Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

April 25, 2007

Existential Ω-Entailment is not explosive

Filed under: General Rant

This should probably be filed under "coolest words I’ve heard/read today", but I can’t think of a catchy yet pithy name for the category, so I’ll just file this generally.

Existential Ω-Entailment is not explosive

At least according to Michael Kassoff, et. al., in PrediCalc: A Logical Spreadsheet Management System.

Why, you might ask, am I reading this? I saw the reference in ACM’s thrice-weekly TechNews about logical spreadsheets (sort of a spreadsheet-based interactive constraint satisfaction problem solver) out of Stanford and figured I’d read more. Alas, I’ve been out of college too long to really understand the paper, but it looks cool.

Tip: Screenshots Should Not Be JPEGs

Filed under: General Rant

I’m amazed at the number of web sites that are selling software (web- or desktop-based) where the screenshots are JPEGs (this rant is courtesy of an interesting requirements gathering product at http://www.gatherspace.com). Screenshots of the software in action are a great way to demonstrate various features and can work as a summary of the features, with the details left for a Flash-based demo. However, when the screenshots are converted to JPEGs, by definition you lose quality (that’s why JPEG is called "lossy"). Viewing screenshots as blurry JPEGs gives a bad impression. PNGs are widely supported these days and the PNG format is lossless, meaning that it still compresses the file, but doesn’t change one pixel from the original.

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