Technical documentation is hard, really hard. It's easier to explain what not to do.
Some suggestions:
- It's no prose, so don't try to be arty.
- Keep it short!
- When in doubt, drop it.
- Use simple words. Not everyone is fluent in English.
- Any sentence with more then two lines is an anomaly.
- Be consistent. Avoid surprises.
- Usecases and Examples are important and may shorten explanations.
- Include common mistakes and their workarounds.
- You have to refactor often (>>20x).
- Use a versioning system like git or mercurial.
- Avoid abbreviations and introduce them at first occurence e.g:
concurrent versioning system (CVS)
- A colum shouldn't exceed 9-12 words (~60 chars) to improve readability.
- Keep your rules in a file (e.g: doc.playbook) and check them
- Let others proof read, or yet better find an editor.
- Try to be gender agnostic. Why? cautionary tale:
https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015
That example just shows, how easy it is to be scamed. No matter how smart and how much of an expert you are, you still may be vulnerable from an totally unsuspected angle. Don't ridicule someone who "deserved" it because of his "stupidity" or "naivety", because you may be the next laughing-stock.
I beg to differ! As the NSA-debacle shows, it takes my right away to a) ensure there's no backdoor, b) the software i get does exactly what was promised and c) in a way and quality as advertised.
Furthermore take a look at the "USL v. BSDi" lawsuit, where BSD was sued by AT&T for infringing copyright-laws against their own(BSD) source-code, which was incorporated into USL(AT&T's) UNIX-variants!
"Freedom" comes with responsibility, if you want carefree "arbitrariness", then say so, but please don't mix them together, they are fundamentally different!
If your freedom/rights takes the freedom/rights of others away, what may you argue about, if your freedom/rights is also taken away?
Because something might be inconvenient to you, it doesn't make it automatically wrong. There's a distinct line between free as in freedom and free as in arbitrariness. The former comes with responsibilities, the later without.
Interesting! The last time i looked, almost 100% of all compiled software of the linux-franchise was gcc-compiled, even a large portion of iOS and android software is gcc-compiled, and it doesn't stop there!
Furthermore which compiler-suite served as so long so good in the "dark" pre-LLVM ages?
Sadly journalism these days means more often to copy press-releases and exaggerate dumb statements, then to dive into a subject and getting to the bottom of it.
In this case 1% of 7-8 billion are roughly ~ 70-80 million people, which holds 50% of global wealth is really not that hard to believe, then the reported 85/7*10^9 ~ 1/10^8 = 0.000001%!
But on a second look, i think it's more an error of the choosen title of the OP. I couldn't find his/hers statement in the BBW-article.
"Hell, No!, Never! ... or so, were my first thoughts, because aren't we brainwashed into thinking that's the way how the market works?
But on second thought: maybe he isn't so of the tangent. How many games did i buy, but never played, even never touched, just they were on sale? And how many games, which i really, really wanted to try did i never buy, because i thought : "Aww i could buy three for the price of this one! So let's wait for the inevitable sales-offer.", just to loose interest, because i was occupied otherwise and a half year later already new games were flooding the market.
So it boils down to price, time and satisfaction! Maybe this is another triangle where you can move just on the axis, and never have all together.
The most limiting factor is time. You can only play one game at a time and if it produces satisfaction you probably would be willing to pay a higher price.
I guess, the "another backdoor" proposal will go very well in Europe, where most citizens are just static about americas view on privacy and respect for constitutional rights. Way to go, maybe the W3C will finally get Europe and the rest of the "free" world to create their own web!
Some suggestions: