looking for jobs on Slashdot" (I'm not; most of you are not my target market) is that well, most of you are not my target market. On the other hand, a lot of you will know things about places to look that I may not have thought of, which is why I think your comment is really useful and informative, despite what one might call "a slight tone problem." I'm going to be tracking down the science writing organization you mention, not because I do science writing, but because they probably know something that would be useful to me.
As it stands, I'm networked in with the local STC chapter, the local IABC chapter, belong to two technical writers' mailing lists (TECHWR-L and Techshoret), and I am also networked into the local small business community through the London Small Business Centre and Fanshawe College, where I instructed for a term. However, while that gives me an excellent local grounding, it doesn't do much for wider exposure. Since most of my clients are not in the local area at this point, I now need to focus more on expanding my network outward nationally and internationally.
While I find the local exposure has been good for me, it's useful to have concrete examples of stuff I haven't yet found in my wanderings (you folks collectively can and have hit a lot more sites than I), and it's always useful to have different eyes looking at any given problem.
Well, it's Perfessor Multigeek's computer; maybe you should take it up with him. You could say I'm more interested in being Reed and Wright compatible than Mac-compatible at this point. When I start making programmer-type money instead of technical writer type money, maybe I can get a new Mac. *grin*
Yes, technical writing is the steno pool of the 21st Century.
I'm not "picking stitches" anymore, I'm "reverse engineering." I'm not "tailoring" anymore, I'm "setting my preferences," and I'm not "customizing a pattern" anymore, I'm "kernel hacking." Ah. Hmm, now that I can talk about it in 1337 code, I feel a lot better about admitting that I (can) sew!
Let's just say I won't be buying any McCall's patterns for quite awhile. I think I'll stick to Burda. (Burda 0wNz0rZ j00!)
There's where Tolkien falls down: Endless, endless descriptions, many of them without the appropriate points of reference for modern readers. I can't get into Tolkien; he and I have nothing to say to each other. Personally, I don't care if he invented his own languages for LOTR; Marc Okrand did that for Star Trek, and no one considers him to be a genius of fictional linguistics -- and I'm not sure if I'd read fiction by Noam Chomsky, either, and he's one hell of a linguist and a not-bad writer -- did you ever see that paper he wrote where he tap-danced on B. F. Skinner? Whew!
:)
:)
Personally, speaking to the 'hacker' mentality, if you wanted to broaden your reading horizons a bit away from straight techno-fables (as good as those might be), I'd recommend some speculative fiction that deals with "What if?" type questions, specifically along the lines of alternate history:
For instance, Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream asks the question "What if Adolf Hitler hadn't been kicked out of art school and had gone on to a career in commercial illustration, then writing, instead?" Likewise, Spinrad's The Mind Game asks "What if a Scientology-like cult took over Hollywood?" ('Trancendentalism' in the book is a very thinly-disguised Scientology clone. In my more tinfoil-hatted moments I can't help but wonder if The Mind Game is part of the reason Spinrad's been virtually blacklisted in North America!)
Also, Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic novel We asks "What if Communism ruled the world?" (This book makes a nice tryptych with 1984 and Brave New World, by the way.)
For a more technological bent, Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine asks "What if Babbage's Difference Engine had actually worked?" Another similar technologically-inclined fable, Jack Williamson's The Silicon Dagger asks "What if a gang of hard-core Libertarians had the means to create their version of Utopia in the middle of the United States?" Although it's not a terribly good novel, per se, it's certainly thought-provoking.
Books such as these are different from the usual sort of SF which postulates a scenario and the rules in which that scenario works, because they start with known history or events, and extrapolate, either by asking "What would have happened if X happened (instead)?" or "What would have happened if X had not happened (instead)?" It's also fun to do your own thought-experiments along these lines, once you get the knack.
Another benefit of these books is that they're mostly older and can be found at most libraries, ergo, for free.
CowboyNeal is my anti-theft device!
Damn "staircase wit"! You always think of an even better line just after you've hit Submit!
...it's a little hard to shock a woman in the testicles, after all. (It'd be almost as hard to shock us in the ovaries, methinks, but that's another kettle of scrod entirely.)
Personally, I think the ultimate anti-theft device for a computer would be a popup holographic simulation of Richard Stallman.
That should read "Defecatus elsum Necessarium Risus," at least in ecclesiastical Latin. :)
Last I checked, the official USPS abbreviation for that state was HI.
:)
Ok, so it's probably a statistically unlikely problem, but if I can spot it in two seconds flat, it's probably at least somewhat of a concern.
Some of us would also feel dumb writing "Dear..." to our bosses or coworkers.
We were selling legitimate products, granted, for a niche market, but we consider ourselves lucky if 1 in 10 people who come by our shop actually buys something. So for this twit to be saying he gets a buy rate of 1 in 100 seems to me to be outrageously high. I would estimate the actual rate is probably more along the lines of 1 in 10 000 000 or so...but then again, I'm not a spammer, so I wouldn't know for sure, and that's one area in which I most emphatically do not want empirical experience!
You may (or not) be thinking of a place near Lewisberry, Pennsylvania
Nope. The parent poster's thinking of Magnetic Hill, NB, which is indeed near Moncton. I've been there, and it's really quite interesting. At the tender age of seven, I intuited that it was an optical illusion when I was there, but my parents explained it anyway.
...to Dyson's creation, and then perhaps only in...Oh, never mind. Bring me the head of Natalie Portman on a plate of hot grits!
We handle safety documentation for a big company (a very big company), and we have to do quarterly updating of some 60 000 documents, plus update new sites as they come in. Suddenly, page-turning ultra-scanners and super-OCR programs look very interesting to me. All our output has to be in PDF, so something like what you described could be very useful.
;)
I can also think of a few non-work uses for the thing, too. Dare I say, avariciously, "I want one!"
If they port it to Linux, will we have to use a urinal emulator, or will they build it from the bottom up to ensure full compatibility? ;)
Isn't there something in US law requiring "due diligence" before attempting to prosecute a suit? Note IANAL, and worse, IANAA (...An American), so I could be wrong, but FindLaw's legal dictionary seems to think so.
In any case, if this means what I think it means in this context, the RIAA sure didn't do it.
(Your head hurt from all these conditionals yet?)
For those of you not up on your accident theory, a guy named Charles Perrow developed a model in which he proposes that there are always going to be the 2% accidents -- total, unpredictable, catastrophic failures. While most incidents telegraph themselves a mile wide and a mile deep, some are just practically unavoidable.
The other side of the coin is that with something as potentially catastrophic and as politically charged as space exploration, we should be aiming even to try to eliminate as many of those "2% Accidents" as possible, which can be done more or less, but takes a lot of work, with (seemingly) minimal return.
At the very least, we need to find a way to circle his house 24/7 with ice-cream trucks that play "Turkey In The Straw" and other similar abominations off-key until he can't stand it anymore and starts beating his head against a brick wall until his face looks like 5 lbs of raw hamburger. Or we could simply find his e-mail address and/or home contact information and send him a deluge of "gift subscriptions," "free trials," Franklin Mint tawdriness, and other junk, not to mention sending him Slashdot's current existing corpus of spam, and some invasive code that will let us know exactly what he's doing every hour of the day (or something equally horrible like that)...or...or...or...
I'm ethically opposed to cruel and unusual punishment, though, so I say we just off the jerk before he can do any more damage. (At the very least, can we exile him to a nice deserted island somewhere with no Internet connection? Please?!)
When the creator of a work can no longer benefit from that work, not when "doing so would not inflict harm on the creators," then it's ok to have work lapse into the public domain, which is in no way a "seizure," unless of course you consider that any sort of expiry is a "seizure."
I don't know what sort of "modern political theory" says that the good of society NEVER outweighs the good of the individual (but it sounds an awful lot like Libertarianism to me), but that's totally incorrect. The good of society OFTEN outweighs the good of the individual. That's why we have laws against murder and rape; that's why we have public schools and rural electrification initiatives, and yes, that's also why we have copyrights. And you know damn well that copyright expiry isn't an unreasonable seizure of property; that's why there are binding agreements about it -- to make it 'reasonable,' so come off.
If you go back and read the original terms of copyright, you will find that it's much closer to the "limited monopoly" argument put forth by the original poster; ideas don't translate well into the 'property rights' sphere (which is a problem we're always wrestling with here on Slashdot), and your argument suggests the type of reasoning the RI/MPAA uses to justify copy protection in the name of copyright protection.
That's not what it's like at all. It isn't like "being anywhere," even for a moment. Things just are the way they are, and the associations are neutral and not connected to memory. Sorry you'll never understand. It hasn't got a damned thing to do with memory associations or recall; it's got everything to do with cross-interpretations of sensory input. Because I think a certain thing "smells brown" doesn't mean I'm associating it with something -- I may never have smelled anything that smells like that before.
And how do you explain that when I had a tactile input I'd never had before, I perceived it as a fuzzy, electrical fluorescent green sensation? Someone touched me in a way I'd never been touched before (scram, you perverts!), and I saw fluorescent green in a sort of spiky electrical pattern. No memory association there, dude. --shrug-- If you don't have it, you'll never "get" it, so don't even try.
I guess I can't help you there...I don't see graphemes as colours, but I can tell you that spoken foreign languages have different colours than English, and written foreign languages have different textures, at least to me. Then again, I suspect that most synaesthesiacs' experiences are highly individualised.