I'm not making an "argument", merely stating how the industry works. Sure, a sort of "bribery" happens, in the sense of gala events, but the real incentive is the stick, not the carrot. Ask Jim Sterling about that - he's been banned from review copies by just about everyone, and had to survive as an independent reviewer since that made him poison to the magazines (not to mention sued for $10M by Digital Homicide).
Fly in to see and test the game. Free swag. Pictures with the hot ladies. Advertising money for your website.....
AKA: lack of ethics in game journalism.
But it's less about the bribes IMO than the simple fact that if you don't consistently give good reviews to a publisher, they lock you out of pre-release review copies. Be nice, or your review comes out a week after your competition.
BTW, the Optima font is a great example of how variable line widths can almost replace the need for serifs. I wouldn't want to read a book set in it, but it's great for headings above a serif font.
It was certainly studied, with large (for the time) research budgets. If you look at printed works from the early days, you'll see how far typography has come. Of course it was mostly guesswork before the Enlightenment, as the scientific method didn't exist yet.
Incunabulum were printed with some pretty terrible fonts as late as the 15th century. The "roman" fonts that started in the 1470s were worlds better - but at first the serifs really weren't helping. They were there by accident/legacy, but they weren't tuned to forming the line. 100 years later this had changed a lot, and you can see Garamond figuring out what worked in the evolution of his typefaces, leaving us a pretty good book font by the end.
By the 1800s, a lot more was understood about variable line widths and how to use them (this is as important an aspect of a good book font as the serifs, IMO). By the turn of the century, printers and newspapers with lots of money were doing real research, as were advertisers, each with a different goal.
As others have said, they give your eyes more information about open vs close. They're a simplified, less noisy form of how some other cultures do the same thing, with guillemets. Sadly, Slashdot's minimal Unicode support doesn't include those.
Like serifs, every hint helps when it comes to reading speed and fatigue, even though you'll never care when reading short amounts of text.
The customer is not your QA lab. CR ran their tests, and saw what they saw. They'll re-test next year. It's not their job to help Apple solve the problems, any more than it is to help Tesla solve their reliability problems (Tesla at least got he Model S off the CR shit-list this year, but it was replaced by the Model X), or a microwave oven vendor, or debug a blender or...
That direction was clear from the first Mac, though. Apple was designing a better machine for hackers and the first Mac in parallel. Sadly, the Mac was the way of the future for Apple.
"Typesetting is a very mature science." BS. There is no "Science" in it whatsoever. Otherwise, Typesetting conventions would be the same in London, Paris, and Krakow, which they most certainly are not, as the article points out.
You dirty something denier! The science is settled!
But, seriously, typesetting has had a lot of research done over hundreds of years. Different fonts are optimized for different purposes. Book fonts are different form newspaper fonts are different from headlines are different from anything in a advertisement. And of course things optimize differently in different languages - heck, you'd expect some trade-offs to be different in different cultures (and they are).
Newspaper fonts are optimized for readability at minimum cost in ink and paper. The New York Times (a former newspaper) had quite an R&D budget back in the day, just because printing costs justified it. Turns out high, narrow letters work well for this. Newspaper fonts are not the right choice for a screen, obviously.
Book fonts, OTOH, are optimized for minimum fatigue when reading large amounts of text, with less concern for real estate. Turns out that broader letters, and more leading (space between lines) work well for this. This is a better choice for anything viewed on screen.
In any case, serifs are there to optimize for the way we actually read - recognizing words by their shape, not so much the actual letters. Most serif fonts are designed for the very high resolution you have available from "ink on paper through a lithographic process". Not so many fonts looked good even at 600 dpi laser printing, and even at 1200 dpi some fonts still didn't quite work. Lower dpi, but the ability to anti-alias, will of course be a different optimization as well, but the concepts
still apply.
Meh, we can't even get reasonable contrast on most web sites. At least Slashdot gets that right!
Heh, I too dropped out of college because "it just wasn't something for me". Fortunately, that wasn't a barrier to a dev job back in the day. I think the same may be true for skilled manufacturing today, as they're really getting desperate (more than a million jobs unfilled in the US), but of course you still have to go where the jobs are.
I usually don't check work email in any way if I'm not in the office - the major exception being when I'm oncall. But even when I'm oncall, no work email on my phone, that way madness lies.
Amazon is growing so fast right now that they'll basically need to keep building one skyscraper a year just to keep up. That seems to be their plan, too: #2 looks ready to open, and construction is underway on #3, with land for several more.
If you want to buy a house for your own sake because you want to own a house for some reason, great. If you want to make improvements to said house for your own sake, great. But it is time to give up on the notion of "investing" in your house; you won't get the money back when you're old enough to stop working.
House prices in the US, on average, keep up with inflation (long term - watch out for bubbles). That's been true for 100 years, and isn't likely to change. That makes a house a better "investment" than a savings account, but that's not saying much. It can work out pretty well, though, if you get a mortgage when interest rates are low, then go through a period of high inflation - then returns are quite nice.
The thing is, most people are incapable of thrift, and have no clue how to invest safely, so a house really is their best investment: it forces you to save, it obvious you need to insure it, and so on. Even though it nets out cheaper to rent in a lot of places, a house can still be a better choice for many.
Yet they have some of the shittiest internet in America.
Welcome to Seattle. Home of tech companies and crappy dialup and ISDN lines.
Why live in the internet ghetto? I have perfectly good broadband - still cable, not fiber, but there's fiber not that for from me. Pick a place to live based on what's important to you.
Curly quotes, like serif fonts, make text less fatiguing to read. Typesetting is a very mature science.
We have the screen resolutions now to allow screen text to benefit from some of the optimization that is present in print (especially phones, where the pixel density it starting to get high enough to make real fonts work). Sadly, the web is infested with "designers", who only want the site to look trendy and care not a bit about the reader.
still fondly remember this site when every single discussion dissolved into how Bush was responsible.
I remember the good old days when every political argument would eventually dissolve into an fight over OSs or text editors, and it was Gates who was responsible for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not making an "argument", merely stating how the industry works. Sure, a sort of "bribery" happens, in the sense of gala events, but the real incentive is the stick, not the carrot. Ask Jim Sterling about that - he's been banned from review copies by just about everyone, and had to survive as an independent reviewer since that made him poison to the magazines (not to mention sued for $10M by Digital Homicide).
Fly in to see and test the game. Free swag. Pictures with the hot ladies. Advertising money for your website.....
AKA: lack of ethics in game journalism.
But it's less about the bribes IMO than the simple fact that if you don't consistently give good reviews to a publisher, they lock you out of pre-release review copies. Be nice, or your review comes out a week after your competition.
I remember when JonKatz was blamed for everything!
Nowadays, it's systemd.
To be fair, everything wrong with the world is acutally systemd's fault.
Freaking slashcode. https://www.fonts.com/font/lin...
BTW, the Optima font is a great example of how variable line widths can almost replace the need for serifs. I wouldn't want to read a book set in it, but it's great for headings above a serif font.
It was certainly studied, with large (for the time) research budgets. If you look at printed works from the early days, you'll see how far typography has come. Of course it was mostly guesswork before the Enlightenment, as the scientific method didn't exist yet.
Incunabulum were printed with some pretty terrible fonts as late as the 15th century. The "roman" fonts that started in the 1470s were worlds better - but at first the serifs really weren't helping. They were there by accident/legacy, but they weren't tuned to forming the line. 100 years later this had changed a lot, and you can see Garamond figuring out what worked in the evolution of his typefaces, leaving us a pretty good book font by the end.
By the 1800s, a lot more was understood about variable line widths and how to use them (this is as important an aspect of a good book font as the serifs, IMO). By the turn of the century, printers and newspapers with lots of money were doing real research, as were advertisers, each with a different goal.
As others have said, they give your eyes more information about open vs close. They're a simplified, less noisy form of how some other cultures do the same thing, with guillemets. Sadly, Slashdot's minimal Unicode support doesn't include those.
Like serifs, every hint helps when it comes to reading speed and fatigue, even though you'll never care when reading short amounts of text.
The whitelist was very very short until quite recently. Certainly a smaller set than 8-bit ascii.
The customer is not your QA lab. CR ran their tests, and saw what they saw. They'll re-test next year. It's not their job to help Apple solve the problems, any more than it is to help Tesla solve their reliability problems (Tesla at least got he Model S off the CR shit-list this year, but it was replaced by the Model X), or a microwave oven vendor, or debug a blender or ...
But I also happen to be an embedded designer
Of course "designers" like Macs - that's exactly the image they sell!
That direction was clear from the first Mac, though. Apple was designing a better machine for hackers and the first Mac in parallel. Sadly, the Mac was the way of the future for Apple.
Read a book, sir, read a book. Then 100 more. They're good for you!
"Typesetting is a very mature science."
BS. There is no "Science" in it whatsoever. Otherwise, Typesetting conventions would be the same in London, Paris, and Krakow, which they most certainly are not, as the article points out.
You dirty something denier! The science is settled!
But, seriously, typesetting has had a lot of research done over hundreds of years. Different fonts are optimized for different purposes. Book fonts are different form newspaper fonts are different from headlines are different from anything in a advertisement. And of course things optimize differently in different languages - heck, you'd expect some trade-offs to be different in different cultures (and they are).
Newspaper fonts are optimized for readability at minimum cost in ink and paper. The New York Times (a former newspaper) had quite an R&D budget back in the day, just because printing costs justified it. Turns out high, narrow letters work well for this. Newspaper fonts are not the right choice for a screen, obviously.
Book fonts, OTOH, are optimized for minimum fatigue when reading large amounts of text, with less concern for real estate. Turns out that broader letters, and more leading (space between lines) work well for this. This is a better choice for anything viewed on screen.
In any case, serifs are there to optimize for the way we actually read - recognizing words by their shape, not so much the actual letters. Most serif fonts are designed for the very high resolution you have available from "ink on paper through a lithographic process". Not so many fonts looked good even at 600 dpi laser printing, and even at 1200 dpi some fonts still didn't quite work. Lower dpi, but the ability to anti-alias, will of course be a different optimization as well, but the concepts
still apply.
Meh, we can't even get reasonable contrast on most web sites. At least Slashdot gets that right!
Heh, I too dropped out of college because "it just wasn't something for me". Fortunately, that wasn't a barrier to a dev job back in the day. I think the same may be true for skilled manufacturing today, as they're really getting desperate (more than a million jobs unfilled in the US), but of course you still have to go where the jobs are.
I don't have work email on my phone. Never will.
I usually don't check work email in any way if I'm not in the office - the major exception being when I'm oncall. But even when I'm oncall, no work email on my phone, that way madness lies.
It can wait.
Consoles.
Well played, sir, well played.
But I actually didn't know /. supported those non-7-bit-ascii characters - that's new!
Amazon is growing so fast right now that they'll basically need to keep building one skyscraper a year just to keep up. That seems to be their plan, too: #2 looks ready to open, and construction is underway on #3, with land for several more.
If you want to buy a house for your own sake because you want to own a house for some reason, great. If you want to make improvements to said house for your own sake, great. But it is time to give up on the notion of "investing" in your house; you won't get the money back when you're old enough to stop working.
House prices in the US, on average, keep up with inflation (long term - watch out for bubbles). That's been true for 100 years, and isn't likely to change. That makes a house a better "investment" than a savings account, but that's not saying much. It can work out pretty well, though, if you get a mortgage when interest rates are low, then go through a period of high inflation - then returns are quite nice.
The thing is, most people are incapable of thrift, and have no clue how to invest safely, so a house really is their best investment: it forces you to save, it obvious you need to insure it, and so on. Even though it nets out cheaper to rent in a lot of places, a house can still be a better choice for many.
Yet they have some of the shittiest internet in America.
Welcome to Seattle. Home of tech companies and crappy dialup and ISDN lines.
Why live in the internet ghetto? I have perfectly good broadband - still cable, not fiber, but there's fiber not that for from me. Pick a place to live based on what's important to you.
Curly quotes, like serif fonts, make text less fatiguing to read. Typesetting is a very mature science.
We have the screen resolutions now to allow screen text to benefit from some of the optimization that is present in print (especially phones, where the pixel density it starting to get high enough to make real fonts work). Sadly, the web is infested with "designers", who only want the site to look trendy and care not a bit about the reader.
if it wasn't buried beneath ice
We're working on it.
in an area where mining is illegal
Drill there, drill now!
Hey, at least it's more likely to be true in the Sun than the NYT or WaPo. The Sun does have some standards.
still fondly remember this site when every single discussion dissolved into how Bush was responsible.
I remember the good old days when every political argument would eventually dissolve into an fight over OSs or text editors, and it was Gates who was responsible for everything.
How foolish we were to think it stopped there.