Sure, fonts can be scaled just fine. But that's not the only user interface element that needs to be scaled.
Here at work, we have several of those IBM T22[01] displays. 24" diagonal with 3840x2400 resolution. I haven't done the math, but I think that's somewhere around 200 ppi. That's way too fine to do everyday work on.
So you scale up the font size. Great. What about images on web pages? What about the size of your scroll bars? What about toolbar buttons? What about....
You see the dilemma.
Until there is a display technology like Quartz Extreme or what I hear rumor of in Longhorn (or a proposal like this, which could conceivably scale all X11 content), very high ppi displays are going to suffer serious usability problems.
For those too lazy (I almost was) to read the text of the complaint, I'll include the relevant portions here:
Specifically, the Defendants have installed wireless networks in each of the school buildings under its jurisdiction. In so doing, the Defendants have ignored the substantial body of evidence that high frequency electro-magnetic radiation poses substantial and serious health risks, particularly to growing children.
And later:
16. In fact, there is a substantial and growing body of scientific literature studying and outlining the serious health risks that exposure to low intensity, but high radio frequency (RF) radiation poses to human beings, particularly children. For example, responsible scientists have reported that prolonged exposure to low intensity RF radiation can break down DNA strands, cause chromosome aberrations and break down the blood-brain barrier, thereby permitting toxic proteins to invade the brain. And, these occur at radiation levels below what a child would be exposed to by sitting in front of a computer on a wireless network.
17. Other researchers have observed other potential health risks that they believe are traceable to exposure to low intensity RF radiation at levels that are at or below the levels that children would experience by using wireless LANs in a classroom. In fact, at present, the lawyers for the Plaintiffs and their clients have collected more than 400 scientific articles, summaries and references outlining health risks from low intensity RF radiation exposure, all or most of which have been researched and written after 1995. By way of example only, attached as Exhibit 2 is a listing and a summary of thirty-one articles, all of which deal with the potential health risks from prolonged exposure to low intensity RF radiation, i.e., radiation given off by, among other things, wireless LANs.
And finally:
19. Defendants have stated publicly that they have examined the current, prevailing government regulations relating to safety of wireless technology and the system installed in District 97 poses no health risks to humans. This statement is false. The only U.S. standards that relate in any way to radiation exposure were developed by the F.C.C. before 1993 and relate only to thermal radiation. The radiation that Plaintiffs object to here is non-thermal and the federal government has not promulgated any standards relating to this.
Owning copying technology is not an unconditional 'free pass' to replicate or distribute protected work." (emphasis mine)
Owning copying technology certainly is a 'free pass' to replicate protected work. It's only the distribution thereof which is restricted. This has to do with the fair use doctrine. Copyright holders may not prevent me from making any number of backup copies. They don't have to make it easy, though, and can try to prevent me from doing so. But I still retain the right to try and succeed in copying works. It's only when I distribute those copies do I infringe.
Of course there are courses of action a cyclist can take to prevent falling over. I can stay essentially motionless on a bicycle for an arbitrary amount of time.
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s," and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c," "y" and "x"--bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez--tu riplais "ch," "sh," and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
I haven't get a lot of virus mailings in the last couple waves. So, while they might be included in the count (I didn't look), they won't significantly change the results.
I just looked at the dates. Spammers lie on the "Date" header, so I looked at the dates in the "Received" lines. These 11,560 spams were received between 15 Jan 2003 and 15 Sep 2003 for a rough average of 40 spam messages a day.
Consider the statistics differently. The percentages are not percentages of all mail, but percentages of the maximum received in any one day. If the most mail is received on Wednesday, it's at the maximum per day. Mondays are 80% of the maximum per day.
One might argue that having the percentages be in relation to all spam received. But I think it's more useful to have it be on a daily basis, as that's what's being reported for that particular graph.
(What a pain it is to get a graph to reproduce correctly on slashdot!)
While it does show a "bell" with a peak on Wednesday and a dip on Sunday and Monday, it's certainly not significant. 20% less email on the lowest vs. the highest day isn't significant in my mind.
I work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the laboratory that Teller and E. O. Lawrence founded back in the 50s. Teller still came into the lab every few days or so up the point of his death. Periodically, he would give Q/A sessions with summer students and other interested parties.
On July 24 of this year, I attended one of these. I can write a lot about what he had to say, but what has come to the fore of my mind since the news of his death was one question in particular. Someone asked him what he most wanted to be remembered for. He responded that his discovery of the "Jahn-Teller effect" was the work that he was most proud of. It involes crystal symmetry arising from interactions between elecrons and nuclei, and turned out to be very important for material science.
This was work that he did to help unravel certain energy configurations of the benzene molecule. I'm not a chemist, so I only have the vaguest notion of what the Jahn-Teller effect entails. But it involves calculating the electron distribution of a molecule, coupled with its vibrational energy. If I am understanding it correctly, Jahn and Teller first demonstrated that the two energy states can be coupled, allowing for a lower, most stable energy state than if each were considered separately. It's still studied to this day.
Teller got very animated while he was talking about his work on this. I find it a shame that none of the writeups and obituaries I've read have mentioned this work. This is my small contribution.
Well, IMO that's oversimplifying his views somewhat.
When I heard him talk about this a couple months ago, he went into a bit more detail. His point is that scientists are not really in a position to evaluate the situations where their inventions might be used.
He mentioned that, while working on the Manhattan Project, he visited Washington D.C. and spoke with the politicians who were considering dropping the bomb. He mentioned that the politicians knew a hell of a lot more about the motivations of the Japanese, their culture, how the war was going, and how and whether certain tactics might be used.
His whole point is that scientists who are working on developing weapons do not have the information nor the expertise to make decisions about the final application of those weapons.
From a purely scientific point of view, he has a point... I don't agree with him, but he has a point.
(This is all OT, so I'm posting without my Karma bonus - another problem with moderation. I suppose I should move this to my Journal, but hey...)
I don't have a lot of experience with other moderation systems (Kuroshin comes to mind), but I know what features I'd like to see in a moderation system.
I expect that any given thread of conversation will have a bell curve distribution of rated comments, assuming no cap to the top or the bottom. That is, there are very few highly-rated comments, very few low-rated comments, and a vast proportion of comments in the middle, spread out.
I'd like to see a moderation system that reflects this. I'd like to be able to set my threshold to a percentage of the bell curve: show me the top 2% of posts. You could also set it to say: show me the top 20 posts, which would figure out what the threshold percentage should be, based on the posting distribution.
With this model, having a cap at the top and the bottom cuts off the bell curve prematurely, saying, in essence, that all posts that would have been rated above (or below) the cap should all be treated as equal.
Caps do prevent the abuse of moderation, however. No single post can be sent into the stratosphere or down to oblivion. But I thought metamoderation, as currently implemented on slashdot, is seen by the editors as being the solution to invalid moderation.
All summed up, I don't see any reason why the scoring caps on the top and the bottom should remain on Slashdot.
However, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Please educate me.
(I think I will mirror this to my Journal, if only to encourage other responders. Go check it out now.)
It's posts like this that tell me that slashdot needs to have a higher score cap than 5. (Or maybe no upper cap at all.) This post has a lot more value than the other +5 posts attached to this article.
A couple years back, one of my co-workers dropped her pager in the toilet. This would have been fine if she hadn't pressed the flush lever seconds before she dropped it. Whoosh! Her pager was gone!
One of our mutual friends wrote this up after hearing the story:
Oh, btw. My toilet beeped at me last night. I was in the living room when it went off, and I thought/I/ was getting paged. Nope. Mine was set on vibrate mode. Then I noticed the beep had a watery sound to it and I tracked it down to the bathroom. Now I was really confused. Here my toilet was beeping at me. It was a sad and mournful beep. Actually, it was a meep.
I took pity on the toilet and said, "What? Do you want to be cleaned?"
*Meeeep*
"Do you need more water?"
*Meeeep*
"Did I forget to flush?"
*Meeeep*
"Did you spring a leak?"
*Meeeep*
Perplexed, I pondered my predicament while my toilet meeped at me some more. It obviously wanted something. But what? I also tried to think what could have caused this sad, mournful meeping noise. Did I possess a dual-purpose toilet that served both as a normal toilet, and a seismic device for detecting earthquakes? That was a possibility. This/is/ California, and it would make sense to put earthquake warning devices on toilets to give someone enraptured in the latest issue of "Field and Stream" to get moving in a hurry!
*Meeeep*
A careful examination revealed no obvious seismic sensor arrays affixed to the toilet. Besides, I think I might have set off any seismic sensor arrays through more "natural causes" in the past. As far as my toilet was concerned, the "big one" should have hit last week after that meal of burritos and refried beans. But anyway...
*Meeeep*
Now I was getting distressed. My toilet was obviously suffereing some awful affliction, and the meeping sound was becoming weaker and weaker. After a moment's thought, I decided that calling 911 was not an option. I couldn't think of a good way to explain the emergency. I was going to have to do this myself. Out of frustration I exclaimed "Damnit Jim! I'm a computer scientist, not a plumber!"
*Meeeep*
My toilet was definitely sick. I had to rescue it. I needed to take action fast. So, with rubber gloves on, and plunger in hand, I lifted the lid of the bowl and saw......nothing. That was good. Whew. What a relief. With no other obvious course of action, I put the plunger into good use. I felt sorry for my toilet, as I was inflicting discomfort on it on the magnitude of taking a throat culture to test for strep. The toilet held up like a champ though and lo-and-behold, what floated into the toilet bowl? A pager! Would ya believe it? It still worked! I reached in and pulled it out (with rubber gloves on, mind you) and examined it closely. I was pretty impressed that it still was emitting meeps that sounded much more like beeps out of the water. I noticed some numbers on the pager. The numbers were slightly faded, but I could make out the following: ??0-42?-770? ?in: 52?8?
*beep*
Well, that didn't do much good, so I dropped it back into the toilet and flushed. The toilet gurgled happily as the pager returned from whence it came with one last parting, mournful meep. I have to say, that was a pretty bizarre evening. However, one positive is that I have this cool idea for a start-up company. It seems to me that Californians would have a vested interest in investing in toilets with seismic warning devices.:)
The reason I bothered to metion all of this was in case your toilet starts meeping one day. I thought I'd save you the trouble of having to diagnose the problem by giving the advice to simply go straight to the plunger. Chances are, it's a pager.:)
Slashdot Mirror
No, but they did say something along the lines ofWhich, according to the article, is incorrect.
Hm. Ya learn something new every day...
Well, don't you think it would be a little suspicious if, suddenly, the logs showed that every http access went to the same machine, for hours on end?
Aaaahhhhh!!! Make it stop!!!
Sure, fonts can be scaled just fine. But that's not the only user interface element that needs to be scaled.
....
Here at work, we have several of those IBM T22[01] displays. 24" diagonal with 3840x2400 resolution. I haven't done the math, but I think that's somewhere around 200 ppi. That's way too fine to do everyday work on.
So you scale up the font size. Great. What about images on web pages? What about the size of your scroll bars? What about toolbar buttons? What about
You see the dilemma.
Until there is a display technology like Quartz Extreme or what I hear rumor of in Longhorn (or a proposal like this, which could conceivably scale all X11 content), very high ppi displays are going to suffer serious usability problems.
Just because PI is infinitely long, and contains a non repeating set of digits, does not mean that it contains all possible sequences of digits.
Here's a sequence that is also infinitely long and is non-repeating: 1221112222111112222221111111...
It does not contain the Linux source code "number."
And later:
And finally:
Owning copying technology is not an unconditional 'free pass' to replicate or distribute protected work." (emphasis mine)
Owning copying technology certainly is a 'free pass' to replicate protected work. It's only the distribution thereof which is restricted. This has to do with the fair use doctrine. Copyright holders may not prevent me from making any number of backup copies. They don't have to make it easy, though, and can try to prevent me from doing so. But I still retain the right to try and succeed in copying works. It's only when I distribute those copies do I infringe.
Or head to store.apple.com , and look at the "Interests..." section on the left. If you click Government, you'll find a page with a link to Federal Employee Store.
The plural of "virus" is not "vira" or even "virii." It's "viruses."
Boring, I know. Read here for more info.
Of course there are courses of action a cyclist can take to prevent falling over. I can stay essentially motionless on a bicycle for an arbitrary amount of time.
<mode type="smartass">
So can I!
(puts one foot on ground.)
</mode>
Mark Twain's plan for the improvement of spelling
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s," and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c," "y" and "x"--bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez--tu riplais "ch," "sh," and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
:-) Very nice!
I wish all slashdot readers thought (and spelled) as you.
Interesting. I defer to your analysis.
I haven't get a lot of virus mailings in the last couple waves. So, while they might be included in the count (I didn't look), they won't significantly change the results.
I just looked at the dates. Spammers lie on the "Date" header, so I looked at the dates in the "Received" lines. These 11,560 spams were received between 15 Jan 2003 and 15 Sep 2003 for a rough average of 40 spam messages a day.
Consider the statistics differently. The percentages are not percentages of all mail, but percentages of the maximum received in any one day. If the most mail is received on Wednesday, it's at the maximum per day. Mondays are 80% of the maximum per day.
One might argue that having the percentages be in relation to all spam received. But I think it's more useful to have it be on a daily basis, as that's what's being reported for that particular graph.
Thanks - I'm always looking for more idiots to automatically mod down through my "foes" list. Thanks for the addition.
In reference to your comment, my wife and I will have a good laugh about your post.
Analyzing 11,560 spam emails that have come to my inbox over the last few years, here is the distribution over the days of the week: (What a pain it is to get a graph to reproduce correctly on slashdot!)
While it does show a "bell" with a peak on Wednesday and a dip on Sunday and Monday, it's certainly not significant. 20% less email on the lowest vs. the highest day isn't significant in my mind.
(Statistics generated with MailListStat from freshmeat.
I work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the laboratory that Teller and E. O. Lawrence founded back in the 50s. Teller still came into the lab every few days or so up the point of his death. Periodically, he would give Q/A sessions with summer students and other interested parties.
On July 24 of this year, I attended one of these. I can write a lot about what he had to say, but what has come to the fore of my mind since the news of his death was one question in particular. Someone asked him what he most wanted to be remembered for. He responded that his discovery of the "Jahn-Teller effect" was the work that he was most proud of. It involes crystal symmetry arising from interactions between elecrons and nuclei, and turned out to be very important for material science.
This was work that he did to help unravel certain energy configurations of the benzene molecule. I'm not a chemist, so I only have the vaguest notion of what the Jahn-Teller effect entails. But it involves calculating the electron distribution of a molecule, coupled with its vibrational energy. If I am understanding it correctly, Jahn and Teller first demonstrated that the two energy states can be coupled, allowing for a lower, most stable energy state than if each were considered separately. It's still studied to this day.
Teller got very animated while he was talking about his work on this. I find it a shame that none of the writeups and obituaries I've read have mentioned this work. This is my small contribution.
Well, IMO that's oversimplifying his views somewhat.
When I heard him talk about this a couple months ago, he went into a bit more detail. His point is that scientists are not really in a position to evaluate the situations where their inventions might be used.
He mentioned that, while working on the Manhattan Project, he visited Washington D.C. and spoke with the politicians who were considering dropping the bomb. He mentioned that the politicians knew a hell of a lot more about the motivations of the Japanese, their culture, how the war was going, and how and whether certain tactics might be used.
His whole point is that scientists who are working on developing weapons do not have the information nor the expertise to make decisions about the final application of those weapons.
From a purely scientific point of view, he has a point... I don't agree with him, but he has a point.
(This is all OT, so I'm posting without my Karma bonus - another problem with moderation. I suppose I should move this to my Journal, but hey...)
I don't have a lot of experience with other moderation systems (Kuroshin comes to mind), but I know what features I'd like to see in a moderation system.
I expect that any given thread of conversation will have a bell curve distribution of rated comments, assuming no cap to the top or the bottom. That is, there are very few highly-rated comments, very few low-rated comments, and a vast proportion of comments in the middle, spread out.
I'd like to see a moderation system that reflects this. I'd like to be able to set my threshold to a percentage of the bell curve: show me the top 2% of posts. You could also set it to say: show me the top 20 posts, which would figure out what the threshold percentage should be, based on the posting distribution.
With this model, having a cap at the top and the bottom cuts off the bell curve prematurely, saying, in essence, that all posts that would have been rated above (or below) the cap should all be treated as equal.
Caps do prevent the abuse of moderation, however. No single post can be sent into the stratosphere or down to oblivion. But I thought metamoderation, as currently implemented on slashdot, is seen by the editors as being the solution to invalid moderation.
All summed up, I don't see any reason why the scoring caps on the top and the bottom should remain on Slashdot.
However, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Please educate me.
(I think I will mirror this to my Journal, if only to encourage other responders. Go check it out now.)
It's posts like this that tell me that slashdot needs to have a higher score cap than 5. (Or maybe no upper cap at all.) This post has a lot more value than the other +5 posts attached to this article.
One of our mutual friends wrote this up after hearing the story:
No one has told me why the timeline is so short for getting this thing up and running...
I hear they are rushing to try to get included in this year's Top 500 Supercomputers list.
My favorite involves a comparison between "night" and "1."