I think he looked into some special fonts, but they lacked our local language glyphs. For straight-up code that wouldn't be a problem (as everything is in English, though a project or two have localized comments), but the UI does need to have text.
I'll point him to those two fonts and see what he has to say. Thanks:)
Here's the funny thing, and I'm honestly not joking: one of these guys is using Comic Sans as his coding font, as he's dyslexic and it helps him. The other is using Tahoma, because it's very narrow.
Visual preferences vary. That is why we are able to set our own fonts and colours in our IDEs. It is strictly a personal thing. I'm a black-on-white guy, but the Tahoma guy from above is using the old Borland nineties colour scheme, yellow-on-blue. Strangely enough, I "grew up" on those same colours, and since switching to LCD monitors, I can't stand it any longer. No idea why...
We're talking about code here. Is anyone using anything but a monospaced font when viewing it?
Yes, plenty of people. I was using a proportional font for a while when I had a low-res monitor and needed more stuff on the screen. I have two coworkers using proportional fonts right now.
What is readable to one person might very well not be readable to someone else. That is why some people like their code on black backgrounds and some will get severe eye strain if they look at white-on-black for a couple of minutes.
Nevertheless, see the post above about monospaced fonts wildly differing in character width.
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer tabs? Seems like unless everyone has the same tab size set, it can make the code more difficult to read than spaces.
For the same reason why CSS was invented to style HTML. Tabs are entirely font-agnostic and they are semantic. Spaces are not, and are directly visual.
There are people who like two characters of indentation and there are those who like eight. Some like six! There are people who like proportional fonts for coding. There are people who like special narrow monospaced pixel fonts. Even Consolas on Windows, a very popular coding font, is narrower than the standard monospaced width, so code is less indented with Consolas than Courier.
Tabs are also easier on the eyes if you have "show special characters" turned on in your IDE. Also, tabs are easier to work with if you ever need to run some regex on your code.
There are no benefits whatsoever to using spaces, only downsides.
I was very pleased to find that in both Borderlands 2 and XCOM Enemy Unknown, the super-annoying splash screens can all be disabled with a little light editing of.ini files in your user profile.
I hate those things, especially when the game developer doesn't let you skip them. (Borderlands 1, I'm looking at you. Ugh.)
Hello,
I picked up Borderlands 1 recenly, and there are two ways to disable the startup movies. The first is to edit an ini file if you have the Steam version, and the second is to add the "-nomoviestartup" parameter to the executable shortcut.
Is there likely to be a lot more of this type of thing out there that just hasn't been discovered?
Yes.
There are four known communication protocols (OldProtocol, OldProtocolIE, SignupProtocol, RedProtocol) and four classes of malware (SP, SPE, IP, FL).
This is SPE. FL was Flame. SP is unknown (though presumed early SPE), IP is also unknown.
IP uses SignupProtocol. It is presumed that RedProtocol is not yet implemented, although I'd lean towards "not yet discovered".
This is really, really precisely targeted stuff. Stuxnet went out - supposedly the Israelis modified it and a bug/feature let it spread - but the others were pretty much precisely guided towards the victims. Nobody has any idea what's out there and which operating systems these things are targeting. Given that the creators of this entire malware family have also utilized a completely new hash collision algorithm and managed to do things nobody ever did before, I wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty more malware unknowns where this came from.
Fascinating stuff. Evil stuff, but incredibly fascinating. To this date, nobody figured out how malware operators gained access to some Linux servers used for C&C, nor why their first action after logging in was to upgrade OpenSSH.
There is probably at least a few employees who can do a full day of productive work in 4-5 hours. Forcing them to sit out 8 hours, even on flexible basis, is very discouraging. Establish a reasonable goal per week, and have them do that in however many hours it takes.
I agree. I have 4-5 hours of productivity myself, and the rest of my time is just spent pretending to work or reading tech sites because that's how things go; management doesn't understand the amount of mental burnout that happens in IT.
If you need me to do something an hour before I'm supposed to go home, more often than not I will fuck things up severely. I'm done, my brain is pudding. I will make mistakes that could be published on TheDailyWTF. I will spend that hour doing something that I'd be able to do properly in five minutes next morning.
Still, flexible working hours are one step towards changing things around. I worked 9-5 at my last job for a while, then I slowly got them to let me eat at the office and go home early, then work flexible hours, then I got them to let me work from home occasionally, and finally, they just gave me "things to do this week" and I was free to do those things however I wanted to. That was especially nice during the winter, when days are short; I'd spend mornings and early afternoons walking around, cooking, etc, then working from home in the evening, being more productive than ever.
I quit because management changed. While they were willing to let me continue working on my own terms, I realized their business ideas were a colossal fuckup and I was on a sinking boat. Now I'm negotiating flexible working hours again and I don't doubt I'll be where I was in a year, maybe two. (The boat sank, by the way.)
There's nothing worse than coming to work in the morning and trying to "work" after your kid puked the entire night and you haven't had half an hour of solid sleep, or if you have a splitting headache that just refuses to go away on its own, but would likely go away if you could nap or walk for a couple of hours (depends on the person).
IT is a line of work where flexible hours are possible. Give them that, but still keep work clocked every week.
Can you even eat "nutritious" for two+ years on the journey? What does a protein paste do to your digestive system? What would the influences of radiation be on food; would the algae undergo mutation?
And once you get there, how do you grow more food and what kind?
How exactly do you feed people on the journey to Mars, what do they eat when they finally get there, and what type of food will even survive that long?
I haven't given this much thought, but it seems that food might be the hardest obstacle for longer travels. Screw muscle atrophy and bone density issues - how do you FEED travellers to Mars?
Good lord... One of the developers says that horizontal scrolling is "horrible", and the other says the comments are unhelpful and tells people to go away.
Is there even a point in using GNOME when shit like this happens and with people in charge being such enormous assholes?
By the end of the fourth, I found myself wishing there were more.
As usual, it takes time (and episodes) for the script to become more relaxed, for the characters to click, and for the humour to start being, well, humorous. In a way, Pink Five reminded me of The IT Crowd and The Big Bang Theory. The first couple of episodes sucked, let's be honest. Everything felt forced and stiff. Later on, the shows evolved and they became funny.
I'm saying this as a graphic designer too... kerning on the text at the end (they overlapped the crossbar on the 'f' and 't')
I don't want to be a dick, but that's not kerning, that's a ligature, and it's been present in various scripts for about five thousand years (seriously). Furthermore, neither 'f' nor 't' have crossbars; they have cross strokes.
And explain my company (video advertising) has had literally ZERO customer uptake of the app SDK we built for Android, versus many production integrations of our iOS SDK, despite feature parity between the two.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but anyway...
I used to play a certain browser-based game. The main bullshitter and, sadly, decision-maker in that game is a huge Apple fanboy, so he decided they should spend a fuckton of money creating an iOS app for the game. It's now being used by about 0.05-0.1% of the game's userbase, which is six figures, dominantly European, male and in their twenties. The shitstorm that happened on the game's forum because they didn't make an Android app was truly epic and was estimated to have been responsible for a 15% decline in the number of users in the game (which they nullified by aggressive and deceitful marketing campaigns, but now they're almost back at the old level since they lost all they gained).
What I'm trying to say here is that many of the idiots that make decisions simply don't know what's going on in real life; they live in their own personal fantasy world with their shiny iGadgets and only see what they want to see.
However, IE 6's box model that people hate started because the W3C finalized version was different than the one the IE team started implementing just weeks before its release.
I'd just like to point out that the IE6 box model is fucking awesome. What people hate is the W3C box model, because it's utterly moronic and illogical.
W3C: element width = content width; border and padding not included
IE6: element width = border + padding + content width
Imagine a real, physical box. Put something in it. W3C says the dimensions of that box are the dimensions of your object. IE6 says the dimensions of that box are the dimensions of that box.
With the crazy W3C box model, if you want to do something as simple as floating two elements with 50% width, you *have* to make them containers and include extra markup. You have to do that even if you don't have borders and padding right now, because eventually you might have.
Basically, you'll have containerLeft and containerRight, both float: x, width: 50%, and both of them will have to include containerLeftContent or containerRightContent, which will then have border and padding set, so your layout doesn't blow up... But it'll be harder to read and maintain, because you'll have "divitis" all around and your CSS will be more complicated than it needs to be.
Enter the "box-sizing: border-box" CSS3 property+value, implemented in all browsers since quite some time ago, which reverts the internal rendering processes to IE6 emulation -- in other words, sanity. Many people even go so far to include this at the beginning of their CSS:
* { box-sizing: border-box }
There are many things that IE6 did wrong, but the box model just isn't one of them.
At around 3:50 in the video, they shut down the motor, and the "fan" then becomes very reasonable in sound emitted.
It's an interesting concept, but yeah, with this motor and this type of sound, I wouldn't want it anywhere near me, or I'd get a migraine almost immediately.
Not much new stuff in there compared to other reviews. I miss the days when they accurately measured CPU and GPU power consumption... Now it's just meaningless "total power".
Slashdot Mirror
I think he looked into some special fonts, but they lacked our local language glyphs. For straight-up code that wouldn't be a problem (as everything is in English, though a project or two have localized comments), but the UI does need to have text.
I'll point him to those two fonts and see what he has to say. Thanks :)
Here's the funny thing, and I'm honestly not joking: one of these guys is using Comic Sans as his coding font, as he's dyslexic and it helps him. The other is using Tahoma, because it's very narrow.
Visual preferences vary. That is why we are able to set our own fonts and colours in our IDEs. It is strictly a personal thing. I'm a black-on-white guy, but the Tahoma guy from above is using the old Borland nineties colour scheme, yellow-on-blue. Strangely enough, I "grew up" on those same colours, and since switching to LCD monitors, I can't stand it any longer. No idea why...
We're talking about code here. Is anyone using anything but a monospaced font when viewing it?
Yes, plenty of people. I was using a proportional font for a while when I had a low-res monitor and needed more stuff on the screen. I have two coworkers using proportional fonts right now.
What is readable to one person might very well not be readable to someone else. That is why some people like their code on black backgrounds and some will get severe eye strain if they look at white-on-black for a couple of minutes.
Nevertheless, see the post above about monospaced fonts wildly differing in character width.
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer tabs? Seems like unless everyone has the same tab size set, it can make the code more difficult to read than spaces.
For the same reason why CSS was invented to style HTML. Tabs are entirely font-agnostic and they are semantic. Spaces are not, and are directly visual.
There are people who like two characters of indentation and there are those who like eight. Some like six! There are people who like proportional fonts for coding. There are people who like special narrow monospaced pixel fonts. Even Consolas on Windows, a very popular coding font, is narrower than the standard monospaced width, so code is less indented with Consolas than Courier.
Tabs are also easier on the eyes if you have "show special characters" turned on in your IDE. Also, tabs are easier to work with if you ever need to run some regex on your code.
There are no benefits whatsoever to using spaces, only downsides.
It's best if you watched some playthroughs on YouTube. Or TotalBiscuit's WTF on the game. Looks fun, but XCOM it is most definitely not.
That said... Xenonauts is probably what both you and I are waiting for.
How do I get the bundle in Europe? It seems that the promotion is only available to US residents, but my google-fu could have failed me...
I was very pleased to find that in both Borderlands 2 and XCOM Enemy Unknown, the super-annoying splash screens can all be disabled with a little light editing of .ini files in your user profile.
I hate those things, especially when the game developer doesn't let you skip them. (Borderlands 1, I'm looking at you. Ugh.)
Hello,
I picked up Borderlands 1 recenly, and there are two ways to disable the startup movies. The first is to edit an ini file if you have the Steam version, and the second is to add the "-nomoviestartup" parameter to the executable shortcut.
Is there likely to be a lot more of this type of thing out there that just hasn't been discovered?
Yes.
There are four known communication protocols (OldProtocol, OldProtocolIE, SignupProtocol, RedProtocol) and four classes of malware (SP, SPE, IP, FL).
This is SPE. FL was Flame. SP is unknown (though presumed early SPE), IP is also unknown.
IP uses SignupProtocol. It is presumed that RedProtocol is not yet implemented, although I'd lean towards "not yet discovered".
This is really, really precisely targeted stuff. Stuxnet went out - supposedly the Israelis modified it and a bug/feature let it spread - but the others were pretty much precisely guided towards the victims. Nobody has any idea what's out there and which operating systems these things are targeting. Given that the creators of this entire malware family have also utilized a completely new hash collision algorithm and managed to do things nobody ever did before, I wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty more malware unknowns where this came from.
Fascinating stuff. Evil stuff, but incredibly fascinating. To this date, nobody figured out how malware operators gained access to some Linux servers used for C&C, nor why their first action after logging in was to upgrade OpenSSH.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/10/security-vulnerability-in-firefox-16/
Great... How does that even happen?!
There is probably at least a few employees who can do a full day of productive work in 4-5 hours. Forcing them to sit out 8 hours, even on flexible basis, is very discouraging. Establish a reasonable goal per week, and have them do that in however many hours it takes.
I agree. I have 4-5 hours of productivity myself, and the rest of my time is just spent pretending to work or reading tech sites because that's how things go; management doesn't understand the amount of mental burnout that happens in IT.
If you need me to do something an hour before I'm supposed to go home, more often than not I will fuck things up severely. I'm done, my brain is pudding. I will make mistakes that could be published on TheDailyWTF. I will spend that hour doing something that I'd be able to do properly in five minutes next morning.
Still, flexible working hours are one step towards changing things around. I worked 9-5 at my last job for a while, then I slowly got them to let me eat at the office and go home early, then work flexible hours, then I got them to let me work from home occasionally, and finally, they just gave me "things to do this week" and I was free to do those things however I wanted to. That was especially nice during the winter, when days are short; I'd spend mornings and early afternoons walking around, cooking, etc, then working from home in the evening, being more productive than ever.
I quit because management changed. While they were willing to let me continue working on my own terms, I realized their business ideas were a colossal fuckup and I was on a sinking boat. Now I'm negotiating flexible working hours again and I don't doubt I'll be where I was in a year, maybe two. (The boat sank, by the way.)
Give them flexible working hours.
There's nothing worse than coming to work in the morning and trying to "work" after your kid puked the entire night and you haven't had half an hour of solid sleep, or if you have a splitting headache that just refuses to go away on its own, but would likely go away if you could nap or walk for a couple of hours (depends on the person).
IT is a line of work where flexible hours are possible. Give them that, but still keep work clocked every week.
Yes, I know SA is basically a hardware tabloid, but they usually get at least some things right...
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/09/27/intels-clover-trail-is-a-bloated-nightmare/
I'm not going to comment on anything they wrote; make your own conclusions.
Read the PDF, people, damn it, before jumping to conclusions.
The fonts used in the experiment were Eurostile as the grotesque and Frutiger as the humanist. Both of those are sans serif.
This is about shapes, form and spacing.
Can you even eat "nutritious" for two+ years on the journey? What does a protein paste do to your digestive system? What would the influences of radiation be on food; would the algae undergo mutation?
And once you get there, how do you grow more food and what kind?
How exactly do you feed people on the journey to Mars, what do they eat when they finally get there, and what type of food will even survive that long?
I haven't given this much thought, but it seems that food might be the hardest obstacle for longer travels. Screw muscle atrophy and bone density issues - how do you FEED travellers to Mars?
Good lord... One of the developers says that horizontal scrolling is "horrible", and the other says the comments are unhelpful and tells people to go away.
Is there even a point in using GNOME when shit like this happens and with people in charge being such enormous assholes?
OSX isn't very used outside the western world. So, I guess it has a lower worldwide marketshare, whereas Linux might have a higher one.
Watched the first episode. It was... bad.
By the end of the fourth, I found myself wishing there were more.
As usual, it takes time (and episodes) for the script to become more relaxed, for the characters to click, and for the humour to start being, well, humorous. In a way, Pink Five reminded me of The IT Crowd and The Big Bang Theory. The first couple of episodes sucked, let's be honest. Everything felt forced and stiff. Later on, the shows evolved and they became funny.
Here's to the fifth episode, and maybe more!
I'm saying this as a graphic designer too ... kerning on the text at the end (they overlapped the crossbar on the 'f' and 't')
I don't want to be a dick, but that's not kerning, that's a ligature, and it's been present in various scripts for about five thousand years (seriously). Furthermore, neither 'f' nor 't' have crossbars; they have cross strokes.
The comments are awful... I never knew Microsoft had fanboys :/
And explain my company (video advertising) has had literally ZERO customer uptake of the app SDK we built for Android, versus many production integrations of our iOS SDK, despite feature parity between the two.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but anyway...
I used to play a certain browser-based game. The main bullshitter and, sadly, decision-maker in that game is a huge Apple fanboy, so he decided they should spend a fuckton of money creating an iOS app for the game. It's now being used by about 0.05-0.1% of the game's userbase, which is six figures, dominantly European, male and in their twenties. The shitstorm that happened on the game's forum because they didn't make an Android app was truly epic and was estimated to have been responsible for a 15% decline in the number of users in the game (which they nullified by aggressive and deceitful marketing campaigns, but now they're almost back at the old level since they lost all they gained).
What I'm trying to say here is that many of the idiots that make decisions simply don't know what's going on in real life; they live in their own personal fantasy world with their shiny iGadgets and only see what they want to see.
However, IE 6's box model that people hate started because the W3C finalized version was different than the one the IE team started implementing just weeks before its release.
I'd just like to point out that the IE6 box model is fucking awesome. What people hate is the W3C box model, because it's utterly moronic and illogical.
W3C: element width = content width; border and padding not included
IE6: element width = border + padding + content width
Imagine a real, physical box. Put something in it. W3C says the dimensions of that box are the dimensions of your object. IE6 says the dimensions of that box are the dimensions of that box.
With the crazy W3C box model, if you want to do something as simple as floating two elements with 50% width, you *have* to make them containers and include extra markup. You have to do that even if you don't have borders and padding right now, because eventually you might have.
Basically, you'll have containerLeft and containerRight, both float: x, width: 50%, and both of them will have to include containerLeftContent or containerRightContent, which will then have border and padding set, so your layout doesn't blow up... But it'll be harder to read and maintain, because you'll have "divitis" all around and your CSS will be more complicated than it needs to be.
Enter the "box-sizing: border-box" CSS3 property+value, implemented in all browsers since quite some time ago, which reverts the internal rendering processes to IE6 emulation -- in other words, sanity. Many people even go so far to include this at the beginning of their CSS:
* { box-sizing: border-box }
There are many things that IE6 did wrong, but the box model just isn't one of them.
At around 3:50 in the video, they shut down the motor, and the "fan" then becomes very reasonable in sound emitted.
It's an interesting concept, but yeah, with this motor and this type of sound, I wouldn't want it anywhere near me, or I'd get a migraine almost immediately.
Would it have been SO FUCKING HARD to link to the original, instead to a site that won't even load as I'm writing this?
http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/yahoo-axis-chrome-extension-leaks-private-certificate-file
X-bit Labs review.
Not much new stuff in there compared to other reviews. I miss the days when they accurately measured CPU and GPU power consumption... Now it's just meaningless "total power".