For print, a cream or other off-white paper improves readability enormously, with black or very dark blue type.
Bright white glossy paper and Times New Roman is about the worst possible combination you can get. Use a typeface with less difference between thick and thin strokes -- Bookman or Ionic are good examples. If you need a sans-serif typeface, try Gill or Futura.
> On a Linux desktop computer, Firefox 3 beta 3 integration is so good
> that the browser is virtually indistinguishable from a conventional GNOME application.
Bad, not good. This is a very poor design decision.
SGML (old HTML) mandates a DTD. If you have browsers take markup seriously, they will of course need to download the DTD in order to process the document. Browser writers have known this since Nov 1993 but failed to grasp that the sensible thing to do is ship with local copies of all the common variants.
XML doesn't mandate a DTD (or a Schema) but a browser may choose to retrieve one if one is specified. Again, local provision or caching is the answer. In both SGML and XML there is a well-defined catalog resolution mechanism available to handle Formal Public Identifiers as well as URIs.
It is disingenuous for the W3C to complain about this when they have consistently allowed themselves to be [mis-]directed by their larger members whose interests lie elsewhere. The solution is to educate the browser-writers to fix their broken code.
It's not going to be any damn use to anyone while it remains impossible to adjust the step granularity of movement.
Right now I can use my SE phone to control the cursor on my Gutsy lapdog, but each click moves the cursor far too much, and there doesn't appear to be anywhere to adjust this. Until they fix fundamental flaws like this, the rest is just pipe-dreams.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It also depends on the balance between the textual content of what you write (the words) and the form they take. In past ages, writers simply wrote -- the formatting was the job of the publisher, and the author had no control over it (unless they were a Big Name). Now that it is possible for every writer to be their own typesetter, many of them feel that it is therefore their job to spend as much if not more time formatting what they write, than actually writing it.
The first thing your publisher does when they receive your final draft is probably to rip out every scrap of your formatting and put in their own, to conform to their house style. They would actually much rather have your book in plain text, with virtually zero formatting, than have to go through the expensive and time-consuming task of removing all the unnecessary hard spaces, hard linebreaks, hard pagebreaks, etc that authors insert in the fond belief that they are "helping". Smart publishers and skilled authors in technical fields use LaTeX or XML because the writer or editor can indicate what is what without prejudicing the formatting; but there are no interfaces to either system yet that are usable by the average non-specialist writer (see my paper on this topic to the Extreme Markup conference in 2006) although a couple are beginning to get close.
Unless you are writing for self-publication (just about viable now; in which case get professional typographic advice), your best bet is a wordprocessor with a stylesheet that uses some kind of Named Styles and that saves in XML so that the publisher can pick out your text with minimal formatting, and trash all the rest of the junk that wordprocessors typically insert. For a novel, however, which typically has only minimal formatting requirements anyway, it's probably not important what you use.
In fact there are a dozen or so simple interface changes that editor makers could implement that would radically ease the burden on the writer of formal or complex documents, but this would involve a paradigm shift in the interface away from concentrating on the appearance to concentrating on actually writing. Editor makers are reluctant to do this because it would reveal just how much of their interface is actually eye-candy and how little of it is really there to help the writer; and authors are naturally reluctant to forsake the comfort of their favourite wordprocessor, especially if they perceive a new interface as restricting their ability to decorate their text (not actually the case, but a perception nevertheless).
--
Claimer: the usability of interfaces to editing structured documents is my thesis topic.
Not unless they can pull a similar stunt to one that was used in the UK,
where a government minister's decision to do [I forget what exactly] was
challenged, and the judge found that the minister "had misdirected himself"
(wonderful wording).
--
We have the best politicians money can buy, and they've all been bought
Good. If someone is going to cut a hole in me to fix bits that have gone wrong, I want them to be seriously good at it.
Equally if someone is going to build a bridge or drill a tunnel or design a chip or write a program or defend me in court, I want them to know what they are doing. I don't give a gnat's fart what nationality they are, but I do want to know that they have been properly taught and trained. That particularly applies to whoever ends up teaching my kids.
This means that some of the people who get into college, whether for a BS/BA, MS/MA, or a PhD, are going to fail -- either in the degree, or in making their career. They won't make the grades or they won't get the job, and they will have to drop out of the field and do something else. It's unpleasant for the individual (and it's happened to me), but it's called the survival of the fittest, and it's the way life works. OK, so a few slimeballs make it to the top by greasing the right palm or kissing the right ass, but statistically we have to live with that long tail.
So what's with this idea that you have to try and re-engineer the human race between the ages of five and 18 by not allowing failure? Why have the educational psychologists who dreamed up this Utopia, the dickheads of politicians who funded it, and the lameass school boards who implemented it, not been re-settled off-planet? Because parents don't like to be told their kid is thick, basically. Nor does the kid, especially if it's repeated. In the past, this was handled by funnelling the kids into different ability streams, which is now considered sacrilege by the same classes of bottom-feeders as in the preceding argument.
Competition is good: it keeps us alive and kicking, and ultimately the weakest go to the wall. In a normal modern society there are safety-nets to prevent them getting hurt (except in the US of A, where a deeply unpleasant spirit of "let 'em rot" persists). So when foreign students sign up for graduate school, let them compete and let US students compete against them. Time will tell which ones rise to the surface and which ones sink.
If you're serious about doing documentation, use an XML editor with something like the DocBook DTD/Schema, not Word. Word is for shopping lists and letters, not "real" documentation. And yes, Word does actually have a real XML editor, but it's pretty crummy; and no, Save As XML (WordML or OOXML) doesn't count.
The problem is that most XML document editors suck for non-XML-gurus. They can display either plaintext with syntax colorisation (Emacs/psgml/xxml) or pseudo-WYSIWYG, but lack the interface smarts that would make them usable (see my paper to Markup last year on this topic, or wait for the full report next year:-). Both have their advantages and disadvantages but they all require a fairly deep prior knowledge of XML. In your own case this may be fine, but not if you want to hand the editing suite to your non-XML colleagues.
A good documentation system takes some effort to build, but the results in terms of usability, persistence, quality, etc are usually well worth it. In the specific case of quoting code, XML's CDATA section feature lets you embed code verbatim, and one of the possible outputs is to transform the XML to LaTeX using XSLT, and thus enable the use of things like the listings package, which makes pretty-printed code in your PDFs.
He also missed the key difference between OO and Word for professional authors and editors: Word has a style margin (set to 0mm by default so that you don't know it's there, but easily reset). With this, you can easily see what named style is in use for each block element, which makes style-editing long documents a snip. With OO, you have to click on each block element in turn to find out what named style is currently applied, which slows editing by an order of magnitude.
I once asked OO if they intended to introduce any similar at-a-glance display, but they just buried their heads in the sand like Microsoft Marketing, bleating some inanities about how it "wasn't needed", and their interface was "just fine as it is".
Meanwhile those professional authors and editors who do use styles, and who haven't yet switched to XML for lack of a decent non-technical editor, are going to ante up for a copy of Word. Much as I hate to say it, this was one interface method that Microsoft got right and that OO has missed by 180 degrees.
> resistance inside companies from [...] the IT staff.
That's because they know it's a passing fad, and will be superseded by Web 3.0 or whatever, and they don't have the resources to commit to projects that are not going to contribute to persistence and durability.
Of course, if their source data were in a persistent and durable format to start with, it wouldn't matter so much, because engineering a Web 2.0 interface wouldn't create structures that would inhibit subsequent interfaces.
Ireland has shamefully voted Yes with reservations ("qualified approval" recommending some small changes), with the National Standards Authority for Ireland (NSAI) hiding it behind an announcement entitled "NSAI PROVIDES QUALIFIED APPROVAL FOR MAJOR SOFTWARE STANDARD".
Such a spellchecker might be useful and might even be possible, but it would be much more valuable if QA caught spelling mistakes in the user interface (menu labels, error messages, etc). "An error has occured" is far to common.
Rather than throw technology at the cabs, I'd prefer if they made it a requirement that NY taxi drivers spoke English and knew their way around the city, like the London ones do.
Is there nothing in the Constitution or Federal law which mandates electoral privacy, which could be used to declare publication of one or other of the lists illegal (list of voters in order; list of timestamped votes)?
No matter how disappointing, it's not really surprising. Elected representatives aren't famous either for understanding technology or for being independent of commercial pressures.
The real reason most businesses and governments default to Microsoft is because they don't regard their information as worth preserving, if they even think about the question at all.
Let's face it, most business and governmental information is administrative and ephemeral. It's not important, and it doesn't change the face of the earth or the lives of its inhabitants. Some of it does (major reports, changes in policy, strategic investments), but the volume of information there is piffling compared with the volume of here-today-gone-tomorrow crud, and major documents tend to be disseminated and recast in many formats.
If they wish to use Microsoft formats, let them. If they end up getting their asses bitten, so be it: they can't say they weren't warned. If it unwittingly affects employees or populations, maybe eventually people will learn about the need to respect information.
We're only at the very beginning of the information age: in a thousand years -- if we last that long -- things may be different, and people will look back pityingly on the savage ignorance of their forebears. We'll all be long since gone, and only a small amount of our information will have survived. Let's concentrate our efforts on making sure it's the important information that makes it, not the unimportant.
Slashdot Mirror
A Giger counter presumably counts paintings.
WTF is "Sloth removal"?
For print, a cream or other off-white paper improves readability enormously, with black or very dark blue type. Bright white glossy paper and Times New Roman is about the worst possible combination you can get. Use a typeface with less difference between thick and thin strokes -- Bookman or Ionic are good examples. If you need a sans-serif typeface, try Gill or Futura.
> On a Linux desktop computer, Firefox 3 beta 3 integration is so good
> that the browser is virtually indistinguishable from a conventional GNOME application.
Bad, not good. This is a very poor design decision.
SGML (old HTML) mandates a DTD. If you have browsers take markup seriously, they will of course need to download the DTD in order to process the document. Browser writers have known this since Nov 1993 but failed to grasp that the sensible thing to do is ship with local copies of all the common variants.
XML doesn't mandate a DTD (or a Schema) but a browser may choose to retrieve one if one is specified. Again, local provision or caching is the answer. In both SGML and XML there is a well-defined catalog resolution mechanism available to handle Formal Public Identifiers as well as URIs.
It is disingenuous for the W3C to complain about this when they have consistently allowed themselves to be [mis-]directed by their larger members whose interests lie elsewhere. The solution is to educate the browser-writers to fix their broken code.
It's not going to be any damn use to anyone while it remains impossible to adjust the step granularity of movement. Right now I can use my SE phone to control the cursor on my Gutsy lapdog, but each click moves the cursor far too much, and there doesn't appear to be anywhere to adjust this. Until they fix fundamental flaws like this, the rest is just pipe-dreams.
It also depends on the balance between the textual content of what you write (the words) and the form they take. In past ages, writers simply wrote -- the formatting was the job of the publisher, and the author had no control over it (unless they were a Big Name). Now that it is possible for every writer to be their own typesetter, many of them feel that it is therefore their job to spend as much if not more time formatting what they write, than actually writing it.
The first thing your publisher does when they receive your final draft is probably to rip out every scrap of your formatting and put in their own, to conform to their house style. They would actually much rather have your book in plain text, with virtually zero formatting, than have to go through the expensive and time-consuming task of removing all the unnecessary hard spaces, hard linebreaks, hard pagebreaks, etc that authors insert in the fond belief that they are "helping". Smart publishers and skilled authors in technical fields use LaTeX or XML because the writer or editor can indicate what is what without prejudicing the formatting; but there are no interfaces to either system yet that are usable by the average non-specialist writer (see my paper on this topic to the Extreme Markup conference in 2006) although a couple are beginning to get close.
Unless you are writing for self-publication (just about viable now; in which case get professional typographic advice), your best bet is a wordprocessor with a stylesheet that uses some kind of Named Styles and that saves in XML so that the publisher can pick out your text with minimal formatting, and trash all the rest of the junk that wordprocessors typically insert. For a novel, however, which typically has only minimal formatting requirements anyway, it's probably not important what you use.
In fact there are a dozen or so simple interface changes that editor makers could implement that would radically ease the burden on the writer of formal or complex documents, but this would involve a paradigm shift in the interface away from concentrating on the appearance to concentrating on actually writing. Editor makers are reluctant to do this because it would reveal just how much of their interface is actually eye-candy and how little of it is really there to help the writer; and authors are naturally reluctant to forsake the comfort of their favourite wordprocessor, especially if they perceive a new interface as restricting their ability to decorate their text (not actually the case, but a perception nevertheless).
--
Claimer: the usability of interfaces to editing structured documents is my thesis topic.--
We have the best politicians money can buy, and they've all been bought
I'd ban any dog under 14 inches high...
What's needed is more data, not more models.
...none of which will now play due to DRM restrictions :-)
It's not the device which is important: it's the file format. As long as these devices use restricted formats, they're dead in the water.
Competition is extremely fierce.
Good. If someone is going to cut a hole in me to fix bits that have gone wrong, I want them to be seriously good at it.
Equally if someone is going to build a bridge or drill a tunnel or design a chip or write a program or defend me in court, I want them to know what they are doing. I don't give a gnat's fart what nationality they are, but I do want to know that they have been properly taught and trained. That particularly applies to whoever ends up teaching my kids.
This means that some of the people who get into college, whether for a BS/BA, MS/MA, or a PhD, are going to fail -- either in the degree, or in making their career. They won't make the grades or they won't get the job, and they will have to drop out of the field and do something else. It's unpleasant for the individual (and it's happened to me), but it's called the survival of the fittest, and it's the way life works. OK, so a few slimeballs make it to the top by greasing the right palm or kissing the right ass, but statistically we have to live with that long tail.
So what's with this idea that you have to try and re-engineer the human race between the ages of five and 18 by not allowing failure? Why have the educational psychologists who dreamed up this Utopia, the dickheads of politicians who funded it, and the lameass school boards who implemented it, not been re-settled off-planet? Because parents don't like to be told their kid is thick, basically. Nor does the kid, especially if it's repeated. In the past, this was handled by funnelling the kids into different ability streams, which is now considered sacrilege by the same classes of bottom-feeders as in the preceding argument.
Competition is good: it keeps us alive and kicking, and ultimately the weakest go to the wall. In a normal modern society there are safety-nets to prevent them getting hurt (except in the US of A, where a deeply unpleasant spirit of "let 'em rot" persists). So when foreign students sign up for graduate school, let them compete and let US students compete against them. Time will tell which ones rise to the surface and which ones sink.
By the time they've finished four years of University, they have between $60,000.00 and $100,000.00 in debt.
Roughly when did this pattern start? 60s? 70s? 80s? And how long does it take them to pay it off (mean and sd)?
If you're serious about doing documentation, use an XML editor with something like the DocBook DTD/Schema, not Word. Word is for shopping lists and letters, not "real" documentation. And yes, Word does actually have a real XML editor, but it's pretty crummy; and no, Save As XML (WordML or OOXML) doesn't count.
The problem is that most XML document editors suck for non-XML-gurus. They can display either plaintext with syntax colorisation (Emacs/psgml/xxml) or pseudo-WYSIWYG, but lack the interface smarts that would make them usable (see my paper to Markup last year on this topic, or wait for the full report next year :-). Both have their advantages and disadvantages but they all require a fairly deep prior knowledge of XML. In your own case this may be fine, but not if you want to hand the editing suite to your non-XML colleagues.
A good documentation system takes some effort to build, but the results in terms of usability, persistence, quality, etc are usually well worth it. In the specific case of quoting code, XML's CDATA section feature lets you embed code verbatim, and one of the possible outputs is to transform the XML to LaTeX using XSLT, and thus enable the use of things like the listings package, which makes pretty-printed code in your PDFs.
He also missed the key difference between OO and Word for professional authors and editors: Word has a style margin (set to 0mm by default so that you don't know it's there, but easily reset). With this, you can easily see what named style is in use for each block element, which makes style-editing long documents a snip. With OO, you have to click on each block element in turn to find out what named style is currently applied, which slows editing by an order of magnitude.
I once asked OO if they intended to introduce any similar at-a-glance display, but they just buried their heads in the sand like Microsoft Marketing, bleating some inanities about how it "wasn't needed", and their interface was "just fine as it is".
Meanwhile those professional authors and editors who do use styles, and who haven't yet switched to XML for lack of a decent non-technical editor, are going to ante up for a copy of Word. Much as I hate to say it, this was one interface method that Microsoft got right and that OO has missed by 180 degrees.
> resistance inside companies from [...] the IT staff.
That's because they know it's a passing fad, and will be superseded by Web 3.0 or whatever, and they don't have the resources to commit to projects that are not going to contribute to persistence and durability.
Of course, if their source data were in a persistent and durable format to start with, it wouldn't matter so much, because engineering a Web 2.0 interface wouldn't create structures that would inhibit subsequent interfaces.
Ireland has shamefully voted Yes with reservations ("qualified approval" recommending some small changes), with the National Standards Authority for Ireland (NSAI) hiding it behind an announcement entitled "NSAI PROVIDES QUALIFIED APPROVAL FOR MAJOR SOFTWARE STANDARD".
Such a spellchecker might be useful and might even be possible, but it would be much more valuable if QA caught spelling mistakes in the user interface (menu labels, error messages, etc). "An error has occured" is far to common.
Rather than throw technology at the cabs, I'd prefer if they made it a requirement that NY taxi drivers spoke English and knew their way around the city, like the London ones do.
Is there nothing in the Constitution or Federal law which mandates electoral privacy, which could be used to declare publication of one or other of the lists illegal (list of voters in order; list of timestamped votes)?
Offensive Technology
Microsoft Windows?
> will use a buyer's television set as a monitor
BTDT 25 years ago. Good then; non-starter nowadays.
No matter how disappointing, it's not really surprising. Elected representatives aren't famous either for understanding technology or for being independent of commercial pressures.
Let's face it, most business and governmental information is administrative and ephemeral. It's not important, and it doesn't change the face of the earth or the lives of its inhabitants. Some of it does (major reports, changes in policy, strategic investments), but the volume of information there is piffling compared with the volume of here-today-gone-tomorrow crud, and major documents tend to be disseminated and recast in many formats.
If they wish to use Microsoft formats, let them. If they end up getting their asses bitten, so be it: they can't say they weren't warned. If it unwittingly affects employees or populations, maybe eventually people will learn about the need to respect information.
We're only at the very beginning of the information age: in a thousand years -- if we last that long -- things may be different, and people will look back pityingly on the savage ignorance of their forebears. We'll all be long since gone, and only a small amount of our information will have survived. Let's concentrate our efforts on making sure it's the important information that makes it, not the unimportant.