Slashdot Mirror

I just looked through that page, a little bit, and while it is well written, they haven't really adapted to the use of the web. Their example pages (well, images of them) are labeled backwards in my opinion. The large rectangular blocks of text with no variation are very hard to read through. The pages with nice breaks and appropriate headers where necessary are much easier to use to find the information I want.

They've also failed to compensate for the fact that most people will sit further from their monitor than they will hold a book or paper in front of their face. I figure I'm sitting twice as far from this 19" monitor in front of me than I would hold a book or newspaper here. That shows up in the amount of text I can comfortably read on a line. My 21" monitor at home is even farther away.

Strangely, on the Typography 1 page they make many of the arguments I am making here, but in terms of lower case and uppper case text. Overall patterns are important for keeping track of where you are in the page. I find it hard to read solid blocks of text without paying extra attention to where I am in the block of text. A more varied paragraph doesn't cause me those problems.

Why does everyone designing these so-called portal sites insist on setting all their table widths to 600 pixels?

Because it is easier to read.

In conventional print design anything from 30-70 characters per line is considered ideal (the ideal length of the line depends on the point size of the characters).

When a designer limits the size of tables, it makes it much easer for the user (especially users with high resolution screens) to keep their place while reading and while moving their eyes from the end of one line back to the beginning of the next. (less eye movement = quicker/easier reading)

Everyone who thinks that they are a designer should read "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst at least 2 times, or at the very least read this page for Yale's web style manual:
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/pages/typogra phy2.html

We even worked on some transistors with I-V (that's current-voltage to you non EE types) curves which had two or three plateaus on them. Theoretically, this means that you could have a transistor which has three states instead of two (0, 1, and 2!)

The biggest problems in making these chips commercially viable -- oh, and by the way, we had Motorola fabricate the devices to our specifications -- were that most of them only exhibited their nifty behavior at low temperature (liquid nitrogen temps, or, if you were extremely unlucky, liquid helium temps of ~4 Kelvin) and that if you wanted to make an array of these things, you had to find a way of accessing all of them. Now, according to scientists like Prof. Reed, the temperature problem may be tractable through the use of high-temperature superconductive materials, but as for interconnect...

Traditional methods of accessing rows of transistors in memory cells don't work. You can't simply select a row and a column and expect the answer to trickle down to your buffers when the stored charge is a single electron. The same is probably true of a single molecule. We experimented with laser scanning & optical techniques, traditional silicon metal layers, and other even more bizarre means -- in the end, we had to use silicon interconnect, which meant that the wires which connected to these devices were thousands of times larger than the devices itself.

I hate to be a party-pooper, but until some sort of discovery occurs in the interconnect field, it won't matter if we can represent a binary state with a single lepton!

If you're a Haskell fan, check out this Mindstorms page .