What I would be more interested in is this: What is the per capita rate of violent crime in the UK, and what is the per capita rate of gun deaths in the UK.
The fact that the gun crowd wants to look at the rate of violent crime, rather than the per capita rate of gun deaths makes me wonder if they are trying to divert attention away from a statistic that doesn't support their position.
It's worth noting that most of the per capita rate of gun deaths in the US is accounted for by suicides. If risk of being killed by somebody else is what most concerns you, that's a much smaller number than the overall rate of gun deaths.
How about the point that despite these rising vs. falling crime rates in the UK and in the US, US still has a much much higher violent crime rate than the UK?
Answer: It's false. You're more likely to be a victim of a violent crime in the UK today than in the US. That wasn't the case 20 years ago, but it is now. "Crime rates as measured in victim surveys are all higher in England than the United States." Check it out.
products were exchanged for that cash. Employees were paid --they bought goods and services; it's not like --woosh let's put billions of dollars in a rocket and shoot it into space. Every penny spent by NASA has been spent on the planet earth.
--Now, that's not to say that there isn't a possibility that there is a more constructive way for the government to spend its tax revenue, but it's not like the money vanishes
So, you're saying that if government were to spend half the GDP paying people to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up again, it's not a waste of resources?
On the contrary - unless you can point to specific benefits of this spending it is like the money vanishes. The cost of paying those employees isn't their salaries, it's that they didn't do anything else productive with their time because they were too busy digging holes (or firing things into space). All those man-years of labor are something you can only use once, and we wasted it. The cost of government is what it spends, not what it takes from us in taxes - and spending money without any offsetting benefit is always a bad thing.
Re:The Matrix?
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is a re-hashed version of ancient Western Philosopy, a philosophy that's been around for thousands of years, considered innovative and fresh?
What eastern phil you might be referring to is beyond me. What does the matrix have to do with the Dao or natural way of the universe which should be followed? What does it have to do with reincarnation or karma? What does it have do with meditating and given up earthly desires to reach enlightenment?
He said western philosophy. And even though I loved Matrix, saw it a dozen times and worked as an extra in the sequels...the guy is right. The notion that we might be "living in a dream world" and unable to trust the evidence of our senses is a very very old idea. And to answer the original question, the important thing isn't what a movie is about so much as how it is about it. Matrix took a few good ideas and made a great looking, kick-ass action film which advanced the state of the art in moviemaking. The directors took visual ideas that had only been tried before in japanese animation and made them work in a live action film by inventing new filming techniques (eg, bullet time) and paying extra attention to shot framing. The look of the Matrix was a bold and expensive experiment that paid off, and techniques that work well tend to be copied by others.
Having a monopoly allows MS to keep poring money down products that are not successful. A luxury no other software manufacturer can afford.
Again, nonsense. Any company that has at least one profitable product can choose to pour money into development of other products. Oracle can spend money on unsuccessful products for quite a while if it so desires, as can Apple and Sun and IBM and AT&T.
Every company can afford a few unproductive investments, and some can afford many. A more charitable term for "pouring money down products that are not successful" is investment in Research and Development.
Microsoft's main distinction is being somewhat more successful in its core business than many, hence somewhat more able to lose money. But: (a) it's not a unique position, and (b) Most such investment in pro-consumer - competition between vast money-losing entities just means we get better products developed sooner than they otherwise would have been. This is something to be thankful for, not something to bemoan.
What is more important to point out is that they are able to subsidize other businesses with their monopoly profits. This makes it impossible for other companies to compete with MS in any market that MS enters.
Nonsense. Other companies can compete if they are sufficiently good at meeting customer needs. Intuit's Quicken succeeded despite massive funding poured into umpteen versions of Microsoft Money and AOL succeeded despite massive funding of MSN as a direct competitor. The pockets are deep, but not infinite.
I'm glad somebody with deep pockets is reinventing the Newton Notepad concept because it was a really great way to take notes and Apple seems to have abandoned the technology.
No, they just ditched the Newton. The handwriting recognition is alive and well in Mac OS X
For me, the important part of the Newton Notepad was not really the handwriting recognition, it was the idea of a free-form notetaking environment in which one can fluidly edit and mix multiple kinds of information (recognized text, reflowable ink text, recognized shapes and sketch ink). The best part was the set of editing gestures that let one use a stylus alone - no buttons! - to fluidly move things around, copy, cut, paste, insert and delete. My biggest disappointment when I saw BillG's COMDEX keynote was when I saw him pop up an edit menu to copy some text - that told me either he still doesn't get it or wasn't willing to tread too closely to Apple's IP.
On the other hand, the part I LOVED in the early Tablet PC demo was that the OS apparently keeps around a set of recognition guesses in the ink text structure so you can do an application level "find" command and find specified strings within a block of handwritten ink text. That was cool. Also I liked the additions of "circled" and "yellow highlighted" text attributes that look natural and reflow cleanly, and I liked the ability to add editing notations in the margins that point to a specific text section.
Does Inkwell include support for editing gestures (such as "scrub" to delete a region) and ink text?
don't get it. The Newton was a piece of crud that failed because the technology was crap. Doonesbury and Scott Adams were not being unfair in their cartoons,
Gary Trudeau had never used a Newton before doing the comic which he intended to make fun of PDAs in general rather than specifically the Newton. Trudeau was so favorably impressed with the Newton MP120 once he got a chance to use one that he drew this panel to be used as an easter egg in the Newton 2.0 ROMs.
The 2.0 Newton had awesome technology, but it was ahead of its time - nobody really knew what a PDA was for at the time. The MessagePad 2000 was great but cost over $1000 and was the size and weight of a small brick.
Most engineering is incremental development rather than a paradigm shift.
This is true. Microsoft has done some excellent work incrementally improving the Aha! InkWriter technology they bought a decade ago and moving some of its features into the OS. And I hope they keep at it, because there's a lot of improvement still to be made.
Here's a brief review of Bill's talk at Comdex 2000 the last time he made a big deal of Tablet PCs.
Microsoft is allowing people to use digital ink as a first class citizen in the computing world. It's a whole new way of looking at computing.
Bill Gates rolls out the "Tablet PC" concept every few years at his CES presentations, and it's always been a minor reinvention of the Apple Newton presented as if Microsoft had thought of it on their own. Reflowable "ink text" could be used almost everywhere on the Newton that you could use printed text. There are a few fun new features in Tablet PC but nothing I've seen justifies the "whole new way of looking at computing" rhetoric. However, even if the core ideas aren't original, they are still important. I'm glad somebody with deep pockets is reinventing the Newton Notepad concept because it was a really great way to take notes and Apple seems to have abandoned the technology.
Oh, and about that electromagnetic sensor: Early researchers in pen computing noticed that when peaple write on a large pad of paper they tend to rest the heel of their hand on it. This interferes with accurate touch-screen input and is why the AT&T Eo and the tablet-sized prototype Newton called "Bic" and other early attempts at large-screen recognition used electromagnetic input.
If you're really interested in this stuff I recommend you check out the Benson book. Fully private and competitive fire companies do exist and work quite well in several parts of the country. I'm not saying that tax-funded services are particularly bad, just that they aren't particularly necessary. So - getting back on topic - the Free State Project simply needn't worry about this.
The fire department is not, and in my opinion should not, going to pause to consult their client list when you yell "Fire!"
One thing they actually have been known to do is give registered customers a medallion to mount on the outside of the house. So houses with a green metal placard might belong to one agency while houses with a red one belong to a different agency, and anybody can figure that out without "consulting a client list". The number to call to get the appropriate agency is on the medallion and also on magnets or telephone stickers. In the days before GPS/mapquest/whatever, the medalion numbers were also used to help the fire department unambiguously find the right house.
As for your concern that poor neighborhoods would be allowed to burn, that's far more of a problem with city-funded services. In a private system people tend to at least get what they pay for, whereas in a public system poor communities often pay taxes to support fire (and police!) services that are unresponsive to their needs.
Your argument seems to be that pretty much everyone is going to pay, so the only effect I can see of not making it a tax is that the unscrupulous, and the stupid don't pay, and those that can't pay burn.
The other effect of not making it a tax is that the vital element of potential competition is introduced. If the local fire department gets to be too expensive, any neighborhood is free to contract with a different firm or start one themseves or self-insure. People who have an unusually low fire risk for whatever reason can opt out as well.
The existence of competitive pressure will serve to improve service and drive down costs, just as it does in every other industry.
You seem to be assuming that tax-paid services are free. If competition drives down the price of service by half, the community as a whole will be able to afford more and better fire protection in the free market than they can with political provision.
If you don't have money, it's a fair bet you don't own your home free and clear - some bank loaned you some money to buy it. That bank requires as a condition of the loan that you maintain insurance. The insurance company knows it will save money if you subsribe to fire prevention services, so they require you to either subscribe or post a bond if you choose to opt out. Or they raise your rates.
So this notion of people being unable to pay for private fire prevention is a non-starter. In practice, it's not an issue.
Fires need to be put out lest they spread.
Right, so if you make it clear you refuse to pay for the service under any circumstances the department might put the fire in your yard out for free to protect the house next door. Or they might not, at their option. You want to risk it? Especially given that in most cases subscribing saves you more money than it costs and is generally bundled with insurance such that it's difficult not to buy it?
Totally private fire departments tend to charge a subscription fee which is often bundled with homeowner's insurance; the insurance policy required by your lender gives a discount for that. If you don't subscribe in advance and they need to come put out your fire your insurance gets billed for the actual cost, which can be pretty substantial.
Volunteer fire departments generally pay for equipment with fundraisers. Bake sales, charity auctions, that sort of thing.
Private fire departments tend to provide better service at lower cost than public ones. For details of how private provision of fire prevention services (and police protection services, and many other sorts of service) works in practice, I recommend The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State by Bruce Benson.
Normally you'd need to wash [extended-wear contacts] once a week or two, but apparently my eyes stay pretty clean and I keep them in the whole month, after which I switch to a new pair.
You are exactly the sort of person who is at the greatest risk for damage. It's not a particularly huge risk you're taking, it's just bigger than the risk of LASIK problems. Or was at the time I was considering the operation.
And just three weeks ago they noticed a scrape in my right eye.
Um, yeah. The people who get in trouble tend to wear extended lenses "too long" (whatever that means) and don't get checkups as often as you. Scratches are bad, and contacts can (a) cause scratches, and (b) interfere with the healing process. But as with LASIK, the odds are on your side. 99% of extended-wear users probably don't have any problems worse than yours.
Personally, I think that if there is any chance at all that a cosmetic surgery will prevent me from doing serious computer work, then the cosmetic surgery is not worth it.
If you wear contact lenses, there is a small chance you may permanently screw up your eyesight due to a scratched and/or infected cornea. The risks of serious negative outcome associated with LASIK are smaller than the normal risks associated with contact lenses, so people who wear contacts now are probably on net helping their odds of keeping decent eyesight if they get LASIK.
Me? I got LASIK a few years ago. Best $4400 I ever spent. The main caveat I might add is that for a computer geek sometime it sucks to have "normal" vision. Back when I was nearsighted it was possible for me to read ultra-fine print. I could print program listings 8 or 16 pages to one side of a laser-printed page and still read it. I could squint a bit and easily make out individual pixels on my Newton or CRT monitor - often useful when doing graphic work.
Now, my vision is just normal. Meaning I no longer need glasses to read stuff 20 feet away, but the flip side is I can't take them off to read stuff 2 inches away. Sometimes I miss that ability.
The example also shows Itunes on the desktop. Although it's not on top, it's not visually obvious that it's currently in background.
I also noticed in the screenshot the iTunes window is tiny and shows just the bare essentials rather than displaying the library. My biggest UI complaint with iTunes has always been that the window is too big and can't be reduced to a small enough size that it doesn't dominate the display. So can anybody tell me how to get the view of iTunes that appears in this screenshot? Is there some really-well-hidden UI element to do that, or is it a third-party hack?
If the alternate frames were all black and all white you'd easily see the flashing. That's why the dithering part is required, to break up the patterns a bit, so your brain can't see the solid patterns being painted to the screen.
for a slow lcd refresh, I'm sure this would bother me.
It's the slow decay rate that makes the technique possible. On many LCDs if you paint a color it fades out slowly rather than instantly. The slower this decay rate is relative to the refresh rate, the more color range you should be able to sneak in with this sort of technique. Hmm, I should go do some experiments to see how well this works on current Palm hardware...
So by your logic, we can call any B&W display (meaning truly 1 bit) greyscale because I can dither or flash them on and off?
If you can get decent greyscale out of it, why not? What matters is the system has sufficient power to display a decent greyscale and the manufacturer provides an API whereby application developers can use it. If developers can call an API to draw a 50% grey pixel at location (x,y) and that's what happens, I call that a device with a greyscale screen. Regardless of what voodoo the OS is doing to get that effect out of the hardware.
(In the case of my Newton application the hires mode I created was hard on the battery and only worked really well in a small window, but with a faster CPU and support from the manufacturer, we could easily have called it a device with a greyscale display.)
The hardware can only display 12-bit (4096) color, so they should just advertise it as such.
What you can address at the hardware level is not the last word on the subject. Or should I have ignored what users saw on their screen and advertised Time Domain Grey as displaying 1-bit color?:-)
If you have a 1 bit display (just black and white), if you make every other pixel black, and every other pixel white, it will give the appearance of being gray (especially at higher resolutions). That is what dithering is. This is opposed to showing a pixel that is actually gray (half black half white, that is, each sub pixel [red, blue, green] on equal intensity, at half intensity).
So far so good. But suppose you generate TWO complementary frames of dithered 50% grey. In one frame the first pixel is white, in the other it is black. If "O" is white and "X" is black your two frames look like this:
FRAME #1:
OXOX
XOXO
OXOX
FRAME #2:
XOXO
OXOX
XOXO
Now, alternate displaying frames #1 and #2 in rapid succession on an LCD display with a slow decay rate. The resulting image looks like this:
COMBINED FRAME:
****
****
****
Where "*" looks like a pixel that is 50% grey. Not dithered grey, real grey.
LCDs have a slow refresh rate so it is possible to display more colors by turning the pixels on and off at a high rate. You need to combine this technique with dithering to avoid the appearance of flicker, so the fact that they mention dithering is NOT a cop-out. It doesn't mean they aren't displaying 58,000 possible color values with 1-pixel resolution.
(I used the same technique to get 5-level greyscale on a 1-bit (black & white) Newton in a demo program called Time Domain Grey.)
I had the argument about the lightbulb with my physics teacher. I lost. Do some research. Cheap efficient lightbulbs that last for decades aren't hard to produce.
Yes, but bright efficient lightbulbs that last for decades are. Check out this link to the nightlight that's been burning since 1901. The secret to that light's longevity is that it is - like so many/. posters - a dim bulb.:-)
Re:What do you expect?
on
Newton Won't Die
·
· Score: 2, Informative
At Newton OS 2, Apple dumped the then fairly buggy CalliGrapher, and used their own recognizers that were better...
Close but not quite. By the time of NewtonOS 2.0 and 2.1 the Apple handwriting recognition technology known as "Rossetta" was awesome at recognizing printed writing and was rapidly improving at cursive but wasn't quite good enough early enough to entirely replace CalliGrapher. So they left a semi-decent version of Calligrapher in the ROM too. If you told the Newton you write mostly "printed, disconnected" text, you are using Rossetta. But if you have it configured to allow cursive recognition, you are using CalliGrapher.
(I was the SQA engineer for Newton's recognition group at the time.)
Side note: the original Newton's poor out-of -the-box HWR probably wasn't the fault of Paragraph's recognizer; it was mostly due to a bad preference setting and a memory issue. Simply turning off dictionary-only mode made the Original MessagePad work much better.
Maybe, just maybe, because Perl is a fun language to program in???
It was a joke. "Why are you so popular?" is
the sort of softball question a fawning jounalist might ask an aspiring politician. The implication is that/. isn't the place to look for hard-hitting Larry Wall questions. He's one of us, a nerd's nerd.
Actually, the thing that got me was that it got my "bad" traits as well - ie/ I often lose the big picture by concentrating on the details:)
Everybody does that. People have limited bandwidth, and projects tend to have too many details to take it all in at once. The main variant is individual interpretations of what "often" means.
Has anybody stopped to consider that Palm might be correct in their revised claim of how many colors they can display?
Back in 1996, my first publically-released program for the Apple Newton was a little demo app called "Time Domain Grey" that could display greyscale pictures on a Newton with a black-and-white screen. The Newton had a 2-color display, but if you launched my program you could see a picture using 5 clean greyscale shades. The shades used were:
(1) 0% black aka "white"
(2) 25% black
(3) 50% black
(4) 75% black
(5) 100% black
My composite picture was composed of four carefully-dithered-to-black-and-white images which my program cycled though at high speed. A 25% black pixel would be set in only one of the four frames; a 50% black pixel would be set in two of them, and so on. Since the screen had a pretty slow decay rate, the illusion worked.
Had I provided an API, I could have let application writers display arbitrary 5-color images on a 2-bit display. Or on a device with a faster refresh ability (but still a slow decay rate) I could have used ten frames or twenty or a hundred to display any arbitrary number of shades on that 2-color display.
Palm claims to be using a similar method to multiply the available shades on the m130. They cite "frame-rate control and dithering techniques", which is exactly what I used. You start with a high-res image, dither it into several frames that individually fit in the color space of your underlying hardware, cycle through those frames at an appropriate rate, and you've got a hi-res video mode with a composite color space that exceeds the single-frame color space.
In conclusion: The fact that the hardware has a 12-bit display is simply not sufficient to establish that they can't show their advertised 58,621 color combinations or more, so we should probably stop jumping to conclusions about it.
Slashdot Mirror
This might help.
The fact that the gun crowd wants to look at the rate of violent crime, rather than the per capita rate of gun deaths makes me wonder if they are trying to divert attention away from a statistic that doesn't support their position.
It's worth noting that most of the per capita rate of gun deaths in the US is accounted for by suicides. If risk of being killed by somebody else is what most concerns you, that's a much smaller number than the overall rate of gun deaths.
Answer: It's false. You're more likely to be a victim of a violent crime in the UK today than in the US. That wasn't the case 20 years ago, but it is now. "Crime rates as measured in victim surveys are all higher in England than the United States." Check it out.
--Now, that's not to say that there isn't a possibility that there is a more constructive way for the government to spend its tax revenue, but it's not like the money vanishes
So, you're saying that if government were to spend half the GDP paying people to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up again, it's not a waste of resources?
On the contrary - unless you can point to specific benefits of this spending it is like the money vanishes. The cost of paying those employees isn't their salaries, it's that they didn't do anything else productive with their time because they were too busy digging holes (or firing things into space). All those man-years of labor are something you can only use once, and we wasted it. The cost of government is what it spends, not what it takes from us in taxes - and spending money without any offsetting benefit is always a bad thing.
Again, nonsense. Any company that has at least one profitable product can choose to pour money into development of other products. Oracle can spend money on unsuccessful products for quite a while if it so desires, as can Apple and Sun and IBM and AT&T.
Every company can afford a few unproductive investments, and some can afford many. A more charitable term for "pouring money down products that are not successful" is investment in Research and Development .
Microsoft's main distinction is being somewhat more successful in its core business than many, hence somewhat more able to lose money. But: (a) it's not a unique position, and (b) Most such investment in pro-consumer - competition between vast money-losing entities just means we get better products developed sooner than they otherwise would have been. This is something to be thankful for, not something to bemoan.
Nonsense. Other companies can compete if they are sufficiently good at meeting customer needs. Intuit's Quicken succeeded despite massive funding poured into umpteen versions of Microsoft Money and AOL succeeded despite massive funding of MSN as a direct competitor. The pockets are deep, but not infinite.
On the other hand, the part I LOVED in the early Tablet PC demo was that the OS apparently keeps around a set of recognition guesses in the ink text structure so you can do an application level "find" command and find specified strings within a block of handwritten ink text. That was cool. Also I liked the additions of "circled" and "yellow highlighted" text attributes that look natural and reflow cleanly, and I liked the ability to add editing notations in the margins that point to a specific text section.
Does Inkwell include support for editing gestures (such as "scrub" to delete a region) and ink text?
Gary Trudeau had never used a Newton before doing the comic which he intended to make fun of PDAs in general rather than specifically the Newton. Trudeau was so favorably impressed with the Newton MP120 once he got a chance to use one that he drew this panel to be used as an easter egg in the Newton 2.0 ROMs.
The 2.0 Newton had awesome technology, but it was ahead of its time - nobody really knew what a PDA was for at the time. The MessagePad 2000 was great but cost over $1000 and was the size and weight of a small brick.
Most engineering is incremental development rather than a paradigm shift.
This is true. Microsoft has done some excellent work incrementally improving the Aha! InkWriter technology they bought a decade ago and moving some of its features into the OS. And I hope they keep at it, because there's a lot of improvement still to be made.
Here's a brief review of Bill's talk at Comdex 2000 the last time he made a big deal of Tablet PCs.
Bill Gates rolls out the "Tablet PC" concept every few years at his CES presentations, and it's always been a minor reinvention of the Apple Newton presented as if Microsoft had thought of it on their own. Reflowable "ink text" could be used almost everywhere on the Newton that you could use printed text. There are a few fun new features in Tablet PC but nothing I've seen justifies the "whole new way of looking at computing" rhetoric. However, even if the core ideas aren't original, they are still important. I'm glad somebody with deep pockets is reinventing the Newton Notepad concept because it was a really great way to take notes and Apple seems to have abandoned the technology.
Oh, and about that electromagnetic sensor: Early researchers in pen computing noticed that when peaple write on a large pad of paper they tend to rest the heel of their hand on it. This interferes with accurate touch-screen input and is why the AT&T Eo and the tablet-sized prototype Newton called "Bic" and other early attempts at large-screen recognition used electromagnetic input.
The fire department is not, and in my opinion should not, going to pause to consult their client list when you yell "Fire!"
One thing they actually have been known to do is give registered customers a medallion to mount on the outside of the house. So houses with a green metal placard might belong to one agency while houses with a red one belong to a different agency, and anybody can figure that out without "consulting a client list". The number to call to get the appropriate agency is on the medallion and also on magnets or telephone stickers. In the days before GPS/mapquest/whatever, the medalion numbers were also used to help the fire department unambiguously find the right house.
As for your concern that poor neighborhoods would be allowed to burn, that's far more of a problem with city-funded services. In a private system people tend to at least get what they pay for, whereas in a public system poor communities often pay taxes to support fire (and police!) services that are unresponsive to their needs.
The other effect of not making it a tax is that the vital element of potential competition is introduced. If the local fire department gets to be too expensive, any neighborhood is free to contract with a different firm or start one themseves or self-insure. People who have an unusually low fire risk for whatever reason can opt out as well.
The existence of competitive pressure will serve to improve service and drive down costs, just as it does in every other industry.
You seem to be assuming that tax-paid services are free. If competition drives down the price of service by half, the community as a whole will be able to afford more and better fire protection in the free market than they can with political provision.
If you don't have money, it's a fair bet you don't own your home free and clear - some bank loaned you some money to buy it. That bank requires as a condition of the loan that you maintain insurance. The insurance company knows it will save money if you subsribe to fire prevention services, so they require you to either subscribe or post a bond if you choose to opt out. Or they raise your rates.
So this notion of people being unable to pay for private fire prevention is a non-starter. In practice, it's not an issue.
Fires need to be put out lest they spread.
Right, so if you make it clear you refuse to pay for the service under any circumstances the department might put the fire in your yard out for free to protect the house next door. Or they might not, at their option. You want to risk it? Especially given that in most cases subscribing saves you more money than it costs and is generally bundled with insurance such that it's difficult not to buy it?
Totally private fire departments tend to charge a subscription fee which is often bundled with homeowner's insurance; the insurance policy required by your lender gives a discount for that. If you don't subscribe in advance and they need to come put out your fire your insurance gets billed for the actual cost, which can be pretty substantial.
Volunteer fire departments generally pay for equipment with fundraisers. Bake sales, charity auctions, that sort of thing.
Private fire departments tend to provide better service at lower cost than public ones. For details of how private provision of fire prevention services (and police protection services, and many other sorts of service) works in practice, I recommend The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State by Bruce Benson.
You are exactly the sort of person who is at the greatest risk for damage. It's not a particularly huge risk you're taking, it's just bigger than the risk of LASIK problems. Or was at the time I was considering the operation.
And just three weeks ago they noticed a scrape in my right eye.
Um, yeah. The people who get in trouble tend to wear extended lenses "too long" (whatever that means) and don't get checkups as often as you. Scratches are bad, and contacts can (a) cause scratches, and (b) interfere with the healing process. But as with LASIK, the odds are on your side. 99% of extended-wear users probably don't have any problems worse than yours.
If you wear contact lenses, there is a small chance you may permanently screw up your eyesight due to a scratched and/or infected cornea. The risks of serious negative outcome associated with LASIK are smaller than the normal risks associated with contact lenses, so people who wear contacts now are probably on net helping their odds of keeping decent eyesight if they get LASIK.
Me? I got LASIK a few years ago. Best $4400 I ever spent. The main caveat I might add is that for a computer geek sometime it sucks to have "normal" vision. Back when I was nearsighted it was possible for me to read ultra-fine print. I could print program listings 8 or 16 pages to one side of a laser-printed page and still read it. I could squint a bit and easily make out individual pixels on my Newton or CRT monitor - often useful when doing graphic work.
Now, my vision is just normal. Meaning I no longer need glasses to read stuff 20 feet away, but the flip side is I can't take them off to read stuff 2 inches away. Sometimes I miss that ability.
I also noticed in the screenshot the iTunes window is tiny and shows just the bare essentials rather than displaying the library. My biggest UI complaint with iTunes has always been that the window is too big and can't be reduced to a small enough size that it doesn't dominate the display. So can anybody tell me how to get the view of iTunes that appears in this screenshot? Is there some really-well-hidden UI element to do that, or is it a third-party hack?
And I miss windowshading.
If the alternate frames were all black and all white you'd easily see the flashing. That's why the dithering part is required, to break up the patterns a bit, so your brain can't see the solid patterns being painted to the screen.
for a slow lcd refresh, I'm sure this would bother me.
It's the slow decay rate that makes the technique possible. On many LCDs if you paint a color it fades out slowly rather than instantly. The slower this decay rate is relative to the refresh rate, the more color range you should be able to sneak in with this sort of technique. Hmm, I should go do some experiments to see how well this works on current Palm hardware...
If you can get decent greyscale out of it, why not? What matters is the system has sufficient power to display a decent greyscale and the manufacturer provides an API whereby application developers can use it. If developers can call an API to draw a 50% grey pixel at location (x,y) and that's what happens, I call that a device with a greyscale screen. Regardless of what voodoo the OS is doing to get that effect out of the hardware.
(In the case of my Newton application the hires mode I created was hard on the battery and only worked really well in a small window, but with a faster CPU and support from the manufacturer, we could easily have called it a device with a greyscale display.)
The hardware can only display 12-bit (4096) color, so they should just advertise it as such.
What you can address at the hardware level is not the last word on the subject. Or should I have ignored what users saw on their screen and advertised Time Domain Grey as displaying 1-bit color? :-)
So far so good. But suppose you generate TWO complementary frames of dithered 50% grey. In one frame the first pixel is white, in the other it is black. If "O" is white and "X" is black your two frames look like this:
FRAME #1:
OXOX
XOXO
OXOX
FRAME #2:
XOXO
OXOX
XOXO
Now, alternate displaying frames #1 and #2 in rapid succession on an LCD display with a slow decay rate. The resulting image looks like this:
COMBINED FRAME:
****
****
****
Where "*" looks like a pixel that is 50% grey. Not dithered grey, real grey.
(I used the same technique to get 5-level greyscale on a 1-bit (black & white) Newton in a demo program called Time Domain Grey.)
Yes, but bright efficient lightbulbs that last for decades are. Check out this link to the nightlight that's been burning since 1901. The secret to that light's longevity is that it is - like so many /. posters - a dim bulb. :-)
Close but not quite. By the time of NewtonOS 2.0 and 2.1 the Apple handwriting recognition technology known as "Rossetta" was awesome at recognizing printed writing and was rapidly improving at cursive but wasn't quite good enough early enough to entirely replace CalliGrapher. So they left a semi-decent version of Calligrapher in the ROM too. If you told the Newton you write mostly "printed, disconnected" text, you are using Rossetta. But if you have it configured to allow cursive recognition, you are using CalliGrapher.
(I was the SQA engineer for Newton's recognition group at the time.)
Side note: the original Newton's poor out-of -the-box HWR probably wasn't the fault of Paragraph's recognizer; it was mostly due to a bad preference setting and a memory issue. Simply turning off dictionary-only mode made the Original MessagePad work much better.
It was a joke. "Why are you so popular?" is the sort of softball question a fawning jounalist might ask an aspiring politician. The implication is that /. isn't the place to look for hard-hitting Larry Wall questions. He's one of us, a nerd's nerd.
Everybody does that. People have limited bandwidth, and projects tend to have too many details to take it all in at once. The main variant is individual interpretations of what "often" means.
Back in 1996, my first publically-released program for the Apple Newton was a little demo app called "Time Domain Grey" that could display greyscale pictures on a Newton with a black-and-white screen. The Newton had a 2-color display, but if you launched my program you could see a picture using 5 clean greyscale shades. The shades used were:
(1) 0% black aka "white"
(2) 25% black
(3) 50% black
(4) 75% black
(5) 100% black
My composite picture was composed of four carefully-dithered-to-black-and-white images which my program cycled though at high speed. A 25% black pixel would be set in only one of the four frames; a 50% black pixel would be set in two of them, and so on. Since the screen had a pretty slow decay rate, the illusion worked.
Had I provided an API, I could have let application writers display arbitrary 5-color images on a 2-bit display. Or on a device with a faster refresh ability (but still a slow decay rate) I could have used ten frames or twenty or a hundred to display any arbitrary number of shades on that 2-color display.
Palm claims to be using a similar method to multiply the available shades on the m130. They cite "frame-rate control and dithering techniques", which is exactly what I used. You start with a high-res image, dither it into several frames that individually fit in the color space of your underlying hardware, cycle through those frames at an appropriate rate, and you've got a hi-res video mode with a composite color space that exceeds the single-frame color space.
In conclusion: The fact that the hardware has a 12-bit display is simply not sufficient to establish that they can't show their advertised 58,621 color combinations or more, so we should probably stop jumping to conclusions about it.