I never said to accept their incorrect jargon. Just to know it well enough to effectively communicate to them and, while you're at it, educate them with correct terminology. Bonus points if you know how to do that without coming across as condescending about it. The key is that you need to do both: Communicate to your clients using language they will understand and teach them the correct usage of the terms they consistently misuse.
Re:The community isn't really vibrant.
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Front End Drupal
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I've found that asking questions is a great way to avoid getting answers. Perhaps things have improved since my last attempt at getting into Drupal (n years ago for n on [2,4]), but at the time it was impossible to even find enough API documentation to develop an extension for such eccentric fringes as wanting a sane work flow for content writers.
Some clients want to be more informed than others, of course, but you're on the right track. The computer shop is too often indistinguishable from the stereotypical dishonest car repair shop. "Here is a list of words you don't know that are wrong with your car. It will cost you a whole lot of money to fix it. And if you don't want to come back here next week, you can give us some more protection^W money to fix this other list of things that will be wrong with your car by tomorrow morning. Don't expect us to explain any of this to you, because it's all a pack of lies to make sure you give us lots of money for labor."
Everyone not only feels better off but actually is better off when people at least partially understand what's wrong and why it should be fixed. It's not like I'm going to start replacing PCV valves on my own or your customers are going to start restoring data from nearly-dead hard drives on their own just because there is a mutual understanding that doing so is the solution to the problem.
Funny - I specifically chose the Mustang because of its history of having a distributor cap for over 30 years. I used the distributor cap analogy because it is a part that someone old enough to have trouble differentiating "hard drive" from "computer" would have extensive experience with it being the cause of car troubles.
I had originally written "car" instead of Mustang, but changed it to a specific model that was awesome in the days when it had a distributor cap and is comparatively not as cool in its modern, fuel-injected, computer-timed form. I did that to avoid comments from people saying that distributor caps haven't been installed on cars in general for over a decade.
As there are two comments pointing out that current-production Mustangs don't have distributor caps, I have obviously failed in my endeavor. From now on, I shall thoroughly footnote all* of my analogies, factual statements, and opinions.
Language is important, indeed. The key to effective communication is to know the language of your audience. If you know that, in your friend's jargon, "hard drive" and "CPU" are both terms used to refer to the entire computer other than external peripherals, you should tell him "a part inside your computer is broken but it can be fixed or even replaced without you having to buy a new computer."
You get bonus points if you know his interests well enough to formulate a good analogy, such as "a part inside your computer needs to be replaced or fixed, kind of like if your Mustang won't start because it needs a new distributor cap."
My only SGI is an Indigo2 I picked up around '98 or '99. It was my main workstation until it got completely and thoroughly rooted a couple years later. I dug it out of storage last fall and got it up and running with a fresh install of Irix 6.2. Just for kicks. These days I'm all Mac at home, Debian on my server, and the lovely world of XP at my day job. I swear, I do have one of those that I occasionally make time for.
You caught me! I didn't figure there'd be much overlap between this world and that one. You may have more amps behind your belt, but at least I have a lower slashdot ID than you do! Which volume of the Real Book is "It's a Small World" in, anyhow?
I hope that, someday, you have a hobby that leads you to excitedly give away for free something that you had the time of your life creating and put all your pride into. Then, I hope that someone tells you what a waste of time it was and insists that you do something less enjoyable for yourself to satisfy his own selfish needs.
I brew my own beer, build my own guitar amplifiers, and write code for projects that have been ongoing for a decade with fewer than a dozen users. To many people, every one of these activities is an utter waste of time. Some of those people get in my face and tell me to spend my time doing something more useful. To that group, I say this: Screw you, I'm having fun.
One time, I was stranded with a disabled vehicle in eastern Colorado in 116-degree weather. No cell phone service, etc. I said a brief prayer and a car pulled up with another state's custom license plate: "JESUS." The driver and his wife were telling us about his most recent book, and I will never forget how happy they were by the sales figures: "We have given away ten thousand copies!"
Nah, you want to pull one copy, open it and turn to the page you want to reference, furrow your brow, replace it, ponder for a moment, and then pull out another copy, from which you dramatically blow a layer of dust into the air before opening it to the same page.
The reason is obvious: A class of defendants could then have one legal team instead of all having to hire one legal team per defendant, and they would all end up with an adequate defense rather than just paying a proposed settlement to avoid having to pay a lawyer more.
In the US, there can indeed be class actions where it's a class of defendants instead of a class of plaintiffs. It's just exceedingly rare. Rule 23, F.R.Civ.P.: "One or more members of a class may sue or be sued as representative parties on behalf of all members only if [requirements for a class action are met]." (emphasis supplied)
Bourbon is to whiskey as Bordeaux is to wine, give or take. As to The Macallan, of course I completely agree with you. I also don't know how anyone who's tasted the stuff could possibly not care enough to spell it right.
I distinguish the spelling based on where the whisk(e)y is from rather than where I am.
Whiskey = American or Irish
Whisky = Canadian or Scotch
Bourbon = Kentucky (nonconformists)
I agree that you need to be able to poke at the holes, whether (a) in the test itself or (b) in the way that the way the test works is kept a secret from the jury and others. And you can. And should.
You'd never make it onto a criminal jury - your idea of what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means is stricter than the law permits. Also, a breath test is not reliable per se, which seems to be the starting point for this entire comment. The exact same logic would lead to fingerprints and DNA tests being excluded in 100% of cases because there is some possible way for the evidence to exist at the crime scene other than the most likely one.
And that's why our legal system is adversarial: You are entitled to perform cross-examination and to present evidence that explains the reading as being other than due to you having alcohol in your bloodstream. If you generally refuse to admit a particular kind of evidence just because it might be unreliable in a given case, you end up with no evidence at all in any case.
I don't recall there being a constitutional right to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. You enter into a bargain when you get a driver's license, and the privilege of holding it can be revoked when you break your side of the bargain. Refusing a breath test is just one way. It has nothing to do with constitutional rights.
The possibility for alcohol other than from your bloodstream to be measured by a breath test, throwing off the accuracy of the test, is one reason that, here, we only use it as evidence of probable cause to arrest and give you a blood test, not to convict you.
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I never said to accept their incorrect jargon. Just to know it well enough to effectively communicate to them and, while you're at it, educate them with correct terminology. Bonus points if you know how to do that without coming across as condescending about it. The key is that you need to do both: Communicate to your clients using language they will understand and teach them the correct usage of the terms they consistently misuse.
I've found that asking questions is a great way to avoid getting answers. Perhaps things have improved since my last attempt at getting into Drupal (n years ago for n on [2,4]), but at the time it was impossible to even find enough API documentation to develop an extension for such eccentric fringes as wanting a sane work flow for content writers.
A sizable portion of the "hard drive == computer" crowd also believe that "hard disk" refers to a 3-1/2-inch floppy diskette.
Some clients want to be more informed than others, of course, but you're on the right track. The computer shop is too often indistinguishable from the stereotypical dishonest car repair shop. "Here is a list of words you don't know that are wrong with your car. It will cost you a whole lot of money to fix it. And if you don't want to come back here next week, you can give us some more protection^W money to fix this other list of things that will be wrong with your car by tomorrow morning. Don't expect us to explain any of this to you, because it's all a pack of lies to make sure you give us lots of money for labor."
Everyone not only feels better off but actually is better off when people at least partially understand what's wrong and why it should be fixed. It's not like I'm going to start replacing PCV valves on my own or your customers are going to start restoring data from nearly-dead hard drives on their own just because there is a mutual understanding that doing so is the solution to the problem.
The disparate skills and resources between you and your client form a better reason to take their money than their mere ignorance does.
Don't dumb it down. Use analogies as part of an overall means of effectively communicating and educating your customers.
Funny - I specifically chose the Mustang because of its history of having a distributor cap for over 30 years. I used the distributor cap analogy because it is a part that someone old enough to have trouble differentiating "hard drive" from "computer" would have extensive experience with it being the cause of car troubles.
I had originally written "car" instead of Mustang, but changed it to a specific model that was awesome in the days when it had a distributor cap and is comparatively not as cool in its modern, fuel-injected, computer-timed form. I did that to avoid comments from people saying that distributor caps haven't been installed on cars in general for over a decade.
As there are two comments pointing out that current-production Mustangs don't have distributor caps, I have obviously failed in my endeavor. From now on, I shall thoroughly footnote all* of my analogies, factual statements, and opinions.
* - Basically none.
Language is important, indeed. The key to effective communication is to know the language of your audience. If you know that, in your friend's jargon, "hard drive" and "CPU" are both terms used to refer to the entire computer other than external peripherals, you should tell him "a part inside your computer is broken but it can be fixed or even replaced without you having to buy a new computer."
You get bonus points if you know his interests well enough to formulate a good analogy, such as "a part inside your computer needs to be replaced or fixed, kind of like if your Mustang won't start because it needs a new distributor cap."
Communication is 90% knowing your audience.
My only SGI is an Indigo2 I picked up around '98 or '99. It was my main workstation until it got completely and thoroughly rooted a couple years later. I dug it out of storage last fall and got it up and running with a fresh install of Irix 6.2. Just for kicks. These days I'm all Mac at home, Debian on my server, and the lovely world of XP at my day job. I swear, I do have one of those that I occasionally make time for.
Virginity is underrated. What's really bad is getting laid once and never again! Or, at least, so I've been told. ;)
You caught me! I didn't figure there'd be much overlap between this world and that one. You may have more amps behind your belt, but at least I have a lower slashdot ID than you do! Which volume of the Real Book is "It's a Small World" in, anyhow?
I hope that, someday, you have a hobby that leads you to excitedly give away for free something that you had the time of your life creating and put all your pride into. Then, I hope that someone tells you what a waste of time it was and insists that you do something less enjoyable for yourself to satisfy his own selfish needs.
I brew my own beer, build my own guitar amplifiers, and write code for projects that have been ongoing for a decade with fewer than a dozen users. To many people, every one of these activities is an utter waste of time. Some of those people get in my face and tell me to spend my time doing something more useful. To that group, I say this: Screw you, I'm having fun.
One time, I was stranded with a disabled vehicle in eastern Colorado in 116-degree weather. No cell phone service, etc. I said a brief prayer and a car pulled up with another state's custom license plate: "JESUS." The driver and his wife were telling us about his most recent book, and I will never forget how happy they were by the sales figures: "We have given away ten thousand copies!"
The reasons you write do matter.
Nah, you want to pull one copy, open it and turn to the page you want to reference, furrow your brow, replace it, ponder for a moment, and then pull out another copy, from which you dramatically blow a layer of dust into the air before opening it to the same page.
The reason is obvious: A class of defendants could then have one legal team instead of all having to hire one legal team per defendant, and they would all end up with an adequate defense rather than just paying a proposed settlement to avoid having to pay a lawyer more.
In the US, there can indeed be class actions where it's a class of defendants instead of a class of plaintiffs. It's just exceedingly rare. Rule 23, F.R.Civ.P.: "One or more members of a class may sue or be sued as representative parties on behalf of all members only if [requirements for a class action are met]." (emphasis supplied)
It'll probably just print 90 copies of an error message that makes sense on the surface but gives no indication of what it actually means.
Bourbon is to whiskey as Bordeaux is to wine, give or take. As to The Macallan, of course I completely agree with you. I also don't know how anyone who's tasted the stuff could possibly not care enough to spell it right.
I distinguish the spelling based on where the whisk(e)y is from rather than where I am.
Whiskey = American or Irish
Whisky = Canadian or Scotch
Bourbon = Kentucky (nonconformists)
I agree that you need to be able to poke at the holes, whether (a) in the test itself or (b) in the way that the way the test works is kept a secret from the jury and others. And you can. And should.
You'd never make it onto a criminal jury - your idea of what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means is stricter than the law permits. Also, a breath test is not reliable per se, which seems to be the starting point for this entire comment. The exact same logic would lead to fingerprints and DNA tests being excluded in 100% of cases because there is some possible way for the evidence to exist at the crime scene other than the most likely one.
And that's why our legal system is adversarial: You are entitled to perform cross-examination and to present evidence that explains the reading as being other than due to you having alcohol in your bloodstream. If you generally refuse to admit a particular kind of evidence just because it might be unreliable in a given case, you end up with no evidence at all in any case.
Allowing the breath test to be used as proof of guilt is different than using it to create the presumption of guilt.
I don't recall there being a constitutional right to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. You enter into a bargain when you get a driver's license, and the privilege of holding it can be revoked when you break your side of the bargain. Refusing a breath test is just one way. It has nothing to do with constitutional rights.
The possibility for alcohol other than from your bloodstream to be measured by a breath test, throwing off the accuracy of the test, is one reason that, here, we only use it as evidence of probable cause to arrest and give you a blood test, not to convict you.