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Education

Submission + - Blogs are to papers what PCs are to mainframes (chrisblanc.org)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "As usual, established interests start relying on one method of doing things so much they forget about other possibilities. I think Dave probably wanted to bring in the greatest parallel ever, which is the personal computer. Back in the 1970s, it was assumed that computers would always need machine rooms and staffs to monitor them, including highly-trained programmers. As operating systems and programming languages both grew up, and got oversimplified, the computer migrated into the home.

Enter the hobbyist programmer. The personal computer software, like the blog versus a system like Vignette, was a shallow competitor because it was simpler and less reliable, lacking the thorough architecture of mainframe software. But it did the job well enough, and people could by having a computer in the office, have a greater amount of control over their data. So they took their dollars and bought IBM PCs, Apple ][s, Tandy TRS-80s, and Commodore 64s.

Blogs are the same way, and I sense the situation is evening out. The medium has changed; the skill of journalism has not.

http://www.chrisblanc.org/blog/culture/2007/12/18/the-future-of-journalism/"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft and Viacom join forces (neowin.net)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "Viacom Incorporated and Microsoft Corporation have negotiated an agreement under which major divisions of both companies will collaborate on advertising, content distribution, event promotions and games over the next several years. Detailed financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal has a projected base value of approximately $500 million in financial considerations and business services between the two companies over the initial five-year length of the agreement. The deal includes a combination of revenue sharing provisions, guarantees and content licensing agreements. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this will be (assuming everything goes well) a huge benefit to both business giants.

http://www.neowin.net/news/main/07/12/19/viacom — microsoft-join-forces"
Editorial

Submission + - Interaction design: both bloat and essential (chrisblanc.org)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "Tom Wolfe believes that the moral quest in humanity is brought on by adaptation to civilization, and that our real pursuit is to find a balance between individual and collective needs. Having seen the pendulum swing both ways in my lifetime, I'm sceptical of both extremes, as I can see how totalitarianism can occur through the acts of individuals as much as it can occur through the acts of one very selfish one (Stalin, I'm calling you out, dawg).

I'm also very much enamored of Robert A. Heinlein's in/famous quote that "specialization is for insects," which was quoted in full in an article on this site a few days ago. He's correct in that the more we specialize, the less general knowledge and broad knowledge we have, so while we have depth of knowledge in specific areas, we lack depth of knowledge about life itself. In my view, this additional dimension is what makes us human.

For that reason, I'm leery of cheering about the introduction of Interaction Design (formerly "Interface Design") as a profession, because while I'm certain it's a skill I'm not certain that skill warrants being a job category, in part because there's not enough work for it which encourages the production of non-necessary "work" that is de facto bureaucracy.

http://www.chrisblanc.org/blog/interaction-design/2007/12/17/usability-interface-design-and-technical-writing/"
The Matrix

Submission + - Google's knol completes Wikipedia cycle (chrisblanc.org)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "When they wanted to take out Microsoft Internet Explorer, they pumped money and developers into Mozilla Firefox, making it as corporate of a project as IE. Result? Many people use it, believing it to be a real alternative, while Google slowly slackens its support into the background.

Finally, Wikipedia: Google needed a way to provide some kind of standard result for any search query, because too many people were spamming. So they encouraged wikipedia, knowing that its content would eventually get out of hand.

Now, they've introduced Google Knol, which is a wikipedia clone — except that it's hybridized with a group blog, and is only open to select contributors. Thinking of Associated Content or Reddit? Yeah, me too.

It's a good way of acknowledging what Wikipedia tries desperately not to let the world know. Most wikipedia articles are written by relatively few people, maybe 2% of the contributing audience. They are augmented by another 10%-20% of the people there. The rest of the people on Wikipedia perform really obvious monkey tasks like plagiarizing websites that are expert in their area, so the Wikipedia page appears above them in search results. This was basically a giant web real estate grab.

With Knol, Google is starting where Wikipedia left off.

http://www.chrisblanc.org/blog/web/2007/12/17/googles-knol-and-what-it-means/"
Toys

Submission + - XML describes knitting, patterns (knitml.com)

Submitted by
Writer of Fiction
Writer of Fiction writes: "KnitML is a community standards effort aimed at defining a universal, machine- and human-readable system for describing knitting patterns.

http://www.knitml.com/blog/static.php?page=about-knitml

* Automatically convert English measurements to and from metric measurements
* Size a pattern up or down to any size, not just the sizes that come with the pattern
* Recalculate a pattern for your gauge rather than the one that came with the pattern
* Explicitly write out mathematically complex directions (e.g., "increase 34 stitches evenly over 171 stiches")
* Alter the pattern using an easy-to-use graphical editor (or create new KnitML-based pattern from scratch)
* Preview the result of a pattern using graphics"
The Matrix

Submission + - The future of humanity requires more reading (chrisblanc.org)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "In my life, the one factor that has made the difference between misery and delight has been learning. I didn't write "education," because there's a difference, but finding the truth (loosely defined as how things work consistently in the shared reality we call physical space!) of any discipline, matter, notion or act has always made me feel free from the great weight of negative "what could be" that we call fear. It's like a darkened room not made light, but I have a map, now.

If those results are in any way true, I'm stubbornly not going to change. I think the rest of the world should. This blog isn't that complicated. More people need to get acquainted with this style of writing so they can appreciate the beauty of learning, especially from books, which get good when they start at this level (the best books are usually far more articulate, and less bloggish). Learning is fun. Reading is power that requires oppressing no one. Pass it on.

http://www.chrisblanc.org/blog/culture/2007/11/27/reading-level-and-future-humanity/"
Security

Submission + - DOS vulnerability in Mac OS X (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "For some, the infallibility of Apple's Mac OS X is so absolute that, despite reports that state the contrary, they continue to believe no harm can ever come. It is this sort of smug attitude that is the single greatest threat to the security of the platform. Choosing not to believe, or rather ignore, security experts is bad practice. But who knows? Every once in a while, the security vulnerabilities that those experts report could prove to be actual threats.

One such example is a new report by Heise Security stating that there is a newly-discovered denial of service vulnerability in Mac OS X, 10.4.11, 10.5 and 10.5.1 that can lead to kernel panics. The problem, according to the company, stems from an "integer overflow in the load_threadstack function in mach_loader.c when processing Mach-O binaries."

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/12/11/heise-warns-of-denial-of-service-and-vpn-flaws-in-os-x"
The Matrix

Submission + - When death comes gently (alsa.org)

Submitted by
anonymous
anonymous writes: "Vincent, then only 50 years old, noticed one day that as he read the evening paper under his favorite tree in the garden, that a finger on his right hand stiffened to the point where he couldn't control it. As months passed, the peculiar sensation overtook other fingers. The couple consulted a neurologist. He diagnosed that Vincent had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Meta was told there was no cure for the disease. "He was very brave as the disease took over his mobility," Meta recalls. "I was scared out of my wits, but I had to be brave too."

http://www.alsa.org/alsa/honorees_sanborn.cfm"
Media

Submission + - Technical Writing changes with the times (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "What characterized technical writing during the early digital years was what we might call a WTFM mentality, for "write the fantastic manual" (or words to that effect). When software or hardware development was done, the tech writer came in on contract and produced a manual, then vanished from the process except for occasional updates. The task was to produce the manual as the last task before shipping.

With the change in our society brought by digital technology has come a change in what the fantastic manual might be, both in form and content. In the 1930s, an egg-beater was a separate tool from a mixer; in the 1950s, they were interchangeable attachments to a motorized mixer base; in the 2000s, they are different rotation patterns programmed into a mixing unit which hooks up to the network, serves a web page of usage statistics, and probably stores recipes to boot.

http://user-advocacy.blogspot.com/2007/11/technical-writing-in-transition-part-ii.html"
Privacy

Submission + - BSA forces businesses to self-incriminate (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
Technical Writing Geek
Technical Writing Geek writes: "The letters will then state that the BSA is willing to avoid court and settle amicably — if the company audits its computers to see whether they contain unlicensed copies of software made by the group's members.

That turns out to be the key step. Usually, companies go along, and report to the BSA's attorneys what they've found. With that information, the BSA will demand payments, plus penalties and attorneys' fees, for the unlicensed software.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071125/ap_on_hi_te/bsa_audits;_ylt="

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