Adrian @ 101:
Could be temporal interpolation, though for most people that's not naked-eye visible.
Some (including all older) LCD monitors display each of red, green and blue at 256 different levels, giving 16,777,216 different colours. Some (including most newer) instead display each of R,G,B at 64 different colours, giving many less colours.
But here's the sneaky bit: if they want to display a colour between shade n and shade n+1, it will display shade n part of the time, and shade n+1 part of the time, rapidly flickering between them. The percentage of the time spent at each shade gives the perceived mix of colour. Usually, it's 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% or 100%. That means that each of R,G,B can be set to (sort of) 253 different levels, giving 253x253x253 = 16,194,277 colours.
You can tell the difference in sales literature in two different ways: firstly, monitors that directly represent the colours will be listed as supporting 16.7 million colours, while monitors that do temporal interpolation might be listed as supporting 16.2 million colours.
Secondly, "response time" is different: if it's 20ms (milliseconds) or more, it's direct, if it's 10ms or less, it's temporally interpolated.
Like I said up the top, the flickering is too fast for most people to see, but if you have a problem with monitor flicker, it's at least possible that this could affect you without you being consciously aware.
By the way, some keyboards do also contain a pointing device (usually a trackball or trackpad). Look perhaps for a "home theatre" keyboard.
@ 35, 37:
It's not necessarily necessary to plug both an external monitor and an external keyboard into the laptop -- plugging in just one external device may be sufficient. If 'twere me, I'd plug in a keyboard, because external keyboards are available in a wide range of shapes, so you've got a better chance of finding one that suits your personal ergonomic desire.
To make the laptop's monitor higher, you can use a stand. Boing Boing Gadgets had a piece about a super-cheap way to this just a few days ago.
It not having a particular assigned meaning, different developers have used the tab key in different ways. This applies at an operating system level and also at an application level.
Alt-tab means "switch to the next application", on Windows and some Linuxes (Linuces?). Alt-Shift-tab means "switch to the previous application". The meaning of "next" and "previous" need defining, too: at least on Windows, the apps are sorted in order of most-recent-usedness, so Alt-tab, let go of the Alt key, then Alt-tab again will get you right back where you started from: the app you Alt-tabbed away from became #2 in the most-recent list, and when you pressed Alt-tab again, you switched back to it. Of course, if you had held the Alt key down and pressed tab twice, you would wind up somewhere entirely different.
Within an app, tab often means "give focus to the next control", and Shift-tab means "give focus to the previous control". Some controls visually indicate that they have focus, by displaying a dotted line around the control, or by brightening it, or by making a flashing cursor appear in it. And some do not.
When you try to scroll in a window and fail, it is because the control that you are trying to scroll in does not have focus. In a web browser, for example, the very large panel that shows the actual web page counts as a control, even though it's not obvious to think of it as such.
So: press down arrow. If nothing happens, press tab, then press down arrow again. Repeat. This may or may not work.
In some environments, arrow keys may also move you between controls. In some environments, if a control within a control has focus (such as a text box within a web page), arrow keys may be used for movement within that smaller control, rather than within the parent.
Again, the meanings of "next" and "previous" may be inobvious: controls have an order that is apparent to the developer, but not to you, so pressing tab may move focus to a counter-intuitive place.
Ctrl-tab also sometimes moves focus: for example, in Firefox, Ctrl-tab moves you between browser tabs.
On an unrelated note, it's possible that some other pointing device might suit you better: trackball and Accu Point pointing stick both spring to mind.
And as grackle @ 17 says, Google is your friend.
When the kitchen door opened suddenly I knew the game was up. It had been sweet -- but it was all over. As the housemate walked in I sat back in the chair and put on a happy grin. He had the same somber expression that they all have -- and the same lack of humor.
"William Carlos Williams I arrest you on the charge --"
I pressed the button that set off the charge of black powder in the ceiling, the crossbeam buckled and the icebox full of plums dropped through right on top of the housemates's head. He squashed very nicely, thank you.
Australian / New Zealand comedian John Clarke and his straight-man Brian Dawe on the official U.S. position.
(Each week Dawe interviews Clarke, with Clarke pretending to be a different person: the prime minister, the treasurer, et cetera. Clarke always speaks in his own (deadpan) voice, merely speaking from the point of view of the person he is impersonating.)
The suggested algorithm is, I think, subject to differential cryptanalysis. That is, if two different messages are encrypted using the same key, it's much easier to crack than brute force would suggest.
Another weakness is that the keystream suggested is not evenly distributed: in a list of numbers like this, numbers are more likely to start with small digits.
Crptonomicon references a crypto scheme which uses a deck of cards (or, really, two matched decks of cards: one for encrypt, one for decrypt). The algorithm is in the back of the book, and on Wikipedia.
Surely the value of a life is two pennies?
Or is that the value of a death?
Brackets in a place other than the place that would make sense in the following sentence:
The deaths occurred inside of that line, with odd lacunae, like the Lion Brewery (only a few yards from the pump) but with no deaths at all.
As always from you, Mr Macdonald, a detailed and interesting post.
Cassandra?
That's really good. "What is a dandelion?"
May I humbly suggest you submit this for publication? Perhaps here.
It is interesting that "only in America" has different meanings within and without the US.
Within, it means "here is an example of America's great freedom"; without, it means "here is an example of America's near-incomprehensible wackiness, often relating to law suits, crime, or guns".
In both cases, the story that immediately follows the phrase is one that confirms the speaker's beliefs about the US.
This has been bothering me for a while.
At the top left of the ML front page, there is a section titled "TNH's Particles". At the bottom of this box there is a link to take you to older posts from this box. This link is titled "More...".
Shouldn't it be titled "Past Particles"?
elise @ 65:
I second the motion. Poetry threads are one of my favourite things on Making Light.
And watching abi be good and nice is another. Thank you, Bruce, for pointing out to me that she was doing it more subtly than usual.
(I have taken
the WCW poem
that pastiches
so well
and which
you were probably
saving
to parodize later.
Forgive me
it was so delicious
so simple
and so cool.)
xkcd, of course, springs to mind in similarly causing its own reality: chessboards on rollercoasters, RMS's katana, Cory's cape and goggles, and the gathering in a Massachusetts park.
The 20th anniversary World Solar Challenge starts in ten and a bit hours. 38 cars will race 3000 km from Darwin to Adelaide. The fastest cars will take 4 days; my car will take... longer.
http://www.wsc.org.au/
http://worldsolarchallenge.blogspot.com
I'd like you all to pretend that I have written this post in the form of a sonnet, since my mind is way too frazzled from mortal combat with the current sense board to actually compose such.
#73: A brief google turned up this site (http://www.heavyglare.com/goggles.php)
Googling for goggles.
Or, from your hot air balloon,
goggling for googles.
Bruce @ 146:
For details of the stolen APC in Perth, try this. Starts on page 20. (I, too, am Western Australian, which is how I was able to dimly recall appropriate terms to feed Google.)
There was a transcript in the paper the following day of the police radio: the despatcher who was coordinating the police efforts watched the APC roll into the secure car park of his police station, run over his motor bike, and roll out again. He was quite indignant.
I notice there's a Toohey's commercial in the Particles. I wish to add their new ad. Inflatable people meet Busby Berkeley.
The inflatable bit I thought worked really well; the beer commercial bit (including gratuitous shot of girl in bikini) not so well.
(Well, it might not be as new as all that: I don't watch a whole lot of television with ads; I in fact saw it at the cinema.)
#24: "The thing about wikipedia is not so much that it's wrong, though it often is, it's that it's wrong with such confidence."
This, I assert, is a problem with many sources, particularly computer-generated ones. I discovered it when following a set of driving directions generated by, oh, MapQuest, MapBlast, one of those. It created for me a set of driving directions, which when I was driving down the road diverged from reality in a way that had not been apparent when I was sitting at my computer printing them.
Subsequently I've seen the phenomenon several times in widely divergent places on the internet, including in MSDN: inherent clues that you could use to estimate the accuracy of the material are absent or are different to the point of being unrecognisable to the casual user.
#7 mentions the experience of correcting an article only to have those corrections reverted, and this is not the first time I have heard this complaint. Wikipedia is a clever idea in that it allows rapid creation of content by a large number of people, but it's so different from more traditional editing processes that it has bugs they don't: there is no mechanism to give preference to the input of people who know what they are talking about. Citizendium is an attempt to fix this problem -- I don't think it will be a successful fix, but I'm glad that there are people out there continuing to experiment with a concept that I think fundamentally has value.
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