discount factor curve - How is the price of a bond actually determined?

How the price of a bond is actually determined? Is it the supply-demand that determines the price first and then the YTM is calculated on the back of this for that bond. Or is it that the changes to interest rate curve comes first and then the bond is priced using the typical discounting method and that becomes the price in stock market?

How are different writing styles/voices possible?

It seems that writing style varies from author to author, and from work to work, but how does the English language allow for so many different writing styles?

In English there is syntax and word choice, but the number of words meaning the same thing is limited, and the number of word orders is also limited, and the best modern prose seems to follow certain kinds of word order.

So, in light of this lack of flexibility, how is it possible to have so many different types of writing styles, each one differing in sound, sound that is due to a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables and the pauses between them?

There are not many synonyms for each word that have the exact same meaning, so how can the same thought be expressed in enough ways that each writer can not only have their own style, but various other styles, each one for a different piece of writing?

If you can, please provide examples of writing, and possible variations of their wording sounding nothing alike. And please tell how you accomplished this.

forms - Best place to put registration fields?

I have a form that will allow a user to post a classified listing on my site. The thing is, we required users to be signed in to post...so instead of redirecting a user to a separate page to sign in or register, I would like to include the sign in / register fields WITHIN my posting form, and save them a step or two.

1. how do you feel about that idea?


2. where in the form is the right place to put the sign in / register fields? a complete list of the fields on that page are as follows:

display name [if registering]
email

password

title
description
price
upload images

Answer

I think its a great idea and having first (like you wrote) is the best way. You don't want a user being surprised after they filled out the form that they must sign up and then decide if they want to sign up.

Alternatively, I would recommend trying to implement OpendID, facebookID, and TwitterID log in systems. You're registrations will go up and for your type of website it makes more sense. Users tire of making accounts for a site they use sparingly.

Creating a 300dpi png in photoshop

Ive creating an email footer in Photoshop. The footer is 650px W x 300 px H. I want to set the resolution of the footer to 300dpi so that the text is readable at a smaller size, but when i do so the size of the canvas area doubles.

I will be exporting this as a .png, is there any way to get a 300dpi 650x300px footer without it becoming 1300x600px ?

help - Built in user guides

I want my web application to be self-explanatory. There are input fields and whole pages which need some paragraphs of explanation. How to integrate these user guides to my application? How to make them visible and not disturbing?

workflow - Illustrator: Quick way of removing redundant anchor points after unifying shapes?

Except for manually removing redundant anchor points that gets added when unifying two or more objects, is there a quicker operation to wipe in-between anchor points?

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EDIT: To complement Lollero's answer below, here's the setting to automatically remove redundant points from Pathfinder operations (as embarrasingly simple as it may seem, I never thought of this before):

Answer

Expand does just that:

http://www.bittbox.com/illustrator/pathfinder-explained

Also:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Illustrator/13.0/help.html?content=WS714a382cdf7d304e7e07d0100196cbc5f-6456.html

Why are keyboard keys staggered?

In every keyboard that I have used, the keys are arranged so that the keys are staggered a small increment to the left from the previous row. Q is above and slightly to the left of A, and A is above and slightly to the left of Z. This pattern continues across the entire board. Case in point:

What is the motivation behind this design? I would think that a column layout would be easier to type on - and indeed, many ergonomic keyboards seem to go with a column layout, where Q is directly above A and so on.

Answer

This is largely a case of path dependency. Originally keyboards had to have a staggered layout to fit the mechanical linkages between the keys and the levers.

After that, it was what industry was tooled up to make, and what people were used to. And there hasn't been a big enough change to typing to get most people to change over to a matrix (non staggered) layout since. Just like most people still use a qwerty layout even though there are other better layouts around.

Keyboards without staggered keys are generally much easier to type on, but hard to find. For example, I built my own keyboard without staggered keys, which I love. You can see the right hand of it below: