the built-in search capability of Firefox or Internet Explorer works just as well, if not better, to search HTML. No, it doesn't. It finds text only in a single page. For any nontrivial application, you're better off separating the documentation into more pages, making the default search useless. HTML can be made to work, but you need an application like Webworks Publisher or AuthorIT to generate a fileset that also contains a table of contents, an index and a search engine.
You'd be surprised. A writer, um, knows about writing stuff. He/she is (usually) much better than you at structuring information logically (i.e. from the point of view of the end user, rather than your 'developer' POV), and knows how to write so the audience can understand what's being said. Programmers who can do this are rare. A writer also really doesn't need to know how a feature has evolved. He just needs to understand the end result. Depending on the complexity of the subject matter, a writer can often figure out quite a lot by himself, so there's less need for hand-holding than you think. Hiring a writer has another benefit: he has a fresh perspective on things, and thinks more like an end-user than most programmers do. A writer can give useful feedback on the UI design and logic of your application.
I think you're being way too specific. You want someone who can document your CMS, not someone who can write a book on 'how to program in PHP/XHTML/CSS'. For that sort of detail, you're better off referring the end user to an existing book on 'how to program in PHP/XHTML/CSS'.
Some basic understanding of programming would be useful for this project, but you really don't need an experienced programmer to write the end-user documentation. What you do need is a writer who groks the concept of CMSs in general, and yours in particular. Fortunately, many tech writers use CMSs on a daily basis. Imagine that: you may learn something from the writer in the process.
If that's you experience with dedicated "documenters" you either haven't been hiring very good ones, or you haven't let them do their jobs properly. A good technical writer doesn't need a stint in tech support or testing in order to write a good manual. What they do need is cooperation from the engineers/coders/testers, and involvement in the project from an early stage (instead of the "oh, fuck, the project is finished and now we need a manual" management style). Also, in many cases you're better off hiring a writer with a technical background than one with a language/psychology etc. background.
No, no, no! That's not what TLDs are for. If you insist on identifying a blog by URL, you can use the subdomain space for that (you you'd get blog.yourdomain.com). Same goes for a wiki, just like FTP servers, mail servers, etc. have always been identified.
TLDs are either national identifiers or topical groups (com, org). The second use is an aberration caused by American domains omitting the.us TLD. The only way to keep domain guessing doable is to keep the number of TLDs limited, which is why proposals like.biz and.travel are such bad ideas.
Re:Following the video ipod's release
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
·
· Score: 1
TiVo only works in the US and UK. Also, an HTPC allows easy playback of material downloaded off the internet (unlike TiVo), and it's more flexible (I've seen HTPCs with 6 tuner cards, for instance).
The system of "one (wo)man, one vote" leads to exactly two parties,
Really? Over here (.nl) we've got 3 dominant parties (on average, they'll get something like 25% of the votes each) and a host of smaller ones, at least 5 of which have a realistic chance of being invited into a coalition government. The voting system we use is 'winner take all', the main difference is that we don't use electoral districts. I suspect it's the district system that sets the threshold (% of votes needed for a party to be effective) so high that only 2 parties remain relevant, not the 'winner take all' voting system per se.
Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding the article (it seems to talk alternately about electricity, and then about heat, and then about electricity. While they can be converted back and forth with varying efficiency, it did seem confusing)
I suspect they were talking about generators driven by an internal combustion engine. Such a generator supplies electric power, plus lots of heat from the engine's cooling system. Putting a small generator in a home enables you to reuse the heat much more easily than reusing the heat from a conventional power plant.
Talking about TC would be a largely theoretical exercise at the moment. Computers with a TC chip are rare, and are there any applications at all that use TC to generate such a unique ID?
In our day, we used to have to {verb} our {noun} manually, using a {obsolete device} and a hand-cranked {platform}. And we liked it that way. You {pejorative} have it too easy with your {adjective} {app}. With all this newfangled technology, {verb} is becoming a lost art.
He wasn't posting anonymously. His site clearly states his name.
His use of 'freely' stems from this: "As I have already mentioned, if you want to print a book, poem, story, or even newspaper or magazine in Iran, you have to obtain permission from the authorities. Very many writers and journalists are affected by this. But if you want to publish a story, poem or essay in a newspaper or magazine, it will be censored. So many Iranian writers publish their views in blogs, at less cost and they are not forced to censor themselves. So the government, as in China and elsewhere, restricts Internet use." (quoted from the Handbook for bloggers and cyberdissidents, p50, italics are mine)
It's already 'worse in North Korea'. Internet access is very restricted there, right now. In NK, it's cellphones rather than the internet that are breaking the government's stranglehold on communications. The fact that it's China that's providing the tools, is ironic, to say the least.
I wonder if it's okay to post the book on a website or P2P network, so people can get at it from countries that have www.rsf.org blocked. The English version states a 'standard' copyright message (C 2005 RSF), nothing more. Since copyright usually implies 'no reproduction', I assume I'm not allowed to. It would have made sense to include a statement that explicitly allows copying and printing the PDF.
The PDF files themselves can use some improvement as well. The UK version has registration marks, is 'printed' 2-up, and doesn't include PDF niceties like bookmarks. The Arab version is split into two files.
RTFA: this is NOT a space-based weapon. It's a team of soldiers tasked to go to enemy ground stations and disrupt communications with enemy satellites.
Second, there is no way to "stop all broadcasts getting out of Washington" short of an EMP weapon, and for an EMP strong enough to black out Washington you need a nuke, so that's not going to happen. A jammer only stops a specific set of radio broadcast frequencies. Microwave transmissions (as often used to relay TV) are much harder to stop because the jammer needs to be in or near the transmission path. Ditto satellite communications. So at most the government would be able to disturb local over-the-air radio and TV. Cable radio/TV wouldn't be affected, nor would most internet links or landline phones. Being paranoid is one thing, but you're way out in black-helicopter country.
Actually, I worked at an electronics lab once where they had just that. They'd wired a piezoelectric lighter to a big coil. This put out enough EM energy to fry nearby electronic components. The range sucked, though.
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the built-in search capability of Firefox or Internet Explorer works just as well, if not better, to search HTML.
No, it doesn't. It finds text only in a single page. For any nontrivial application, you're better off separating the documentation into more pages, making the default search useless.
HTML can be made to work, but you need an application like Webworks Publisher or AuthorIT to generate a fileset that also contains a table of contents, an index and a search engine.
You'd be surprised. A writer, um, knows about writing stuff. He/she is (usually) much better than you at structuring information logically (i.e. from the point of view of the end user, rather than your 'developer' POV), and knows how to write so the audience can understand what's being said.
Programmers who can do this are rare.
A writer also really doesn't need to know how a feature has evolved. He just needs to understand the end result. Depending on the complexity of the subject matter, a writer can often figure out quite a lot by himself, so there's less need for hand-holding than you think.
Hiring a writer has another benefit: he has a fresh perspective on things, and thinks more like an end-user than most programmers do. A writer can give useful feedback on the UI design and logic of your application.
I think you're being way too specific. You want someone who can document your CMS, not someone who can write a book on 'how to program in PHP/XHTML/CSS'. For that sort of detail, you're better off referring the end user to an existing book on 'how to program in PHP/XHTML/CSS'.
Some basic understanding of programming would be useful for this project, but you really don't need an experienced programmer to write the end-user documentation.
What you do need is a writer who groks the concept of CMSs in general, and yours in particular. Fortunately, many tech writers use CMSs on a daily basis. Imagine that: you may learn something from the writer in the process.
If that's you experience with dedicated "documenters" you either haven't been hiring very good ones, or you haven't let them do their jobs properly. A good technical writer doesn't need a stint in tech support or testing in order to write a good manual.
What they do need is cooperation from the engineers/coders/testers, and involvement in the project from an early stage (instead of the "oh, fuck, the project is finished and now we need a manual" management style).
Also, in many cases you're better off hiring a writer with a technical background than one with a language/psychology etc. background.
No, no, no! That's not what TLDs are for. If you insist on identifying a blog by URL, you can use the subdomain space for that (you you'd get blog.yourdomain.com). Same goes for a wiki, just like FTP servers, mail servers, etc. have always been identified.
.us TLD. The only way to keep domain guessing doable is to keep the number of TLDs limited, which is why proposals like .biz and .travel are such bad ideas.
TLDs are either national identifiers or topical groups (com, org). The second use is an aberration caused by American domains omitting the
No words yet on the release date of emacsPod.
They already have that. It's called 'PowerBook'.
TiVo only works in the US and UK. Also, an HTPC allows easy playback of material downloaded off the internet (unlike TiVo), and it's more flexible (I've seen HTPCs with 6 tuner cards, for instance).
The system of "one (wo)man, one vote" leads to exactly two parties,
Really? Over here (.nl) we've got 3 dominant parties (on average, they'll get something like 25% of the votes each) and a host of smaller ones, at least 5 of which have a realistic chance of being invited into a coalition government. The voting system we use is 'winner take all', the main difference is that we don't use electoral districts. I suspect it's the district system that sets the threshold (% of votes needed for a party to be effective) so high that only 2 parties remain relevant, not the 'winner take all' voting system per se.
Perhaps I'm just totally misunderstanding the article (it seems to talk alternately about electricity, and then about heat, and then about electricity. While they can be converted back and forth with varying efficiency, it did seem confusing)
I suspect they were talking about generators driven by an internal combustion engine. Such a generator supplies electric power, plus lots of heat from the engine's cooling system. Putting a small generator in a home enables you to reuse the heat much more easily than reusing the heat from a conventional power plant.
Talking about TC would be a largely theoretical exercise at the moment. Computers with a TC chip are rare, and are there any applications at all that use TC to generate such a unique ID?
The problem with the curses library is that everything that uses it, automatically ends up being classified as NC-17.
And don't forget the R&D, a factor that doesn't seem to be included in the figure at all.
In our day, we used to have to {verb} our {noun} manually, using a {obsolete device} and a hand-cranked {platform}. And we liked it that way. You {pejorative} have it too easy with your {adjective} {app}. With all this newfangled technology, {verb} is becoming a lost art.
He wasn't posting anonymously. His site clearly states his name.
His use of 'freely' stems from this:
"As I have already mentioned, if you want to print a book, poem, story, or even newspaper or magazine in Iran, you have to obtain permission from the authorities. Very many writers and journalists are affected by this.
But if you want to publish a story, poem or essay in a newspaper or magazine, it will be censored. So many Iranian writers publish their views in blogs, at less cost and they are not forced to censor themselves. So the government, as in China and elsewhere, restricts Internet use."
(quoted from the Handbook for bloggers and cyberdissidents, p50, italics are mine)
So yes, different definition.
It's already 'worse in North Korea'. Internet access is very restricted there, right now.
In NK, it's cellphones rather than the internet that are breaking the government's stranglehold on communications. The fact that it's China that's providing the tools, is ironic, to say the least.
No, it doesn't talk about TC.
I wonder if it's okay to post the book on a website or P2P network, so people can get at it from countries that have www.rsf.org blocked.
The English version states a 'standard' copyright message (C 2005 RSF), nothing more. Since copyright usually implies 'no reproduction', I assume I'm not allowed to. It would have made sense to include a statement that explicitly allows copying and printing the PDF.
The PDF files themselves can use some improvement as well. The UK version has registration marks, is 'printed' 2-up, and doesn't include PDF niceties like bookmarks. The Arab version is split into two files.
You can download it as a PDF, or have sympathizers smuggle the book into the country.
Swap the sissy weapon for a Gatling gun, and at least you'll be able to generate a Beowulf cluster of bullets...
RTFA: this is NOT a space-based weapon. It's a team of soldiers tasked to go to enemy ground stations and disrupt communications with enemy satellites.
Second, there is no way to "stop all broadcasts getting out of Washington" short of an EMP weapon, and for an EMP strong enough to black out Washington you need a nuke, so that's not going to happen.
A jammer only stops a specific set of radio broadcast frequencies. Microwave transmissions (as often used to relay TV) are much harder to stop because the jammer needs to be in or near the transmission path. Ditto satellite communications. So at most the government would be able to disturb local over-the-air radio and TV. Cable radio/TV wouldn't be affected, nor would most internet links or landline phones. Being paranoid is one thing, but you're way out in black-helicopter country.
Not just the Pentagon. Strategypage runs a prediction market with this type (terrorism, and national security/defence-related in general) of events.
Actually, I worked at an electronics lab once where they had just that. They'd wired a piezoelectric lighter to a big coil. This put out enough EM energy to fry nearby electronic components. The range sucked, though.
In Dutch, we use 'bla' as well. It loses something without the Inspector Clouseau/Monty Python [1] accent, though.
1: French peasant from the Quest for the Holy Grail
Nah, it's been powersliding, Dukes-of-Hazzard style, whenever the operators weren't looking.
If it's the kind of hotel that has to specify the stay as 'overnight', Kleenex usage (cough) shouldn't come as a surprise...