I was particularly interested in learning that he doesn't have a doctorate -- on this side on the pond that would have been required (for better or worse) for his academic position.
Indeed, he had a distinguished early career for someone without a PhD. Still, he was both a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Turing Award recipient several years before he became Prof. Milner and then became the head of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge. (Note to US-based readers: in the UK, the title "professor" is very senior, typically given only to the most distinguished figures in a university department.)
I think CS is one of those fields where sometimes a PhD has limited value, though. If you're intending to work in industry, three or four years of solid experience to start a career is worth way more than three or four years doing theoretical research in a narrow area. Even if you're intending to do research later, the academic community is so tied in with industry in much of the CS field that it's quite possible to move from one to the other, either way around, several times during a career. At that point, other achievements (including research carried out in the industry) could easily count for as much as a PhD anyway.
While I don't have a benchmark, I do think a wider space is a readability advantage.
The thing is, AFAIK there aren't any formal tests that have supported using a double space as an aid to readability. If you look in isolation, it's down to personal preference, and people who are used to typing two spaces are known to favour that style in isolation. However, if you sit a random selection of people down in front of an extended piece of text and ask half to read it typeset one way and half the other, double spacing doesn't result in easier reading.
If anything, the evidence suggests that "real" double-spacing, without kerning reducing the size of the second space, is a disadvantage. One possible explanation is that it creates the same sort of mental interruption that you get when you sound out an unfamiliar word, as opposed to reading by shape as you normally do. And if you're going to kern one of the spaces down anyway, you might as well use the standard style with a good font and save yourself the trouble.:-)
Yes, I believe the comma is normally required, just as you would write one after the words "for example" or "that is". Sometimes it looks slightly crowded, IMHO, but it is grammatically correct.
I believe you're right about italics; these abbreviations used to be italicised by some publishers, but it is no longer the norm.
The only recent variation I recall seeing is adding a thin space after the first period, but even Knuth doesn't seem to bother with that.
It was kind of difficult to read with out paragraph spacing, wasn't it?
Of course, but you removed all of the indications for inter-paragraph separation. If you'd started a new-line after each paragraph and indented, instead of leaving the usual (on-line) blank line between paragraphs, the text would have been perfectly readable.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I have two basic disagreements with your arguments for double spacing.
Firstly, it doesn't work: to look good, we still need kerning anyway.
Secondly, it doesn't generalise: you can't handle the analogous situations with commas, colons, decimal separators or ellipses using only inter-word spaces, or indeed any other spacing techniques used in fine typography (such as inserting a thin space between adjacent closing " and ' characters).
Inter-word spaces are simply too coarse a measure for fine typography. A well-designed font with built-in kerning and including the standard spacing adjustment characters fixes this problem in a way that no number of inter-word space characters ever can. Hence we need a framework for the use of such fonts, and the standard for such a framework is to use a single space.
Sure, you can get ligatures on many systems, including Microsoft Word on Windows today. But can you find me a WP that still spell-checks correctly when ligatures are in use...?
Thanks! Posting nicely presented code is a real PITA usually. I guessed at this meaning for <ECODE> a while back, but when I tried it, it didn't seem to work, so I've just ignored it since.:-(
I'm afraid your arguments here are shooting yourself in the foot.
A cat.. whatever breed, can always see better in the dark.
Are there two sentences there? What does your parser think?
It will think whatever I code it to. In this case, it will probably report that there's a grammatical error. What will yours do? What does it matter, since this is an artificial example and has little to do with modern typography?
Microsoft already changes double-spaces to 1.5 spaces. Look at the image I provided again. The spacing is 12 versus 8 in the double-spacing.
Exactly. Word already does some kerning tricks with double spaces. Why? Because the full width of two spaces looks bad and distracts the reader, that's why!
This is where it's preferable to change the spacing because why would you want to support a typeset that has different punctuation marks such as [ . ! ? : ] for both within the sentence and end of sentence?
Because you don't use a full stop within a sentence, by definition. A full stop should normally rest to the right of the last character in the sentence, clear of that character but visually associated with it. This is typesetting 101, and the same reason that headings should generally have more space above them than below. In contrast, a decimal separator in the number 3.14159 looks better equally spaced between the digits "3" and "1", rather than positioned closer to the 3.
Of course, it would be possible to design a font that anticipated having two full-width spaces after a full stop, and do away with any built-in spacing altogether. The major problem here is that an inter-word space is simply too rough a measure to give aethetically pleasing text in all the relevant contexts. This is why proper kerning, whether in the font description itself or by a WP or typesetting program, is so important. Even if you had no built-in space at all after a full stop, two full inter-word spaces is too wide, hence Word's kerning trick and so on. The standard solution in modern (English) digital typesetting is to use a properly kerned font and identified character symbols in context, and then to use a single inter-word space after all the appropriate punctuation characters.
Your other example, where you used a comma instead of a full stop, also makes this point: in a well-designed font, there would be subtly different spacing characteristics in the comma and full stop characters, giving a slightly larger break after a full stop, to aid scanning.
Think about how much more difficult it would have been for archaeologists to decipher 3000-year-old scripts exhumed from dig sites if the people of the time said, "Let's do away with that extra (whitespace or any other) character that clearly distinguishes complete thoughts."
But we already have a character that does that unambiguously: the full stop. The spacing issue is one of reading ease and scannability, not something for the benefit of someone reading your electronic documents in 3,000 years!
Maybe that's because it's bad design to use pixels in web pages.
OK, I'll make you a deal. You produce a 100% error-free scalable graphic format that can be rendered by every browser my clients use, and I'll give up matching certain page dimensions on a pixel-size basis to my graphics.
For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing.
I typically enclose quotations in both <blockquote> and <i> as seen above. Are the <p> tags strictly necessary there? I always thought a block quote was free-standing, though it's possible that either I've just always been wrong or the behaviour's been changed by the more formal specs for later (X)HTML revisions...
(I don't find the extra typing slows me down much when posting, BTW.)
The CSS Zen Garden is a very impressive demonstration of what stylesheets can do. It's worth bearing in mind that the underlying mark-up is heavily overloaded to allow such a wide range of radically different rendering strategies, though. Several of the major differences (the headings and background images in many of the representations) are also graphics rather than styled. IOWs, you couldn't take a typical web page and remodel it so dramatically using only CSS, without some significant work on the underlying HTML source as well. I'll say again that the site is still a very impressive demonstration, but you have to view it from an informed perspective to appreciate what is and isn't realistic for Any Old Site.
Go ahead and parse a document by sentence while using single-spacing. If you think you can do it using regular expressions, think again. If everyone would adhere to a double-space standard, parsing at this level would be a snap.
Have you ever heard the old saying (usually used as a slight against Python programmers) that "friends don't let friends use whitespace as punctuation"? What are you going to do when your beautifully crafted script that searches for a double space runs into text produced in the other style? Or an occasion where someone just miskeyed and entered only one space? Don't code for idealism, code for reality.
As for the argument that modern word processors use additional padding for punctuation glyphs, "Yeah, right!"
As I pointed out in my post on current word processors, it's unfortunate that the state of the art on typical desktop WP software is nowhere near the standards of serious typesetting/typography. If the few fonts distributed with Windows, MacOS, etc. were set up well (and, in fairness, they are getting better) then WP software could produce the same quality of output.
Moreover, setting up an automatic change from.[sp][sp] to.[sp] on-the-fly isn't exactly difficult, and similar things are already done by programs like Microsoft Word to convert en- and em-dashes, ellipses, etc. You could even have an option to ignore double spaces after punctuation to ensure consistency; if memory serves, some programs already have this, though I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.
As anyone can plainly see, the second partial sentence with a double-space displays a natural appearing break, while the first displays the same size space as any found between words.
As has been noted by many commentators on the subject, you can't look at this in isolation, because which you prefer depends on personal experience and your own accepted norms at that point. If you look at Knuth's Computer Modern fonts in isolation, a lot of people find them overly "light". However, a lot of the same people seem to find them easier to read for several pages of academic paper, and set their own papers in that face rather than something heavier.
To demonstrate the personal preference further, to me the spacing of your first version (with a single space) is clearer. This is probably because the visible spacing isn't the same in the two cases; you should be comparing the space between the right of the "g" and the left of the "N" with the spacing from the right of the "e" to the left of the "t", since these are the whitespace areas that the human eye will perceive when scanning the text.
The big point is that if, instead of taking a specific "benchmark", you just sit people down and watch how fast and accurately they read extended pieces of text in the two versions, AFAIK no-one has ever found that a wider spacing gives a readability advantage. Since typography is all about making things easier to read, there's not much argument for double-spacing there.
There is much more that could be said in defense of double-spacing sentences, but I think enough has been said to justify its use.
Sorry, we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I find none of your three arguments (parsing, state of current WP software, readability) to be particularly compelling. On the contrary, if anything, the latter two argue for single-spacing and the other doesn't care.
I think that two spaces afer a period looks much nicer, even on todays word processors.
It's unfortunate that many of today's word processors, and the fonts on an average PC, haven't yet caught up with the field when it comes to typography. As a result, the "serious typography" conventions for use of characters don't always work, and some tweaking (such as adding a second space character after a full stop) can improve the appearance.
One of these days, someone will produce a WP+typefaces combination that actually does render well on a desktop; we've had smart quotes and automatic ellipses for years, but no-one's yet done character ligatures (fi and such) properly in a WP. Worse, kerning and hyphenation algorithms are usually very poor. Finally, with a few notable exceptions, most fonts supplied with a Windows/MacOS/*nix box aren't very well designed, and don't reach the design standards that a serious typographer would demand in terms of spacing and range of characters.
I have been putting two spaces after periods (full stops) for so many years that I can't count them. I see no difference between typing on a typewriter or a keyboard on this issue.
In most well-designed typefaces, there is a certain amount of built-in space around punctuation glyphs, with the amounts chosen to match the other design characteristics of the characters to maximise reading ease. This gives you, amongst other things, a slightly wider space after a '.' (full stop/period) at the end of a sentence, which in turn gives a natural break while reading without being overly distracting. Note that in most typefaces, two full space characters after a full stop would give an excessively wide space, breaking the reading flow more than necessary, particularly where full justification is in use.
For the same reason, serious typography uses separate characters to represent full stops and (English) decimal place separators, and has another character for ellipses ('...'). If you used the normal full stop character singly as a decimal separator or thrice for ellipses, the spacing would be awkward.
Alas, this sort of detail is the bane of the typographer's life: they spend their days designing typefaces that are easy for you to read, without distracting artifacts, but most people will never appreciate the artistry involved, and only ever notice when they get it wrong.
Obviously, this can't apply when using a monospaced ("typewriter") typeface, because the designer doesn't have the luxury of fine-tuning the widths of characters. This partly explains why reading large blocks of text in a monospaced typeface is difficult for most people, and was also the reasoning behind using two full spaces in that context, although it's unnecessary with good proportionally spaced fonts.
If you'd like more information, you might try Microsoft's excellent Typography web site, or Donald Knuth's works on digital typography if you're really hardcore. There are excellent examples in each case of things that good typography will take into account to make for better readability, and of the distracting effects that can happen if you don't account for them. And as a bonus, once you've read Knuth, you'll know exactly how to typeset "e.g.," using TeX with perfect spacing. =:-)
Poll your friends and family. Ask them if it's legal to use a VCR to record a movie that is on TV for a friend. Ask if it is legal to record a radio program for someone on their cassette recorder. They will (correctly) answer that both are legal.
OK, before we start, let's be clear that you're completely wrong about that, on both counts.
Now ask them about file sharing. [...] I think that most file sharers don't see it being any different than a different way to listen to the radio.
Most people know damn well that it's illegal. They do it because they think they can get away with it. Claiming that 90% of file swappers think it's legal is laughable.
A 15-year-old is perfectly well aware of what he or she is doing when they break the law in such a blatant way.
If that 15-year-old had just stolen a car and gone joy-riding, it wouldn't have been OK because she was 15 and no-one would be arguing that she didn't know what she was doing.
If that 15-year-old had just smashed the window of a shop because she was bored and wanted to do something exciting, it wouldn't have been OK because she was 15.
If that 15-year-old had just beaten up on a smaller kid who irritated her, it wouldn't have been OK because she was 15.
You may disagree with the copyright laws, and you may disagree with the RIAA's tactics, but if you're going to do so, please do it on merit, and not by pretending that a 15-year-old is all sweet and innocent. Any kid smart enough to set up Kazaa or Morpheus is smart enough to know that file swapping in breach of copyright is illegal.
Most people who know what they're talking about believe 'SAME DAY SHIPPING" is not a dream but a reality within a year or two.
I doubt it. There will always be a human element that is susceptible to failure, even if it's only who loads the stuff on the truck.
IMHO, the single biggest problem with many companies today is that they neglect the human element, and their service suffers as a result. How often today do you find that a company gets things wrong and then claims it's all the computer's fault? How often today can you even find a company that will give you personal service, if your needs are subtly different from Joe Consumer? Just in business with IT suppliers, I've seen numerous orders delayed, misleading information about delivery times supplied, wrong parts delivered, missing components, components of wrong spec delivered, incorrect invoices and more, all because of human errors and/or flaws in the IT infrastructure.
Until businesses realise that IT is not a magic want that obviates the need for people skills and good customer service, and that IT systems are fallible themselves, all the new toys will still do as much harm as good in many cases.
I'll go one farther and assert there hasn't been a substantial improvement in word processing technology since WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
I'm sure there's an element of truth in that, though I think perhaps it's an extreme perspective. There have been several developments in word processing since then that are very useful to at least a significant number of people, including improvements to:
graphical print previews
formatting tools and stylesheets
writing aids (spelling checkers, thesauruses,...)
mail merge
importing external data and graphics
electronic forms.
In terms of usability, there have also been improvements: "auto-correct" tools can be very helpful, and while I don't personally like wavy underlines from on-the-fly spell-checking, I know plenty of people who do.
I think the problem today is that the trends are for more buzzwordy "usability" features like clippy and "smart this" and "intellithat", most of which just get in the way when all I want to do is write a letter. Microsoft are, of course, the prime culprit, but it's not as though the alternatives are making huge advances in other directions either. In this sense, while I don't quite agree that nothing's improved substantially since WordPerfect 5.1, I do agree that the developments in recent years haven't exactly been radical improvements in most cases.
But do they? Would a secretary typing up her letters be any less productive using Word 2000, running on Windows 2000, on a PIII/500, than she is using Word 2002, running on Windows XP, on a PIV/1.6GHz?
Sometimes upgrades have definite value; see my earlier comment in this thread about monitors. Other times, they make no real difference at all, and it's just a numbers game, where the prize is... nothing.
Today, as always, most of the serious work is done on older, tried and tested systems. The users of the most recent toys are either the few who genuinely do require state of the art power and/or technology to do their work, or those who like to be on the bleeding edge, because.
Why extra inches *really* matter :-)
on
Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
On the other hand, having a new 20-inch iMac on every desktop doesn't much matter. (Drat.)
I realise that your statement was somewhat in jest, but actually I don't think that's true a lot of the time. If this is what you mean by "new technology" (as opposed to things like "web services", XML,.NET, etc.) then there are clear benefits.
Firstly, users with big or multiple monitors are often measurably more productive when using a computer all day. A colleague at work has just got a second monitor. It's just an old but serviceable 17" box, but it makes him more efficient, and he loves it.
And that, of course, is a second good reason to spend that little extra on the hardware people use all day: it has a morale-boosting effect. Employers that treat their staff well get treated well in return.
And of course, Macs are vastly superior to Windoze boxes anyway. <ducks>:-)
Absolutely agreed. My first reaction was that the answer to this:
Do you feel that corporate IT budgets should be focusing on cutting edge technology to best serve its customer's needs
was this:
No, corporate IT budgets should be focussing on technology to best serve the corporation's needs.
Whether or not it's cutting edge is irrelevant; what matters is whether it does the necessary job. Whether it serves the customer's needs is irrelevant (to the corporation) too: there are lots of in-house needs that can be helped with good use of IT, and serving the customer's needs is certainly good business sense, but in business you do it for that reason, and not as an end in itself.
Also, regarding non-compete clauses, they are perfectly legal, as long as they are for a limited and reasonable time. [...] you can do a "can't work for a competetor for three years" pretty easily.
That depends on who is defined to be a "competitor". In a reasonable case, what you say holds. However, there have been cases where, say, a software development house has objected to an ex-employee working for any other software development house on the grounds of inevitable disclosure blah blah yada yada. Unfortunately for them, it is illegal in most places to deprive someone of their livelihood or to make them a slave unable to work for anyone else. Thus, at least in the cases I've seen cited, the court overturned the contractual restriction in fairly short order.
My point was that in the case we're discussing, the contractual restrictions being implied by certain/. posters (who knows what the contract really says?) would be similarly broad: part of our business once wrote a multimedia app, therefore any multimedia-related app you write while working for us belongs to us, whether or not we had anything to do with you writing it. This is similarly unfair on the employee, and probably similarly unenforceable in a court.
Hey, you're the one who generalised here, so there's no point shouting at me about differences.
This guy's whole argument is that any such term that exists in his contract with Apple does not apply in this case, because the law does not allow it. Ungrounded Lightning's "RTF Law" post challenged the validity of using that law to overrule the contract in this case, on the basis that there is an exception included within that law. I simply posted a counter-argument noting that the overruling law seems to apply by default, and the burden of proof for using the exception seems to lie with Apple.
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Indeed, he had a distinguished early career for someone without a PhD. Still, he was both a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Turing Award recipient several years before he became Prof. Milner and then became the head of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge. (Note to US-based readers: in the UK, the title "professor" is very senior, typically given only to the most distinguished figures in a university department.)
I think CS is one of those fields where sometimes a PhD has limited value, though. If you're intending to work in industry, three or four years of solid experience to start a career is worth way more than three or four years doing theoretical research in a narrow area. Even if you're intending to do research later, the academic community is so tied in with industry in much of the CS field that it's quite possible to move from one to the other, either way around, several times during a career. At that point, other achievements (including research carried out in the industry) could easily count for as much as a PhD anyway.
The thing is, AFAIK there aren't any formal tests that have supported using a double space as an aid to readability. If you look in isolation, it's down to personal preference, and people who are used to typing two spaces are known to favour that style in isolation. However, if you sit a random selection of people down in front of an extended piece of text and ask half to read it typeset one way and half the other, double spacing doesn't result in easier reading.
If anything, the evidence suggests that "real" double-spacing, without kerning reducing the size of the second space, is a disadvantage. One possible explanation is that it creates the same sort of mental interruption that you get when you sound out an unfamiliar word, as opposed to reading by shape as you normally do. And if you're going to kern one of the spaces down anyway, you might as well use the standard style with a good font and save yourself the trouble. :-)
Yes, I believe the comma is normally required, just as you would write one after the words "for example" or "that is". Sometimes it looks slightly crowded, IMHO, but it is grammatically correct.
I believe you're right about italics; these abbreviations used to be italicised by some publishers, but it is no longer the norm.
The only recent variation I recall seeing is adding a thin space after the first period, but even Knuth doesn't seem to bother with that.
I believe the major style guides prefer
There's no inter-word space between the . and e characters.
Of course, but you removed all of the indications for inter-paragraph separation. If you'd started a new-line after each paragraph and indented, instead of leaving the usual (on-line) blank line between paragraphs, the text would have been perfectly readable.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I have two basic disagreements with your arguments for double spacing.
Firstly, it doesn't work: to look good, we still need kerning anyway.
Secondly, it doesn't generalise: you can't handle the analogous situations with commas, colons, decimal separators or ellipses using only inter-word spaces, or indeed any other spacing techniques used in fine typography (such as inserting a thin space between adjacent closing " and ' characters).
Inter-word spaces are simply too coarse a measure for fine typography. A well-designed font with built-in kerning and including the standard spacing adjustment characters fixes this problem in a way that no number of inter-word space characters ever can. Hence we need a framework for the use of such fonts, and the standard for such a framework is to use a single space.
Sure, you can get ligatures on many systems, including Microsoft Word on Windows today. But can you find me a WP that still spell-checks correctly when ligatures are in use...?
Thanks! Posting nicely presented code is a real PITA usually. I guessed at this meaning for <ECODE> a while back, but when I tried it, it didn't seem to work, so I've just ignored it since. :-(
I'm afraid your arguments here are shooting yourself in the foot.
It will think whatever I code it to. In this case, it will probably report that there's a grammatical error. What will yours do? What does it matter, since this is an artificial example and has little to do with modern typography?
Exactly. Word already does some kerning tricks with double spaces. Why? Because the full width of two spaces looks bad and distracts the reader, that's why!
Because you don't use a full stop within a sentence, by definition. A full stop should normally rest to the right of the last character in the sentence, clear of that character but visually associated with it. This is typesetting 101, and the same reason that headings should generally have more space above them than below. In contrast, a decimal separator in the number 3.14159 looks better equally spaced between the digits "3" and "1", rather than positioned closer to the 3.
Of course, it would be possible to design a font that anticipated having two full-width spaces after a full stop, and do away with any built-in spacing altogether. The major problem here is that an inter-word space is simply too rough a measure to give aethetically pleasing text in all the relevant contexts. This is why proper kerning, whether in the font description itself or by a WP or typesetting program, is so important. Even if you had no built-in space at all after a full stop, two full inter-word spaces is too wide, hence Word's kerning trick and so on. The standard solution in modern (English) digital typesetting is to use a properly kerned font and identified character symbols in context, and then to use a single inter-word space after all the appropriate punctuation characters.
Your other example, where you used a comma instead of a full stop, also makes this point: in a well-designed font, there would be subtly different spacing characteristics in the comma and full stop characters, giving a slightly larger break after a full stop, to aid scanning.
But we already have a character that does that unambiguously: the full stop. The spacing issue is one of reading ease and scannability, not something for the benefit of someone reading your electronic documents in 3,000 years!
OK, I'll make you a deal. You produce a 100% error-free scalable graphic format that can be rendered by every browser my clients use, and I'll give up matching certain page dimensions on a pixel-size basis to my graphics.
Sometimes px are still the right answer.
I typically enclose quotations in both <blockquote> and <i> as seen above. Are the <p> tags strictly necessary there? I always thought a block quote was free-standing, though it's possible that either I've just always been wrong or the behaviour's been changed by the more formal specs for later (X)HTML revisions...
(I don't find the extra typing slows me down much when posting, BTW.)
What does <ECODE> do, anyway? I've never managed to work it out...
The CSS Zen Garden is a very impressive demonstration of what stylesheets can do. It's worth bearing in mind that the underlying mark-up is heavily overloaded to allow such a wide range of radically different rendering strategies, though. Several of the major differences (the headings and background images in many of the representations) are also graphics rather than styled. IOWs, you couldn't take a typical web page and remodel it so dramatically using only CSS, without some significant work on the underlying HTML source as well. I'll say again that the site is still a very impressive demonstration, but you have to view it from an informed perspective to appreciate what is and isn't realistic for Any Old Site.
Have you ever heard the old saying (usually used as a slight against Python programmers) that "friends don't let friends use whitespace as punctuation"? What are you going to do when your beautifully crafted script that searches for a double space runs into text produced in the other style? Or an occasion where someone just miskeyed and entered only one space? Don't code for idealism, code for reality.
As I pointed out in my post on current word processors, it's unfortunate that the state of the art on typical desktop WP software is nowhere near the standards of serious typesetting/typography. If the few fonts distributed with Windows, MacOS, etc. were set up well (and, in fairness, they are getting better) then WP software could produce the same quality of output.
Moreover, setting up an automatic change from .[sp][sp] to .[sp] on-the-fly isn't exactly difficult, and similar things are already done by programs like Microsoft Word to convert en- and em-dashes, ellipses, etc. You could even have an option to ignore double spaces after punctuation to ensure consistency; if memory serves, some programs already have this, though I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.
As has been noted by many commentators on the subject, you can't look at this in isolation, because which you prefer depends on personal experience and your own accepted norms at that point. If you look at Knuth's Computer Modern fonts in isolation, a lot of people find them overly "light". However, a lot of the same people seem to find them easier to read for several pages of academic paper, and set their own papers in that face rather than something heavier.
To demonstrate the personal preference further, to me the spacing of your first version (with a single space) is clearer. This is probably because the visible spacing isn't the same in the two cases; you should be comparing the space between the right of the "g" and the left of the "N" with the spacing from the right of the "e" to the left of the "t", since these are the whitespace areas that the human eye will perceive when scanning the text.
The big point is that if, instead of taking a specific "benchmark", you just sit people down and watch how fast and accurately they read extended pieces of text in the two versions, AFAIK no-one has ever found that a wider spacing gives a readability advantage. Since typography is all about making things easier to read, there's not much argument for double-spacing there.
Sorry, we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I find none of your three arguments (parsing, state of current WP software, readability) to be particularly compelling. On the contrary, if anything, the latter two argue for single-spacing and the other doesn't care.
It's unfortunate that many of today's word processors, and the fonts on an average PC, haven't yet caught up with the field when it comes to typography. As a result, the "serious typography" conventions for use of characters don't always work, and some tweaking (such as adding a second space character after a full stop) can improve the appearance.
One of these days, someone will produce a WP+typefaces combination that actually does render well on a desktop; we've had smart quotes and automatic ellipses for years, but no-one's yet done character ligatures (fi and such) properly in a WP. Worse, kerning and hyphenation algorithms are usually very poor. Finally, with a few notable exceptions, most fonts supplied with a Windows/MacOS/*nix box aren't very well designed, and don't reach the design standards that a serious typographer would demand in terms of spacing and range of characters.
In most well-designed typefaces, there is a certain amount of built-in space around punctuation glyphs, with the amounts chosen to match the other design characteristics of the characters to maximise reading ease. This gives you, amongst other things, a slightly wider space after a '.' (full stop/period) at the end of a sentence, which in turn gives a natural break while reading without being overly distracting. Note that in most typefaces, two full space characters after a full stop would give an excessively wide space, breaking the reading flow more than necessary, particularly where full justification is in use.
For the same reason, serious typography uses separate characters to represent full stops and (English) decimal place separators, and has another character for ellipses ('...'). If you used the normal full stop character singly as a decimal separator or thrice for ellipses, the spacing would be awkward.
Alas, this sort of detail is the bane of the typographer's life: they spend their days designing typefaces that are easy for you to read, without distracting artifacts, but most people will never appreciate the artistry involved, and only ever notice when they get it wrong.
Obviously, this can't apply when using a monospaced ("typewriter") typeface, because the designer doesn't have the luxury of fine-tuning the widths of characters. This partly explains why reading large blocks of text in a monospaced typeface is difficult for most people, and was also the reasoning behind using two full spaces in that context, although it's unnecessary with good proportionally spaced fonts.
If you'd like more information, you might try Microsoft's excellent Typography web site, or Donald Knuth's works on digital typography if you're really hardcore. There are excellent examples in each case of things that good typography will take into account to make for better readability, and of the distracting effects that can happen if you don't account for them. And as a bonus, once you've read Knuth, you'll know exactly how to typeset "e.g.," using TeX with perfect spacing. =:-)
OK, before we start, let's be clear that you're completely wrong about that, on both counts.
Most people know damn well that it's illegal. They do it because they think they can get away with it. Claiming that 90% of file swappers think it's legal is laughable.
A 15-year-old is perfectly well aware of what he or she is doing when they break the law in such a blatant way.
If that 15-year-old had just stolen a car and gone joy-riding, it wouldn't have been OK because she was 15 and no-one would be arguing that she didn't know what she was doing.
If that 15-year-old had just smashed the window of a shop because she was bored and wanted to do something exciting, it wouldn't have been OK because she was 15.
If that 15-year-old had just beaten up on a smaller kid who irritated her, it wouldn't have been OK because she was 15.
You may disagree with the copyright laws, and you may disagree with the RIAA's tactics, but if you're going to do so, please do it on merit, and not by pretending that a 15-year-old is all sweet and innocent. Any kid smart enough to set up Kazaa or Morpheus is smart enough to know that file swapping in breach of copyright is illegal.
I doubt it. There will always be a human element that is susceptible to failure, even if it's only who loads the stuff on the truck.
IMHO, the single biggest problem with many companies today is that they neglect the human element, and their service suffers as a result. How often today do you find that a company gets things wrong and then claims it's all the computer's fault? How often today can you even find a company that will give you personal service, if your needs are subtly different from Joe Consumer? Just in business with IT suppliers, I've seen numerous orders delayed, misleading information about delivery times supplied, wrong parts delivered, missing components, components of wrong spec delivered, incorrect invoices and more, all because of human errors and/or flaws in the IT infrastructure.
Until businesses realise that IT is not a magic want that obviates the need for people skills and good customer service, and that IT systems are fallible themselves, all the new toys will still do as much harm as good in many cases.
I find your lack of faith... disturbing.
I'm sure there's an element of truth in that, though I think perhaps it's an extreme perspective. There have been several developments in word processing since then that are very useful to at least a significant number of people, including improvements to:
In terms of usability, there have also been improvements: "auto-correct" tools can be very helpful, and while I don't personally like wavy underlines from on-the-fly spell-checking, I know plenty of people who do.
I think the problem today is that the trends are for more buzzwordy "usability" features like clippy and "smart this" and "intellithat", most of which just get in the way when all I want to do is write a letter. Microsoft are, of course, the prime culprit, but it's not as though the alternatives are making huge advances in other directions either. In this sense, while I don't quite agree that nothing's improved substantially since WordPerfect 5.1, I do agree that the developments in recent years haven't exactly been radical improvements in most cases.
But do they? Would a secretary typing up her letters be any less productive using Word 2000, running on Windows 2000, on a PIII/500, than she is using Word 2002, running on Windows XP, on a PIV/1.6GHz?
Sometimes upgrades have definite value; see my earlier comment in this thread about monitors. Other times, they make no real difference at all, and it's just a numbers game, where the prize is... nothing.
Today, as always, most of the serious work is done on older, tried and tested systems. The users of the most recent toys are either the few who genuinely do require state of the art power and/or technology to do their work, or those who like to be on the bleeding edge, because.
I realise that your statement was somewhat in jest, but actually I don't think that's true a lot of the time. If this is what you mean by "new technology" (as opposed to things like "web services", XML, .NET, etc.) then there are clear benefits.
Firstly, users with big or multiple monitors are often measurably more productive when using a computer all day. A colleague at work has just got a second monitor. It's just an old but serviceable 17" box, but it makes him more efficient, and he loves it.
And that, of course, is a second good reason to spend that little extra on the hardware people use all day: it has a morale-boosting effect. Employers that treat their staff well get treated well in return.
And of course, Macs are vastly superior to Windoze boxes anyway. <ducks> :-)
Absolutely agreed. My first reaction was that the answer to this:
was this:
Whether or not it's cutting edge is irrelevant; what matters is whether it does the necessary job. Whether it serves the customer's needs is irrelevant (to the corporation) too: there are lots of in-house needs that can be helped with good use of IT, and serving the customer's needs is certainly good business sense, but in business you do it for that reason, and not as an end in itself.
That depends on who is defined to be a "competitor". In a reasonable case, what you say holds. However, there have been cases where, say, a software development house has objected to an ex-employee working for any other software development house on the grounds of inevitable disclosure blah blah yada yada. Unfortunately for them, it is illegal in most places to deprive someone of their livelihood or to make them a slave unable to work for anyone else. Thus, at least in the cases I've seen cited, the court overturned the contractual restriction in fairly short order.
My point was that in the case we're discussing, the contractual restrictions being implied by certain /. posters (who knows what the contract really says?) would be similarly broad: part of our business once wrote a multimedia app, therefore any multimedia-related app you write while working for us belongs to us, whether or not we had anything to do with you writing it. This is similarly unfair on the employee, and probably similarly unenforceable in a court.
Hey, you're the one who generalised here, so there's no point shouting at me about differences.
This guy's whole argument is that any such term that exists in his contract with Apple does not apply in this case, because the law does not allow it. Ungrounded Lightning's "RTF Law" post challenged the validity of using that law to overrule the contract in this case, on the basis that there is an exception included within that law. I simply posted a counter-argument noting that the overruling law seems to apply by default, and the burden of proof for using the exception seems to lie with Apple.