That's a distribution issue. Your publisher is going to be the guy calling up the distributor, not packaging the MP3s.
Trust me, it's nuts for a publisher to just sit on your work, unless he's just that busy with his other clients, or your work is crap. And it's a musician's job to find a publisher they trust in the first place. Often it's a life-long relationship.
Slashdot loves doomsday scenarios but the music business is tough enough without everything hinging on a technicality. In real life your publisher isn't the guy trying to screw you, it's the collections agencies like ASCAP & BMI, also the labels when they are lowballing you on a contract.
Your publisher has a strong interest in seeing you succeed and the situation that Hawk-eye posted, while technically valid, just doesn't happen, since your publisher is essentially working on a commission. There is no benefit to them for actively sabotaging you.
The post is about to fall off of my comments page, so this is your last opportunity to read and understand.
The AC said that this article automatically made global warming science "wrong", as if such a thing could be summed up in one word, and mentions Al Gore, as if he were a climate scientist.
A reply came:
I can easily imagine an ice cap melting somewhere in the antarctic, raising the humidity, and a good portion of that water vapor attaching and freezing again somewhere else where it's cooler. That doesn't mean that the warm currents aren't having a devastating effect overall.
(emphasis mine) This was a hypothetical argument intended to show the gap in logic present in the parent's post. It has nothing to do with what I believe or don't believe, it was very clear from the wording that this was a hypothetical argument.
Nonetheless, you, Moridineas, immediately saw a straw-man that you could set up and begin to knock down like a true internet tough guy. I posted an article because I thought that, even though it would be dangerous to validate your original whine about how nobody's defending this straw-man you built yourself (and therefore no one in the world but the climate change deniers have anything concrete to say), maybe it would demonstrate that not only are you grasping at straws, but the straws themselves are imaginary.
It was selfish, I admit. I couldn't bear the thought of you going to work and gloating about how those damned lieberals whine about imaginary ice but can't even give you the latitude and longitude of said imaginary ice. So I took a gamble.
I should have known better than to feed the troll. I am sorry, and you can consider this my formal apology to both you and myself.
Agreed. The song lyrics work well on paper, but in a movie they take the place of a real score, which to me is often the strongest part of a film. Imagine Jurassic Park without the score, the main theme in particular. It makes it just epic and fantastical enough for me to be okay with the fact that I am seeing Jeff Goldblum and Wayne Knight running around, and there are freaking dinosaurs on screen.
However, I really loved the scene where they bury the Comedian. I doubt I'll ever tire of hearing "The Sound of Silence", especially where that first drum hit comes in.
The Slashdot bias tends to be toward things that require less human interaction. I mean I don't always have money to go to the movies but I won't deny that I enjoy going to see them with my friends.
I think that you could say that about LoTR but not Watchmen. They turned Watchmen into an action flick. The fact that the general consensus on here seems to be that there was too much dialogue and not enough action sort of scares me.
I agree, not much re-watch value in the actual movie. The diehards will buy the DVD for the extras, some of which are pretty good.
I will say (in direct defiance of your OMG reading protest! even) that if you are intent on over-analyzing the plot, you should start with the source material. Most of it was replaced in the movie with slow-motion punches.
As far as the ending, is your problem with it just that it's not a happy one? That's what it sounds like. Watchmen is more about flaw than virtue.
I'd say Watchmen is more in line with what comes out of DC/Vertigo than anything Marvel has done. Constantine and Lobo are some more examples of the 80s comic anti-hero. Or maybe you've heard of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Watchmen comes from a similar time and school of thought.
(I'm not huge into comics so maybe someone will point out how I'm wrong about all this.)
It's certainly not sci-fi or fantasy, if that's what you mean by tech/nerd culture. The comics that were big when you (and I) grew up, crap like X-Force and Spawn, can probably be best summed up as a bunch of comic book artists who flew too close to the sun and whom the industry would rather forget.
Personally I think the idea that there is a nerd canon (that is, if you like D&D you must also be into Trek or Dune) can be somewhat destructive. I mean I like all that stuff too but there's a lot of good culture out there to be absorbed.* I know that's not really what you were getting at, though.
* please nobody come back with "yeah dude like DBZ"
Comics were once for kids and now they're for the adults who loved them as kids but suddenly became adults with no upward motivation. Talented people did and still work on comics and as immature and goofy as any hobby can be, they should be respected and admired for their work. We don't hate comics. I'm a little more bitter about the loss of innocence than Bill, but we both don't appreciate Garth Ennis having Superman demand blowjobs in a comic and expecting people to call him a genius.
People do. People suck.
If you haven't read that article, it's a real hoot.
The talk about Dr. Manhattan being naked is strongly exaggerated. It's very brief and I didn't find it uncomfortable.
It even functions in the story. He's withdrawing from what regular society considers normal, and by the time he has to put on a suit for his interview it's like he's forgotten they exist. It's not for shock value, it was part of the original story, was related to character development, and the director left it in.
Also, Watchmen the comic was violent for its time, sure, but it was markedly different in its treatment of violence and sexuality than the schlock that, say, Image Studios, put out in the 90s. Sex in Watchmen is awkward, and violence is not idealized but committed by individuals with mental issues.
I guess my point is that I'm more than ok with an R-rated movie, as long as there's a compelling reason why it was done that way. The opposite happens a lot, too: stories that would benefit from the realism that are bowdlerized for the sake of having a bigger opening weekend.
It's just too nuanced of a story to translate well to film. Also much of what made the comic great was how it was a reaction to the genre itself. However, that being said I do think they could have managed to put something better together, had they left Zack Snyder and Malin Akerman out of it. Too much slo-mo action and valspeak.
I can't wait for the day when monitors are hi-res enough that this is no longer an issue, at least not to the extent that it is now. Then again, really good font rendering on linux may well happen before that.
I don't know how Macs do it specifically but I do know that proper kerning results from examining each possible letter pair. This is supposed to be done by the creator of the typeface, and ideally the rendering would just figure out how to best represent that tuning in cases where the pixel grid causes distortion.
Much of the difference between professional and amateur fonts is a lack of kerning data, forcing the designer to do a lot more manual kerning. But rendering the kerning data at a given resolution is another matter altogether. Windows solves the problem by changing the font to match the pixels, Macs by comparison ignore the pixels. After a while your eye does, too. I think that it'd actually be easier to ape the Mac style than the Windows style, it seems to involve less work. But I am just speculating.
As far as that API: I don't think Windows has one either:) I can't spend five minutes on Old New Thing without going, WTF? It takes that much work to get that right?
You're probably right, but that's just a single game. Not a whole genre. There are other games that strive for accuracy in car racing. Not to mention a boatload of expensive peripherals to play them with. They're not the norm, but they didn't die with that single game.
And if we generalize further to just super-realistic sims in general, that's never going to go away. To this day people are making nuclear power plant simulation "games", not to mention flight sims.
I think the larger point was that hardcore gamers care about the settings. You just wrote a paragraph about them:)
But I agree with you on every point. I usually switch the Y to invert and leave the rest alone. New controls are part of that new game smell. And I always leave the difficulty on normal because I'd like to beat it. Rarely do I care enough about a game to then go back and try to beat it on hard, not when there's a world of other games that can be played.
And finally that there's no easy way to nail down what hardcore gaming is. It's only really obvious during a comparison, and even then it's quite a loaded term.
I am a casual gamer who grew up in a time when playing a game for hours to try and beat it was just what you did with video games, it was not hardcore. Now the games are easier and at the same time I am too old to be spending hours on them, so it all worked out for me:P
Frankly, I haven't seen a definition of hardcore gaming that I didn't think was stupid.
The whole term is just an excuse to bash people that actually have fun playing video games, and who save their sense of accomplishment for actual accomplishments.
Whether or not a player is hardcore has more to do with the player than the game. You can be hardcore with FF6 just as much as with Counter-Strike. Maybe not Wii Bowling. But Smash Bros. for sure. But as long as the game rewards extended play, it's possible.
A game that can take weeks or months of tedious time-sinks to achieve minor goals...well, we need a name for that.
RPGs is as good a name as any:)
There is a fine line between "pleasant diversion" and "escaping from your obligations while simultaneously getting a false sense of achievement." Not that I can profess to really understand the difference myself. I still have a bit of work to do there. Slashdot doesn't help.
Then again, I consider my Mac to have the least amount of eye-candy to any system that I use. Certainly less than Vista, with it's thick "glass" borders around everything and reflections that shift when you move a window. Regular Gnome doesn't suffer from such distractions. I can't say the same for Emerald or e17, but Emerald's not bad.
One specific difference is the onslaught of tiny icons in menus that Windows and Linux programs all use now. Favicons in bookmarks are pretty much the only time I find them useful. Mac programs usually avoid the practice and I am thankful for that.
The pinstripes and gloss look of early Aqua was garish, and brushed metal wasn't much better. But the UI of recent Macs is sparse and gray and it gets out of the way. More text, less icons. I think Gnome is actually on the right track with everything they've been doing recently. Simple and functional is just fine...it's is that desire to not be constantly visually assaulted that draws some to OS X.
So better looks can lead to usability, but only if we interpret better to mean *less* distracting crap on the screen as opposed to more of it.
10 years ago, HD video editing was not cheap or commonplace. Nor could you back up your computer automatically over Wi-Fi. Nor did your OS keep system state backups that you could roll back to, or do background indexing of your files for faster searching.
Hell, you used to be able to crash a Windows machine (full crash / BSOD) just by sending a particular packet to it. So you had your speed on old hardware, but at what cost?
But if you want to limit it to reading and writing: I have a 20 meg PDF e-book. In OS X, I just hit space, and it comes up immediately. Not a half-second after it starts loading...immediately. I can flip to any page with no delay. Back then I wouldn't have had any place to put a 20 meg PDF. It would have been wasteful.
Trying to read it while burning a CD? Depends on whether or not you want that CD to play afterward.
It does annoy me that it still takes between 20 and 30 seconds for the various machines I use to do a cold boot. That should have been remedied years ago. Phoenix BIOS needs to be put in the old computer program's home.
I don't know about specific issues with drop down boxes. I haven't experienced that either. But usually when people complain about fonts on linux they're complaining about stuff like this:
In many cases on that page letters are actually touching each other. I think they're using the Microsoft Web fonts there, though, and I usually avoid having those on for that reason: they kern badly in Linux. But even in the address bar in that picture, the periods and slashes don't kern well. Look at how the e in Player is rendered in the largest headline. The center bar is too high. This isn't 6 pt or anything, I can't see any excuse why it would be that way. The text on the bottom looks like a ransom note.
I have often read that there are actual bugs with the Microsoft fonts, but they seem to render fine on Macs. Also, there are a lot of things you can tweak with X and certainly my fonts don't look that bad (Arch Linux + KDE + DejaVu Sans).
Then again, my inclination is towards Mac-style font rendering. Long-time Windows users seem to hate it (although I am one, but I don't). Some of it is subjective, but I consider the examples above to be pretty objective. My general rule is that the font at small sizes should resemble the same font at large sizes. This doesn't always mean that it is the same, in terms of pixel ratios. Usually there are some optical illusions at work.
Hit the nail on the head. I was just about to post the exact some two points: design by committee doesn't work, and designers like to get paid.
I realize how elitist it sounds against the backdrop of Slashdot's mostly-DIY ethic, but design is a skill. It must be taught, learned and experienced. You cannot fire up Photoshop or GIMP and declare yourself to be a graphic designer. There's no tutorial on it, no universal guideline. The fact is, good design is elitist and not everyone is capable of it. There's not much on spec sites like 99designs that I see that doesn't seem like absolute shit. It's hard to explain something like that to a programmer, who will usually expect a general reason or a universal rule that was broken. But with design it's more about what specifically was done right or wrong with a piece. There are rules but learning where to apply them takes a lifetime.
The way it generally works in the art and design world is: you look at my portfolio, if you like what I do then you hire me and I do it. Artwork for FOSS projects is more like spec work (can you say "logo contest?"), because the work of design is just not valued as much in those places. At least not initially. It is seen as a finishing touch rather than something integral. A piece of fashion rather than a useful component.
So in cases where design decisions are made on purpose rather than accidentally, you still end up with the people who do spec work. You end up with an interface that defaults to the color of road cones.
It hurts, but it's the truth. Designers move in different circles. Apple puts design first, FOSS puts openness and DIY first*. I guess in a desert island scenario I'd choose the latter, but obviously it's not mutually exclusive, just a question of priority.
It's always a thing of beauty with those circles converge. Jon Hicks & Firefox, for instance. Or the Tango Desktop Project. Design and user experience in FOSS gets better all the time and Ubuntu is certainly doing its part to improve things. I can't wait to see what the future holds, but I realize that it's always going to be an uphill battle because there are some cultural differences that may never go away.
* I'm not sure what Microsoft puts first (someone is shouting "developers" at me, maybe that's it).
You're probably right. I was raised Catholic but assumed that Protestants also considered hell to be eternal. But there is a lot of variation within Protestantism and of course individuals don't always follow the doctrine of their particular church to the letter.
I should mention that I am going off of the KJV. Newer translations have less references to hell, and some don't use the word in the OT. The concept certainly developed as time went on. However I think that in places where something appears in the NT, it should supersede the earlier books.
In Catholic school a lot of the sisters would tell us about what they personally thought the afterlife would be like. One of them (oddly enough, the meanest one) read us Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I don't personally believe in hell but you need the world's most creative concordance if you're going to read "fire and brimstone" as reincarnation.
Maybe that's for the best, though. Maybe people are just taking the best of the teachings and leaving the puritan stuff behind. I guess we can draw the line at the resurrection. Like if someone didn't believe in it, then they need to piss or get off the pot. I often wonder how many people simply profess to be Christian just take things like that for granted...I studied a lot of philosophy and theology and was going on retreats, toying with the idea of becoming a Catholic Brother. But I wasn't called to it, and finally the really big stuff just got to me. Hell, the resurrection, the virgin birth...I can't reconcile it anymore. Bad things happening to good people finished it off.
I do believe that the universe has beauty and order both on scales that we can understand and scales that we have yet to understand.
On one hand, I feel that a lot of Christian doctrine is frankly pretty weird, and I get the impression that in this modern age people have a hard time owning up to it. On the other, if someone can believe that life is beautiful and has a purpose (side note: I don't know any atheists who don't, despite the reckless live-for-the-day stereotype), and be just as sure of the resurrection, and takes the stuff printed in red ink to heart, that's probably Christian enough to keep you out of whatever hells there are.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a distribution issue. Your publisher is going to be the guy calling up the distributor, not packaging the MP3s.
Trust me, it's nuts for a publisher to just sit on your work, unless he's just that busy with his other clients, or your work is crap. And it's a musician's job to find a publisher they trust in the first place. Often it's a life-long relationship.
Slashdot loves doomsday scenarios but the music business is tough enough without everything hinging on a technicality. In real life your publisher isn't the guy trying to screw you, it's the collections agencies like ASCAP & BMI, also the labels when they are lowballing you on a contract.
Your publisher has a strong interest in seeing you succeed and the situation that Hawk-eye posted, while technically valid, just doesn't happen, since your publisher is essentially working on a commission. There is no benefit to them for actively sabotaging you.
It is in your publishers' best interest to make your music available in as many forms as possible, since they are getting half of whatever comes back.
The post is about to fall off of my comments page, so this is your last opportunity to read and understand.
The AC said that this article automatically made global warming science "wrong", as if such a thing could be summed up in one word, and mentions Al Gore, as if he were a climate scientist.
A reply came:
I can easily imagine an ice cap melting somewhere in the antarctic, raising the humidity, and a good portion of that water vapor attaching and freezing again somewhere else where it's cooler. That doesn't mean that the warm currents aren't having a devastating effect overall.
(emphasis mine) This was a hypothetical argument intended to show the gap in logic present in the parent's post. It has nothing to do with what I believe or don't believe, it was very clear from the wording that this was a hypothetical argument.
Nonetheless, you, Moridineas, immediately saw a straw-man that you could set up and begin to knock down like a true internet tough guy. I posted an article because I thought that, even though it would be dangerous to validate your original whine about how nobody's defending this straw-man you built yourself (and therefore no one in the world but the climate change deniers have anything concrete to say), maybe it would demonstrate that not only are you grasping at straws, but the straws themselves are imaginary.
It was selfish, I admit. I couldn't bear the thought of you going to work and gloating about how those damned lieberals whine about imaginary ice but can't even give you the latitude and longitude of said imaginary ice. So I took a gamble.
I should have known better than to feed the troll. I am sorry, and you can consider this my formal apology to both you and myself.
Agreed. The song lyrics work well on paper, but in a movie they take the place of a real score, which to me is often the strongest part of a film. Imagine Jurassic Park without the score, the main theme in particular. It makes it just epic and fantastical enough for me to be okay with the fact that I am seeing Jeff Goldblum and Wayne Knight running around, and there are freaking dinosaurs on screen.
However, I really loved the scene where they bury the Comedian. I doubt I'll ever tire of hearing "The Sound of Silence", especially where that first drum hit comes in.
The Slashdot bias tends to be toward things that require less human interaction. I mean I don't always have money to go to the movies but I won't deny that I enjoy going to see them with my friends.
Then again, I have friends.
You're not going to win this one, circle.
I think that you could say that about LoTR but not Watchmen. They turned Watchmen into an action flick. The fact that the general consensus on here seems to be that there was too much dialogue and not enough action sort of scares me.
I agree, not much re-watch value in the actual movie. The diehards will buy the DVD for the extras, some of which are pretty good.
I will say (in direct defiance of your OMG reading protest! even) that if you are intent on over-analyzing the plot, you should start with the source material. Most of it was replaced in the movie with slow-motion punches.
As far as the ending, is your problem with it just that it's not a happy one? That's what it sounds like. Watchmen is more about flaw than virtue.
I'd say Watchmen is more in line with what comes out of DC/Vertigo than anything Marvel has done. Constantine and Lobo are some more examples of the 80s comic anti-hero. Or maybe you've heard of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Watchmen comes from a similar time and school of thought.
(I'm not huge into comics so maybe someone will point out how I'm wrong about all this.)
It's certainly not sci-fi or fantasy, if that's what you mean by tech/nerd culture. The comics that were big when you (and I) grew up, crap like X-Force and Spawn, can probably be best summed up as a bunch of comic book artists who flew too close to the sun and whom the industry would rather forget.
Personally I think the idea that there is a nerd canon (that is, if you like D&D you must also be into Trek or Dune) can be somewhat destructive. I mean I like all that stuff too but there's a lot of good culture out there to be absorbed.* I know that's not really what you were getting at, though.
* please nobody come back with "yeah dude like DBZ"
Reminds me of http://progressiveboink.com/archive/robliefeld.html
Comics were once for kids and now they're for the adults who loved them as kids but suddenly became adults with no upward motivation. Talented people did and still work on comics and as immature and goofy as any hobby can be, they should be respected and admired for their work. We don't hate comics. I'm a little more bitter about the loss of innocence than Bill, but we both don't appreciate Garth Ennis having Superman demand blowjobs in a comic and expecting people to call him a genius.
People do. People suck.
If you haven't read that article, it's a real hoot.
The talk about Dr. Manhattan being naked is strongly exaggerated. It's very brief and I didn't find it uncomfortable.
It even functions in the story. He's withdrawing from what regular society considers normal, and by the time he has to put on a suit for his interview it's like he's forgotten they exist. It's not for shock value, it was part of the original story, was related to character development, and the director left it in.
Also, Watchmen the comic was violent for its time, sure, but it was markedly different in its treatment of violence and sexuality than the schlock that, say, Image Studios, put out in the 90s. Sex in Watchmen is awkward, and violence is not idealized but committed by individuals with mental issues.
I guess my point is that I'm more than ok with an R-rated movie, as long as there's a compelling reason why it was done that way. The opposite happens a lot, too: stories that would benefit from the realism that are bowdlerized for the sake of having a bigger opening weekend.
Pick a different project :)
It's just too nuanced of a story to translate well to film. Also much of what made the comic great was how it was a reaction to the genre itself. However, that being said I do think they could have managed to put something better together, had they left Zack Snyder and Malin Akerman out of it. Too much slo-mo action and valspeak.
They weren't really midgets. That was just special effects.
I can't wait for the day when monitors are hi-res enough that this is no longer an issue, at least not to the extent that it is now. Then again, really good font rendering on linux may well happen before that.
I don't know how Macs do it specifically but I do know that proper kerning results from examining each possible letter pair. This is supposed to be done by the creator of the typeface, and ideally the rendering would just figure out how to best represent that tuning in cases where the pixel grid causes distortion.
Much of the difference between professional and amateur fonts is a lack of kerning data, forcing the designer to do a lot more manual kerning. But rendering the kerning data at a given resolution is another matter altogether. Windows solves the problem by changing the font to match the pixels, Macs by comparison ignore the pixels. After a while your eye does, too. I think that it'd actually be easier to ape the Mac style than the Windows style, it seems to involve less work. But I am just speculating.
As far as that API: I don't think Windows has one either :) I can't spend five minutes on Old New Thing without going, WTF? It takes that much work to get that right?
You're probably right, but that's just a single game. Not a whole genre. There are other games that strive for accuracy in car racing. Not to mention a boatload of expensive peripherals to play them with. They're not the norm, but they didn't die with that single game.
And if we generalize further to just super-realistic sims in general, that's never going to go away. To this day people are making nuclear power plant simulation "games", not to mention flight sims.
I really don't understand where this urge to claim the sky is falling and nintendo is causing it is coming from.
It rhymes with shmad shmimpressions.
I think the larger point was that hardcore gamers care about the settings. You just wrote a paragraph about them :)
But I agree with you on every point. I usually switch the Y to invert and leave the rest alone. New controls are part of that new game smell. And I always leave the difficulty on normal because I'd like to beat it. Rarely do I care enough about a game to then go back and try to beat it on hard, not when there's a world of other games that can be played.
And finally that there's no easy way to nail down what hardcore gaming is. It's only really obvious during a comparison, and even then it's quite a loaded term.
I am a casual gamer who grew up in a time when playing a game for hours to try and beat it was just what you did with video games, it was not hardcore. Now the games are easier and at the same time I am too old to be spending hours on them, so it all worked out for me :P
Frankly, I haven't seen a definition of hardcore gaming that I didn't think was stupid.
The whole term is just an excuse to bash people that actually have fun playing video games, and who save their sense of accomplishment for actual accomplishments.
Whether or not a player is hardcore has more to do with the player than the game. You can be hardcore with FF6 just as much as with Counter-Strike. Maybe not Wii Bowling. But Smash Bros. for sure. But as long as the game rewards extended play, it's possible.
A game that can take weeks or months of tedious time-sinks to achieve minor goals...well, we need a name for that.
RPGs is as good a name as any :)
There is a fine line between "pleasant diversion" and "escaping from your obligations while simultaneously getting a false sense of achievement." Not that I can profess to really understand the difference myself. I still have a bit of work to do there. Slashdot doesn't help.
You're both wrong, it was 2008.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/17/1459202
Not really.
Then again, I consider my Mac to have the least amount of eye-candy to any system that I use. Certainly less than Vista, with it's thick "glass" borders around everything and reflections that shift when you move a window. Regular Gnome doesn't suffer from such distractions. I can't say the same for Emerald or e17, but Emerald's not bad.
One specific difference is the onslaught of tiny icons in menus that Windows and Linux programs all use now. Favicons in bookmarks are pretty much the only time I find them useful. Mac programs usually avoid the practice and I am thankful for that.
The pinstripes and gloss look of early Aqua was garish, and brushed metal wasn't much better. But the UI of recent Macs is sparse and gray and it gets out of the way. More text, less icons. I think Gnome is actually on the right track with everything they've been doing recently. Simple and functional is just fine...it's is that desire to not be constantly visually assaulted that draws some to OS X.
So better looks can lead to usability, but only if we interpret better to mean *less* distracting crap on the screen as opposed to more of it.
10 years ago, HD video editing was not cheap or commonplace. Nor could you back up your computer automatically over Wi-Fi. Nor did your OS keep system state backups that you could roll back to, or do background indexing of your files for faster searching.
Hell, you used to be able to crash a Windows machine (full crash / BSOD) just by sending a particular packet to it. So you had your speed on old hardware, but at what cost?
But if you want to limit it to reading and writing: I have a 20 meg PDF e-book. In OS X, I just hit space, and it comes up immediately. Not a half-second after it starts loading...immediately. I can flip to any page with no delay. Back then I wouldn't have had any place to put a 20 meg PDF. It would have been wasteful.
Trying to read it while burning a CD? Depends on whether or not you want that CD to play afterward.
It does annoy me that it still takes between 20 and 30 seconds for the various machines I use to do a cold boot. That should have been remedied years ago. Phoenix BIOS needs to be put in the old computer program's home.
I don't know about specific issues with drop down boxes. I haven't experienced that either. But usually when people complain about fonts on linux they're complaining about stuff like this:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/images/flashintrepid02.png
In many cases on that page letters are actually touching each other. I think they're using the Microsoft Web fonts there, though, and I usually avoid having those on for that reason: they kern badly in Linux. But even in the address bar in that picture, the periods and slashes don't kern well. Look at how the e in Player is rendered in the largest headline. The center bar is too high. This isn't 6 pt or anything, I can't see any excuse why it would be that way. The text on the bottom looks like a ransom note.
I have often read that there are actual bugs with the Microsoft fonts, but they seem to render fine on Macs. Also, there are a lot of things you can tweak with X and certainly my fonts don't look that bad (Arch Linux + KDE + DejaVu Sans).
Then again, my inclination is towards Mac-style font rendering. Long-time Windows users seem to hate it (although I am one, but I don't). Some of it is subjective, but I consider the examples above to be pretty objective. My general rule is that the font at small sizes should resemble the same font at large sizes. This doesn't always mean that it is the same, in terms of pixel ratios. Usually there are some optical illusions at work.
Hit the nail on the head. I was just about to post the exact some two points: design by committee doesn't work, and designers like to get paid.
I realize how elitist it sounds against the backdrop of Slashdot's mostly-DIY ethic, but design is a skill. It must be taught, learned and experienced. You cannot fire up Photoshop or GIMP and declare yourself to be a graphic designer. There's no tutorial on it, no universal guideline. The fact is, good design is elitist and not everyone is capable of it. There's not much on spec sites like 99designs that I see that doesn't seem like absolute shit. It's hard to explain something like that to a programmer, who will usually expect a general reason or a universal rule that was broken. But with design it's more about what specifically was done right or wrong with a piece. There are rules but learning where to apply them takes a lifetime.
The way it generally works in the art and design world is: you look at my portfolio, if you like what I do then you hire me and I do it. Artwork for FOSS projects is more like spec work (can you say "logo contest?"), because the work of design is just not valued as much in those places. At least not initially. It is seen as a finishing touch rather than something integral. A piece of fashion rather than a useful component.
So in cases where design decisions are made on purpose rather than accidentally, you still end up with the people who do spec work. You end up with an interface that defaults to the color of road cones.
It hurts, but it's the truth. Designers move in different circles. Apple puts design first, FOSS puts openness and DIY first*. I guess in a desert island scenario I'd choose the latter, but obviously it's not mutually exclusive, just a question of priority.
It's always a thing of beauty with those circles converge. Jon Hicks & Firefox, for instance. Or the Tango Desktop Project. Design and user experience in FOSS gets better all the time and Ubuntu is certainly doing its part to improve things. I can't wait to see what the future holds, but I realize that it's always going to be an uphill battle because there are some cultural differences that may never go away.
* I'm not sure what Microsoft puts first (someone is shouting "developers" at me, maybe that's it).
Huh.
Mods, read up:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/userexperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/XHIGIntro.html
You're probably right. I was raised Catholic but assumed that Protestants also considered hell to be eternal. But there is a lot of variation within Protestantism and of course individuals don't always follow the doctrine of their particular church to the letter.
I should mention that I am going off of the KJV. Newer translations have less references to hell, and some don't use the word in the OT. The concept certainly developed as time went on. However I think that in places where something appears in the NT, it should supersede the earlier books.
In Catholic school a lot of the sisters would tell us about what they personally thought the afterlife would be like. One of them (oddly enough, the meanest one) read us Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I don't personally believe in hell but you need the world's most creative concordance if you're going to read "fire and brimstone" as reincarnation.
Maybe that's for the best, though. Maybe people are just taking the best of the teachings and leaving the puritan stuff behind. I guess we can draw the line at the resurrection. Like if someone didn't believe in it, then they need to piss or get off the pot. I often wonder how many people simply profess to be Christian just take things like that for granted...I studied a lot of philosophy and theology and was going on retreats, toying with the idea of becoming a Catholic Brother. But I wasn't called to it, and finally the really big stuff just got to me. Hell, the resurrection, the virgin birth...I can't reconcile it anymore. Bad things happening to good people finished it off.
I do believe that the universe has beauty and order both on scales that we can understand and scales that we have yet to understand.
On one hand, I feel that a lot of Christian doctrine is frankly pretty weird, and I get the impression that in this modern age people have a hard time owning up to it. On the other, if someone can believe that life is beautiful and has a purpose (side note: I don't know any atheists who don't, despite the reckless live-for-the-day stereotype), and be just as sure of the resurrection, and takes the stuff printed in red ink to heart, that's probably Christian enough to keep you out of whatever hells there are.
OK, here's the actual paper:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL034791.shtml