Core Dump

This exclusive and informative top ten list is based on interviews conducted by TheContentWrangler.com with technical writers at more than 20 software companies—tech writers that are actually using DITA to create documentation today. It’s jam-packed with useful advice, practical tips, honest warnings, and lessons learned. No marketing blabber. No hidden sales agenda. No name dropping. Just straight forward and useful information no software company is likely to share with you any time soon.

Blue Origin proposes to launch its reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet (99,060 meters) from a privately-owned space launch site in Culberson County, Texas.

As outlined in the EA, the Blue Origin launch site would be approximately 25 miles (40.2 kilometers) north of Van Horn, Texas. It lies within a larger, privately-owned property known as the Corn Ranch. Access to the proposed launch site is from Texas Highway 54, which is approximately five miles (8 kilometers) west of the proposed project's center of operations.

In this on-demand seminar, you will learn the pros and cons of adopting DITA as an end-to-end solution for authoring, producing and delivering technical information at a topic level. You will also learn how FrameMaker embraces the DITA architecture in a writer-friendly, WYSIWG environment.

A few days back, the Senior Writers' Lounge at Language Log Plaza was enlivened by an exchange about the passive voice in English. Poser relayed a query about where the injunction against the passive originated. Nunberg fixed on George Orwell's 1946 article "Politics and the English Language", where Orwell firmly instructs us: "Never use the passive where you can use the active." I demurred, noting that the injunction was a commonplace in college writing handbooks in the 30s and 40s (in the U.S., anyway); and now I'm ready to show some of the evidence.

So Orwell isn't the originator. But it's likely that his very influential essay brought Avoid Passive to a much larger audience than it had before; no doubt Strunk and White's equally influential Elements of Style (1st ed. 1959) helped spread the word in the U.S. Eventually, Avoid Passive becomes a central element in the ideology of English writing style.

But where DID it originate?

Now as he set a slippery cup in the drying rack, he decided that Nauja wasn’t exactly wrong. SimCanada was an amazing thing. Its bank of servers in Ottawa ran economic, cultural and geophysical simulations of the whole country, at faster than real-time. You could log into SimCanada and manipulate the parameters--eliminate the GST, raise the carbon tax, or expropriate land for a high-speed rail link between Montreal and Toronto. Then run the simulation forward a few years and check the results against the status-quo projections. Or browse to see what other people were doing, and discuss or collaborate with them.

“Why debate public policy,” Nauja had said, “when you can sim it?”

Supernova explosions are so enormous that their scale is difficult to imagine. Thought experiments and simple calculations involving the Sun going supernova can help with visualization. The energy flux would be roughly equivalent to having the entire earth's nuclear arsenal detonated a kilometer away, and would be sufficient to boil away the surface at hundreds of meters per second. Even on the temporarily protected night side, scattered light in the atmosphere and light reflected from interplanetary dust would far exceed normal sunlight, and radiation reflected from the moon would heat the earth to lethal temperatures if the moon were near full. The earth would take at most a few days to vaporize.
Fortunately, the sun is not massive enough to become a supernova. Supernova explosions occur only in short lived stars, so that the melancholy science fiction theme of a civilization being incinerated by its own sun is very unlikely to happen in reality.

A draft of ISO 26514: User Documentation Requirements
for Documentation Designers and Developers is now ready for comment prior
to balloting by national delegations. Comments will be made available to
the US and Canadian delegations to assist them in developing their official
response to the draft.

The most important difference between the internet and all the media that came before it is the cost of participation. On the internet, participation is pretty much free — or at least, it's in free-fall, with library terminals, cheap hardware, open WiFi and free training courses making the net available to ever-larger pools of people.

Almost anyone can participate. If having the money to run a publication was ever any kind of proxy for reliability, kiss it goodbye. You can't even count on a site's prominence as a barometer of its truthfulness. Wildly popular sites like the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia can be edited by anyone who comes upon them, anonymously, and those edits show up live the instant they're made.

An experimental inflatable spacecraft that blasted into space on Wednesday has successfully expanded. Bigelow Aerospace, the commercial firm behind the Genesis 1 module, confirmed that the ship was in orbit and was beaming pictures back to Earth.

"All systems are operating within expected parameters," the company founder, hotel tycoon Robert Bigelow, said in a statement.

The water-melon shaped craft could form the basis of a future space hotel.

It's difficult not to be wholly impressed with Intel's Core 2 Duo processors. The micro-architecture leverages a bunch of smart technologies that come together to form the most potent range of CPUs available. Putting it in some kind of context, the next-to-bottom model, E6400, costing $220, is, over the course of our benchmarks, as fast as an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 or Intel Extreme Edition 965. That, readers, is how good Core 2 Duo is.

What's equally as impressive as sheer performance is the fact that Intel has managed to architect such power into an energy-efficient package that puts out half the TDP of the two aforementioned high-end CPUs. Even the Extreme Edition, clocked in at 2.93GHz and multiplier-unlocked, ships with a 75W TDP. We suppose it's like buying a faster, more powerful car that also gives better fuel economy than your current model. A win-win situation.

There are four core ways to use open source techniques and technologies to dramatically increase the effectiveness of any organization's tech writing. These techniques can greatly enhance the power of technical writing applied in user guides, marketing materials and software documentation.

• The reader feedback loop
• The living document
• Quantitative analysis
• New age of tech writing (I'm not sure this is a technique, but it's not my article).

For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google, the company must still work through common business problems such as reporting revenue and tracking projects. But it sometimes addresses those needs in unconventional—yet highly efficient—ways. Others are starting to follow its lead. Here's why.

But technology didn’t just allow fans to sidestep the cash register. It also offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what they could hear. The average file-trading network has more songs than any music store – by a factor of more than 100. Music fans had the opportunity for limitless choice, and they took it. Today, listeners have not only stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to bring throngs into record stores on release day. If they have to choose between a packaged act and something new, more and more people are opting for exploration.

Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify assembly — and reduce the presumed repair time — by not fastening components to the servers at all but simply laying them on a bed of cork. This proved to be unstable, and so parts were connected with Velcro.

Foundations is a series of articles, first published in the magazine Eidolon, on some of the theories of twentieth-century physics that have most influenced modern science fiction. However, these are not essays on the history or philosophy of science; their aim is to show how the central idea of each theory leads to detailed, quantitative predictions of real physical effects. For example, the article on special relativity derives formulas for time dilation, Doppler shift, and aberration.

These articles are for the interested lay reader. No prior knowledge of mathematics beyond high school algebra and geometry is needed.

The scenario he describes is the background he researched for Rainbows End. Set in 2025, the characters are surrounded by logical extensions of today's developing technology. Wearable computing is commonplace. Tagging and ubiquitous networked sensors mean you can look at the landscape with your choice of overlay and detail. People send each other silent messages and Google for information within conversations with participants who may be physically present or might be remote projections. One character's projection is hijacked and becomes the front for three people. The owner of another remote intelligence is unknown. Several continents' top intelligence operatives try to solve a smart biological attack that infects a test population with the willingness to obey orders.