For variable-width fonts, regardless of the medium (computer or print), you're only supposed to use a single space. As far as I'm aware, this pre-dates computers altogether. It's only when using a monospace font that two spaces are necessary.
In any case, a lot of software written now is based on that assumption. The HTML spec, for example, will strip all but one space if more than one space is typed in a row.
The difference is that the US gained its position without the mass-murder of 14+ million of its own citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Besides, the only reason China is as prosperous as it is now is that they adopted (the illusion of) a free market.
There's a good book about this, called "The Mac is not a Typewriter:" http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312 It's not specific to the Mac, but it tries to dispel the old ways of thinking about how to create documents. (i.e. use the tab stops in your word processor instead of just hitting space a bunch, stuff like that, use only one space behind a period when using a variable-width font, etc.) It applies equally well to all GUI computers, but was written back when the Mac was about the only one out there.
This is one of those endless debates between old fogeys who hate everything that didn't already exist in 1975, and people who realize that, hey, paragraph breaks make a hell of a lot more sense than line breaks!
Capitalism and all its fictional scarcity have been destroying productivity in the name of control for a long time. The liberty that lies beneath free software and open publishing is increasing productivity, not damaging it.
Wha? Are you seriously arguing that Visual Studio 2008 makes programmers less productive than, say, Borland Builder circa 1999?
Capitalist economics is a big shell game, meant to fleece suckers. It's monopoly, dependence, exploitation and theft, pure and simple.
Ok, Mr. Marx, but the alternative systems don't exactly have a history of working out too well, do they?
Because we're Americans, damnit. We're fiercely-independent, and you can't be independent while waiting at a train station. Our dads all watched "Renegade Without a Cause", their dads all watched "McKenna's Gold", and we all watched "Knight Rider."
Also, now that we're attempting to apply some different political and economic decisions, we're utterly incompetent at it. For example, Sound Transit here in Western Washington recently wanted me to vote for a bond issue to start building their light rail system in Snohomish County. It all sounds good, except when you realize that they're not even going to start building the track until 2025. Yeah, I'm going to pay more taxes so you can maybe, perhaps, if you feel like it, start building a new train in 20 years. Brilliant.
I'll try not to get into growth management in Snohomish County, or lack thereof. "Sure, can build 10,000 multi-family homes, it doesn't matter that the only road to the place where people work is a 2-lane highway that was already grossly overloaded 20 years ago, and is one of the most dangerous highways in the US. Just make sure you add a sidewalk!"
HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
Wow, has "evil" lost all meaning? I like to think of "evil" as things like, say, gassing people or conquering a neighboring country with extremely brutality. Now adding pretty pictures to emails qualifies.
In any case, phishing was possible when emails were text-only. I saw dozens of phishing messages in text-only emails, so in addition to deflating the word "evil" to uselessness, you're also flat-out wrong.
Maybe you're right, or maybe you're wrong, but the point is that I was refuting the statement that good products at reasonable prices aren't pirated. It's a blatant lie from my experience.
Another example: there was a study shown shortly after the Macintosh version of Halo was released showing that over half of the copies in circulation were pirated. Halo is a game of proven quality on Xbox and PC, and was released at an average price for video games.
It's one of those nice Slashdot fictions "we like piracy, therefore let's pretend there's no actual piracy problem." But it's simply not true.
I don't buy it. Starsiege Tribes was perhaps the best team-based multiplayer game ever made, released at a reasonable price and with no copy protection. And yet, during my entire college years, I think I only saw *one* legitimate purchased copy of the game (mine.) I did see hundreds of burned CDs of it, and God knows how many players online were playing from burned CDs.
Seconded. Could somebody PLEASE explain what the hell this article means? What "VW" stands for? (My guess: either Virtual World or Virtual Winter, but since I don't know what the latter is that's not very helpful.)
In the ancient Greek case, we're talking about using literacy as a substitute for memorisation. Did that cause our memory to wither? Transportation is used as a substitute for walking places. Did that cause our health to wither? Calculators are used as a substitute for mental arithmetic. Did that cause our arithmetic skills to wither? Google is used as a substitute for general knowledge. Is that causing our knowledge to wither?
Don't forget the other, most important, part: does it matter?
Let's say our arithmetic skills did wither. Does it matter? Does that hurt people in some way? Does it make civilization grind to a halt? If the amount of stuff we have memorized decreases, does that matter? Will it make civilization collapse?
The ability to use a calculator is considered a skill. The ability to search effectively will soon be considered a skill.
If I go outside every night wearing overalls covered in blood stains, dig holes in my front yard, and bury body sized bundles wrapped in garbage bags every night for a couple of weeks, I'll probably be investigated for murder.
Hm, good point-- I better start using the back yard.
So, standard solution: ask the people as they leave the polling station.
This is called an "exit poll" and it's remarkably accurate. Except of course in the last couple of elections in the USA, where the exit polls utterly failed, especially in districts that had new shiny e-voting machines with no paper trail.
You can't make exit polls part of the official process, as then it would no longer be a secret ballot. Unless you do an exit poll with complete anonymity, in which case you're just making people vote twice.
Also, as a resident of the west coast, I hate exit polls with a passion. Getting the early poll results from the east coast before our voting locations even open has to influence voters in an extremely negative way. I'd prefer the press be banned from reporting any polls or results until after polls close on the west coast, personally. Damned free press.;)
Now, you're probably thinking, "That sounds like a paper ballot system? Why would we pay all this money for these fancy machines when we have to basically fall back on a paper ballot system to make sure they're reliable?"
And that is the real question.
To be a devil's advocate:
1) To avoid the "hanging chad" problem, that is, ballots that look Okto the voter, but clog or are rejected by the voting machines/people that do the counting. 2) To avoid the "butterfly ballot/I didn't mean to vote for Pat Robertson!" problem of confusingly-printed ballots. Relevant example: http://www.infoplease.com/images/cig/supreme-court/1592571492_img_371.png The computer systems can show the candidate you voted for prominently before submitting the vote, thus helping accuracy. 3) The computer UI can easily be translated into many more languages than paper ballots, and if you translate into a language that turns out to not be used, you don't waste a ton of paper. 4) The computer UI is more accessible by 'partially disabled' voters, and thus requires less assistance rendered by voting officials, and thus reduces the chance of a assisting voting official influencing the vote. (Obviously, they aren't 100% accessible, but they're a lot better than a big lever.)
I'm sure there's other reasons; possibly cost as well. Fix voting computers if you want, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; there are a lot of good reasons to use computers.
I realize it's anecdotal, but talking to a number of my friends who were ardent Clinton supporters I've become worried that they simply won't vote Democrat due to what they perceive was the unfairness and sexism of the campaign.
Clinton's argument is that she's suffered from sexism in the primaries (where virtually only Democrats participate), but she won't have that problem in the general election (where both Democrats and Republicans vote) and will garner more votes than Obama.
Isn't she basically saying that she believes that the Republican Party is less sexist than the Democratic Party?
(I understand you're saying "perceive", but I still think that point is interesting. Personally, I don't think there's been any sexism or racism in the campaign and I wish people would just shut up about it.)
That does not change the fact that the US, my country, is now explicitly responsible for many thousands of deaths which would not have otherwise occurred.
That's exactly the point I was arguing. Saddam has an established history of killing tens of thousands of his own people, to say that no deaths would have occurred without coalition action is ridiculously simplistic. The simple fact is that he was already a mass-murderer, and there's no reason to believe he would have stopped killing after some arbitrary cut-off date.
It also makes the whole argument about which browser has "more" standards support irrelevant.
The web developer has to test all browsers anyway, and users don't give a flying crap. Sure, web development is tough-- so is application development. So's building a skyscraper, or designing a new model of car. But you're developers; cope! (And yes, there are crappy developers who won't use standards regardless of how many browsers support them.)
Whenever a browser adds more standards support, all they're really doing is making the web developer's job easier at the expense of adding features actual users can use for a better browsing experience.
I think the whole thing is a false economy, frankly.
The states could have simply not put Hussein in power and everyone would have been ahead.
I enjoy your "diplomacy via time travel" concept, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Here in the real world, however... the reality is that had we not done something, Saddam likely would have gassed more of his own people than are dead today, twice over. Of course, if you listen to the left-wing, Saddam was made out of cotton candy and puppies and could do no evil.
I agree entirely. If there's one thing I've learned from reading lots of science fiction and predictions of the future, the more outlandish the prediction, the less likely it'll actually occur. That's not to say that incredible inventions come into being, but they usually come way out of left field and take everybody by surprise.
Predictions that do turn out to be relatively accurate (i.e. Star Trek's communicator, or 2001: A Space Odyssey aircraft displays) are far, far overshadowed by the predictions that turn out to be complete bunk.
The singularity prediction (which, BTW, is almost never explained in these articles-- what kind of circles do you people travel in where your friends instantly know what you mean by "singularity?") strikes me as complete bunk.
Few other countries have the influence to manipulate content on the Internet on a wide scale as does the United States. For worse or worse, U.S. law is applied on the Internet more than any other.
The change in IE8 is that there is no "quirks mode." It always renders in "super-standards" mode, and then has a button on the toolbar to switch to IE7-style quirks mode rendering. The user has to specifically recognize that the page renders wrong, and tell the browser to render it the old way. That's exactly the issue here, and why IE8 breaks damn near every page on the web.
IE has now fallen under the same spell that the rest of the web standards community has fallen under, namely, the illusion that old web sites will be upgraded for newer browser. Here's a hint, W3C, Mozilla, and now Microsoft: They won't.
Large commercial websites (for example, this one: http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx ) are coded using the 1998 method of lots of tables and hardly any CSS. And that's a page that's: 1) Been updated every single day for the last 5 years at least 2) Could have massive, massive bandwidth and render-time savings if they switched the layout.
And that's one site. And that's just one site that's actually maintained. There are thousands of others, still written using the same methods. Many of those are entirely orphaned or unmaintained. Many of those contain critical information that you can't get on any other sites.
Any web standard that isn't written with this in mind (for example, XHTML) will fail. It'll just be one more standard for browsers to support until the end of time, until browsers are so bloated it takes twenty minutes to render Yahoo.com.
People on this site who hate Microsoft actually should be applauding this decision, since users upgrading to IE8 will simply think IE8 is fundamentally broken. Of course, the tears'll start flowing when Firefox, Safari, Opera, and all the browsers Slashdotters like have the same problem. My personal guess is that Microsoft isn't going to let this happen, and they'll make super-strict mode off by default.
IMHO, the HTML 5 spec is a move in the right direction. We all agree that web standards suck, but whatever we do, we need to ensure backwards compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
For variable-width fonts, regardless of the medium (computer or print), you're only supposed to use a single space. As far as I'm aware, this pre-dates computers altogether. It's only when using a monospace font that two spaces are necessary.
In any case, a lot of software written now is based on that assumption. The HTML spec, for example, will strip all but one space if more than one space is typed in a row.
The difference is that the US gained its position without the mass-murder of 14+ million of its own citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Besides, the only reason China is as prosperous as it is now is that they adopted (the illusion of) a free market.
There's a good book about this, called "The Mac is not a Typewriter:" http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312 It's not specific to the Mac, but it tries to dispel the old ways of thinking about how to create documents. (i.e. use the tab stops in your word processor instead of just hitting space a bunch, stuff like that, use only one space behind a period when using a variable-width font, etc.) It applies equally well to all GUI computers, but was written back when the Mac was about the only one out there.
This is one of those endless debates between old fogeys who hate everything that didn't already exist in 1975, and people who realize that, hey, paragraph breaks make a hell of a lot more sense than line breaks!
Capitalism and all its fictional scarcity have been destroying productivity in the name of control for a long time. The liberty that lies beneath free software and open publishing is increasing productivity, not damaging it.
Wha? Are you seriously arguing that Visual Studio 2008 makes programmers less productive than, say, Borland Builder circa 1999?
Capitalist economics is a big shell game, meant to fleece suckers. It's monopoly, dependence, exploitation and theft, pure and simple.
Ok, Mr. Marx, but the alternative systems don't exactly have a history of working out too well, do they?
Because we're Americans, damnit. We're fiercely-independent, and you can't be independent while waiting at a train station. Our dads all watched "Renegade Without a Cause", their dads all watched "McKenna's Gold", and we all watched "Knight Rider."
Also, now that we're attempting to apply some different political and economic decisions, we're utterly incompetent at it. For example, Sound Transit here in Western Washington recently wanted me to vote for a bond issue to start building their light rail system in Snohomish County. It all sounds good, except when you realize that they're not even going to start building the track until 2025. Yeah, I'm going to pay more taxes so you can maybe, perhaps, if you feel like it, start building a new train in 20 years. Brilliant.
I'll try not to get into growth management in Snohomish County, or lack thereof. "Sure, can build 10,000 multi-family homes, it doesn't matter that the only road to the place where people work is a 2-lane highway that was already grossly overloaded 20 years ago, and is one of the most dangerous highways in the US. Just make sure you add a sidewalk!"
HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
Wow, has "evil" lost all meaning? I like to think of "evil" as things like, say, gassing people or conquering a neighboring country with extremely brutality. Now adding pretty pictures to emails qualifies.
In any case, phishing was possible when emails were text-only. I saw dozens of phishing messages in text-only emails, so in addition to deflating the word "evil" to uselessness, you're also flat-out wrong.
Maybe you're right, or maybe you're wrong, but the point is that I was refuting the statement that good products at reasonable prices aren't pirated. It's a blatant lie from my experience.
Another example: there was a study shown shortly after the Macintosh version of Halo was released showing that over half of the copies in circulation were pirated. Halo is a game of proven quality on Xbox and PC, and was released at an average price for video games.
It's one of those nice Slashdot fictions "we like piracy, therefore let's pretend there's no actual piracy problem." But it's simply not true.
I don't buy it. Starsiege Tribes was perhaps the best team-based multiplayer game ever made, released at a reasonable price and with no copy protection. And yet, during my entire college years, I think I only saw *one* legitimate purchased copy of the game (mine.) I did see hundreds of burned CDs of it, and God knows how many players online were playing from burned CDs.
Seconded. Could somebody PLEASE explain what the hell this article means? What "VW" stands for? (My guess: either Virtual World or Virtual Winter, but since I don't know what the latter is that's not very helpful.)
Oh, and most importantly: Why should I care?
In the ancient Greek case, we're talking about using literacy as a substitute for memorisation. Did that cause our memory to wither? Transportation is used as a substitute for walking places. Did that cause our health to wither? Calculators are used as a substitute for mental arithmetic. Did that cause our arithmetic skills to wither? Google is used as a substitute for general knowledge. Is that causing our knowledge to wither?
Don't forget the other, most important, part: does it matter?
Let's say our arithmetic skills did wither. Does it matter? Does that hurt people in some way? Does it make civilization grind to a halt? If the amount of stuff we have memorized decreases, does that matter? Will it make civilization collapse?
The ability to use a calculator is considered a skill. The ability to search effectively will soon be considered a skill.
It isn't now?
To quote a familiar old monster from the swamp, "It only makes you more of what you really are."
Ok, I looked on Google and I can't find that quote anywhere. Are you referring to Yoda, or Swamp Thing, or something else entirely?
If I go outside every night wearing overalls covered in blood stains, dig holes in my front yard, and bury body sized bundles wrapped in garbage bags every night for a couple of weeks, I'll probably be investigated for murder.
Hm, good point-- I better start using the back yard.
So, standard solution: ask the people as they leave the polling station.
;)
This is called an "exit poll" and it's remarkably accurate. Except of course in the last couple of elections in the USA, where the exit polls utterly failed, especially in districts that had new shiny e-voting machines with no paper trail.
You can't make exit polls part of the official process, as then it would no longer be a secret ballot. Unless you do an exit poll with complete anonymity, in which case you're just making people vote twice.
Also, as a resident of the west coast, I hate exit polls with a passion. Getting the early poll results from the east coast before our voting locations even open has to influence voters in an extremely negative way. I'd prefer the press be banned from reporting any polls or results until after polls close on the west coast, personally. Damned free press.
Now, you're probably thinking, "That sounds like a paper ballot system? Why would we pay all this money for these fancy machines when we have to basically fall back on a paper ballot system to make sure they're reliable?"
And that is the real question.
To be a devil's advocate:
1) To avoid the "hanging chad" problem, that is, ballots that look Okto the voter, but clog or are rejected by the voting machines/people that do the counting.
2) To avoid the "butterfly ballot/I didn't mean to vote for Pat Robertson!" problem of confusingly-printed ballots. Relevant example: http://www.infoplease.com/images/cig/supreme-court/1592571492_img_371.png The computer systems can show the candidate you voted for prominently before submitting the vote, thus helping accuracy.
3) The computer UI can easily be translated into many more languages than paper ballots, and if you translate into a language that turns out to not be used, you don't waste a ton of paper.
4) The computer UI is more accessible by 'partially disabled' voters, and thus requires less assistance rendered by voting officials, and thus reduces the chance of a assisting voting official influencing the vote. (Obviously, they aren't 100% accessible, but they're a lot better than a big lever.)
I'm sure there's other reasons; possibly cost as well. Fix voting computers if you want, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; there are a lot of good reasons to use computers.
I realize it's anecdotal, but talking to a number of my friends who were ardent Clinton supporters I've become worried that they simply won't vote Democrat due to what they perceive was the unfairness and sexism of the campaign.
Clinton's argument is that she's suffered from sexism in the primaries (where virtually only Democrats participate), but she won't have that problem in the general election (where both Democrats and Republicans vote) and will garner more votes than Obama.
Isn't she basically saying that she believes that the Republican Party is less sexist than the Democratic Party?
(I understand you're saying "perceive", but I still think that point is interesting. Personally, I don't think there's been any sexism or racism in the campaign and I wish people would just shut up about it.)
That does not change the fact that the US, my country, is now explicitly responsible for many thousands of deaths which would not have otherwise occurred.
That's exactly the point I was arguing. Saddam has an established history of killing tens of thousands of his own people, to say that no deaths would have occurred without coalition action is ridiculously simplistic. The simple fact is that he was already a mass-murderer, and there's no reason to believe he would have stopped killing after some arbitrary cut-off date.
It also makes the whole argument about which browser has "more" standards support irrelevant.
The web developer has to test all browsers anyway, and users don't give a flying crap. Sure, web development is tough-- so is application development. So's building a skyscraper, or designing a new model of car. But you're developers; cope! (And yes, there are crappy developers who won't use standards regardless of how many browsers support them.)
Whenever a browser adds more standards support, all they're really doing is making the web developer's job easier at the expense of adding features actual users can use for a better browsing experience.
I think the whole thing is a false economy, frankly.
Because IE's a bitch to develop with. On a javascript error, it tells you the correct line number but it can't tell you which file it's in.
It can if you break into the debugger.
It doesn't allow anywhere near the quality of plugins that firefox does, so it doesn't get firebug,
Yeah, but to be fair, Firebug cribs a lot from IE's DOM Explorer. True, the implementation is better.
Finally, IE doesn't comply with the standards very well, so it's a lot harder to get the site looking how you want it to.
I've yet to head a compelling reason for me to worry about web standards as opposed to simply making my site look good in all the major browsers.
Converting the final product to something IE can render is a lot easier to working with IE the entire way.
Doesn't that imply that the standards support isn't nearly as bad as everyone says?
The states could have simply not put Hussein in power and everyone would have been ahead.
I enjoy your "diplomacy via time travel" concept, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Here in the real world, however... the reality is that had we not done something, Saddam likely would have gassed more of his own people than are dead today, twice over. Of course, if you listen to the left-wing, Saddam was made out of cotton candy and puppies and could do no evil.
I agree entirely. If there's one thing I've learned from reading lots of science fiction and predictions of the future, the more outlandish the prediction, the less likely it'll actually occur. That's not to say that incredible inventions come into being, but they usually come way out of left field and take everybody by surprise.
Predictions that do turn out to be relatively accurate (i.e. Star Trek's communicator, or 2001: A Space Odyssey aircraft displays) are far, far overshadowed by the predictions that turn out to be complete bunk.
The singularity prediction (which, BTW, is almost never explained in these articles-- what kind of circles do you people travel in where your friends instantly know what you mean by "singularity?") strikes me as complete bunk.
Gives new meaning to LCD TV.
What? How? Is LCD an abbreviation for some lame-ass MMO I've never heard of or something?
These don't even fucking make sense anymore.
Few other countries have the influence to manipulate content on the Internet on a wide scale as does the United States. For worse or worse, U.S. law is applied on the Internet more than any other.
Example?
That's my exact point. But... thanks for repeating it.
The change in IE8 is that there is no "quirks mode." It always renders in "super-standards" mode, and then has a button on the toolbar to switch to IE7-style quirks mode rendering. The user has to specifically recognize that the page renders wrong, and tell the browser to render it the old way. That's exactly the issue here, and why IE8 breaks damn near every page on the web.
This is all idiocy anyway.
IE has now fallen under the same spell that the rest of the web standards community has fallen under, namely, the illusion that old web sites will be upgraded for newer browser. Here's a hint, W3C, Mozilla, and now Microsoft: They won't.
Large commercial websites (for example, this one: http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx ) are coded using the 1998 method of lots of tables and hardly any CSS. And that's a page that's:
1) Been updated every single day for the last 5 years at least
2) Could have massive, massive bandwidth and render-time savings if they switched the layout.
And that's one site. And that's just one site that's actually maintained. There are thousands of others, still written using the same methods. Many of those are entirely orphaned or unmaintained. Many of those contain critical information that you can't get on any other sites.
Any web standard that isn't written with this in mind (for example, XHTML) will fail. It'll just be one more standard for browsers to support until the end of time, until browsers are so bloated it takes twenty minutes to render Yahoo.com.
People on this site who hate Microsoft actually should be applauding this decision, since users upgrading to IE8 will simply think IE8 is fundamentally broken. Of course, the tears'll start flowing when Firefox, Safari, Opera, and all the browsers Slashdotters like have the same problem. My personal guess is that Microsoft isn't going to let this happen, and they'll make super-strict mode off by default.
IMHO, the HTML 5 spec is a move in the right direction. We all agree that web standards suck, but whatever we do, we need to ensure backwards compatibility.