1. What you know you know. 2. What you know you don't know. 3. What you don't know you know. 4. What you don't know you don't know.
As long as Google tells people items where removed from their search because of their government, then Google is still providing information in the form of #2 instead of #4 like other search engines might, or the absense of any search engine would be.
That is my point, I think - it doesn't seem to be worth my time to hire anybody to write documentation for me, even though I am selling boxed copies and only using HTML for help files.
I didn't say that PDF files aren't printable, but that most users won't see any benefit to PDF over just HTML. Personally, the Acrobat reader is *very* slow and annoying to use, and the built-in search capability of Firefox or Internet Explorer works just as well, if not better, to search HTML. The main benefit to HTML though is that 1 single document works in 3 different places (online, embedded in an IE sidepane in the program, and printed) with little to no changes or manipulation required.
An important note here is that I am self-employed, and thus, a 1-man team. I do let close friends test my software, and they do help a lot with making the interface more intuitive, but only I really know all of the details of the unreleased program, and I don't think anybody else would be qualified for the first draft of any documentation at least.
As for layout tools and print versions, I like to stick with just HTML. HTML allows me to have the help files all available online, and with some simple PHP templates, I can generate slighly modified versions suitable for including inside the program, as well as print versions. CHM/PDF/MAN help systems don't really provide most common users any real benefit over HTML, and can at times just make searching the document more difficult. I'm talking only about general small/medium sized applications users may download and install from the Internet, not anything that is going to have several thousand pages worth of documentation when printed.
Actually, I am pretty good with grammar, and spelling is easy enough to check. I do realize that at times I can document the wrong things, but that will lead to a volume of support questions all related to the same issue, which will make it into the FAQ and future documentation eventually. Even hiring a technical writer wouldn't eliminate that issue though, as users will always find some new thing to all agree to not understand.
As a programmer, I admit that actually writing the documentation can be the most annoying and time-consuming part of creating a finished program, and I can procrastinate forever, adding tiny features to the program instead of spending my time writing boring English, but why should I hire a technical writer? When my progam is more-or-less done, I am the only person on the planet who knows how every single feature works, what all the hidden shortcut keys or shift/control+mouse click operations may do, and what the whole expected behaviour of any option is supposed to be.
How could I possibly explain all of this to a technical writer to have documentation written, without just writing the documentation myself? Sure there are comments in the code, but they're not going to help write a idiot-friendly tutorial very much. Sure I have some planning scratch-pad-like text files or paintbrush image doodles of my ideas, but they might not fully represent all of the features, or even a particular feature in their final existing form anymore.
I really loathe writing documentation, but unless the person helping my write it is involved in the entire program creating phase, sitting right there beside me the entire time, watching all of the features evolve, I don't think they'll be able to write complete help files.
I'm self employed, and as such, I can't afford insurance realistically, and thus I don't go to the doctor, ever, because I don't want to pony up $65/hr or more for the visit and then more for anything else I might need. I'm just hoping my wife gets a job now that she graduated college, and then her insurance can cover me. It's not law that employers pay for medical, but it's very common for salary and higher paying jobs, as a sort of incentive really. You still have to pay for the insurance, but it comes right out of your paycheck, and only costs about 1/10th of what the same coverage would cost you to buy on our own around here that way.
How well do computerized IR transmitters really work? My Dish networks receiver has features like that where it says it can control my VCR to make it start recording and have the Dish tuner automatically select the channel at the right time, but my experience with using an IR or even an RF remote control is that button presses frequently are not received by the TV/VCR/DVD/Stereo/etc and require 2 or 3 presses. Even worse, sometimes pressing a few button sequences really fast results in some unrelated operation taking place, such as my RF remote for the Dish will display the program info (as if I pressed the Info button) when pressing the Up button several times in a row really fast. How could such a system ever be reliable? What I want to see in a PCI based tuner card is the ability to decode the digital cable or satelite signals themselves, without having to use an external tuner device (Cablecard?). At the very least, some sort of standard cable hookup to allow wired control of a device would be nice, instead of faking a remote control with a blind IR transmitter.
Re:so what's nvidia's equivalent of this thing?
on
ATI's All-In-Wonder 2006
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That is a good point that is only recently an option with USB 2 (Hi-Speed 480Mbps) since "Full Speed" 12Mbps could never carry a full resolution, full framerate TV stream. It would be very important to verify that you truely have Hi-Speed USB 2.0 ports available before buying such a device, but with a new system build, it would be very likely that you would now.
Re:so what's nvidia's equivalent of this thing?
on
ATI's All-In-Wonder 2006
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The closest thing I've seen with nVidia is those ASUS cards with tuner functionality slapped on, but ASUS's driver quality is no where near as good as nVidia's driver quality, so you are likely much better off getting a plain nVidia card which can be indepentantly upgraded, and pairing it with a generic PCI TV tuner card.
I've owned a few All-in-Wonders and I can say first-hand that support is horrible. The first All-in-Wonder was never supported under Windows 2000 or higher as anything other then a basic video card. Forget watching TV unless you want to downgrade to Windows ME or lower! The card wasn't even that old when Windows 2000 came out either. When you are using them on the right OS and with the newest drivers, they still tend to crash quite a bit, even the new Radeon All-in-Wonders under XP are quite unreliable. I also have an original Rage II+ and a Rage 128Pro All-in-Wonder, and don't care for any of them.
The worst of it is, you can't upgrade to a better 3D card without re-buying the TV tuner features again and again, since if you use them as a secondary card (PCI versions) the TV features don't work! I tend to upgrade my video card and CPU a lot more often than I need to upgrade me TV-in ability. I've since switched to stand-alone generic PCI tuner cards, which work much better, and don't get in the way of upgrading my main AGP or PCI-express video card when I need to play newer 3D games.
I've also used nVidia cards since the TNT2, and the drivers have *always* been great. I've never had a single bit of trouble with any nVidia card or driver, and I've gone through 5 iterations of GeForce cards on top of the TNT2 now.
480p is a big deal vs 480i, especially for first person shooters. First off, interlacing is really annoying to look at if you move around really fast, but more importantly, 480i is more-or-less 240 lines. 480p is twice the vertical resolution, at 60 frames per second. 480i is only 30 frames per second, with 2 half-height interlaced fields per frame. Plus, many old regular TVs are lucky if that can achieve 400x300 pixels realistically, so you might be looking at near 3x the detail level simply by playing at 480p on an HDTV. Thats about the same different from going to 720p from 480p. Also, I would consider 1080i to be a step down from 480p, since interlacing is that annoying.
Yes, Firefox, and cssRules is the standard for DOM, and so it probably works the same in Opera too. IE6's rules array is similar, but not standard. I wonder if IE7 will support cssRules or not.
So if you view an embeded movie on a webpage, and the plugin has a Play and Stop button, you should have to click in the plugin box area first, just to activate that area, then click on the button you want. In effect, you have to doubleclick on the Stop button to stop playing the movie. This doesn't have to be IE and WMP specifically. Any plugin, ActiveX or not, would have to work like that, from what I'm understanding here.
Firefox has had the yellow=secure for quite a while, and IE7 is not yet out. Obviously it is IE that needs to change then. The yellow color comes from the yellow/gold lock icon that almost all browsers display someplace unnoticable usually. Now the golden lock is displayed in the location bar on the right hand side in both Opera and Firefox, and the background color is yellow in both of them. Firefox has the entire location bar yellow, while Opera has a yellow outlined and yellow shaded box with the lock icon and the name the certificate is listed under. Clearly yellow (gold) is the de facto standard for "secure" and IE7 is just plain wrong to use green instead, and make gold mean something bad.
I'm using the "normal" setting because the 3x and 4x brighness just blurs the hell out of any text on the screen. You might be able to get a brighter white with those settings but not a blacker black, which is the bigger surprise. Comparing the two monitors with the power off shows the LCD is significantly blacker to start with. The viewsonic CRT looks like a dark grey compared to the LCD. Same with a pure black box on screen with the power on.
I do mostly programming, and basic text is world of difference on the LCD compared to the CRT. You don't even need to add in the cleartype fonts to see how much better text looks on the LCD, but that helps too. The only thing I think the CRT is good for now is games. I showed my friend, who does art stuff with photoshop mostly, the two displays side by side, and he would definately go for the LCD with his next purchase now.
It's really just games that make me want a CRT still.
Honestly, I have a ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT and a Samsung 912T 19" LCD cloned right now, and I was really surprised by how much whiter white is on the LCD and how much blacker black is on the LCD. I didn't think it was possible (this being my first LCD purchase ever) but the color reproduction, contrast, brightness, and sharpness are truely much better on this particular LCD. The *only* downside I can tell is that the LCD is only rated at 25ms, and I do notice slight blurring in games such as Dungeon Siege II. I don't really know how the 6-bit panels are with color and view angles, but the 8-bit panels like mine are really outstanding. I've been a firm believer in CRTs for a long time. That ViewSonic CRT is only 1 year old, but I don't think I'll ever go back now. I just wish 8-bit PVA panels where available at 8ms or better for a decent price ($300 range, not $600 range like I think they are now).
Slashdot Mirror
1. What you know you know.
2. What you know you don't know.
3. What you don't know you know.
4. What you don't know you don't know.
As long as Google tells people items where removed from their search because of their government, then Google is still providing information in the form of #2 instead of #4 like other search engines might, or the absense of any search engine would be.
That is my point, I think - it doesn't seem to be worth my time to hire anybody to write documentation for me, even though I am selling boxed copies and only using HTML for help files.
I didn't say that PDF files aren't printable, but that most users won't see any benefit to PDF over just HTML. Personally, the Acrobat reader is *very* slow and annoying to use, and the built-in search capability of Firefox or Internet Explorer works just as well, if not better, to search HTML. The main benefit to HTML though is that 1 single document works in 3 different places (online, embedded in an IE sidepane in the program, and printed) with little to no changes or manipulation required.
An important note here is that I am self-employed, and thus, a 1-man team. I do let close friends test my software, and they do help a lot with making the interface more intuitive, but only I really know all of the details of the unreleased program, and I don't think anybody else would be qualified for the first draft of any documentation at least.
As for layout tools and print versions, I like to stick with just HTML. HTML allows me to have the help files all available online, and with some simple PHP templates, I can generate slighly modified versions suitable for including inside the program, as well as print versions. CHM/PDF/MAN help systems don't really provide most common users any real benefit over HTML, and can at times just make searching the document more difficult. I'm talking only about general small/medium sized applications users may download and install from the Internet, not anything that is going to have several thousand pages worth of documentation when printed.
Actually, I am pretty good with grammar, and spelling is easy enough to check. I do realize that at times I can document the wrong things, but that will lead to a volume of support questions all related to the same issue, which will make it into the FAQ and future documentation eventually. Even hiring a technical writer wouldn't eliminate that issue though, as users will always find some new thing to all agree to not understand.
Yes, and those larger teams don't need to hire free-lance technical writers.
I am now a 1-man team though, which is what my previous post is really about.
As a programmer, I admit that actually writing the documentation can be the most annoying and time-consuming part of creating a finished program, and I can procrastinate forever, adding tiny features to the program instead of spending my time writing boring English, but why should I hire a technical writer? When my progam is more-or-less done, I am the only person on the planet who knows how every single feature works, what all the hidden shortcut keys or shift/control+mouse click operations may do, and what the whole expected behaviour of any option is supposed to be.
How could I possibly explain all of this to a technical writer to have documentation written, without just writing the documentation myself? Sure there are comments in the code, but they're not going to help write a idiot-friendly tutorial very much. Sure I have some planning scratch-pad-like text files or paintbrush image doodles of my ideas, but they might not fully represent all of the features, or even a particular feature in their final existing form anymore.
I really loathe writing documentation, but unless the person helping my write it is involved in the entire program creating phase, sitting right there beside me the entire time, watching all of the features evolve, I don't think they'll be able to write complete help files.
I don't think File/Group/Record Separators where really considered line ending conventions.
I'm self employed, and as such, I can't afford insurance realistically, and thus I don't go to the doctor, ever, because I don't want to pony up $65/hr or more for the visit and then more for anything else I might need. I'm just hoping my wife gets a job now that she graduated college, and then her insurance can cover me.
It's not law that employers pay for medical, but it's very common for salary and higher paying jobs, as a sort of incentive really. You still have to pay for the insurance, but it comes right out of your paycheck, and only costs about 1/10th of what the same coverage would cost you to buy on our own around here that way.
How well do computerized IR transmitters really work? My Dish networks receiver has features like that where it says it can control my VCR to make it start recording and have the Dish tuner automatically select the channel at the right time, but my experience with using an IR or even an RF remote control is that button presses frequently are not received by the TV/VCR/DVD/Stereo/etc and require 2 or 3 presses. Even worse, sometimes pressing a few button sequences really fast results in some unrelated operation taking place, such as my RF remote for the Dish will display the program info (as if I pressed the Info button) when pressing the Up button several times in a row really fast. How could such a system ever be reliable? What I want to see in a PCI based tuner card is the ability to decode the digital cable or satelite signals themselves, without having to use an external tuner device (Cablecard?). At the very least, some sort of standard cable hookup to allow wired control of a device would be nice, instead of faking a remote control with a blind IR transmitter.
That is a good point that is only recently an option with USB 2 (Hi-Speed 480Mbps) since "Full Speed" 12Mbps could never carry a full resolution, full framerate TV stream. It would be very important to verify that you truely have Hi-Speed USB 2.0 ports available before buying such a device, but with a new system build, it would be very likely that you would now.
The closest thing I've seen with nVidia is those ASUS cards with tuner functionality slapped on, but ASUS's driver quality is no where near as good as nVidia's driver quality, so you are likely much better off getting a plain nVidia card which can be indepentantly upgraded, and pairing it with a generic PCI TV tuner card.
I've owned a few All-in-Wonders and I can say first-hand that support is horrible. The first All-in-Wonder was never supported under Windows 2000 or higher as anything other then a basic video card. Forget watching TV unless you want to downgrade to Windows ME or lower! The card wasn't even that old when Windows 2000 came out either. When you are using them on the right OS and with the newest drivers, they still tend to crash quite a bit, even the new Radeon All-in-Wonders under XP are quite unreliable. I also have an original Rage II+ and a Rage 128Pro All-in-Wonder, and don't care for any of them.
The worst of it is, you can't upgrade to a better 3D card without re-buying the TV tuner features again and again, since if you use them as a secondary card (PCI versions) the TV features don't work! I tend to upgrade my video card and CPU a lot more often than I need to upgrade me TV-in ability. I've since switched to stand-alone generic PCI tuner cards, which work much better, and don't get in the way of upgrading my main AGP or PCI-express video card when I need to play newer 3D games.
I've also used nVidia cards since the TNT2, and the drivers have *always* been great. I've never had a single bit of trouble with any nVidia card or driver, and I've gone through 5 iterations of GeForce cards on top of the TNT2 now.
Is that why I got a big sales-tax refund from the state of Texas for all the sales tax collected for my ev1.net server not that long ago?
480p is a big deal vs 480i, especially for first person shooters. First off, interlacing is really annoying to look at if you move around really fast, but more importantly, 480i is more-or-less 240 lines. 480p is twice the vertical resolution, at 60 frames per second. 480i is only 30 frames per second, with 2 half-height interlaced fields per frame. Plus, many old regular TVs are lucky if that can achieve 400x300 pixels realistically, so you might be looking at near 3x the detail level simply by playing at 480p on an HDTV. Thats about the same different from going to 720p from 480p. Also, I would consider 1080i to be a step down from 480p, since interlacing is that annoying.
No.
Yes.
No.
Yes, Firefox, and cssRules is the standard for DOM, and so it probably works the same in Opera too. IE6's rules array is similar, but not standard. I wonder if IE7 will support cssRules or not.
document.styleSheets[0].rules has no properties
:P)
(and even if you changed that to cssRules, you would still have the value "transparent url(hello world!) repeat scroll 0% 0%" for background
So if you view an embeded movie on a webpage, and the plugin has a Play and Stop button, you should have to click in the plugin box area first, just to activate that area, then click on the button you want. In effect, you have to doubleclick on the Stop button to stop playing the movie. This doesn't have to be IE and WMP specifically. Any plugin, ActiveX or not, would have to work like that, from what I'm understanding here.
Firefox has had the yellow=secure for quite a while, and IE7 is not yet out. Obviously it is IE that needs to change then. The yellow color comes from the yellow/gold lock icon that almost all browsers display someplace unnoticable usually. Now the golden lock is displayed in the location bar on the right hand side in both Opera and Firefox, and the background color is yellow in both of them. Firefox has the entire location bar yellow, while Opera has a yellow outlined and yellow shaded box with the lock icon and the name the certificate is listed under.
Clearly yellow (gold) is the de facto standard for "secure" and IE7 is just plain wrong to use green instead, and make gold mean something bad.
Have you ever played Metroid Prime 2? A horrible GUI / menu system can really make a game pretty annoying to play.
http://www.the-rye.dreamhosters.com/familiars/Fami liar%20Strengths_files/familiar11.gif
Mine all have a K on the top of them ...
Only one? Right now it must be http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/
I'm using the "normal" setting because the 3x and 4x brighness just blurs the hell out of any text on the screen. You might be able to get a brighter white with those settings but not a blacker black, which is the bigger surprise. Comparing the two monitors with the power off shows the LCD is significantly blacker to start with. The viewsonic CRT looks like a dark grey compared to the LCD. Same with a pure black box on screen with the power on.
I do mostly programming, and basic text is world of difference on the LCD compared to the CRT. You don't even need to add in the cleartype fonts to see how much better text looks on the LCD, but that helps too. The only thing I think the CRT is good for now is games. I showed my friend, who does art stuff with photoshop mostly, the two displays side by side, and he would definately go for the LCD with his next purchase now.
It's really just games that make me want a CRT still.
Honestly, I have a ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT and a Samsung 912T 19" LCD cloned right now, and I was really surprised by how much whiter white is on the LCD and how much blacker black is on the LCD. I didn't think it was possible (this being my first LCD purchase ever) but the color reproduction, contrast, brightness, and sharpness are truely much better on this particular LCD. The *only* downside I can tell is that the LCD is only rated at 25ms, and I do notice slight blurring in games such as Dungeon Siege II. I don't really know how the 6-bit panels are with color and view angles, but the 8-bit panels like mine are really outstanding. I've been a firm believer in CRTs for a long time. That ViewSonic CRT is only 1 year old, but I don't think I'll ever go back now. I just wish 8-bit PVA panels where available at 8ms or better for a decent price ($300 range, not $600 range like I think they are now).