Color film is actually still divided into three or four layers, each of which captures a certain color.
Digital does, yes, usually look different than film, but that's more because of the "gamma" of film, the way it handles changes in brightness. Video sensors have a linear response, while film has an S shape. At the darkest and brightest parts of a film image, the film is no longer responding to light linearly. A spot that was twice as bright in real life only looks, say, 50% brighter on film. In other words, it tapers off.
This sounds worse, a distortion of reality, and it kind of is, but it is the best way to compress brightness. You have to compress it, unless you want your TV set to be able to be as bright as the noon-day sun. A scene in real life with a 100,000:1 contrast ratio is reduced to about 500:1, because it's easier on the eyes (and your electric bill).
Both video and film compress brightness, but video does a hard clip at pure black and pure white. It's mid-tones are also lower contrast than film's, which give video sort of a milky or even plastic look. Film has high-contrast mid-tones (where faces and other subjects of interest are) and low-contrast lows and highs. Video just has medium-contrast everything. And that is a big part of the film look.
No, film is not infinitely sharp. The maximum resolution of a 35mm motion picture film negative has been measure to be about 4,000 by 3,000 pixels. But that's a negative. The audience does not watch projected negatives. The answer print projected in theaters is a few generations away from the negative --- a copy of a copy of a copy, etc. --- and has a resolution of less than 2,000 pixels across.
Platforms like this and Google Chrome OS are not meant for the typical Slashdot reader. They're not trying to force everyone onto the Web for everything. They're meant for people who already are on the Web for everything, who fire up Windows and immediately then fire up a browser and never touch any other app. It's not like they're saying, "Oh, you're using that app? Well now you have to use it in a browser!" It's more like, "Oh, you aren't using that? Well, let's just get rid of it."
I think there will continue to be a choice between these browser-only computers and the ones that have a separate app framework for the OS, as long as there are many people who still want to use those native apps. But for people who only use a browser, there are several gains to be had if you just rip everything else out. You can get things like longer battery life, shorter boot times, a smaller, tighter, safer OS, and easier upkeep. Almost everything my mother calls me about for tech support would not be an issue if she had a Chromebook. And if she had a Chromebook, there is nothing she would miss.
Seriously, I've never heard so much FUD. The collective "Get off my lawn" hurts my ears.
My Linux desktop runs exactly two programs: Firefox and Shell. If I weren't a programmer, like 99% of the world populace, then I would run just Firefox.
HTML + CSS + JavaScript is the new platform, again. This time, I think it's gonna work.
Computer makers would do well to realize that there always will be two uses, fun and work, and the interface for both should not be the same.
It's like camcorders. A $20,000 TV news camera still straddles your shoulder, has a black-and-white viewfinder, and lacks autofocus. Pros like it that way. But you would never want to take one on vacation. While a consumer, you want something you can hold in one hand while sipping a lemonade in the other. While a producer, you want a tool that you will give your full attention in order to make something good enough to put your name on it.
Likewise with computers. As consumer, you want something like an iPad so you can browse Facebook or the news or watch movies. As a producer (programmer, spreadsheet jockey) an iPad would drive you mad. You want something with a keyboard, at least.
Don't be intimidated by its size, most of it is simply reference material
Yes, the book could be four:
1. language walk-through
2. browser API walk-through
3. language reference
4. browser API reference
If you read this book cover-to-cover (well, except for the hefty reference pages), you will be a JavaScript expert.
Yes, I read the last edition, after finding nothing online but ad-packed sites tossing around code snippets to copy and paste. There's nothing like what's for Python or even PHP online.
Javascript gets a bad reputation mostly because it is misunderstood.
Yes, I don't know how anyone comes to understand JavaScript by just reading online. The scarcity of good online documentation, combined with the absolutely contradictory implementation of it by Internet Explorer 6 and 7, would cause you to go mad.
The book takes you step by step, from the basics to advanced, carefully pointing out the pitfalls in Internet Explorer at each step, so you clearly see what works, where, and why.
This story is overwrought. I'm a web developer who maintains about 40 apps on our Intranet, and I have always tried to make them work in IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now Chrome. But really it boils down to making them work in both IE and non-IE browsers. First I try to make it work in Firefox, and I find that it then also works without modification in Opera, Safari, and Chrome. That was the easy part. Then I try to make it work in IE, which involves various patches, and hand-wringing.
I haven't yet developed against it, but I hear that IE 9 has finally become enough like the rest that maybe the angst will end. Indeed, the browsers are overall converging, not diverging. Really, this is the happiest time in 10 years of web development.
And as for HTML 5? Well, yeah, it's still in development, and different browsers support different parts of it. But it's not like the CSS or DOM nightmare of the past, where different browsers --- I mean, IE, implemented the standard differently. But yes, if you want to make a web site that uses all the latest features like Canvas, Audio, and offline storage, then yes you might have a hard time for a couple years.
I just Alt-Tab back and forth between vi and Firefox. You have to anyway, even with two monitors, to change keyboard focus. By the way, I don't need my mouse, either.
My mom already uses a Chromebook. Except:
- it's a Compaq
- it has about half the battery life
- she has to wait an extra couple of minutes for Windows to boot before she can boot into Chrome (or Firefox)
- it is more open to attack
- it doesn't have 3G, and the WiFi is useless because she and my step-dad can't figure out to set up Wi-Fi. (I tried to help, but I live in another state)
But all she uses a computer for is GMail and Facebook and pictures, so it's enough for her.
I went into programming from a liberal arts background. I majored in Communication, minored in English, was a technical writer before becoming a programmer. When I started learning programming, I was surprised by the similarities with good English writing:
1. There are infinite ways to say it
2. Shorter is better
3. Writing is rewriting. Professionals rewrite their stuff eight or nine times before giving it in to the editor
4. Newbies are drawn to exotic vocabulary and long-winded sentences, but mature writers mainly try to write clearly.
My point is, we should take a cue from human communication. Um, it's still mainly text-based. We haven't replaced English with flash cards to talk to each other, and students aren't resorting to wireframes no matter how much they hate writing essays.
This is coming from someone who has a love for the visual arts. I was the guy in school who drew really well, I've worked as a graphic designer, and actually my major was filmmaking (it was a subset of the Communication major). You can illustrate an article with pictures, and you can "communicate" something with a movie, but, as Samuel Goldwyn said, "Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union."
Executive editor Bill Keller told The Cutline that he couldn't go into details, "especially since nothing is nailed down."
Gotta love the plain-jane speak that gets drilled into journalists. You'd never hear that from the stupid tech corporations. If it were Microsoft:
Vice president Bill Lumbergh told The Cutline that he couldn't go into details, "because we still are finalizing our enterprise solution implemention --- plus, it's patented."
The HTML standards committee takes eternity and a day to finalize anything.
Exactly. Ten years passed between HTML 3 and 4. Another ten have now passed from 4 to 5, and 5 is still not an official standard.
Meantime, requests for features and API tweaks flow in, and all browsers are going ahead and building them (even IE!). If you froze the spec after so many features, you would be drafting HTML 8 before HTML 5 became standard.
Second, I don't know about you, but I write web apps for a living, and I've used HTML since 1997, and never once did version numbers help me. By the time I got serious, it was HTML 4. But none of the browsers posted anything like "we are an HTML 4 browser," and if they did, they lied, especially Internet Explorer. To know what worked, you tested and read about tests other people did on each the browsers.
Finally, the term "HTML 5" has already been stretched so much to be meaningless. I'm not even talking about the journalists who use it to mean things that you could do with 4. HTML 5 is huge: Canvas, video, audio, three persistent storage APIs and one session storage API, various APIs to do with the web address, geolocation, and others. Does a browser need to call itself HTML 4 until fully implements all of these? How would that help me?
The only thing I have ever really looked for are those comparison tables with the red and green squares, like we've always done, to figure out what to use in my web page next.
Chrome's difference was not so much that its tabs lay above the address bar but that they lay in the title strip --- thus reducing vertical real estate by one control strip. You have just two strips of controls, the tab strip and the strip with the address field.
Firefox 3 or IE, on the other hand, have four or five control strips at the top (title, menu, address, tabs, bookmarks). You can hide and rearrange things until you're down to two strips like Chrome as long as you have open only one tab. Open a second tab, though, and in pops the tab bar, and you're stuck with at least three strips. Firefox 4 did not combine the tab strip with the title strip, so there is no gain in real estate for the actual web page content. Plus, Firefox has the ever-present status bar at the bottom, while Chrome has a transient status bar that fades in just when it has something to say.
Small matters, you might say. But these things are a big part of why people feel Chrome looks cleaner. Small differences, but if you're staring at it all day, it may be worth it. And in my experience designing user interfaces, a thousand tiny decisions are the path of an okay or slightly irritating interface and a great, delightful one.
Most users now either do, or could, spend much of their working lives in the context of a Web browser. Writing documents, fiddling spreadsheets, editing presentations, handling e-mails, filling accounting forms, ordering supplies, learning about the competition, collaborating with co-workers, meeting with partners and prospects--I increasingly do all of these things online. As a content producer, I still spend a good deal of heads-down time in heavyweight apps, but less every year. There's much less of my desktop to be virtualized because it's been so extensively Webized.
The Web is a nice compromise between thin and thick. Especially with Chrome and newer versions of browsers allowing work offline.
Remember when you refactored a 500-line program to 300? How about to 100? Harder or easier?
The same applies to hardware. What looks simple on the outside is very, very, very hard to come up with.
Look cursorily over an Apple product, like the MacBook Air, and you won't see anything mindbendingly "innovative." What? It's rather plain. No fancy flowers laser-etched into the chassis. Quite the opposite. It's even out-austerizes Bauhas in its austerity.
Or the iPhone. What? It has, like, zero buttons on its face, and I am surprised to find any, by what I know about Steve Jobs.
And what is one thing I know about Steve? I've never met him, but I know that he's like me: a Minimalist. Steve Jobs's minimalism is the reason (insert your needed jack here) is not on the side of the MacBook. It was his minimalism that took away the floppy disk drive from the Mac in 2000 (when I bought it, and sorely needed it). His minimalism dates back to the early Macs and that's why there was not a separate numeric keypad on the early Macs. It's because Jobs hates buttons. Because Jobs is a minimalist. Understand that, and you understand his design decisions a lot more.
But that would just get you to understand Jobs, and Jobs is just one person at Apple (albeit the CEO). But that's just it. The second thing about Apple that's different from most companies is the CEO's involvement in design. Jobs is a micromanager. Google it and I'm sure you can find the articles I've read about Jobs's specifiicity about the colors of those candy-colored iMacs, or about the exact brightness of the lights at the latest Apple Expo. He is an employee's worst nightmare about micromanagement --- except for the fact that he happens to be a smart person. I mean just in general, of course, but also as a designer. He just is. I don't know why, but Steve Jobs is a good Designer. He just is, mainly because (A) he's smart, and (B) he likes it. I honestly believe that he cares slightly more about Design than about Money. That is, given the choice between between being richer with a mediocre product line or poorer with a superb, awesome, spectacular, well-designed product line, he would choose to be the poorer. Why? Because as any artist knows, the pleasure of looking at your superior product is more satisfying than money. This does not apply to all people, but artistic people really do derive more joy from making good things than by making money.
I think it is, in part, happenstance, that Apple is successful. It just so happens that people like the iPhone. After all, the Mac OS 7 was better than Windows way back then, but people bought Windows. Why are they paying Apple more now? I don't know. Maybe the oddity was back then, and the normal is now. Good design wins. Back then, it didn't for freakish, once-in-a-long-time circumstances.
I believe that the patent examiner did not know what it meant. I bet most of the time he does not but pretends to, for fear of looking stupid. Maybe even phrases or diagrams trigger something in his head that, combined with a belief in the patent system (that patents are legitimate, that companies are submitting things in good faith), he gives them the benefit of the doubt. He does not know what it means, but he becomes convinced that, whatever it is, it's clever.
Today, in 1066, the Normans beat the English. Fitting, since it reminds me about how simple it is in our native tongue to say the say the same thing by trading words of Anglo-Saxon origin for ones of Latin. I'll do it with the paragraph I just wrote (throwing in a good bit of pompous circumlocution to boot):
The Author maintains the conviction that the Agent conducting said examination of said Application concerning potentially patentable apparatus, may, or may not, have ascertained comprehensive intellectual assimilation of the propositions described by therein. Extrapolation from the hypothesis that trepidation of the probability of the appearance of vocational incompetence furthermore indicates the habitude of said agent for the majority of applications. Hypothesized furthermore is that associations with the verbal and graphical constructions in combination with a predilection to initiate positive attitudes toward said application systems process aggregate to induce said Agent to invest preemptive credence to said applicant. Notwithstanding that the Agent misapprehends the description, said Agent arrives at the conclusion that the application contains imminently patentable material.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Barnes & Noble should get the Nobel Peace Prize.
Color film is actually still divided into three or four layers, each of which captures a certain color.
Digital does, yes, usually look different than film, but that's more because of the "gamma" of film, the way it handles changes in brightness. Video sensors have a linear response, while film has an S shape. At the darkest and brightest parts of a film image, the film is no longer responding to light linearly. A spot that was twice as bright in real life only looks, say, 50% brighter on film. In other words, it tapers off.
This sounds worse, a distortion of reality, and it kind of is, but it is the best way to compress brightness. You have to compress it, unless you want your TV set to be able to be as bright as the noon-day sun. A scene in real life with a 100,000:1 contrast ratio is reduced to about 500:1, because it's easier on the eyes (and your electric bill).
Both video and film compress brightness, but video does a hard clip at pure black and pure white. It's mid-tones are also lower contrast than film's, which give video sort of a milky or even plastic look. Film has high-contrast mid-tones (where faces and other subjects of interest are) and low-contrast lows and highs. Video just has medium-contrast everything. And that is a big part of the film look.
No, film is not infinitely sharp. The maximum resolution of a 35mm motion picture film negative has been measure to be about 4,000 by 3,000 pixels. But that's a negative. The audience does not watch projected negatives. The answer print projected in theaters is a few generations away from the negative --- a copy of a copy of a copy, etc. --- and has a resolution of less than 2,000 pixels across.
Subsidize LTE build-out. The best of both worlds. Cheaper, too, to reach the remaining masses.
What's wrong with the desktop I have now?
Platforms like this and Google Chrome OS are not meant for the typical Slashdot reader. They're not trying to force everyone onto the Web for everything. They're meant for people who already are on the Web for everything, who fire up Windows and immediately then fire up a browser and never touch any other app. It's not like they're saying, "Oh, you're using that app? Well now you have to use it in a browser!" It's more like, "Oh, you aren't using that? Well, let's just get rid of it."
I think there will continue to be a choice between these browser-only computers and the ones that have a separate app framework for the OS, as long as there are many people who still want to use those native apps. But for people who only use a browser, there are several gains to be had if you just rip everything else out. You can get things like longer battery life, shorter boot times, a smaller, tighter, safer OS, and easier upkeep. Almost everything my mother calls me about for tech support would not be an issue if she had a Chromebook. And if she had a Chromebook, there is nothing she would miss.
I thought it looks rather nice (ducks).
Seriously, I've never heard so much FUD. The collective "Get off my lawn" hurts my ears.
My Linux desktop runs exactly two programs: Firefox and Shell. If I weren't a programmer, like 99% of the world populace, then I would run just Firefox.
HTML + CSS + JavaScript is the new platform, again. This time, I think it's gonna work.
Wasn't just in the 90's, dawg: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
Computer makers would do well to realize that there always will be two uses, fun and work, and the interface for both should not be the same.
It's like camcorders. A $20,000 TV news camera still straddles your shoulder, has a black-and-white viewfinder, and lacks autofocus. Pros like it that way. But you would never want to take one on vacation. While a consumer, you want something you can hold in one hand while sipping a lemonade in the other. While a producer, you want a tool that you will give your full attention in order to make something good enough to put your name on it.
Likewise with computers. As consumer, you want something like an iPad so you can browse Facebook or the news or watch movies. As a producer (programmer, spreadsheet jockey) an iPad would drive you mad. You want something with a keyboard, at least.
Don't be intimidated by its size, most of it is simply reference material
Yes, the book could be four:
1. language walk-through
2. browser API walk-through
3. language reference
4. browser API reference
If you read this book cover-to-cover (well, except for the hefty reference pages), you will be a JavaScript expert.
Yes, I read the last edition, after finding nothing online but ad-packed sites tossing around code snippets to copy and paste. There's nothing like what's for Python or even PHP online.
Javascript gets a bad reputation mostly because it is misunderstood.
Yes, I don't know how anyone comes to understand JavaScript by just reading online. The scarcity of good online documentation, combined with the absolutely contradictory implementation of it by Internet Explorer 6 and 7, would cause you to go mad.
The book takes you step by step, from the basics to advanced, carefully pointing out the pitfalls in Internet Explorer at each step, so you clearly see what works, where, and why.
This story is overwrought. I'm a web developer who maintains about 40 apps on our Intranet, and I have always tried to make them work in IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now Chrome. But really it boils down to making them work in both IE and non-IE browsers. First I try to make it work in Firefox, and I find that it then also works without modification in Opera, Safari, and Chrome. That was the easy part. Then I try to make it work in IE, which involves various patches, and hand-wringing.
I haven't yet developed against it, but I hear that IE 9 has finally become enough like the rest that maybe the angst will end. Indeed, the browsers are overall converging, not diverging. Really, this is the happiest time in 10 years of web development.
And as for HTML 5? Well, yeah, it's still in development, and different browsers support different parts of it. But it's not like the CSS or DOM nightmare of the past, where different browsers --- I mean, IE, implemented the standard differently. But yes, if you want to make a web site that uses all the latest features like Canvas, Audio, and offline storage, then yes you might have a hard time for a couple years.
I just Alt-Tab back and forth between vi and Firefox. You have to anyway, even with two monitors, to change keyboard focus. By the way, I don't need my mouse, either.
My mom already uses a Chromebook. Except:
- it's a Compaq
- it has about half the battery life
- she has to wait an extra couple of minutes for Windows to boot before she can boot into Chrome (or Firefox)
- it is more open to attack
- it doesn't have 3G, and the WiFi is useless because she and my step-dad can't figure out to set up Wi-Fi. (I tried to help, but I live in another state)
But all she uses a computer for is GMail and Facebook and pictures, so it's enough for her.
I went into programming from a liberal arts background. I majored in Communication, minored in English, was a technical writer before becoming a programmer. When I started learning programming, I was surprised by the similarities with good English writing:
My point is, we should take a cue from human communication. Um, it's still mainly text-based. We haven't replaced English with flash cards to talk to each other, and students aren't resorting to wireframes no matter how much they hate writing essays.
This is coming from someone who has a love for the visual arts. I was the guy in school who drew really well, I've worked as a graphic designer, and actually my major was filmmaking (it was a subset of the Communication major). You can illustrate an article with pictures, and you can "communicate" something with a movie, but, as Samuel Goldwyn said, "Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union."
This computer later became Skynet.
Ding!
What --- who shall I say, who --- is Watson?
Gotta love the plain-jane speak that gets drilled into journalists. You'd never hear that from the stupid tech corporations. If it were Microsoft:
The HTML standards committee takes eternity and a day to finalize anything.
Exactly. Ten years passed between HTML 3 and 4. Another ten have now passed from 4 to 5, and 5 is still not an official standard.
Meantime, requests for features and API tweaks flow in, and all browsers are going ahead and building them (even IE!). If you froze the spec after so many features, you would be drafting HTML 8 before HTML 5 became standard.
Second, I don't know about you, but I write web apps for a living, and I've used HTML since 1997, and never once did version numbers help me. By the time I got serious, it was HTML 4. But none of the browsers posted anything like "we are an HTML 4 browser," and if they did, they lied, especially Internet Explorer. To know what worked, you tested and read about tests other people did on each the browsers.
Finally, the term "HTML 5" has already been stretched so much to be meaningless. I'm not even talking about the journalists who use it to mean things that you could do with 4. HTML 5 is huge: Canvas, video, audio, three persistent storage APIs and one session storage API, various APIs to do with the web address, geolocation, and others. Does a browser need to call itself HTML 4 until fully implements all of these? How would that help me?
The only thing I have ever really looked for are those comparison tables with the red and green squares, like we've always done, to figure out what to use in my web page next.
DELETE!
Chrome's difference was not so much that its tabs lay above the address bar but that they lay in the title strip --- thus reducing vertical real estate by one control strip. You have just two strips of controls, the tab strip and the strip with the address field.
Firefox 3 or IE, on the other hand, have four or five control strips at the top (title, menu, address, tabs, bookmarks). You can hide and rearrange things until you're down to two strips like Chrome as long as you have open only one tab. Open a second tab, though, and in pops the tab bar, and you're stuck with at least three strips. Firefox 4 did not combine the tab strip with the title strip, so there is no gain in real estate for the actual web page content. Plus, Firefox has the ever-present status bar at the bottom, while Chrome has a transient status bar that fades in just when it has something to say.
Small matters, you might say. But these things are a big part of why people feel Chrome looks cleaner. Small differences, but if you're staring at it all day, it may be worth it. And in my experience designing user interfaces, a thousand tiny decisions are the path of an okay or slightly irritating interface and a great, delightful one.
From the article:
The Web is a nice compromise between thin and thick. Especially with Chrome and newer versions of browsers allowing work offline.
The PICTURES show it as black. With a name like "chrome," shouldn't it at least be shiny?
No.
Microsoft is tops at the office this year mostly because it was tops at the office last year. It's called institutional inertia.
It is a sign of declining health for an old company to pride itself most on its presence in the business sector.
By this token, Microsoft should also claim that Internet Explorer 6 was its best product ever.
Remember when you refactored a 500-line program to 300? How about to 100? Harder or easier?
The same applies to hardware. What looks simple on the outside is very, very, very hard to come up with.
Look cursorily over an Apple product, like the MacBook Air, and you won't see anything mindbendingly "innovative." What? It's rather plain. No fancy flowers laser-etched into the chassis. Quite the opposite. It's even out-austerizes Bauhas in its austerity.
Or the iPhone. What? It has, like, zero buttons on its face, and I am surprised to find any, by what I know about Steve Jobs.
And what is one thing I know about Steve? I've never met him, but I know that he's like me: a Minimalist. Steve Jobs's minimalism is the reason (insert your needed jack here) is not on the side of the MacBook. It was his minimalism that took away the floppy disk drive from the Mac in 2000 (when I bought it, and sorely needed it). His minimalism dates back to the early Macs and that's why there was not a separate numeric keypad on the early Macs. It's because Jobs hates buttons. Because Jobs is a minimalist. Understand that, and you understand his design decisions a lot more.
But that would just get you to understand Jobs, and Jobs is just one person at Apple (albeit the CEO). But that's just it. The second thing about Apple that's different from most companies is the CEO's involvement in design. Jobs is a micromanager. Google it and I'm sure you can find the articles I've read about Jobs's specifiicity about the colors of those candy-colored iMacs, or about the exact brightness of the lights at the latest Apple Expo. He is an employee's worst nightmare about micromanagement --- except for the fact that he happens to be a smart person. I mean just in general, of course, but also as a designer. He just is. I don't know why, but Steve Jobs is a good Designer. He just is, mainly because (A) he's smart, and (B) he likes it. I honestly believe that he cares slightly more about Design than about Money. That is, given the choice between between being richer with a mediocre product line or poorer with a superb, awesome, spectacular, well-designed product line, he would choose to be the poorer. Why? Because as any artist knows, the pleasure of looking at your superior product is more satisfying than money. This does not apply to all people, but artistic people really do derive more joy from making good things than by making money.
I think it is, in part, happenstance, that Apple is successful. It just so happens that people like the iPhone. After all, the Mac OS 7 was better than Windows way back then, but people bought Windows. Why are they paying Apple more now? I don't know. Maybe the oddity was back then, and the normal is now. Good design wins. Back then, it didn't for freakish, once-in-a-long-time circumstances.
More about good design: Taste for Makers, by Paul Graham.
"Use it regularly, change it frequently, and don't share it with anyone!"
But what if you have to keep track of twelve toothbrushes?
I believe that the patent examiner did not know what it meant. I bet most of the time he does not but pretends to, for fear of looking stupid. Maybe even phrases or diagrams trigger something in his head that, combined with a belief in the patent system (that patents are legitimate, that companies are submitting things in good faith), he gives them the benefit of the doubt. He does not know what it means, but he becomes convinced that, whatever it is, it's clever.
Today, in 1066, the Normans beat the English. Fitting, since it reminds me about how simple it is in our native tongue to say the say the same thing by trading words of Anglo-Saxon origin for ones of Latin. I'll do it with the paragraph I just wrote (throwing in a good bit of pompous circumlocution to boot):
The Author maintains the conviction that the Agent conducting said examination of said Application concerning potentially patentable apparatus, may, or may not, have ascertained comprehensive intellectual assimilation of the propositions described by therein. Extrapolation from the hypothesis that trepidation of the probability of the appearance of vocational incompetence furthermore indicates the habitude of said agent for the majority of applications. Hypothesized furthermore is that associations with the verbal and graphical constructions in combination with a predilection to initiate positive attitudes toward said application systems process aggregate to induce said Agent to invest preemptive credence to said applicant. Notwithstanding that the Agent misapprehends the description, said Agent arrives at the conclusion that the application contains imminently patentable material.
The author of Information Is Beautiful also tried his hand at a better picture: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-in-the-telecoms-trade/