I never heard the Great Man giving credit to anyone else but himself. You hear all the time about how the iPod's success is because Steve Jobs himself said how loud the volume button should go, but you never hear who was actually the guy who designed the bloody thing. Well, not from Apple. It's not hard to dig up the names, but I'd like just once to hear Apple just come out and say "we'd like to thank these guys for making it possible." Just watch a Keynote speech.
Steve Jobs trots out a half-dozen people, remarks how this person worked on this and that person lead this great team who did that, and generally gives credit to lots of other people, including people who aren't even directly part of Apple. He's done this at EVERY keynote speech pretty much since he's been giving them.
Honestly Steve Jobs hasn't been one to toot his own horn. Sure there isn't a lack of OTHER people doing it but you'd be hard-pressed to find many places where he says that he was the only one who did X, Y, and Z for Apple.
If you want to see some good history about all the old Macintosh crew, go take a look at Folklore.org. There's a lot there about Steve Jobs for sure, but also a lot about all the other people who worked on the first Macintoshes. Steve Jobs is hardly the only one who is recognized for his work at Apple.
Yeah I beta'd AoC too. It was ok but definitely not better than WoW. In fact, some aspects are much worse, such as the UI. The UI is terrible, non-intuitive and you can't do a lot of things you'd take for granted, such as setting UI element transparency. This wouldn't be so bad if there was some allowance for UI modifications but nope, there is no API available for it and mods are not allowed. This sets it far below WoW in that if there is any deficiency with the WoW UI then you can be sure someone will program a mod to work around it.
AoC will get some people to try it but I'm betting that it doesn't last. People will get over the novelty and will leave unless they loosen up the game restrictions quickly.
You've probably only had them twice because some video problems only show up when the hardware is stressed in certain ways. Maybe the video circuitry got a bit hotter than it could tolerate, maybe there was an unusual load on the video memory. One thing is pretty certain, glitches like the one in your screenshot are usually hardware problems, not software, and hardware problems usually get worse, not better, with time.
Here you have a screenshot from my MBP 16:25 today, I had my browser running and had run Google Earth, quit it and I got this kind of graphics glitches, the stuff to the right is spotlight. The machine was very slow as soon as there was a line switch in a text area and in the end it halted completely so I cold rebooted. http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8727/bild82ch6.png I'm fairly certain that this is not a software problem. It looks like you have a problem with the video hardware on your computer which is causing slowdowns, crashes, and video corruption. I would bring this system in for repair as soon as possible because this problem might cause problems with other components in your machine, as well as data corruption and loss.
Overall I've found Mac OS X to be a fairly stable operating system and the Mac hardware to be pretty solid but things do go wrong. This is almost definitely one of those cases. Get your computer repaired and then take another look at your Mac and see if it performs better.
Never mind the Apple fanboys which says that a G3 are still future proof.... Or how macs don't crash (mine crashed today for instance, I can somewhat understand it since Safari usually pick up like 800 MB of ram and I only have 2GB and I had run Google Earth aswell. And if the machine runs out of ram you get issues. The Mac G3s are as "future proof" a any older processor can get. Apple has continued with every release of Mac OS X to support the PowerPC processors and they will probably continue to do so for at least a while longer. Even when Apple stops producing Mac OS X for PowerPC you can still keep on running whatever version of Mac OS X you currently have on it. Yes, eventually people will stop producing PowerPC binaries which will run on the G3 but by then that machine will be so outdated you're probably better off putting BSD or Linux on it and using it as a file server or router.
I don't know of anyone beyond the most clueless of idiots who think that Macs don't crash. Of course they can crash, every computer has a chance to crash. The thing is that Macs tend to crash less often than certain other computer platforms because Mac OS X and Apple hardware are designed to integrate tightly and there are less variables in their construction. Apple is also not immune to producing the occasional lemon but in experience they tend to build solid machines that have very few problems.
Mac OS X is VERY tolerant of situations where you are running low on RAM, once it has enough RAM to run itself. Generally once you are above about 512 MB of RAM you have a decent amount to run Mac OS X. Yes, it will run better with more RAM than that but for the casual user anything from 512 MB to 1 GB is pretty decent.
I don't know if you understand how modern operating systems work but generally they will load TONS into memory, even if they don't really need it. Just because Safari is "using" 800 MB of RAM doesn't mean that it's really using that much. A lot of that is caches, backing stores, associated libraries, and other support data that the operating system loads just in case it's needed. That sort of stuff can be overwritten in a jiffy if another application needs the memory. Not only that but a lot of that memory is likely to be libraries that are common to other running applications so 3 or 4 running applications might all be using the same 500 MB chunk of RAM.
Actually, a 2x4 is the right width to place in a wall that is 4" thick. There are other layers that go on top, sheetrock for example, so that the studs have to be somewhat smaller. It's strange that a bunch of lumber companies don't use the same reasoning that you do: Arnold Lumber Advantage Lumber Howe Lumber
Just to name a few.
Yes, by putting sheetrock on the lumber you bulk the size of the wall out a bit but the true reason for lumber being a bit less than it's nominal size is how it is finished.
I was under the impression that 2x4s are, in fact, actually 2in by 4in when cut wet, but shrink to the standard size when seasoned. Partially true. A 2x4 is rough cut to 2" by 4", then is dried (seasoned) and planed (smoothed), reducing its dimensions to approximately 1.5" by 3.5". The shrinkage due to drying and the material removal due to planing is what reduces the boards to their current commonly-found dimensions.
Sure, now all you have to do is work around the fact that the human body isn't aerodynamic, that there's no space for fuel, and make a rocket engine fast enough to outrace a fighter jet, yet fit into a shoe. Sounds like a SMOP to me. Actually it's not that improbable, just expensive. The human body is actually decently aerodynamic if the air is traveling from the head down to the feet. Yes, the human form won't function as a lifting body on its own but that's easily solved by adding some strategic fins and surfaces to a suit, perhaps ones that can be extended and collapsed at will.
Honestly though, you don't need to have lifting surfaces to fly, all you need is properly directed thrust. That takes energy and a lot of it. What you need is some sort of fuel that has a high thrust to mass ratio, like antimatter. It's something that we can and do make today and even though we don't make a lot of it right now we could easily ramp up production. The true problem is the cost of producing it but it's not inconceivable that the cost will eventually drop as we develop new ways to produce it.
Once you have enough antimatter the rest of the problem comes down to simple engineering and a computer capable enough to calculate all of the thrust vectors needed to perform stable flight. Can we do it today? Probably not but it's not that far-fetched that we can't imagine it being possible sometime soon.
You're assuming a constant diagonal measurement, which is a very narrow way of looking at things. Instead, you could assume a constant vertical height, in which case making it a wider aspect ratio only adds width, and takes not height away. I'm assuming a constant diagonal measurement because laptop manufacturers are generally replacing regular displays with the same diagonal measurement widescreen displays. In that case the manufacturer is trading off vertical height for screen width. I agree that if they kept the height constant and just increased the width then there would be less of a concern but this generally doesn't happen.
Now, some people here are claiming that widescreen aspect ratios are bad because they "take away" vertical space. I think it's worth noting that it all depends on how you look at it-- to make the display wider, do you take away vertical space or do you add horizontal space. The very nature of widescreen takes away vertical space.
If you have two screens with the same diagonal length, say 19", but one is 4:3 and the other is 16:9 then the vertical height of the 4:3 window is 11.4" and the vertical height of the 16:9 window is 9.3". Not only that but using diagonal length as the main measure of a monitor is deceptive because the area of the 4:3 window is 173.3 square inches and the area of the 16:9 window is 154.8 square inches, a loss of approximately 11% viewing area.
So by going from 4:3 to 16:9 you do gain some extra width but you lose total viewing area in addition to losing vertical space. That is the crux of the problem, when manufacturers move to widescreen they are reporting the same diagonal dimension but are actually giving you less for your money. They tout this as a feature since you can now view movies with less of a black border but overall you lose functionality.
That's the job of your window manager: Ctrl+N to open a new window, then tell your WM to Tile the frontmost two windows. If your WM cannot do this, consider trying a new WM;-) Which still doesn't properly duplicate multiple columns since I'll just have two duplicate windows. In order to duplicate columns one window would have to be set to show the content the other window doesn't. Not to mention the screen space wasted on two sets of window decorations rather than a thin gutter that proper columns would have. Multiple windows is a poor substitute for true columned text.
You still scroll within one window while the second window displays a different document. This is not about showing two different documents at once, this is about showing one document in the best manner possible. For text viewing, one wide column is not as effective as having several narrower columns (about 10 words wide is optimal if I remember correctly). You can size the window narrower but then you have to scroll which is much less optimal than wrapping the text to a new column due to the fact that during scrolling you need to re-find your place and it is harder to maintain the context of what you are reading - especially if you need to go back and forth in the text.
turn your LCD panel 90 degrees and tell your OS how you turned it. Yes, that works on desktops but it's kind of a pain on laptops which is what the whole article is about!:)
Oh and it just occurred to me that Slashdot is a fantastic example of how a narrower window doesn't help much. I like to use the nested view (WITHOUT the new discussion system, thank you!) and if I made my window narrower in order to shorten the comments to a more readable width I'd end up with some of the deeper nested comments being much smaller in width than the shallowly nested comments.
What would be nice is if I could make my window as wide as I want but have the text within each comment turned into columns of a fixed width and height. This would greatly enhance the readability of each comment. Alas, I'm sure that sort of layout would be much more complicated to handle and probably won't happen anytime soon, if ever.
Would I be right in thinking that you tend to work with maximised windows? No, I tend to make the windows only as wide as I have to make them in order to show the full horizontal width of the layout. The problem is that most websites only go so narrow before their design elements cause the horizontal scroll bar to appear. That is also combined with the problem that making the window narrow tends to make many elements on a page narrower, not just the one column I want narrower.
I could muck around with custom CSS stylesheets but they don't support multiple columns (see an earlier post of mine here) and it can be a pain to put together custom stylesheets that are general enough to handle most websites or create a slew of specific ones for certain websites
In the end a lot of websites ignore the tons of research that has been done on human cognitive psychology and typography. This paper is a good example of some of the concepts but there is a lot more research on the field. I don't expect many of the amateur websites to keep up with the latest research but it'd be nice if some of the major players in web publishing took a look at what has been discovered.
Newspapers came up with a solution to the mess of long lines years ago: they added multiple columns. Is it that hard to unmaximize a web browser, resize it to half the screen width, and put another page into a second window? There are several reasons why this is a poor substitute for a taller window. First of all this is extra work. Every text page that you open you would need to open, re-size (if your default window width was not narrow to begin with), open a second window, re-size, position it, and focus the window on at the appropriate place in the text for the next column. With a tall, narrow screen you would have naturally narrow windows and more vertical lines, thus less need for multiple columns.
Secondly columns themselves present problems. The jump from the bottom of one column to the top of the next comes with a break in your reading that may not correspond with a natural break in the flow of the text. A taller window has less column breaks which interrupts the flow of reading less.
It would be nice if there was support for multiple columns in CSS, that way you could have a custom stylesheet to apply to text on webpages in order to make it more readable. Unfortunately there are only a working draft and a few experimental modules floating around now.
Sure there are workarounds to widescreen monitors and reading text but the fact remains that there are a good deal of people who would prefer to have their displays oriented vertically rather than horizontally, for whatever reason. It's just too bad that the preponderance of widescreen displays currently out there interferes with that desire.
Yes this matters. It is well-known throughout the publishing world that wide columns of text are harder to read than narrow columns. Our eyes are more suited to reading narrow columns of text than wide ones and having to jump from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen to read the next column is not optimal. The current generation of widescreen displays and the way text is laid-out onscreen causes you to lose track of which line you are reading and it also causes you to slow down in order to better keep track of your vertical position.
A display with a higher vertical to horizontal ratio makes it easier to read and edit text on. Text columns are naturally narrower so your eyes have less problems tracking horizontally and the columns are also higher which means that there is less scrolling. It also means that menu bars at the top or bottom of the screen or window take up a smaller percent of the vertical presentation, which uses the display more effectively.
Widescreen is better suited to video and pictures than it is for text. It would be nice to have displays optimized for text so that people who work with text can do so more effectively. One thing I try to do to counteract a widescreen is to place as many elements as I can (toolbars, etc.) in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one. By maximizing my vertical space and using the horizontal space to stack bars side-by-side I do what I can to create a narrow, high space for text. It would be much better to have a screen that was oriented this way in the first place but if you can't find one...
The main difference between a ten-year-old's idea and a solid scientific theory is very simple: math.
Anyone can come up with all sorts of "it sounds logical" ideas but until you can back that idea with solid theory and mathematics all you have is wild conjecture. This idea of "twin" universes is based on a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity which has made several important observations about the universe and has a very solid mathematical backing.
After all I can come up with the theory that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure and back it with some compelling reasoning but that doesn't mean I've accomplished anything noteworthy...
Recently it's been British. Well, you've got Lily Allen (Capitol), Kate Nash (Interscope), Amy Winehouse (Republic), and then the one American KT Tunstall (Virgin). I'm not sure how KT Tunstall qualifies as being American since she is from Scotland. She did spend a few years of her life going to school in the United States, but I'd hardly say that qualifiers her as "American". Virgin Records is a British company, so I can't see the connection that way either.
The problem is that for many of these new artists, they're also the predominant songwriters (Allen, Nash and Winehouse, I know, Tunstall I'm unsure) As far as I know KT Tunstall writes at least a good portion of her own music. She has a lot of stuff which she wrote way before a major label was interested in her. That might have changed on her most recent album but I don't think it has, the new album has a very similar style to her older stuff and it sounds like she's writing it.
Oh, I forgot to add that you are missing the opening html tag. Most browsers will work around the bug but you probably should still put it in there, especially since you have the closing html tag in there.
Juan|Corral had this to say:
There's also a Chappelle's Show easter egg if you click the Hypnotoad's collar tag, but you need to have pop-ups enabled. The easter egg is cool and all but I'm curious why you didn't just do the hypnotoad as an animated image or something similar? It seems like a bit of overkill to be using Flash for something so simple. You could have even used an image map in order to still have your Easter egg.
If it was done like this then your page would be a lot more lightweight and portable, working on just about every browser configuration out there, including the iPhone/iTouch.
... THE HYPNOTOAD.... ALL HAIL... THE HYPNOTOAD. I think the funniest part of that web page is the source code. Not only does it have an ASCII-art hypnotoad comment but it also uses the special iPhone icon setting.
What's funny about that last part? Well, pretty much all the content on the web page is in a Flash movie and the iPhone can't view it because the iPhone doesn't support Flash!
Kinda ironic that your iPhone bookmark will have a pretty icon for content it can't view...
Since WebKit is included as part of the operating system, applications should not embed their own versions of it, unless they have a very good reason to. If your app embeds an older version of WebKit, then your app won't be able to take advantage of the security, stability, and performance improvements in the next version of WebKit, unless you put together a new version of your app that embeds the new version of WebKit and all your users download the update from you. True enough. That being said there are a couple of applications out there that do embed their own versions of WebKit. OmniWeb is one of them, they embed their own versions of WebCore and JavaCore because they had some customized bits that they needed for their own use. I just figured I'd cover all the bases by mentioning there might be multiple versions of WebKit somewhere on your computer.
The fact remains that although WebKit is used by software on your system, it probably won't kill your system to remove it. The only major thing that will happen is some applications will complain or won't work at all. This is a far different situation than with Windows where if you removed the Internet Explorer libraries major parts of the system would stop working altogether.
What I'm reading is this. WebKit team, an Apple team, makes use of info available only to Apple people, and not to 3rd party development houses.
Apple not being a convicted monopoly, this may be an acceptable practice, but technically, this is exactly the same thing (actually, one of many things) people accuse MS of, regardless of the underlying motive, and to argue that this is somehow different is dishonest. You seem to be repeating yourself and you got it wrong again.
The WebKit team has created a framework which is free and open for anyone to use. In order to make this framework as compatable as possible they used some undocumented methods in Quartz, the drawing layer of Mac OS X. Yes, they are also Apple developers and they have intimate knowledge of the internals of Mac OS X. This is why they feel reasonably safe in doing something as unsafe as using undocumented methods for means which they were never intended. They didn't do it because it provided some sort of advantage to WebKit over other applications, they did it because it kept WebKit from breaking some applications that embedded WebKit.
The Mac OS X developers also have a documented, public way of doing this very same thing and the Firefox developers used it. It worked well and everyone is happy now. In fact when you compare the public way of solving the problem and the behind-the-scenes way of doing it you find that the behind-the-scenes way is much more difficult to work with and more likely to have problems down the road.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a history of developing two different layers of its API, both of which are equally safe. The private API is only shared with internal Microsoft Developers and is much quicker/easier/more efficient than the public API. This is what has gotten Microsoft in hot water before.
It's a far cry to say that Microsoft's dual API is at all comparable to Apple's public API and the undocumented methods being used here. If Apple was truly doing the same thing as Microsoft then the undocumented methods would do the job more easily and efficiently than the public API. They don't, they are just a hack that only an internal developer could come up with to make sure OTHER people's applications keep working well. If you look at the developer's (David Hyatt's) comments he even says that they don't use this hack in Safari, Apple's own web browser. It's meant so that other people's browsers can work well.
I'd say the dishonest thing here is your feigned innocence over your comments. "I'm not trying to read too much into it." - yes you are! All of this was explained to you by several people in several different ways and yet you still came back to try to further muddy the waters. Just admit that either you have no clue about the whole situation or that you do understand the difference between Microsoft's and Apple's behaviors and you are just trying to stir up trouble.
So WebKit is tightly integrated with the underlying OS service like Internet Explorer is alleged to be with Windows. So, if you use WebKit, you benefit from the private, "better" linkage to the OS service, but if you don't, your performance (or perhaps other qualities) will suffer. Am I getting that right? No, you have it wrong.
Webkit is a framework that is open for anyone to take and put into their own application. Safari and some components of Mac OS use WebKit for their own rendering of html. There is no private, "better" linkage to WebKit, there is just a hack within the WebKit framework that is there so that other applications using WebKit will not have problems with it. The Apple developers knew the internals of the operating system well enough to do this semi-safely but even they aren't happy with themselves doing it because it can still cause problems.
There is also a public, safer, more documented way of doing the same thing for applications that don't use WebKit. This public method is not perfect either but it is much safer. The Apple developers are keeping parts of the operating system under wraps which could cause major problems if you don't know EXACTLY what the internals are doing. This is a very common thing for responsible developers to do, you don't want to expose API that could fail catastrophically if something isn't set up just exactly correctly.
In short, nothing to see here, the public API is the safest bet to use. If you choose to use undocumented methods for a bit more speed then you risk bringing down your application in a hard and messy way. The WebKit developers weighed that in their own minds and decided that the risks were worth it, since they had a hand in developing the undocumented methods and could account for the quirks in a semi-safe manner.
In the case of Internet Explorer, Microsoft had a separate set of completely safe API that were optimized versions of methods other developers got to use. If you were an internal Microsoft developer you could do more with the internal API than anyone could with the external API. This was done deliberately so that Microsoft products could get preferential treatment on the Windows operating system. Microsoft also made it so that you couldn't easily use Windows without having some part of Internet Explorer as part of the system. Under Mac OS X you can remove every mention of WebKit and all that will happen is a couple of programs won't work until you re-install them with their embedded versions of WebKit.
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Steve Jobs trots out a half-dozen people, remarks how this person worked on this and that person lead this great team who did that, and generally gives credit to lots of other people, including people who aren't even directly part of Apple. He's done this at EVERY keynote speech pretty much since he's been giving them.
Honestly Steve Jobs hasn't been one to toot his own horn. Sure there isn't a lack of OTHER people doing it but you'd be hard-pressed to find many places where he says that he was the only one who did X, Y, and Z for Apple.
If you want to see some good history about all the old Macintosh crew, go take a look at Folklore.org. There's a lot there about Steve Jobs for sure, but also a lot about all the other people who worked on the first Macintoshes. Steve Jobs is hardly the only one who is recognized for his work at Apple.
Yeah I beta'd AoC too. It was ok but definitely not better than WoW. In fact, some aspects are much worse, such as the UI. The UI is terrible, non-intuitive and you can't do a lot of things you'd take for granted, such as setting UI element transparency. This wouldn't be so bad if there was some allowance for UI modifications but nope, there is no API available for it and mods are not allowed. This sets it far below WoW in that if there is any deficiency with the WoW UI then you can be sure someone will program a mod to work around it.
AoC will get some people to try it but I'm betting that it doesn't last. People will get over the novelty and will leave unless they loosen up the game restrictions quickly.
You've probably only had them twice because some video problems only show up when the hardware is stressed in certain ways. Maybe the video circuitry got a bit hotter than it could tolerate, maybe there was an unusual load on the video memory. One thing is pretty certain, glitches like the one in your screenshot are usually hardware problems, not software, and hardware problems usually get worse, not better, with time.
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8727/bild82ch6.png I'm fairly certain that this is not a software problem. It looks like you have a problem with the video hardware on your computer which is causing slowdowns, crashes, and video corruption. I would bring this system in for repair as soon as possible because this problem might cause problems with other components in your machine, as well as data corruption and loss.
Overall I've found Mac OS X to be a fairly stable operating system and the Mac hardware to be pretty solid but things do go wrong. This is almost definitely one of those cases. Get your computer repaired and then take another look at your Mac and see if it performs better.
I don't know of anyone beyond the most clueless of idiots who think that Macs don't crash. Of course they can crash, every computer has a chance to crash. The thing is that Macs tend to crash less often than certain other computer platforms because Mac OS X and Apple hardware are designed to integrate tightly and there are less variables in their construction. Apple is also not immune to producing the occasional lemon but in experience they tend to build solid machines that have very few problems.
Mac OS X is VERY tolerant of situations where you are running low on RAM, once it has enough RAM to run itself. Generally once you are above about 512 MB of RAM you have a decent amount to run Mac OS X. Yes, it will run better with more RAM than that but for the casual user anything from 512 MB to 1 GB is pretty decent.
I don't know if you understand how modern operating systems work but generally they will load TONS into memory, even if they don't really need it. Just because Safari is "using" 800 MB of RAM doesn't mean that it's really using that much. A lot of that is caches, backing stores, associated libraries, and other support data that the operating system loads just in case it's needed. That sort of stuff can be overwritten in a jiffy if another application needs the memory. Not only that but a lot of that memory is likely to be libraries that are common to other running applications so 3 or 4 running applications might all be using the same 500 MB chunk of RAM.
I think you might want to read up on memory management under Mac OS X before you make these sort of wild speculations...
Arnold Lumber
Advantage Lumber
Howe Lumber
Just to name a few.
Yes, by putting sheetrock on the lumber you bulk the size of the wall out a bit but the true reason for lumber being a bit less than it's nominal size is how it is finished.
Honestly though, you don't need to have lifting surfaces to fly, all you need is properly directed thrust. That takes energy and a lot of it. What you need is some sort of fuel that has a high thrust to mass ratio, like antimatter. It's something that we can and do make today and even though we don't make a lot of it right now we could easily ramp up production. The true problem is the cost of producing it but it's not inconceivable that the cost will eventually drop as we develop new ways to produce it.
Once you have enough antimatter the rest of the problem comes down to simple engineering and a computer capable enough to calculate all of the thrust vectors needed to perform stable flight. Can we do it today? Probably not but it's not that far-fetched that we can't imagine it being possible sometime soon.
If you have two screens with the same diagonal length, say 19", but one is 4:3 and the other is 16:9 then the vertical height of the 4:3 window is 11.4" and the vertical height of the 16:9 window is 9.3". Not only that but using diagonal length as the main measure of a monitor is deceptive because the area of the 4:3 window is 173.3 square inches and the area of the 16:9 window is 154.8 square inches, a loss of approximately 11% viewing area.
So by going from 4:3 to 16:9 you do gain some extra width but you lose total viewing area in addition to losing vertical space. That is the crux of the problem, when manufacturers move to widescreen they are reporting the same diagonal dimension but are actually giving you less for your money. They tout this as a feature since you can now view movies with less of a black border but overall you lose functionality.
Oh and it just occurred to me that Slashdot is a fantastic example of how a narrower window doesn't help much. I like to use the nested view (WITHOUT the new discussion system, thank you!) and if I made my window narrower in order to shorten the comments to a more readable width I'd end up with some of the deeper nested comments being much smaller in width than the shallowly nested comments.
What would be nice is if I could make my window as wide as I want but have the text within each comment turned into columns of a fixed width and height. This would greatly enhance the readability of each comment. Alas, I'm sure that sort of layout would be much more complicated to handle and probably won't happen anytime soon, if ever.
I could muck around with custom CSS stylesheets but they don't support multiple columns (see an earlier post of mine here) and it can be a pain to put together custom stylesheets that are general enough to handle most websites or create a slew of specific ones for certain websites
In the end a lot of websites ignore the tons of research that has been done on human cognitive psychology and typography. This paper is a good example of some of the concepts but there is a lot more research on the field. I don't expect many of the amateur websites to keep up with the latest research but it'd be nice if some of the major players in web publishing took a look at what has been discovered.
Secondly columns themselves present problems. The jump from the bottom of one column to the top of the next comes with a break in your reading that may not correspond with a natural break in the flow of the text. A taller window has less column breaks which interrupts the flow of reading less.
It would be nice if there was support for multiple columns in CSS, that way you could have a custom stylesheet to apply to text on webpages in order to make it more readable. Unfortunately there are only a working draft and a few experimental modules floating around now.
Sure there are workarounds to widescreen monitors and reading text but the fact remains that there are a good deal of people who would prefer to have their displays oriented vertically rather than horizontally, for whatever reason. It's just too bad that the preponderance of widescreen displays currently out there interferes with that desire.
Yes this matters. It is well-known throughout the publishing world that wide columns of text are harder to read than narrow columns. Our eyes are more suited to reading narrow columns of text than wide ones and having to jump from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen to read the next column is not optimal. The current generation of widescreen displays and the way text is laid-out onscreen causes you to lose track of which line you are reading and it also causes you to slow down in order to better keep track of your vertical position.
A display with a higher vertical to horizontal ratio makes it easier to read and edit text on. Text columns are naturally narrower so your eyes have less problems tracking horizontally and the columns are also higher which means that there is less scrolling. It also means that menu bars at the top or bottom of the screen or window take up a smaller percent of the vertical presentation, which uses the display more effectively.
Widescreen is better suited to video and pictures than it is for text. It would be nice to have displays optimized for text so that people who work with text can do so more effectively. One thing I try to do to counteract a widescreen is to place as many elements as I can (toolbars, etc.) in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one. By maximizing my vertical space and using the horizontal space to stack bars side-by-side I do what I can to create a narrow, high space for text. It would be much better to have a screen that was oriented this way in the first place but if you can't find one...
The main difference between a ten-year-old's idea and a solid scientific theory is very simple: math.
Anyone can come up with all sorts of "it sounds logical" ideas but until you can back that idea with solid theory and mathematics all you have is wild conjecture. This idea of "twin" universes is based on a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity which has made several important observations about the universe and has a very solid mathematical backing.
After all I can come up with the theory that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure and back it with some compelling reasoning but that doesn't mean I've accomplished anything noteworthy...
Oh, I forgot to add that you are missing the opening html tag. Most browsers will work around the bug but you probably should still put it in there, especially since you have the closing html tag in there.
If it was done like this then your page would be a lot more lightweight and portable, working on just about every browser configuration out there, including the iPhone/iTouch.
... THE HYPNOTOAD.What's funny about that last part? Well, pretty much all the content on the web page is in a Flash movie and the iPhone can't view it because the iPhone doesn't support Flash!
Kinda ironic that your iPhone bookmark will have a pretty icon for content it can't view...
Who are you "loosing the babes" on? You can loose those babes my way, I'll take any loose babes you have.
Now if they are losing the babes then that's an entirely different thing...
The fact remains that although WebKit is used by software on your system, it probably won't kill your system to remove it. The only major thing that will happen is some applications will complain or won't work at all. This is a far different situation than with Windows where if you removed the Internet Explorer libraries major parts of the system would stop working altogether.
Apple not being a convicted monopoly, this may be an acceptable practice, but technically, this is exactly the same thing (actually, one of many things) people accuse MS of, regardless of the underlying motive, and to argue that this is somehow different is dishonest. You seem to be repeating yourself and you got it wrong again.
The WebKit team has created a framework which is free and open for anyone to use. In order to make this framework as compatable as possible they used some undocumented methods in Quartz, the drawing layer of Mac OS X. Yes, they are also Apple developers and they have intimate knowledge of the internals of Mac OS X. This is why they feel reasonably safe in doing something as unsafe as using undocumented methods for means which they were never intended. They didn't do it because it provided some sort of advantage to WebKit over other applications, they did it because it kept WebKit from breaking some applications that embedded WebKit.
The Mac OS X developers also have a documented, public way of doing this very same thing and the Firefox developers used it. It worked well and everyone is happy now. In fact when you compare the public way of solving the problem and the behind-the-scenes way of doing it you find that the behind-the-scenes way is much more difficult to work with and more likely to have problems down the road.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a history of developing two different layers of its API, both of which are equally safe. The private API is only shared with internal Microsoft Developers and is much quicker/easier/more efficient than the public API. This is what has gotten Microsoft in hot water before.
It's a far cry to say that Microsoft's dual API is at all comparable to Apple's public API and the undocumented methods being used here. If Apple was truly doing the same thing as Microsoft then the undocumented methods would do the job more easily and efficiently than the public API. They don't, they are just a hack that only an internal developer could come up with to make sure OTHER people's applications keep working well. If you look at the developer's (David Hyatt's) comments he even says that they don't use this hack in Safari, Apple's own web browser. It's meant so that other people's browsers can work well.
I'd say the dishonest thing here is your feigned innocence over your comments. "I'm not trying to read too much into it." - yes you are! All of this was explained to you by several people in several different ways and yet you still came back to try to further muddy the waters. Just admit that either you have no clue about the whole situation or that you do understand the difference between Microsoft's and Apple's behaviors and you are just trying to stir up trouble.
Webkit is a framework that is open for anyone to take and put into their own application. Safari and some components of Mac OS use WebKit for their own rendering of html. There is no private, "better" linkage to WebKit, there is just a hack within the WebKit framework that is there so that other applications using WebKit will not have problems with it. The Apple developers knew the internals of the operating system well enough to do this semi-safely but even they aren't happy with themselves doing it because it can still cause problems.
There is also a public, safer, more documented way of doing the same thing for applications that don't use WebKit. This public method is not perfect either but it is much safer. The Apple developers are keeping parts of the operating system under wraps which could cause major problems if you don't know EXACTLY what the internals are doing. This is a very common thing for responsible developers to do, you don't want to expose API that could fail catastrophically if something isn't set up just exactly correctly.
In short, nothing to see here, the public API is the safest bet to use. If you choose to use undocumented methods for a bit more speed then you risk bringing down your application in a hard and messy way. The WebKit developers weighed that in their own minds and decided that the risks were worth it, since they had a hand in developing the undocumented methods and could account for the quirks in a semi-safe manner.
In the case of Internet Explorer, Microsoft had a separate set of completely safe API that were optimized versions of methods other developers got to use. If you were an internal Microsoft developer you could do more with the internal API than anyone could with the external API. This was done deliberately so that Microsoft products could get preferential treatment on the Windows operating system. Microsoft also made it so that you couldn't easily use Windows without having some part of Internet Explorer as part of the system. Under Mac OS X you can remove every mention of WebKit and all that will happen is a couple of programs won't work until you re-install them with their embedded versions of WebKit.