"word throws a wobbly and sticks red crosses in for no apparent reason... even if the embedded object is inside the document (such as an equation, if it's lost the internal bitmap representation, then what you'll see is a BIG RED CROSS."
I have personally not had a problem with this, but I don't use the equation editor or internal drawing package. My problem is inevitably a graphic that was linked to, and the link is to a file on someone's laptop.
"If you have ever seen a large Word document where all the image placeholders have become replaced with a large red cross you will know what I mean."
That is NOT Word. That is a user inserting an image as a link on a drive you do not
That said - Word does accumulate large amounts of cruft. We regularly pass docs aorund for review, and because the department is using a multitude of language settings, I invariably have my nice English text come back thinking it is Brazilian Portuguese or French.
It also had a document shredder called the "Master Document" feature. Something writers tell each other to never use.
"90,000 volumes were transferred to other collections in the campus's massive library system"
Smart move. Rather than fight the students who wanted a place to hang out and do online research, they expanded the area dedicated to the other way of learning on campus: talking to fellow students. And the other libraries now have a perfect excuse to eject those who are chatting and IM'ing.
If you want to make the effect comprehensible to Joe Sixpack, words like "attention" or "situational awareness" are too vague, too hich on the abstraction scale. "Blindness", in the commonly accepted meaning of "unable to see" is a concrete word.
"Hysterical blindness" is an accepted term for a condition where the physical parts are working but the processing is either not happening or not being accepted by whatever accepts vision. And how about those poor "stripe-blind" kittens that were reared with nothing but strong vertical or horizontal lines... and became unable to "see" lines in the other direction.
Obviously, the next step is to see whether the inputs briefly shut down, or if the input is ignored because of a rush of brain activity.
"the fact that they never even saw the image of the building lying on its side is very significant"
Witnesses to a crime often have problems remembering what happened after a traumatic event, to the extent that they often give conflicting accounts of which direction a suspect fled. This research indicated that they might not have processed that information because of the emotional overload.
I'd have to dredge the hard drive for the code, but this sounds very much like a VBA macro I wrote in the late 1990s.
We had to verify that all numbers, of whatever style, were correctly formatted in a 1200+ page document. We also had to cross check the numbers in the document - mingled in the text - against the specs in another document. This was such a monumental PITA that I wrote a macro to find them and make them a gaudy color. The reverse macro was not needed because we manually restored the color to normal as each instance was corrected. It would have been extremely easy to write.
Re:It's NOT a new idea - saw it in the 1980s
on
Textbooks With EULAs
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· Score: 1
After 20+ years you expect me to remember his cockamamie scheme? AFAIR, it had something to do with a config file on the floppy controlling whether the lesson's files could be copied to another floppy for alteration during class. His idea was that each semester would require purchase of a new workbook diskette... the "not good after ddmmyy" file would prevent resale of the course materials.
Un-protect the disk, delete the control, and it was all available for use.
A long time ago, Grasshoppers, I reviewed a potential textbook for a publisher... the author went to GREAT lengths to explain how his copy-protected course workbook diskettes were going to produce lots of profit for the bookstores and the publisher. It took me about 30 seconds to unlock his copy protected diskette with a hole puncher from my desk drawer.
Frist Post? And What a DUMB idea
on
Textbooks With EULAs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Paying 2/3 retail for a book you can't mark in, underline, or ceremonially BURN after the class is over?
"There is NO guarantee that the specs or the comments will match what the actual code does- and thanks to you, I now see why most user manuals are so incredibly bad."
The preferred practice is to write a draft "as specified" basing it on the product's use cases and functional specs (WHAT it needs to do, not how it does it). Shortly before alpha release, edit the draft to match the reality, add screen shots, etc. If your final product doesn't function like the original spec quite closely, the planning stage was short-changed.
I've seen the riots by fans after football games... win or lose, it's a great excuse to set fires and break windows.
How many videogame players riot after the game? When was the last time (or the first) that the conclusion of the Sims led to overturned vehicles, flaming trashcans and assaults on strangers?
I don't mess with source code: I use software specs, software comments, and various builds to write user manuals.
The "why should I have a spec/comments/whatever mindset is what I was railing against. Nobody should have to reverse-engineer or mentally compile code to figure out what it is supposed to do.
I'm a writer, not a typist... and Google is a much better speller than I am.:)
Google has some way of detecting common typos that are based on keyboard layout. Double-strikes, where you hit both keys, off-sets where you are touch-typing one key to the left... it's really nice.
" I think it's a bit of a wasted effort for engineers to try to learn to communicate in English past a certain level. "
The hardest thing to write is a clear, concise explanation... I've been a technical writer for 20 years or so and I'm STILL LEARNING. However, the core techniques of writing non-fiction can be taught fairly quickly.
I'm afraid that the book's author may have spent a lot of time on layout, which is probably something better left to a professional.
In a very short time, often simultaneously, I can be writing user-level material for software written in C, Java, Cobol, Fortran, Python, Perl, or whatever the language du jour may be.
"Running the code in my head" is not going to work, unless you expect me to master not only English but every other programming language in use, or that has ever been used.
We were discussing the need for technical writing skills on the part of programmers and engineers... and unfortunately, the "read my code" attitude is alive and well in the OSS community.
If you can't understand what I've done by my source code, then you're worthless.
Does your source code start with a clear software specification document, and are all your mudulkes accurately and completely commented? If not... what the heck are you coding?
"Anybody working on a team ought to be able to read code and understand the internals of the machine. If they can't- they're working in the wrong industry."
I should NOT have to reverse engineer your code to find out what it does. A competent technical writer can take a well-written software specification and have a draft user manual ready by the time the code is compilable.
I'm a professional technical writer... and I'm not going to worry that engineers or programmers will learn how to write so well that I'm redundant.
However, if they could just learn to write a decent paragraph or two explaining the way their newest brain-child REALLY works, I'd be a very happy writer.
Want to talk brittle? I installed MS project... shortly thereafter site IT forced a patch to MS Project onto me.
After that patch was installed (and the obligatory reboot happened), MSFT Word was fubar... but in a wierd way. In outline view, and only in outline view, all my text was reading right-to-left and shifted to the right side of the page... like the following paragraph is, except also right-aligned.
.page the of side right the to shifted and right-to-left reading was text my All
"They should have first ported their servers to Linux on the mainframes"
Yeah... like a 1970s era mainframe could run Linux! They could have LEASED enough Linux servers to do a full test run. Still, until you actually do the cutover, it's hard to really know what will break with a complex app.
"The issue is that you're working without a safety net. If things go really wrong, there's no backup army of specially trained techs to run in and fix things."
They had serious problems, but this sounds like a sufficient safety net: "a 40- to 50-person cutover team of IBM, Red Hat and Cendant engineers brought the problems under control by throwing more servers into the mix."
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I have personally not had a problem with this, but I don't use the equation editor or internal drawing package. My problem is inevitably a graphic that was linked to, and the link is to a file on someone's laptop.
That is NOT Word. That is a user inserting an image as a link on a drive you do not
That said - Word does accumulate large amounts of cruft. We regularly pass docs aorund for review, and because the department is using a multitude of language settings, I invariably have my nice English text come back thinking it is Brazilian Portuguese or French.
It also had a document shredder called the "Master Document" feature. Something writers tell each other to never use.
It makes sure you don't come back with something that you can spread to your community. Measles kills and blinds and damages brains.
Smart move. Rather than fight the students who wanted a place to hang out and do online research, they expanded the area dedicated to the other way of learning on campus: talking to fellow students. And the other libraries now have a perfect excuse to eject those who are chatting and IM'ing.
PETA = People for the Ethical Treatment of Algae
"Hysterical blindness" is an accepted term for a condition where the physical parts are working but the processing is either not happening or not being accepted by whatever accepts vision. And how about those poor "stripe-blind" kittens that were reared with nothing but strong vertical or horizontal lines ... and became unable to "see" lines in the other direction.
Obviously, the next step is to see whether the inputs briefly shut down, or if the input is ignored because of a rush of brain activity.
Witnesses to a crime often have problems remembering what happened after a traumatic event, to the extent that they often give conflicting accounts of which direction a suspect fled. This research indicated that they might not have processed that information because of the emotional overload.
We had to verify that all numbers, of whatever style, were correctly formatted in a 1200+ page document. We also had to cross check the numbers in the document - mingled in the text - against the specs in another document. This was such a monumental PITA that I wrote a macro to find them and make them a gaudy color. The reverse macro was not needed because we manually restored the color to normal as each instance was corrected. It would have been extremely easy to write.
Un-protect the disk, delete the control, and it was all available for use.
A long time ago, Grasshoppers, I reviewed a potential textbook for a publisher ... the author went to GREAT lengths to explain how his copy-protected course workbook diskettes were going to produce lots of profit for the bookstores and the publisher. It took me about 30 seconds to unlock his copy protected diskette with a hole puncher from my desk drawer.
Paying 2/3 retail for a book you can't mark in, underline, or ceremonially BURN after the class is over?
I wuz there.
The preferred practice is to write a draft "as specified" basing it on the product's use cases and functional specs (WHAT it needs to do, not how it does it). Shortly before alpha release, edit the draft to match the reality, add screen shots, etc. If your final product doesn't function like the original spec quite closely, the planning stage was short-changed.
How many videogame players riot after the game? When was the last time (or the first) that the conclusion of the Sims led to overturned vehicles, flaming trashcans and assaults on strangers?
The "why should I have a spec/comments/whatever mindset is what I was railing against. Nobody should have to reverse-engineer or mentally compile code to figure out what it is supposed to do.
I'm a writer, not a typist ... and Google is a much better speller than I am. :)
Google has some way of detecting common typos that are based on keyboard layout. Double-strikes, where you hit both keys, off-sets where you are touch-typing one key to the left ... it's really nice.
The hardest thing to write is a clear, concise explanation ... I've been a technical writer for 20 years or so and I'm STILL LEARNING. However, the core techniques of writing non-fiction can be taught fairly quickly.
I'm afraid that the book's author may have spent a lot of time on layout, which is probably something better left to a professional.
In a very short time, often simultaneously, I can be writing user-level material for software written in C, Java, Cobol, Fortran, Python, Perl, or whatever the language du jour may be.
"Running the code in my head" is not going to work, unless you expect me to master not only English but every other programming language in use, or that has ever been used.
We were discussing the need for technical writing skills on the part of programmers and engineers ... and unfortunately, the "read my code" attitude is alive and well in the OSS community.
Does your source code start with a clear software specification document, and are all your mudulkes accurately and completely commented? If not ... what the heck are you coding?
I should NOT have to reverse engineer your code to find out what it does. A competent technical writer can take a well-written software specification and have a draft user manual ready by the time the code is compilable.
However, if they could just learn to write a decent paragraph or two explaining the way their newest brain-child REALLY works, I'd be a very happy writer.
After that patch was installed (and the obligatory reboot happened), MSFT Word was fubar ... but in a wierd way. In outline view, and only in outline view, all my text was reading right-to-left and shifted to the right side of the page ... like the following paragraph is, except also right-aligned.
.page the of side right the to shifted and right-to-left reading was text my All
Yeah ... like a 1970s era mainframe could run Linux! They could have LEASED enough Linux servers to do a full test run. Still, until you actually do the cutover, it's hard to really know what will break with a complex app.
They had serious problems, but this sounds like a sufficient safety net: "a 40- to 50-person cutover team of IBM, Red Hat and Cendant engineers brought the problems under control by throwing more servers into the mix."