Heisenburg theorized that nothing can be measured with perfect accuracy, therefore any two measurements will have different results.. however, the overall accuracy will be dependant upon the instrument (and as a result of the theory, even an infinitely accurate instrument will have slight inaccuracies) Shchroedinger created the cat parable to illustrate superposition, the idea that something exists in all possible states until its state is observed (ie. the cat was both dead and alive).
Although neither of those two things really have much to do with a webpage, I would assume that a "Heisenburg page" would be one where, upon successive views, could have some variation, although at an extremely small level, and given that humans are imperfect, the variation would probably not be enough for us to detect..
A "Schroedinger page" would be a page that would contain all possible information, until you viewed it and determined it's state.
My vote is that the correct page would the Chaos Theory page.
And that is how to suck all of the fun out of a simple joke.
There are secrets that should always be secrets, namely military information on weapons, etc. I wouldn't want just anyone getting some of that information.
However, secrets should be maintained by a check/balances method, more so than it is now. Some group of people should constantly be deciding if it should in fact be secret or not, since in reality all that information is really the property of the american people. The problem right now is, I don't trust the people who decide if something should be secret or not.
The review should be conducted by unbiased, hard-nosed, "my feelings on the matter be damned" individuals, and lots of them. Compartmentalize information even among those people so that no single person is exposed to all the secrets. Only some.. but have enough that any personal slant is negated.
Yes, that sounds like the way things are supposed to be done now, but the problem is it isn't being done that way. Kind of related to this idea is that, in my opinion, there should be more people on the Supreme Court to dilute personal opinion biases, and they should have term limits so that they don't rule like kings. They are just supposed to judge. "Yes, you can do that. No, you can't do that. UNLESS you change the constitution."
And if we revamp anything, it should be to push for the "unwritten" rights afforded by the contstitution to finally be written.
I consisder my father the grandfather of case modding. Our Sinclair had a full size keyboard (I think he got it out of a Teletype or a VT 100..), a wooden case, The printer (Wow, that was impressive) and two of the 16k (?) expansion adapters hooked to some sort of homemade switching device.. I think he worked out how to switch the adapters programatically, but I wasn't old enough to be able to comprehend how that worked. He also made this DAC the size of a toaster oven to allow him to drive motors and other gizmos with the Sinclair, including a modified Radio Shack "Armitron" and some large wheels to make a simple robot that ran on motorcycle batteries. The case-mod part comes from the fact that the DAC was smoked lucite on one side with 100s of LEDs and 7 segment displays that means something to him, probably memory states and registers or something, but to me it was just "Bling" and fun as hell to watch. I always begged him to make it beep...
The first computer that was specificly set aside as "mine" was a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 hooked to a teletype for a printer.. I was 4 or 5. I could only do a 10 PRINT "Hello" 20 GOTO 10 but that would entertain me for hours making different patterns and things. I managed to get it onto my shell account at a local ISP once at 300 baud via accoustic coupling, and used the teletype for output. IRC actually worked fairly well, but used a lot of paper.. but man, it felt like I was tapped into NORAD:) tick tick tick ti-ti-tick tick slam tick ti-ti-tick-ti tick...
No, no, maybe I mispoke, I think we agree.. What I was saying is that there is more security in a standard app communicating with my hard drive than in an "app" that is browser based communicating with an unknown system over a public network like the internet. There is far less of a chance of "middlemen" in my IDE cable. If I were paranoid about the first instance, I can just unplug the machine from network access, and lock it down from local access. (Assuming no one has already installed some sort of keylogger).
Applications built through the browser, like AJAX, do a lot of things behind the scenes that can be tricky to monitor, just like the Firefox ping can be transparent to the user. I was implying that these sorts of applications are more difficult to secure than the above "closed" machine "by orders of magnitude" because they rely on the network.. you can't simply turn off the connnection. At the very least you would have to do some traffic monitoring/filtering, and encryption if you want to stop man in the middle capture.
In the example given, there was a comparison between AJAX and an app run off the local harddrive. To me, in terms of security, those are wildly different animals because the hard drive only app at least offers me easy localization.
Communication between an application and my hard drive should not result in data leaving my immediate "control zone" (or at least one would hope). That same sort of activity occuring over a public network to an unknown destination is more insecure by orders of magnitude.
Your point is valid that AJAX functionality poses many of the same issues as this Firefox "feature", but I politely refute your hypothetical example.
I find it really amusing that people put so much time and effort into nit-picking posts for spelling and grammar mistakes. The primary language of this site, after all, is English. It takes only a cursory view of Shakespeare or Chaucer or other historical prose to realize that spelling and grammar normalization in English is a relatively new 'feature' compared to its incorporation in other languages.
On top of that, a language originating on an island in Western Europe is now the predominant language on several continents in different hemispheres (as well as in it's non-trivial area of origin). That is a lot of land over which a lot of changes can evolve. New words will appear and other words will deprecate as the language evolves.
Whether you like it or not, eventually the language will evolve out redundancy. One immediate, clear area of redundancy is the amount of homophones. If you look at many older, time-worn languages, you will find that they often will use a single sound to represent many different ideas or things which must be determined by the context. This is then carried over into informal written language. Many languages also have both a strictly formal and informal version, written and spoken.
There is no real need to have two/too/to when to will suffice. This goes as well for your/you're/yore, its/it's and many of the other "common mistakes" that are so widely ballyhooed in the forums.
In conclusion, no one reads your post and thinks to themselves "Wow! That is some excellent grammar, and not one homophone mishap or vowel transposition. This chap must be from Oxford." You do not win friends or inspire people by achieving 100% correct comma usage. No one will remember you as "The poster who ingeniously displays semi-colon dexterity". We do judge people by their ability to communicate, however, the norm is to accept the minimal acceptable standard ("Can I clearly understand it?") and lay judgment on those who clearly fall below ("3R337 5P3A|"). If you find that you truly cannot accept or understand a person because of a single misuse of one of the variants of "to", then I suggest you would do well to spend time with a language therapist.
Slashdot is an informal exchange, not a doctoral thesis or job application.
- From a dyslexic former elementary English teacher who, in informal settings, could care less about spelling and grammar.
The freakish thing about this, is that if it is indeed a backdoor, it an odd way to go about it. You can't force someone to try to view a WMF. What would its purpose be? You can't use it to get into the exact box you want to, just into a random box that perhaps picks up your WMF from a webpage, or displayed in an application.
Maybe I didn't catch it, but I RTFA and I didn't see the specific numbers of 10,000 severs or "hundreds" or admins mentioned. IIRC, it said they use less than a 100 admins, and several thousand severs, or language such as that.
The article says some of these stars have been quite visible for a long time.. I think what you are missing is that the new telescope/camera allowed them to determine approximate distances of the stars in question, which revealed that these stars were clumped together, not just far away and within our own galactic plane. In essence, they were able to simulate taking one giant step to the left (or right, doesn't matter) and see how the view would change. This is why they described it as being like 3D.. Because of the limited information available to the naked eye on distance differences between stars, it appears to be a flat, 2 dimensional plane of lighter and darker stars all of similar distance. When they added the distance information, suddenly, they were able to make out the characteristics of the dwarf galaxy.
Imagine looking through one eye at a beach ball a few meters away, and a super-ball held close enough to you that both balls appeared to be the same size. If you didn't have visual cues like shading and hilights, and you only are using one eye and don't move, you would be unable to tell which was actually farther away and which was closer. However, if you took a step to the side, moving your point of view just a bit, you would very easily be able to figure out the relative distance of the objects by the different rates at which they appear to move. Closer objects appear to move more from your perspective. (I say use one eye because even though we use two to look at the night sky, a few inches of seperation from each view is meaningless over several light years, while at a few inches it is quite significant.)
Sort of how the Super Nintendo added some depth to side scrolling video games by allowing the background to move at a slightly different rate than the foreground.
Okay, I will concede.. somewhat common, but in finite supply, and a little bit of a 'historical' piece of kit.. as they die out there will be fewer and fewer..
Maybe I'm still cranky that I sold someone a cherry VW Beetle I restored and they made it into a dune buggy... lol
Like I said, I *may* be a purist:)
That said, you've certainly got a unique iPod. An idea for you: Maybe you could mod in a usb port into the can so you could sync it without opening it (I didn't see if that was possible in the Flickr set)
"One nice feature that it does have is a small, exempt-quantity uranium check source on the side of the case to verify function." - from The Health Physics Society
One 700 I've got measures 30 mr/hr from the test source at 2 inches (.3 on the x100 setting) and the other pegs the meter on x100. Both read the same. One originated at Seabrook Nuclear power plant, which I acquired in 1996 or so and the last calibration date on it is sometime in the late 80s, and the other was calibrated for the radiological department of a (somewhat) local hospital in 2002 (IIRC).
They have been used primarily on natural samples of minerals collected in the White Mountains. My point wasn't that the source is very strong, just that even a little bit of radioactive dust is something to avoid if you can help it!
Maybe I'm a purist, but I don't see the point in destroying a working CDV-700 Geiger to simply put an iPod inside. There is a lot of room in there if you move the batteries around, it would be possible to do this and keep it functioning.
Even scarier: That thing still has a live test source on the side of it (or it should). Scarier than that, if he removed the test source, what did he do with it!? I wonder if he even know there was radioactivity there, and it was probably old, decrepid, and dust from it poorly contained.. I think those things had a bit of Cesium or Uranium on the side. I know mine still pegs the meter.. (haven't used it in a while and it was last calibrated a few years before that so I don't remember the exact mr/hr) Not the strongest source in the world but generally I think it is good practice to avoid messing with radioactive substances that are poorly contained no matter their strength.
If the counter still worked, it might be neat.. but then, why repaint it so that no one knows what it is? That CD Yellow and characteristic shape is pretty recognizable to anyone familiar with the civil defense counters, and generally the 700 is the most desireable because it is the most sensitive (the other models were used to measure background radiation).
I used to have fun taking mine to flea markets and "Scanning" over everyones tables with a clip-board in hand, making "notes". Probably get me arrested these days, but funny as hell then:)
Something inside me says it will be MacBook (iBook) MacBook Pro (PowerBook) and then Mac (iMac) and MacPro (PowerMac).
Imagine the coming superbowl, or 4/1/2006.. "Introducing.. The Macintosh."
(smash big brother)
The answer is simple: Yonah is out, so they put it into the laptop where it would do most good, and the lower end desktop.
Conroe will drop soon, and fill in the blanks. Wouldn't make sense to make everything Yonah based just to change in a couple of months.
I seriously dissapointed that Kaleidescope didn't see daylight today, however.
Unlink submitters names. It adds nothing to either the article or the conversation, and solves this problem. People will submit without their "Reward".. and really, why do you want to reward people by using slashdot's google-power to bolster bad webpages? If I submit a good article will you let me hawk herbal viagra on the main page? What does that say about slashdot in return? It doesn't make sense, and it really is a very simple issue. Just remove them.
If you tend to forget to look away, get up and take a break, look up workrave (windows and linux) which is basicly a timer you can set to remind yourself to take a 30 second eye break. Its meant to prevent RSI, but you could use it for vision ( and the RSI bits might not be bad for you either ).
Reduce the brightness as much as possible. If you are in XP on a laptop, turn on ClearType. dont' use such a high res you have to strain to see. Soft backlighting (gradients to a contrasting background) are best. Sit with the top of the screen about dead level with the top of your head (you may have to get creative with a laptop).. you weren't designed to stare into your lap for 15 hours a day.
If your programming, honestly, get more sleep. You will be much more effective in the less time you spend. Sleep deprivation has been proven to add up to being equivelent to being legally drunk after a while. (I wish I had a link to a study to back it up but I dont, have some fun with google). 8 or 9 hours sleep, 8 or 9 on the PC and put the thing down.
If your up playing WoW, and your losing sleep because of it, then you've got a problem, and no amount of ergonomics is going to fix it. Lots of us here in the forum work with computers professionally every day, all day, and we've all pretty much said go outside more:) workrave is a good tool to remind yourself to get up and walk around a bit every hour or so.
That said, I personally have astigmatism in both eyes (.5 and.75) and at work I use glare reducing weak negative magnification lenses for work, with the brightness as low as I can get it and high contrast, 75Hz refresh rate, and a 21" monitor, 1600x1200 res. - Low saturation colors on the desktop, large icons.
Slashdot Mirror
Heisenburg theorized that nothing can be measured with perfect accuracy, therefore any two measurements will have different results.. however, the overall accuracy will be dependant upon the instrument (and as a result of the theory, even an infinitely accurate instrument will have slight inaccuracies) Shchroedinger created the cat parable to illustrate superposition, the idea that something exists in all possible states until its state is observed (ie. the cat was both dead and alive).
Although neither of those two things really have much to do with a webpage, I would assume that a "Heisenburg page" would be one where, upon successive views, could have some variation, although at an extremely small level, and given that humans are imperfect, the variation would probably not be enough for us to detect..
A "Schroedinger page" would be a page that would contain all possible information, until you viewed it and determined it's state.
My vote is that the correct page would the Chaos Theory page.
And that is how to suck all of the fun out of a simple joke.
There are secrets that should always be secrets, namely military information on weapons, etc. I wouldn't want just anyone getting some of that information.
However, secrets should be maintained by a check/balances method, more so than it is now. Some group of people should constantly be deciding if it should in fact be secret or not, since in reality all that information is really the property of the american people. The problem right now is, I don't trust the people who decide if something should be secret or not.
The review should be conducted by unbiased, hard-nosed, "my feelings on the matter be damned" individuals, and lots of them. Compartmentalize information even among those people so that no single person is exposed to all the secrets. Only some.. but have enough that any personal slant is negated.
Yes, that sounds like the way things are supposed to be done now, but the problem is it isn't being done that way. Kind of related to this idea is that, in my opinion, there should be more people on the Supreme Court to dilute personal opinion biases, and they should have term limits so that they don't rule like kings. They are just supposed to judge. "Yes, you can do that. No, you can't do that. UNLESS you change the constitution."
And if we revamp anything, it should be to push for the "unwritten" rights afforded by the contstitution to finally be written.
The only Bush or his affiliates would attract attention to themselves is if they shot someone in the FACE! Oh, wait, nevermind.
no no no...
(Google's 'Main Computer' analyzing furiously and displaying nonsense on a billboard-size display in a NORAD style bunker)
GOOGLE: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of I'm feeling lucky?
I consisder my father the grandfather of case modding. Our Sinclair had a full size keyboard (I think he got it out of a Teletype or a VT 100..), a wooden case, The printer (Wow, that was impressive) and two of the 16k (?) expansion adapters hooked to some sort of homemade switching device.. I think he worked out how to switch the adapters programatically, but I wasn't old enough to be able to comprehend how that worked. He also made this DAC the size of a toaster oven to allow him to drive motors and other gizmos with the Sinclair, including a modified Radio Shack "Armitron" and some large wheels to make a simple robot that ran on motorcycle batteries. The case-mod part comes from the fact that the DAC was smoked lucite on one side with 100s of LEDs and 7 segment displays that means something to him, probably memory states and registers or something, but to me it was just "Bling" and fun as hell to watch. I always begged him to make it beep...
:) tick tick tick ti-ti-tick tick slam tick ti-ti-tick-ti tick...
The first computer that was specificly set aside as "mine" was a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 hooked to a teletype for a printer.. I was 4 or 5. I could only do a 10 PRINT "Hello" 20 GOTO 10 but that would entertain me for hours making different patterns and things. I managed to get it onto my shell account at a local ISP once at 300 baud via accoustic coupling, and used the teletype for output. IRC actually worked fairly well, but used a lot of paper.. but man, it felt like I was tapped into NORAD
.. this guy must have a bad case of Aspbergers?
That's MIND TAKING baby!
Someone please find a high-res version of this photo, that thing is GOLD.
No, no, maybe I mispoke, I think we agree.. What I was saying is that there is more security in a standard app communicating with my hard drive than in an "app" that is browser based communicating with an unknown system over a public network like the internet. There is far less of a chance of "middlemen" in my IDE cable. If I were paranoid about the first instance, I can just unplug the machine from network access, and lock it down from local access. (Assuming no one has already installed some sort of keylogger).
Applications built through the browser, like AJAX, do a lot of things behind the scenes that can be tricky to monitor, just like the Firefox ping can be transparent to the user. I was implying that these sorts of applications are more difficult to secure than the above "closed" machine "by orders of magnitude" because they rely on the network.. you can't simply turn off the connnection. At the very least you would have to do some traffic monitoring/filtering, and encryption if you want to stop man in the middle capture.
In the example given, there was a comparison between AJAX and an app run off the local harddrive. To me, in terms of security, those are wildly different animals because the hard drive only app at least offers me easy localization.
Communication between an application and my hard drive should not result in data leaving my immediate "control zone" (or at least one would hope). That same sort of activity occuring over a public network to an unknown destination is more insecure by orders of magnitude.
Your point is valid that AJAX functionality poses many of the same issues as this Firefox "feature", but I politely refute your hypothetical example.
In my opinion, people who use phrases like "that's what annoys people" usually mean "that's what annoys me."
I find it really amusing that people put so much time and effort into nit-picking posts for spelling and grammar mistakes. The primary language of this site, after all, is English. It takes only a cursory view of Shakespeare or Chaucer or other historical prose to realize that spelling and grammar normalization in English is a relatively new 'feature' compared to its incorporation in other languages.
On top of that, a language originating on an island in Western Europe is now the predominant language on several continents in different hemispheres (as well as in it's non-trivial area of origin). That is a lot of land over which a lot of changes can evolve. New words will appear and other words will deprecate as the language evolves.
Whether you like it or not, eventually the language will evolve out redundancy. One immediate, clear area of redundancy is the amount of homophones. If you look at many older, time-worn languages, you will find that they often will use a single sound to represent many different ideas or things which must be determined by the context. This is then carried over into informal written language. Many languages also have both a strictly formal and informal version, written and spoken.
There is no real need to have two/too/to when to will suffice. This goes as well for your/you're/yore, its/it's and many of the other "common mistakes" that are so widely ballyhooed in the forums.
In conclusion, no one reads your post and thinks to themselves "Wow! That is some excellent grammar, and not one homophone mishap or vowel transposition. This chap must be from Oxford." You do not win friends or inspire people by achieving 100% correct comma usage. No one will remember you as "The poster who ingeniously displays semi-colon dexterity". We do judge people by their ability to communicate, however, the norm is to accept the minimal acceptable standard ("Can I clearly understand it?") and lay judgment on those who clearly fall below ("3R337 5P3A|"). If you find that you truly cannot accept or understand a person because of a single misuse of one of the variants of "to", then I suggest you would do well to spend time with a language therapist.
Slashdot is an informal exchange, not a doctoral thesis or job application.
- From a dyslexic former elementary English teacher who, in informal settings, could care less about spelling and grammar.
The freakish thing about this, is that if it is indeed a backdoor, it an odd way to go about it. You can't force someone to try to view a WMF. What would its purpose be? You can't use it to get into the exact box you want to, just into a random box that perhaps picks up your WMF from a webpage, or displayed in an application.
Maybe I didn't catch it, but I RTFA and I didn't see the specific numbers of 10,000 severs or "hundreds" or admins mentioned. IIRC, it said they use less than a 100 admins, and several thousand severs, or language such as that.
"free netscape account since I was 11 - never any spam.)"
/., Dvorak.
We've told you to please stay off
The article says some of these stars have been quite visible for a long time.. I think what you are missing is that the new telescope/camera allowed them to determine approximate distances of the stars in question, which revealed that these stars were clumped together, not just far away and within our own galactic plane. In essence, they were able to simulate taking one giant step to the left (or right, doesn't matter) and see how the view would change. This is why they described it as being like 3D.. Because of the limited information available to the naked eye on distance differences between stars, it appears to be a flat, 2 dimensional plane of lighter and darker stars all of similar distance. When they added the distance information, suddenly, they were able to make out the characteristics of the dwarf galaxy.
Imagine looking through one eye at a beach ball a few meters away, and a super-ball held close enough to you that both balls appeared to be the same size. If you didn't have visual cues like shading and hilights, and you only are using one eye and don't move, you would be unable to tell which was actually farther away and which was closer. However, if you took a step to the side, moving your point of view just a bit, you would very easily be able to figure out the relative distance of the objects by the different rates at which they appear to move. Closer objects appear to move more from your perspective. (I say use one eye because even though we use two to look at the night sky, a few inches of seperation from each view is meaningless over several light years, while at a few inches it is quite significant.)
Sort of how the Super Nintendo added some depth to side scrolling video games by allowing the background to move at a slightly different rate than the foreground.
"Lookout, it's coming straight for us!"
I wonder if this might be the elusive "Ford Galaxy"
Okay, I will concede.. somewhat common, but in finite supply, and a little bit of a 'historical' piece of kit.. as they die out there will be fewer and fewer..
:)
Maybe I'm still cranky that I sold someone a cherry VW Beetle I restored and they made it into a dune buggy... lol
Like I said, I *may* be a purist
That said, you've certainly got a unique iPod. An idea for you: Maybe you could mod in a usb port into the can so you could sync it without opening it (I didn't see if that was possible in the Flickr set)
"One nice feature that it does have is a small, exempt-quantity uranium check source on the side of the case to verify function." - from The Health Physics Society
One 700 I've got measures 30 mr/hr from the test source at 2 inches (.3 on the x100 setting) and the other pegs the meter on x100. Both read the same. One originated at Seabrook Nuclear power plant, which I acquired in 1996 or so and the last calibration date on it is sometime in the late 80s, and the other was calibrated for the radiological department of a (somewhat) local hospital in 2002 (IIRC).
They have been used primarily on natural samples of minerals collected in the White Mountains. My point wasn't that the source is very strong, just that even a little bit of radioactive dust is something to avoid if you can help it!
The CDV-700 came with a slightly largish ear phone, and I believe it was white as well (at least the pad was before it disintegrated)
Maybe I'm a purist, but I don't see the point in destroying a working CDV-700 Geiger to simply put an iPod inside. There is a lot of room in there if you move the batteries around, it would be possible to do this and keep it functioning.
:)
Even scarier: That thing still has a live test source on the side of it (or it should). Scarier than that, if he removed the test source, what did he do with it!? I wonder if he even know there was radioactivity there, and it was probably old, decrepid, and dust from it poorly contained.. I think those things had a bit of Cesium or Uranium on the side. I know mine still pegs the meter.. (haven't used it in a while and it was last calibrated a few years before that so I don't remember the exact mr/hr) Not the strongest source in the world but generally I think it is good practice to avoid messing with radioactive substances that are poorly contained no matter their strength.
If the counter still worked, it might be neat.. but then, why repaint it so that no one knows what it is? That CD Yellow and characteristic shape is pretty recognizable to anyone familiar with the civil defense counters, and generally the 700 is the most desireable because it is the most sensitive (the other models were used to measure background radiation).
I used to have fun taking mine to flea markets and "Scanning" over everyones tables with a clip-board in hand, making "notes". Probably get me arrested these days, but funny as hell then
I think it was more so you could repair the thing after "The big one".
Something inside me says it will be MacBook (iBook) MacBook Pro (PowerBook) and then Mac (iMac) and MacPro (PowerMac). Imagine the coming superbowl, or 4/1/2006.. "Introducing.. The Macintosh." (smash big brother)
The answer is simple: Yonah is out, so they put it into the laptop where it would do most good, and the lower end desktop. Conroe will drop soon, and fill in the blanks. Wouldn't make sense to make everything Yonah based just to change in a couple of months. I seriously dissapointed that Kaleidescope didn't see daylight today, however.
Unlink submitters names. It adds nothing to either the article or the conversation, and solves this problem. People will submit without their "Reward".. and really, why do you want to reward people by using slashdot's google-power to bolster bad webpages? If I submit a good article will you let me hawk herbal viagra on the main page? What does that say about slashdot in return? It doesn't make sense, and it really is a very simple issue. Just remove them.
If you tend to forget to look away, get up and take a break, look up workrave (windows and linux) which is basicly a timer you can set to remind yourself to take a 30 second eye break. Its meant to prevent RSI, but you could use it for vision ( and the RSI bits might not be bad for you either ). Reduce the brightness as much as possible. If you are in XP on a laptop, turn on ClearType. dont' use such a high res you have to strain to see. Soft backlighting (gradients to a contrasting background) are best. Sit with the top of the screen about dead level with the top of your head (you may have to get creative with a laptop).. you weren't designed to stare into your lap for 15 hours a day. If your programming, honestly, get more sleep. You will be much more effective in the less time you spend. Sleep deprivation has been proven to add up to being equivelent to being legally drunk after a while. (I wish I had a link to a study to back it up but I dont, have some fun with google). 8 or 9 hours sleep, 8 or 9 on the PC and put the thing down. If your up playing WoW, and your losing sleep because of it, then you've got a problem, and no amount of ergonomics is going to fix it. Lots of us here in the forum work with computers professionally every day, all day, and we've all pretty much said go outside more :) workrave is a good tool to remind yourself to get up and walk around a bit every hour or so.
That said, I personally have astigmatism in both eyes (.5 and .75) and at work I use glare reducing weak negative magnification lenses for work, with the brightness as low as I can get it and high contrast, 75Hz refresh rate, and a 21" monitor, 1600x1200 res. - Low saturation colors on the desktop, large icons.