To blow my own tiny trumpet for a moment, I've written and updated a manual to go with: http://sourceforge.net/project... for each release.
However, it isn't terrific AND I worked as a technical author for a number of years, doing mainframe software manuals. This is my main point, good manuals [mine is not] are hard and probably require equivalent effort to the software itself. The other big obstacle is that in, for example, mainframe world there is formal review process, formalised customer feedback, errata etc. etc. Also, manuals are planned as a 'set' installation, operation, troubleshooting, API etc.
I don't know a lot of my customers and can only correct things that appear in the Google group. In my case, since it's a niche. there's not very much.
Actually there's an opportunity here as well, in that non-code people could also participate in their favourite projects by writing guides. Indeed sometimes they do, but not often enough and they're fragmentary.
Absolutely. I'm 63 and as I and my boss used to joke 'it's the year 2000, where's my toga and my flying car?'. On a serious note, there's no reason why we shouldn't aim for utopia, but hyper-capitalism [and before anyone says anything, no, I'm not a communist] is bringing most people a gentle dystopia, poor diets, precarious work contracts for bad pay, pollution, overcrowding, intrusive state, intrusive advertising, small wars, 'war on terror', 'war on drugs', you name it. That's the first world and life is still bad in the third world too, in spite of our promises.
I do feel that life was better in many ways, in the early 1970s when I started work.
I'm from the UK which is probably [slightly] less dog-eat-dog than the USA also, I mainly work in a niche, [Perl] and I do contract work rather than permanent.
However I'm still working about as much as I want. I blew an interview recently, but I'm OK with that, since I performed pretty badly in it. I try and keep up and still enjoy computers and computing. So for my younger friends, and they are nearly all younger now:
- It helps to enjoy computing, not be in it 'just' for the [increasing illusory] big money
- Flexibility helps, the UK has a smaller square area than the US though
- Soft skills help, I'm a pretty medium programmer but an approachable person
- Niche skills often make a difference, everyone [except me] is an 'OK' Java person, for example
- It helps to look ahead to up-curve trends [as long as not hypeware], I learnt a lot of Javascript/Jquery quite 'early' for example
- The soft skills will help with the next job too, many of my 'new' contracts involve people I know somewhat, at least
That's my 2c of a euro, the html is badly formatted, but hey it's almost time for Sunday lunch.
Yes. That's exactly what's wrong with most of agile, lots of project momentum and minimal thought about 'what is this for', 'who wants this', 'will this damage the architecture' etc. Result object-oriented spaghetti and lots of unreadable post-its on a board somewhere in the first circle of development hell.
I'll declare interest, I work on an open source, mutual social credit system: https://sourceforge.net/projec... so I'm not neutral. But microfinance usually has high interest rates and is 'owned' by large aid organisations that have their private agendas.
Debt money is created by private institutions from thin air and 'ought' either to be based on existing deposits [full reserve banking which would 'slow' everything, not a bad thing] or money creation should be in the hands and governed by the 'users'. So I don't believe that microfinance is the 'answer' and can't find evidence either.
Waste of a good walk and large bits of open space used by a few quite rich people. Use the courses for public parks and communal gardens [that's allotments to we Brits] instead.
The secret is probably that [like many anoraky people] I enjoy the new things, I'm a neophile. Also, I'm not afraid to be mediocre at some things, I enjoy, a luxury I have because I don't use everything I know 'professionally' nowadays. But, if you don't enjoy technical stuff and do it 'just for money', it's harder to learn.
A couple of open source projects, however small, probably help as well, to 'fix' knowledge. 18 years pfui, get off my lawn...but seriously, yes, you can.
I love the Expert System. Was it designed by the Really Clever Person? Is Dr. Evil working on the Really Stupid System to counter it? Go figure, or not, depending on the Really Mathematical System.
I'm a fluent French bilingual, but I learnt as an adult in Paris where they are about as patient as New Yorkers.
There's a huge difference between listening, where you have no control over the speed of delivery/level of difficulty and reading where you can take your time, look up 'words' [or pieces of unfamiliar syntax] and writing, harder than reading but you can still pace yourself and work around difficulties.
Otherwise there's anecdotal evidence that 'extra' natural languages are easier after the first one. I feel that's also true of programming languages, the first one is alien, lots of alien concepts [variables, file handles, operations] and the next few, in imperative languages contain the same thing with different syntactic candy. It's to do with memory, usage and repitition then, less with conceptual grasp.
Agree, nearly everyone is a debt serf. If you have family, work for salary own a house, went to university and do most of the 'ordinary' things that people do in developed countries, you probably have substantial debt. People don't 'choose' to be unfree, the current arrangements compel them in the course of living their lives.
I personally have very little debt and, as a result [apart from being quite old] don't work all year, every year. Now just IMAGINE if people started doing that [actually, apparently a serf had about 100 days holiday, religious festivals included, in the middle ages] the SYSTEM would break down and people would DO WHAT THEY WANTED. Of course, they've been taught to want Facebook, Caca-cola and expensive sneakers, so maybe it wouldn't be too bad, would it?
Apologies for the sarcastic capitals in the post. We really need a 'new' financial system that serves the 'people' and not gov, large corporations, the banks and all these other layers-of-shit, to use the technical term. Meanwhile, people need to wake up to the fact that, every day, they're being gamed.
We used in the 1960s/1970s to give grants to study at university rather than the USA-style debt/indenture system we have now. At that stage, we had fewer universities, since we hadn't converted our polytechnics, many of which were rubbish, into 'universities'. Also, most of the degree were in actual subjects, science, maths, engineering and english, history, geography, for example.
Now we have media studies, we had kite flying for a while at Thames Valley. In short, the worst of all possible worlds, basically by 'financialising' the system and expanding it in a very thoughtless way. The debt and high fee make it difficult for working class kids too, in my time they would have had a full grant, though they would have probably had to work a little in vacation time. I did.
So I agree somewhat with Dyson. He's a little younger than me and probably remembers the older system.
So agree. Used to take my son there in the late 1980s, when everything was pretty similar to my childhood. Basically, wonderfully engineered things with handles and buttons. I went recently with my nephews and much of this is gone, gradually replaced by superficial, patronising displays.
Yes, and used it for a while. Thanks for reminding me, may go back there. Last thing I used it for was a borough with tens of environmental projects that needed to intercommunicate, they migrated that to Ning, their loss, IMO.
Thanks! I'm the submitter, I'm 63 and have spent most of my life in IT. There's several 'near' fits to this problem, usually using CMS software, but it's still interesting to look for 'closer' fits and, in general, learn from others. 'Learn from others' is always fun, almost more than shouting at the kids on my lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
As I'm getting older, I want to say that I do not give my consent to have sodium metal injected. It might be a bit dangerous.
To blow my own tiny trumpet for a moment, I've written and updated a manual to go with: http://sourceforge.net/project... for each release.
However, it isn't terrific AND I worked as a technical author for a number of years, doing mainframe software manuals. This is my main point, good manuals [mine is not] are hard and probably require equivalent effort to the software itself. The other big obstacle is that in, for example, mainframe world there is formal review process, formalised customer feedback, errata etc. etc. Also, manuals are planned as a 'set' installation, operation, troubleshooting, API etc.
I don't know a lot of my customers and can only correct things that appear in the Google group. In my case, since it's a niche. there's not very much.
Actually there's an opportunity here as well, in that non-code people could also participate in their favourite projects by writing guides. Indeed sometimes they do, but not often enough and they're fragmentary.
Absolutely. I'm 63 and as I and my boss used to joke 'it's the year 2000, where's my toga and my flying car?'. On a serious note, there's no reason why we shouldn't aim for utopia, but hyper-capitalism [and before anyone says anything, no, I'm not a communist] is bringing most people a gentle dystopia, poor diets, precarious work contracts for bad pay, pollution, overcrowding, intrusive state, intrusive advertising, small wars, 'war on terror', 'war on drugs', you name it. That's the first world and life is still bad in the third world too, in spite of our promises.
I do feel that life was better in many ways, in the early 1970s when I started work.
Me too for Geany. Use it for Perl.
So do I. Do you remember dropping a box of 2000 punched up but with no sequence number on them?! They really need to get off our lawn NOW!
I'm from the UK which is probably [slightly] less dog-eat-dog than the USA also, I mainly work in a niche, [Perl] and I do contract work rather than permanent.
However I'm still working about as much as I want. I blew an interview recently, but I'm OK with that, since I performed pretty badly in it. I try and keep up and still enjoy computers and computing. So for my younger friends, and they are nearly all younger now:
That's my 2c of a euro, the html is badly formatted, but hey it's almost time for Sunday lunch.
Yes. That's exactly what's wrong with most of agile, lots of project momentum and minimal thought about 'what is this for', 'who wants this', 'will this damage the architecture' etc. Result object-oriented spaghetti and lots of unreadable post-its on a board somewhere in the first circle of development hell.
Been waiting all my life for that. I can go out in the evening now.
I'll declare interest, I work on an open source, mutual social credit system: https://sourceforge.net/projec... so I'm not neutral. But microfinance usually has high interest rates and is 'owned' by large aid organisations that have their private agendas.
Debt money is created by private institutions from thin air and 'ought' either to be based on existing deposits [full reserve banking which would 'slow' everything, not a bad thing] or money creation should be in the hands and governed by the 'users'. So I don't believe that microfinance is the 'answer' and can't find evidence either.
Or to snobby Europeans [like me!] Ca-CA
Waste of a good walk and large bits of open space used by a few quite rich people. Use the courses for public parks and communal gardens [that's allotments to we Brits] instead.
The secret is probably that [like many anoraky people] I enjoy the new things, I'm a neophile. Also, I'm not afraid to be mediocre at some things, I enjoy, a luxury I have because I don't use everything I know 'professionally' nowadays. But, if you don't enjoy technical stuff and do it 'just for money', it's harder to learn.
A couple of open source projects, however small, probably help as well, to 'fix' knowledge. 18 years pfui, get off my lawn...but seriously, yes, you can.
Sorry, I wasted some of your time. I know all that, I was being sarcastic.
I love the Expert System. Was it designed by the Really Clever Person? Is Dr. Evil working on the Really Stupid System to counter it? Go figure, or not, depending on the Really Mathematical System.
I'm a fluent French bilingual, but I learnt as an adult in Paris where they are about as patient as New Yorkers.
There's a huge difference between listening, where you have no control over the speed of delivery/level of difficulty and reading where you can take your time, look up 'words' [or pieces of unfamiliar syntax] and writing, harder than reading but you can still pace yourself and work around difficulties.
Otherwise there's anecdotal evidence that 'extra' natural languages are easier after the first one. I feel that's also true of programming languages, the first one is alien, lots of alien concepts [variables, file handles, operations] and the next few, in imperative languages contain the same thing with different syntactic candy. It's to do with memory, usage and repitition then, less with conceptual grasp.
Thank you, my $15 is cash money, of course, I can meet them in the usual place.
If they pay me $15, I'll take a copy. Don't want it on any device I own or use though...
Agree, nearly everyone is a debt serf. If you have family, work for salary own a house, went to university and do most of the 'ordinary' things that people do in developed countries, you probably have substantial debt. People don't 'choose' to be unfree, the current arrangements compel them in the course of living their lives.
I personally have very little debt and, as a result [apart from being quite old] don't work all year, every year. Now just IMAGINE if people started doing that [actually, apparently a serf had about 100 days holiday, religious festivals included, in the middle ages] the SYSTEM would break down and people would DO WHAT THEY WANTED. Of course, they've been taught to want Facebook, Caca-cola and expensive sneakers, so maybe it wouldn't be too bad, would it?
Apologies for the sarcastic capitals in the post. We really need a 'new' financial system that serves the 'people' and not gov, large corporations, the banks and all these other layers-of-shit, to use the technical term. Meanwhile, people need to wake up to the fact that, every day, they're being gamed.
More power to you. Also, I wanted to say in my first comment, many of the polys were very good, it was a mistake to mess about with them.
We used in the 1960s/1970s to give grants to study at university rather than the USA-style debt/indenture system we have now. At that stage, we had fewer universities, since we hadn't converted our polytechnics, many of which were rubbish, into 'universities'. Also, most of the degree were in actual subjects, science, maths, engineering and english, history, geography, for example.
Now we have media studies, we had kite flying for a while at Thames Valley. In short, the worst of all possible worlds, basically by 'financialising' the system and expanding it in a very thoughtless way. The debt and high fee make it difficult for working class kids too, in my time they would have had a full grant, though they would have probably had to work a little in vacation time. I did.
So I agree somewhat with Dyson. He's a little younger than me and probably remembers the older system.
So agree. Used to take my son there in the late 1980s, when everything was pretty similar to my childhood. Basically, wonderfully engineered things with handles and buttons. I went recently with my nephews and much of this is gone, gradually replaced by superficial, patronising displays.
Good luck to you sir, but please grow up a little!
Yes, and used it for a while. Thanks for reminding me, may go back there. Last thing I used it for was a borough with tens of environmental projects that needed to intercommunicate, they migrated that to Ning, their loss, IMO.
For me, that's not a solution, I want something that doesn't depend/share-data-with a large for-profit. Actually I don't even have a facebook account.
Thanks! I'm the submitter, I'm 63 and have spent most of my life in IT. There's several 'near' fits to this problem, usually using CMS software, but it's still interesting to look for 'closer' fits and, in general, learn from others. 'Learn from others' is always fun, almost more than shouting at the kids on my lawn.