And, in fact, all major platforms allow you to render "Times Roman 24" at 1x magnification and "Helvetica 12" at 2x magnification and get two different results, and they actually have multiple ways for you to do so.... and they might even let you render "Times Roman 24" at 1x magnification and "Times Roman 12" at 2x magnification and get two different results:-), provided that the hints for the Times Roman font you are using specify non-linear scaling.
Sun wasn't working on the language because they were busy building up the libraries--arguably a better choice.
Oh, come on, that's pretty ridiculous. Sun is a 16B company with 36000 employees. If they can't simultaneously add a few minor backwards compatible extensions to the Java-to-byte-code-compiler and develop a library for enterprise applications, they really shouldn't be writing software at all.
Instead of generics and autoboxing, we have J2EE, which (in the right parts) is probably a larger productivity gain.
What you are basically saying is that Sun Java has become a specialty tool for people who write a certain class of enterprise applications. Nice. Fine. We can agree on that.
Now, if the implementation of features important for everybody is held up by Sun's involvement in J2EE, what does that say about Java for all the other applications? It says that Sun has no commitment to them and that Java will remain cumbersome and poorly supported for anybody who doesn't write enterprise applications. And we all should remember that next time Sun keeps trying to sell Java for desktop applications or education.
Then I discovered C# and was happy to have found a usable Java - until I saw the probs Mono is facing porting.NET, particularly System.Windows.Forms, to Unix...
Who cares? Open source programming in Mono uses toolkits like Gtk#, which are more efficient and more familiar to OSS programmers anyway..NET compatibility in Mono may be a migration path for Windows programmers and it may appeal people with some special needs, but even if.NET compatibility was completely dropped tomorrow, Mono woulc continue to be a great platform.
and the fact that they would always have toplay catch up, with no big company to support them (IBM, Sun and other Linux/Open source backers already have a huge stake in Java)
Gosh, yeah, just like IBM and Sun also had a huge stake in their own UNIX systems. (Well, Sun is still trying to kill Linux, but IBM at least has pretty much given up AIX for Linux.)
When I read about the proposed features for Java 1.5, I knew i could stick with Java for the long term. Good news!
If you look more closely, you'll see that they really have failed to address the hard stuff: generics over unboxed types, value classes, efficient native code interfaces, etc. So, no, serious limitations remain in Java and the 1.5 changes are no reason for much increased confidence. I would actually ask: "what took you so long?"--these changes could have been implemented years ago with no problems.
Besides, Java still is not an open platform and there are no open source implementations of the entire platform, so when you compare it to Mono, you are comparing apples and oranges.
As I said, this would make sense IF THERE WAS A CALL THAT TOOK BOTH!
There usually isn't a single call that takes both because there doesn't need to be. The usual sequence of events is that you separately inform the system about the rendering resolution you use (or use the default), load a scalable font, choose the point size you want, and maybe even choose a magnification at which it is to be rendered. The actual call that renders glyphs usually takes no size information of any kind in most APIs, just the string and a location where it is to be rendered.
On X11, as you observed, you can select fonts based on any combination of resolution, point size, and pixel size.
In PostScript (and similarly PDF and OS X), you get a resolution from the device, then pick a font in a particular point size, and you can optionally set a scale factor using the "scale" operator before rendering.
In Windows, you apparently can also make graphics scalable with the new GDI, so it probably works similarly.
In TeX, you say that you want "Computer Modern 12pt scaled by a factor of 3" or "scaled to 36pt" or something like that.
In FreeType, you can also determine the two parameters separately (I don't remember how, but you can, since I've done it).
Sorry if those choices are not blindingly obvious, but they are there...
Since M and N are absolutely irretrivably linked, there is no reason not to specify M instead of N. This is all I have been saying!
No, they are not linked. Even if a platform was so broken that it didn't give you a separate "scale" or "magnification" parameter in its font rendering library, it has to let you set device resolution for things like creating bitmaps for printing.
And, in fact, all major platforms allow you to render "Times Roman 24" at 1x magnification and "Helvetica 12" at 2x magnification and get two different results, and they actually have multiple ways for you to do so.
These are language fixes that should have happened years ago. The real question is: why did it take Sun so long? Why is the process by which the Java language evolves so severely broken?
And many serious problems remain with the Java language:
Java genericity has no special support in the runtime, which limits the type safety it can provide.
Generics over primitive types are boxed, meaning they are inefficient.
Java's native code interface is still inefficient and complex.
Java still lacks value classes and operator overloading, making it a poor choice for applications involving numerics or graphics.
The most serious problem with the Java platform is and remains, however, that it is basically proprietary: all Java 2 platform implementations depend crucially on code licensed from Sun (e.g., there is no independent Swing implementation). Furthermore, there doesn't exist a Java standard that people can implement without having legal constraints imposed on them by Sun.
With POTS, you're able to call 911 easily and reliably, even in severe conditions (e.g. blackout).
Most people who have high-speed Internet access probably also have cell phones. And whether you want it or not, you even have E911 with your cell phone.
The 911 issue is a marketing gimmick by the phone companies.
Well, I have to say, NeWS was a thing of beauty - especially with the HyperNeWS stuff that Arthur Van Hoff did.
I have to disagree. There were several window systems that put code display-side. NeWS perhaps got the most exposure at the time, but it was, in my experience, the flakiest and hardest to program. No doubt, a lot of that was due to the exceptionally poor choice of PostScript as the displaly-side programming language. Even Apple finally exorcised that demon.
And Java, like it or not, and I do, was a great tool.
Java was (and is) 1970's technology. The original Java design and implementation, a typed stack-oriented byte code, was unoriginal and contained some serious blunders. Credit for Java's success goes to Sun marketing who, whether you like it or not, really did do a spectacular job, the Self team and IBM for bringing the technology up-to-speed, and lots of other contributors for fixing innumerable problems with the original design.
It's good that Java has finally brought garbage collection and runtime safety into the mainstream. But that it was Java, rather than one of dozens of similar languages available at the time, is a pure accident of history.
By joint mission, you are perhaps refering to the fact that the US shoulders ~85% [space.com] of the cost compared to the European 8.3 [esa.int].
See, you make my point: when talking about joint space efforts, you only think of the "international" space station, which isn't much of a space station and even less international.
Living in the US and talking to many people, I can tell you that few take complete credit for winning WWII.
Living in the US and talking to many people, I can tell you that you are wrong. Educated people are usually more aware of the historical facts, but many people have very little understanding of US or European history. Perhaps you should get out into the real world a little more.
So, yes we somehow believe that the US deserves a great deal of credit for the war.
So do we in the US (did Iowa secede from the Union while I wasn't looking?). But you seem to be missing the distinction between "a great deal of credit" and "sole credit" (has Iowa stopped educating people in English?).
The biggest value, and probably the only value, of Mars is scientific. And if it's contaminated with terrestrial microorganisms, then its scientific value becomes much less.
Maybe instead of sending probes to Mars, we should send a couple buckets full of the hardiest bacteria we can find.
That's roughly what sending a bunch of astronauts amounts to: their main relevance to Mars is that each is an incubator for a couple of pounds of bacterial stew.
I haven't tried "long doubles" specifically, but GNU C/C++ on Opteron and Linux supports full 64 bit addressing for all other datatypes. If the "long doubles" type is implemented (and I don't see why not), it should work with that, too.
Is there some specific reason why you think there might be a problem?
He created a commercial Emacs clone, which didn't particularly ingratiate him to the open source community.
He created a commercial window system called NeWS and tried to kill X11 with it, but that was a commercial failure, never really worked anyway, and was largely based on other people's technology.
Then he built a simplistic language for programming consumer devices, but that project failed miserably as well. Only when they put it out on the Internet for free, claimed that they were going to make it "open", and promised to create a browser based application delivery platform did it take off--not because there was anything technical novel about it, but because people wanted to believe in browser-based programming (sadly, Sun has pretty much failed to deliver on all of that). Most of the hard work to make Java a success was done by the JIT developers and IBM.
These days, he seems to be porting over code highlighting and some other features from Emacs to NetBeans.
Sorry, but if this is a "personality story", maybe someone can explain to me why I should be excited about it. At Sun, Guy Steele would be my vote for one of the most competent people they have. But Gosling? Why?
Follow the links. Even if coffee has a small diuretic effect, you still get more water from a cup of coffee than you lose. So, no, it doesn't cause dehydration at all.
You can get liquid coffee extract at your supermarket. Some brands are quite good. I find it's a lot better than the dry stuff. Note: the extract must be refrigerated after opening, so you can't just keep it sitting on a shelf.
All your arguments make sense if there were calls to draw scaled things other than fonts.
Non-linear scaling of graphics is something that cannot be implemented by the graphics API at the level of individual primitives because it is a property of the entire image you are rendering. Therefore, there is nothing sensible the API can offer you--it can only give you physical coordinates and let you do the work. But fonts are already compound graphics objects, so someone had the opportunity to think about it and the API can actually do the work for you; that's why the font API takes both point size and resolution parameters (at least implicitly).
So, yes, when you scale a drawing to twice the size, the width of the line with which you draw a rectangle may not, in fact, scale up by a factor of two. Or it may. It depends on what that rectangle means. But since the low-level graphics API can't know what the rectangle means, it can't make that decision for you, and so you just get an API in terms of physical coordinates.
In some cases, the need for non-linear scaling is blatantly obvious even to people who don't usually think about such issues. For example, it becomes clear quickly to most people that you can't just rescale 3D buttons linearly: you'd get bevel sizes that are far too large if you did.
All modern font rendering systems render those two fonts exactly the same.
That's complete nonsense. TrueType supports non-linear scaling; it's part of the hinting. Non-linear scaling is an essential part of typography.
Your argument also makes no sense because there is no way to seperately specify the point size and pixel size.
Sure there is: the two parameters you specify are point size and resolution. (You might also specify point size and pixel size, but you need two parameters.) It's just that historically, some APIs implicitly assumed that you always wanted screen resolution (which could still vary from machine to machine).
There does seem to be an incredible mental block on the part of a lot of posters here. There is NO reason why exactly one graphics call (select a font) is specified in a different coordinate system than every other graphics call! Fonts are not special, if you think they are you seem to be stuck in 1960's graphics!
You are quite right: fonts are not special. You should implement non-linear scaling will all graphics. That means that with all graphics, you need to know both the physical size and the resolution at which it is to be rendered. It's just that with fonts, someone else already has done the work and that most applications don't bother doing it for anything else because either their authors don't know any better or because they (often justifiably) decide that it's too hard.
In the 50s-80s, it was about beating the USSR, now, Europe is still behind Russia and Russia is a 3rd world country!
Perhaps your impression is just related to the fact that the US media like to portray joint missions domestically as pure NASA successes, a phenomenon not entirely absent from other kinds of international ventures the US participated in. One of the examples that annoys many people to no end is the US seemingly taking sole credit for winning WWII.
In any case, Europe has mostly focused on commercial and astronomical use of space: unspectacular, but either financially or scientifically profitable. "First to..." kinds of missions don't seem to have been of so much interest.
We know the suits arent sterile, that's the point, why not sterilize them? Bringing the suits back on would be easy to sterilize, just put the suit in an autoglave and tada..
Sterilizing something that big is really hard, even on earth. Making something as big as the habitation module impermeable and sterile is even harder.
Once people land on Mars, it will definitely be contaminated, and in a big way.
That's the real problem with sending people to Mars: they'll introduce microbes.
There is no rush to send people. I think we can easily get by with robotic probes for a century or two. It will take at least that long to even begin to determine reliably whether Mars has any kind of microbial life.
Bush and ESA's "human to Mars" efforts are motivated purely politically, against all scientific reason.
Meanwhile, Mono already has a complete suite of open source toolkits and APIs that run rings around what Microsoft offers and let any Gnome programmer become instantly productive on the platform.
In that, Mono has a leg up both on Java and on.NET: both Java and.NET require open source programmers to learn completely new APIs, APIs that are arguably proprietary. And in the case of Java, there isn't even a credible attempt at an open source implementation (of, for example, Swing), and it is questionable whether an open source implementation is even legally possible.
Mono, in contrast, offers access to many open source APIs and libraries (foremost, Gtk+, which is the de-facto standard for Mono GUIs) and, in addition, makes a credible effort at providing a.NET environment and Java support, to the degree legally possible.
Overall, the progress of the Mono project over the last year and a half has been nothing short of astounding. GNU C, GNU C++, and GNU gcj, took much longer just to produce a compiler and runtime, and all the open source Java platform efforts are woefully incomplete in comparison. The closest in terms of offering a complete environment is perhaps Python, but Python is a much simpler system under the hood and has different range of possible applications.
There are a couple of points I tried to make in my comment. One is that as we roll forward, everything is becoming more efficient. Vehicles, homes, water use, etc... People are also becoming more educated about conservation. Not everyone applies practices like turning off the water while brushing their teeth, but more and more do.
But even the more educated and more environmentally conscious consumers in the US consume many times the world average. We couldn't scale up world consumption even to the levels of, say, an environmental nut living in Berkeley.
But in the US, a higher net pay (after deducting costs of transportation to work, lunch, etc...) in any urban area do mean a higher standard of living.
If you measure "standard of living" primarily in terms of "goods and services you can purchase".
As far as the economy itself goes, the President and Congress have a tough job. Both trickle-down and trickle-up economics have their problems, but both seem to work a bit in boosting a lagging economy. Either put the money in people's hands so they'll spend some of it, or put it in companies hands so they'll hire more people. Either way, it's all very cyclical, and we're on the downward side of the boom we saw that ended in 1999.
I think you are having a very short-term perspective. Do you really think that China and India are going to be content with continuing to do low-wage manufacturing so that we can buy T-shirts and computers really cheaply? If they aren't going to do sweat shop labor anymore, who is? And do you really think they are going to curb their consumption of energy and raw materials to make sure that the US can continue to get them cheaply? Prices will go up steeply, both on manufacturing and on raw materials, as nations like India and China modernize. Maybe we can find another generation of people to work for us for nothing in Russia and Africa, but then we have pretty much used up all the continents.
I have a question though... how could you fill a smaller house with more furniture?
You don't. You fill it with more expensive, more customized furniture requiring more manual labor and craftsmanship to design. In fact, ideally, you have the furniture custom crafted for your specific needs.
And bigger houses require much more labor,
No, sorry, they really don't.
as well as the idea that they tend to have more labor intensive improvements... such as tile floors rather than linoleum, granite counters rather than formica, custom cabinets rather than off the shelf cabinetry, etc... All of which require more labor and keep more people in work.
Bigger houses require less of all of that. In a big house, you can afford to buy pre-fab components: pre-fab kitchen cabinets, pre-cut countertops, etc. because, hey, if you lose a couple of feet here and there, it doesn't matter. In a small house, everything has to fit, and that means that things often need to be custom designed and built.
I've been through this a couple of times. With a big place, I could just drive a pickup truck down to some big appliance or furniture store and pick up mass-produced items. I knew they'd fit in somewhere. With a small place, I needed to call in expert designers and carpenters. Overall, the small place was still more affordable, but it also actually generated far more jobs, and jobs of the desirable variety, and ended up being overall nicer anyway: better location, more upscale look, etc. It's a tradeoff well-worth considering: with homes, bigger is not at all better.
The whole 96 DPI and 72 DPI thing refers to rendering the font on-screen. In this sense, 12 point start to become meaningless because some computers can render fonts at other resolutions besides 96 or 72 DPI.
No, it's not at all "meaningless". The character shapes in a 12pt font are different from those of the same font at 14pt.
Regardless of what it looks like on screen, 12 should always be the same size on paper.
A 12pt font on screen should "look like" a 12pt font on paper, no matter what. If the viewing conditions of the screen are very different, it may end up being a different size. So, for a wall-size display, you might render it as "a 12pt font scaled to 120pt". But that is not at all the same as a "120pt font".
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And, in fact, all major platforms allow you to render "Times Roman 24" at 1x magnification and "Helvetica 12" at 2x magnification and get two different results, and they actually have multiple ways for you to do so. ... and they might even let you render "Times Roman 24" at 1x magnification and "Times Roman 12" at 2x magnification and get two different results :-), provided that the hints for the Times Roman font you are using specify non-linear scaling.
Sun wasn't working on the language because they were busy building up the libraries--arguably a better choice.
Oh, come on, that's pretty ridiculous. Sun is a 16B company with 36000 employees. If they can't simultaneously add a few minor backwards compatible extensions to the Java-to-byte-code-compiler and develop a library for enterprise applications, they really shouldn't be writing software at all.
Instead of generics and autoboxing, we have J2EE, which (in the right parts) is probably a larger productivity gain.
What you are basically saying is that Sun Java has become a specialty tool for people who write a certain class of enterprise applications. Nice. Fine. We can agree on that.
Now, if the implementation of features important for everybody is held up by Sun's involvement in J2EE, what does that say about Java for all the other applications? It says that Sun has no commitment to them and that Java will remain cumbersome and poorly supported for anybody who doesn't write enterprise applications. And we all should remember that next time Sun keeps trying to sell Java for desktop applications or education.
Then I discovered C# and was happy to have found a usable Java - until I saw the probs Mono is facing porting .NET, particularly System.Windows.Forms, to Unix ...
.NET compatibility in Mono may be a migration path for Windows programmers and it may appeal people with some special needs, but even if .NET compatibility was completely dropped tomorrow, Mono woulc continue to be a great platform.
Who cares? Open source programming in Mono uses toolkits like Gtk#, which are more efficient and more familiar to OSS programmers anyway.
and the fact that they would always have toplay catch up, with no big company to support them (IBM, Sun and other Linux/Open source backers already have a huge stake in Java)
Gosh, yeah, just like IBM and Sun also had a huge stake in their own UNIX systems. (Well, Sun is still trying to kill Linux, but IBM at least has pretty much given up AIX for Linux.)
When I read about the proposed features for Java 1.5, I knew i could stick with Java for the long term. Good news!
If you look more closely, you'll see that they really have failed to address the hard stuff: generics over unboxed types, value classes, efficient native code interfaces, etc. So, no, serious limitations remain in Java and the 1.5 changes are no reason for much increased confidence. I would actually ask: "what took you so long?"--these changes could have been implemented years ago with no problems.
Besides, Java still is not an open platform and there are no open source implementations of the entire platform, so when you compare it to Mono, you are comparing apples and oranges.
As I said, this would make sense IF THERE WAS A CALL THAT TOOK BOTH!
There usually isn't a single call that takes both because there doesn't need to be. The usual sequence of events is that you separately inform the system about the rendering resolution you use (or use the default), load a scalable font, choose the point size you want, and maybe even choose a magnification at which it is to be rendered. The actual call that renders glyphs usually takes no size information of any kind in most APIs, just the string and a location where it is to be rendered.
On X11, as you observed, you can select fonts based on any combination of resolution, point size, and pixel size.
In PostScript (and similarly PDF and OS X), you get a resolution from the device, then pick a font in a particular point size, and you can optionally set a scale factor using the "scale" operator before rendering.
In Windows, you apparently can also make graphics scalable with the new GDI, so it probably works similarly.
In TeX, you say that you want "Computer Modern 12pt scaled by a factor of 3" or "scaled to 36pt" or something like that.
In FreeType, you can also determine the two parameters separately (I don't remember how, but you can, since I've done it).
Sorry if those choices are not blindingly obvious, but they are there...
Since M and N are absolutely irretrivably linked, there is no reason not to specify M instead of N. This is all I have been saying!
No, they are not linked. Even if a platform was so broken that it didn't give you a separate "scale" or "magnification" parameter in its font rendering library, it has to let you set device resolution for things like creating bitmaps for printing.
And, in fact, all major platforms allow you to render "Times Roman 24" at 1x magnification and "Helvetica 12" at 2x magnification and get two different results, and they actually have multiple ways for you to do so.
And many serious problems remain with the Java language:
The most serious problem with the Java platform is and remains, however, that it is basically proprietary: all Java 2 platform implementations depend crucially on code licensed from Sun (e.g., there is no independent Swing implementation). Furthermore, there doesn't exist a Java standard that people can implement without having legal constraints imposed on them by Sun.
With POTS, you're able to call 911 easily and reliably, even in severe conditions (e.g. blackout).
Most people who have high-speed Internet access probably also have cell phones. And whether you want it or not, you even have E911 with your cell phone.
The 911 issue is a marketing gimmick by the phone companies.
Well, I have to say, NeWS was a thing of beauty - especially with the HyperNeWS stuff that Arthur Van Hoff did.
I have to disagree. There were several window systems that put code display-side. NeWS perhaps got the most exposure at the time, but it was, in my experience, the flakiest and hardest to program. No doubt, a lot of that was due to the exceptionally poor choice of PostScript as the displaly-side programming language. Even Apple finally exorcised that demon.
And Java, like it or not, and I do, was a great tool.
Java was (and is) 1970's technology. The original Java design and implementation, a typed stack-oriented byte code, was unoriginal and contained some serious blunders. Credit for Java's success goes to Sun marketing who, whether you like it or not, really did do a spectacular job, the Self team and IBM for bringing the technology up-to-speed, and lots of other contributors for fixing innumerable problems with the original design.
It's good that Java has finally brought garbage collection and runtime safety into the mainstream. But that it was Java, rather than one of dozens of similar languages available at the time, is a pure accident of history.
By joint mission, you are perhaps refering to the fact that the US shoulders ~85% [space.com] of the cost compared to the European 8.3 [esa.int].
See, you make my point: when talking about joint space efforts, you only think of the "international" space station, which isn't much of a space station and even less international.
Living in the US and talking to many people, I can tell you that few take complete credit for winning WWII.
Living in the US and talking to many people, I can tell you that you are wrong. Educated people are usually more aware of the historical facts, but many people have very little understanding of US or European history. Perhaps you should get out into the real world a little more.
So, yes we somehow believe that the US deserves a great deal of credit for the war.
So do we in the US (did Iowa secede from the Union while I wasn't looking?). But you seem to be missing the distinction between "a great deal of credit" and "sole credit" (has Iowa stopped educating people in English?).
To me, the obvious question is "So?"
The biggest value, and probably the only value, of Mars is scientific. And if it's contaminated with terrestrial microorganisms, then its scientific value becomes much less.
Maybe instead of sending probes to Mars, we should send a couple buckets full of the hardiest bacteria we can find.
That's roughly what sending a bunch of astronauts amounts to: their main relevance to Mars is that each is an incubator for a couple of pounds of bacterial stew.
I haven't tried "long doubles" specifically, but GNU C/C++ on Opteron and Linux supports full 64 bit addressing for all other datatypes. If the "long doubles" type is implemented (and I don't see why not), it should work with that, too.
Is there some specific reason why you think there might be a problem?
Let's see what Gosling has done:
He created a commercial Emacs clone, which didn't particularly ingratiate him to the open source community.
He created a commercial window system called NeWS and tried to kill X11 with it, but that was a commercial failure, never really worked anyway, and was largely based on other people's technology.
Then he built a simplistic language for programming consumer devices, but that project failed miserably as well. Only when they put it out on the Internet for free, claimed that they were going to make it "open", and promised to create a browser based application delivery platform did it take off--not because there was anything technical novel about it, but because people wanted to believe in browser-based programming (sadly, Sun has pretty much failed to deliver on all of that). Most of the hard work to make Java a success was done by the JIT developers and IBM.
These days, he seems to be porting over code highlighting and some other features from Emacs to NetBeans.
Sorry, but if this is a "personality story", maybe someone can explain to me why I should be excited about it. At Sun, Guy Steele would be my vote for one of the most competent people they have. But Gosling? Why?
Follow the links. Even if coffee has a small diuretic effect, you still get more water from a cup of coffee than you lose. So, no, it doesn't cause dehydration at all.
Here are some more references, albeit from a more biased source.
That's a myth. See here for an explanation.
You can get liquid coffee extract at your supermarket. Some brands are quite good. I find it's a lot better than the dry stuff. Note: the extract must be refrigerated after opening, so you can't just keep it sitting on a shelf.
Caffeine keeps you awake, but reduces your ability to think clearly.
Care to back up that claim with evidence? Everything I have ever read seems to indicate the opposite.
All your arguments make sense if there were calls to draw scaled things other than fonts.
Non-linear scaling of graphics is something that cannot be implemented by the graphics API at the level of individual primitives because it is a property of the entire image you are rendering. Therefore, there is nothing sensible the API can offer you--it can only give you physical coordinates and let you do the work. But fonts are already compound graphics objects, so someone had the opportunity to think about it and the API can actually do the work for you; that's why the font API takes both point size and resolution parameters (at least implicitly).
So, yes, when you scale a drawing to twice the size, the width of the line with which you draw a rectangle may not, in fact, scale up by a factor of two. Or it may. It depends on what that rectangle means. But since the low-level graphics API can't know what the rectangle means, it can't make that decision for you, and so you just get an API in terms of physical coordinates.
In some cases, the need for non-linear scaling is blatantly obvious even to people who don't usually think about such issues. For example, it becomes clear quickly to most people that you can't just rescale 3D buttons linearly: you'd get bevel sizes that are far too large if you did.
All modern font rendering systems render those two fonts exactly the same.
That's complete nonsense. TrueType supports non-linear scaling; it's part of the hinting. Non-linear scaling is an essential part of typography.
Your argument also makes no sense because there is no way to seperately specify the point size and pixel size.
Sure there is: the two parameters you specify are point size and resolution. (You might also specify point size and pixel size, but you need two parameters.) It's just that historically, some APIs implicitly assumed that you always wanted screen resolution (which could still vary from machine to machine).
There does seem to be an incredible mental block on the part of a lot of posters here. There is NO reason why exactly one graphics call (select a font) is specified in a different coordinate system than every other graphics call! Fonts are not special, if you think they are you seem to be stuck in 1960's graphics!
You are quite right: fonts are not special. You should implement non-linear scaling will all graphics. That means that with all graphics, you need to know both the physical size and the resolution at which it is to be rendered. It's just that with fonts, someone else already has done the work and that most applications don't bother doing it for anything else because either their authors don't know any better or because they (often justifiably) decide that it's too hard.
In the 50s-80s, it was about beating the USSR, now, Europe is still behind Russia and Russia is a 3rd world country!
Perhaps your impression is just related to the fact that the US media like to portray joint missions domestically as pure NASA successes, a phenomenon not entirely absent from other kinds of international ventures the US participated in. One of the examples that annoys many people to no end is the US seemingly taking sole credit for winning WWII.
In any case, Europe has mostly focused on commercial and astronomical use of space: unspectacular, but either financially or scientifically profitable. "First to..." kinds of missions don't seem to have been of so much interest.
We know the suits arent sterile, that's the point, why not sterilize them? Bringing the suits back on would be easy to sterilize, just put the suit in an autoglave and tada..
Sterilizing something that big is really hard, even on earth. Making something as big as the habitation module impermeable and sterile is even harder.
Once people land on Mars, it will definitely be contaminated, and in a big way.
That's the real problem with sending people to Mars: they'll introduce microbes.
There is no rush to send people. I think we can easily get by with robotic probes for a century or two. It will take at least that long to even begin to determine reliably whether Mars has any kind of microbial life.
Bush and ESA's "human to Mars" efforts are motivated purely politically, against all scientific reason.
Meanwhile, Mono already has a complete suite of open source toolkits and APIs that run rings around what Microsoft offers and let any Gnome programmer become instantly productive on the platform.
.NET: both Java and .NET require open source programmers to learn completely new APIs, APIs that are arguably proprietary. And in the case of Java, there isn't even a credible attempt at an open source implementation (of, for example, Swing), and it is questionable whether an open source implementation is even legally possible.
.NET environment and Java support, to the degree legally possible.
In that, Mono has a leg up both on Java and on
Mono, in contrast, offers access to many open source APIs and libraries (foremost, Gtk+, which is the de-facto standard for Mono GUIs) and, in addition, makes a credible effort at providing a
Overall, the progress of the Mono project over the last year and a half has been nothing short of astounding. GNU C, GNU C++, and GNU gcj, took much longer just to produce a compiler and runtime, and all the open source Java platform efforts are woefully incomplete in comparison. The closest in terms of offering a complete environment is perhaps Python, but Python is a much simpler system under the hood and has different range of possible applications.
Look in the FAQ. "Mono" means "monkey" in Spanish. Presumably, it's because of Miguel's heritage and the Ximian sponsorship.
Because of the associations in English (mono-nucleosis, mono-poly, mono-aural) it was not such a great choice.
There are a couple of points I tried to make in my comment. One is that as we roll forward, everything is becoming more efficient. Vehicles, homes, water use, etc... People are also becoming more educated about conservation. Not everyone applies practices like turning off the water while brushing their teeth, but more and more do.
But even the more educated and more environmentally conscious consumers in the US consume many times the world average. We couldn't scale up world consumption even to the levels of, say, an environmental nut living in Berkeley.
But in the US, a higher net pay (after deducting costs of transportation to work, lunch, etc...) in any urban area do mean a higher standard of living.
If you measure "standard of living" primarily in terms of "goods and services you can purchase".
As far as the economy itself goes, the President and Congress have a tough job. Both trickle-down and trickle-up economics have their problems, but both seem to work a bit in boosting a lagging economy. Either put the money in people's hands so they'll spend some of it, or put it in companies hands so they'll hire more people. Either way, it's all very cyclical, and we're on the downward side of the boom we saw that ended in 1999.
I think you are having a very short-term perspective. Do you really think that China and India are going to be content with continuing to do low-wage manufacturing so that we can buy T-shirts and computers really cheaply? If they aren't going to do sweat shop labor anymore, who is? And do you really think they are going to curb their consumption of energy and raw materials to make sure that the US can continue to get them cheaply? Prices will go up steeply, both on manufacturing and on raw materials, as nations like India and China modernize. Maybe we can find another generation of people to work for us for nothing in Russia and Africa, but then we have pretty much used up all the continents.
I have a question though... how could you fill a smaller house with more furniture?
You don't. You fill it with more expensive, more customized furniture requiring more manual labor and craftsmanship to design. In fact, ideally, you have the furniture custom crafted for your specific needs.
And bigger houses require much more labor,
No, sorry, they really don't.
as well as the idea that they tend to have more labor intensive improvements... such as tile floors rather than linoleum, granite counters rather than formica, custom cabinets rather than off the shelf cabinetry, etc... All of which require more labor and keep more people in work.
Bigger houses require less of all of that. In a big house, you can afford to buy pre-fab components: pre-fab kitchen cabinets, pre-cut countertops, etc. because, hey, if you lose a couple of feet here and there, it doesn't matter. In a small house, everything has to fit, and that means that things often need to be custom designed and built.
I've been through this a couple of times. With a big place, I could just drive a pickup truck down to some big appliance or furniture store and pick up mass-produced items. I knew they'd fit in somewhere. With a small place, I needed to call in expert designers and carpenters. Overall, the small place was still more affordable, but it also actually generated far more jobs, and jobs of the desirable variety, and ended up being overall nicer anyway: better location, more upscale look, etc. It's a tradeoff well-worth considering: with homes, bigger is not at all better.
The whole 96 DPI and 72 DPI thing refers to rendering the font on-screen. In this sense, 12 point start to become meaningless because some computers can render fonts at other resolutions besides 96 or 72 DPI.
No, it's not at all "meaningless". The character shapes in a 12pt font are different from those of the same font at 14pt.
Regardless of what it looks like on screen, 12 should always be the same size on paper.
A 12pt font on screen should "look like" a 12pt font on paper, no matter what. If the viewing conditions of the screen are very different, it may end up being a different size. So, for a wall-size display, you might render it as "a 12pt font scaled to 120pt". But that is not at all the same as a "120pt font".