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Re: Archimedes Socrates, ace tech writer, wins another one
Subject:Re: Archimedes Socrates, ace tech writer, wins another one From:Peter <pnewman1 -at- home -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sat, 01 Sep 2001 06:59:36 -0400
Michael West wrote:
>
>http://www.msnbc.com/news/621462.asp
>
> There's an interesting piece at the above URL by veteran journalist
> Howard Fineman. Seems he had some difficulties installing a firewall
> router on his cable connection. Among the problems he cites was
> 'the absurdly complicated instruction manual that came with the first
> firewall router' he brought home.
>
> Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I gather that in the opinion of
> the esteemed members of this list, Fineman is a sniveling, incompetent
> boob who isn't worthy to use high-tech equipment, and the author
> of that firewall router manual, whose name was probably
> Archimedes Socrates or something like that, is a hero because
> he eats lunch with systems engineers and really understands the
> complexities of router technology.
>
> Am I right?
Nope,
1. Fineman is a journalist, humorist. It perfectly adequate firewall can
be downloaded from the Web for personal use a little or no cost. He
probably just needed an article. I'm confident that he took a lot of
journalistic license.
2. I have been requested to analyze a proprietary program and teach the
bookeeping portion of it to the employees of particular company, who are
not trained bookeepers. I can easily describe the manual as containing
hundreds of pages of incomprehensible gibberish. It goes into great
detail describing various functions of the different files, hundreds of
screen shots, but nowhere does it clearly explain how to use the
product. During the course of a lengthy conversation with a technical
support person, he informed me that the entire tech support department
was frustrated, because documentation was so poor. (Opportunity for the
next gig is knocking.) I am having discussions about interest in
permitting the sale of my written instruction sheets to the software
publisher. Yes Michael, poor documentation and design is a perennial
problem. It also puts bread on some of our tables. <vbg>
--
Peter
Mailto:peternew -at- optonline -dot- net
Adapting old programs to fit new machines
usually means adapting new machines to
behave like old ones.
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