Think of it in terms of how much porn they can store.
Arcade: public place; most people don't keep their porn stashes in public. No HDD.
Pro: somewhat private; maybe you've spent one or two afternoons entertaining yourself on company time. Small HDD.
Elite: parent's basement; pretend this is spelled "1337" and everything falls into place.
Wow! An electronic nose that can smell incriminating information. We could replace the entire detective industry with these.
"Has my wife been cheating on me, detective?"
"Let's find out!" *waves electronic nose over computer*
"No—but you've been falsifying information on your tax returns! Consider yourself under arrest."
Well, right now they're planning on replacing it with a all-but-completely non-reusable system, the Orion + Ares I, which is a revamp of Apollo, and not what you have in mind. They also can't afford to stop manned flight completely for a long period of time because the ISS will fall out of the sky: for a while now, the shuttle has been given the task of pushing it back up higher in orbit with each visit. The situation is fairly sucky.
Presumably because internal corporate apps are going to be a dozen years old and already so finely tuned to the intricacies of IE6 that reworking them would cost too much—and so companies wouldn't upgrade to IE8. I think The Register is being a little unfair in this case, although their comment about the icon (which takes up too much space and uses language so loaded ("discrimination") that it verges on being connotatively wrong) is much easier to appreciate. Perhaps the CTO of Opera is not the ideal person to expect to deliver an unbiased commentary.
I guess this all reflects the same woe preventing any standard's adoption: is it cheaper for the corporate sector to go with it or go against it? In the case of Intranet apps, I suspect the answer is a resounding "no," and it would most likely just be seen as breaking compatibility for an abstract reason.
I bet that, with enough poking and shit from the community, however, the MS guys could be convinced to have it default to compatibility mode for intranet sites only on Business versions of Vista.
Heavens, no! At Slashdot, CAPTCHA-breakers are used for less lucrative motives than elsewhere. The posts are, in fact, originating from PROFESSIONAL CAPCHA ENTRY OPEATORS AND WE CAN DO EVEN 25000 ENTRIES PER DAY AS MY COMPANY IS A 25 SEATER FIRM SPEALISED IN DATA ENTRY.
I saw a crack site once where the CAPTCHA you had to fill out to download the file had a myspace watermark. I believe it would be crackstorage.
First, the DRM scheme proposed is XORing the data with 0x50. So, it's not really much overhead. Second, that's overhead calculated once when the page is loaded; current implementations of SVG are still dog-slow on every refresh or scroll. Third, font handling is also lower-level in the system than a browser's SVG renderer has any right to be, and will always be innately faster.
A major use for embedded typography does tend to revolve around cases where, yes, accurately reproducing historical presentations is significant. But there are still alien scripts, obscure Unicode subranges that most fonts don't support, and newspapers that want their distinctive typeface to also represent them on the web—since, right now, they've pretty much got the choice between Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Verdana. All of these are perfectly valid justifications for embedded typefaces as well, even if you don't like printer's ornaments or illuminations.
Alas, typographers, being designers, have mostly fallen into the blogosphere these days. To get a feel for fonts, the best suggestion I can give is to plunge your head into designer-blog-land; the only alternative is to take an actual course in the stuff. Above all blogs, I'd recommend I Love Typography. Theoretical articles, reviews of typefaces, history of type, interviews with typographers, samples of fonts in use, etc. It's where I caught on to my (totally nonprofessional!) interest in the stuff. Typophile might be of interest too; it's an active forum populated with a variety of opinions and questions, and probably a pretty good place to ask questions, if that's what you're after.
Sorry, correction. Anything BUT Helvetica (at certain sizes) on KDE 2 looks like ass. And even then the Ws are fucked up. I suppose Courier is sort of OK, but it looks rather inferior to Courier New on Windows. All of this is because X (and the copy of Helvetica that came with most Linux distros) had imperfect hinting stuff for a long time.
Observe this: http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/kde2final_4.jpg
I suspect you're probably spoiled when it comes to computer typography and rarely have to put up with anything bad, since Microsoft airbrushed their fonts to perfection from day one. See how all of the lower-case "w"s don't look quite right? That's why typographers are nitpicky; they spend all of their time getting the hinting correct to prevent this kind of ugliness. The hinting information in Arial took a long time and a lot of co-operation with Monotype to develop; in fact, it developed alongside hinting technology. If you try to scale a vector image to a very small size with no anti-aliasing, you will see rather quickly that it looks even worse than the image above. Fonts are augmented with all sorts of information that makes them stretch the right way when you go from 10pt to 11pt, and this is what typographers spend all of their time doing.
As a programmer myself, I can assure you that it's a completely different world we're talking about here. Much of the time goes into reshaping the letters so that each letter combination is spaced evenly (there are fewer than 26*26 combinations that need to be worried about, but still quite a few; this is more of a problem in print than on the screen) and programming in hinting information, so that the font looks sharp and crisp at low resolutions instead of a grey mess. (Remember all of those fonts that, in the days before ClearType and ubiquitous anti-aliasing, looked very crude and irregular at small sizes? Those are the ones that weren't hinted properly! Helvetica on KDE 2 is a perfect example.)
It is indeed very nitpicky, but it's not about artistic BS; the artsy phase of a text block font's design is usually much shorter than the engineering phase.
The protest is more about "PDFs and SVGs have huge overhead." TTF and OTF are nimble binary formats, SVG is a terrifyingly slow XML-ish text format not suited to long passages of text that could take up screenfuls of real estate, and PDF is a document encapsulation format with a huge number of features (including things like embedded 3D and javascript) that are totally excessive if all you want to do is use a font. Also, an embedded PDF would not be re-CSS-able. Font formats are the appropriate tool for the job, even if other methods can be used. Not every use of an embedded font is a drop-cap, after all; that's just an example. (There are also a number of drop-cap fonts.)
It's just added incentive, that's all. I think everyone knows that DRM is normally used as a (bad) copyright enforcement mechanism. You needn't be so hostile.
My apologies for conflating the two. BD+, then, stands as an example of DRM so horrendous that it presently remains unbroken. I tend to recall that it also has a much higher chance of being at least as difficult to re-crack as it was to crack the first time, a luxury that HD-DVD and BD discs don't enjoy, thereby making matters even more painful. (In any case, though, garden-variety DRM still remains cumbersome to casual ripping-off, which is the main problem in the font world!)
Perhaps PDF is the way to go for print-quality documents, but there's still the field (albeit somewhat futuristic still) in between of resolution-independent graphics and high-DPI displays; such is the point of SVG and the half-implemented scheme Apple designed for Leopard. Expecting everyone to use PDFs for their eighty-bazillion DPI laz0r-displays or live with 72-DPI images standing in for what should be high-res vectors is not good enough.
The lack of diversity in font use is a symptom, not proof that this is unnecessary. Designers and webmasters have become used to limited choices, just like governments and corporations have gotten used to Helvetica, or people have gotten used to *ahem* the intolerability of Windows. Embedded fonts would let this problem be escaped, which publishers in the printed world have been doing for a few years now. (Yes, the notion of having to regenerate a font is ugly, as is DRM, but having more fonts is very compatible with making each site have its own unique identity. And that identity probably isn't going to be Wingdings 2.)
It's not exactly revolutionary to say that most people don't care about art or design. But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed, or they might contain other ornaments, or an alien script for a sci-fi novel. The main advantage here is that they're in a vector format with a lower overhead than SVG.
On top of that, this can sort of be correlated to the holocaust of the GNOME stupidity debate. Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice? Body fonts can do a great many things with apparently subtle changes, from making a page look very antiquated to expressing emotions. Maybe not everyone notices it, but it still provides an important element of the experience tot hose who do.
Also, this could mean fewer flash banners made in the name of interesting fonts. (I can't think of any, but I'm sure it's been done.)
I wholeheartedly agree that DRM is a dumb idea. I only meant to indicate that, in terms of effort, fonts are probably more deserving of protection than music.
In this case it's a little more like "I made something and therefore I demand that you pay me to use it." Operative word being "use," indicating that some transaction is occurring. If it makes you feel any better, in the olden days, department chairs and heads of state would commission fonts (I.e., people would be paid for their time in designing them), and then make their designs publicly available, such as with the Romain du Roi. Most transactions thereafter would involve physical copies of the fount and the labour involved in cutting them.
Well, the DRM protecting Blu-Ray discs hasn't been cracked yet. Also, in the case of fonts, their primary vulnerability isn't large-scale commercial IP infringement, or hardcore piracy, but casual downloaders. If you type "free fonts" into Google, most of the stuff on the first page has quietly filtered out of corporations via bored secretaries and wage-slaves armed with floppies. DRM as a hurdle is perceived as being able to drastically reduce casual piracy, which is what typographers and font foundries get bitten the hardest by. Since fonts are perceived as totally valueless by the average person (as rather evidenced by some of the comments in this discussion), there's a lot of sharing that goes on, and that has more of an effect than cracking groups dedicated to the business--so DRM looks like the right tool for the right job.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it in terms of how much porn they can store.
Arcade: public place; most people don't keep their porn stashes in public. No HDD.
Pro: somewhat private; maybe you've spent one or two afternoons entertaining yourself on company time. Small HDD.
Elite: parent's basement; pretend this is spelled "1337" and everything falls into place.
Wow! An electronic nose that can smell incriminating information. We could replace the entire detective industry with these.
"Has my wife been cheating on me, detective?"
"Let's find out!"
*waves electronic nose over computer*
"No—but you've been falsifying information on your tax returns! Consider yourself under arrest."
I believe the quote that best describes your views on life is "This is why we can't have nice people."
The offer does seem legitimate, though. Go for it, submitter!
Well, right now they're planning on replacing it with a all-but-completely non-reusable system, the Orion + Ares I, which is a revamp of Apollo, and not what you have in mind. They also can't afford to stop manned flight completely for a long period of time because the ISS will fall out of the sky: for a while now, the shuttle has been given the task of pushing it back up higher in orbit with each visit. The situation is fairly sucky.
...cannot be disclosed." But the names, photographs and ages of their founders can! Great work, Spiegel Online!
Presumably because internal corporate apps are going to be a dozen years old and already so finely tuned to the intricacies of IE6 that reworking them would cost too much—and so companies wouldn't upgrade to IE8. I think The Register is being a little unfair in this case, although their comment about the icon (which takes up too much space and uses language so loaded ("discrimination") that it verges on being connotatively wrong) is much easier to appreciate. Perhaps the CTO of Opera is not the ideal person to expect to deliver an unbiased commentary.
I guess this all reflects the same woe preventing any standard's adoption: is it cheaper for the corporate sector to go with it or go against it? In the case of Intranet apps, I suspect the answer is a resounding "no," and it would most likely just be seen as breaking compatibility for an abstract reason.
I bet that, with enough poking and shit from the community, however, the MS guys could be convinced to have it default to compatibility mode for intranet sites only on Business versions of Vista.
In other words, they are just maintaining what the majority does not accept at the time?
Heavens, no! At Slashdot, CAPTCHA-breakers are used for less lucrative motives than elsewhere. The posts are, in fact, originating from PROFESSIONAL CAPCHA ENTRY OPEATORS AND WE CAN DO EVEN 25000 ENTRIES PER DAY AS MY COMPANY IS A 25 SEATER FIRM SPEALISED IN DATA ENTRY.
I saw a crack site once where the CAPTCHA you had to fill out to download the file had a myspace watermark. I believe it would be crackstorage.
Yes. I absolutely recommend it as a gateway drug to understanding fonts. It used to be on Google Video; Digg has a copy at present.
First, the DRM scheme proposed is XORing the data with 0x50. So, it's not really much overhead. Second, that's overhead calculated once when the page is loaded; current implementations of SVG are still dog-slow on every refresh or scroll. Third, font handling is also lower-level in the system than a browser's SVG renderer has any right to be, and will always be innately faster.
I meant that they have more grown-up motives than "random, cutesy, difficult to read fonts." Sorry.
A major use for embedded typography does tend to revolve around cases where, yes, accurately reproducing historical presentations is significant. But there are still alien scripts, obscure Unicode subranges that most fonts don't support, and newspapers that want their distinctive typeface to also represent them on the web—since, right now, they've pretty much got the choice between Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Verdana. All of these are perfectly valid justifications for embedded typefaces as well, even if you don't like printer's ornaments or illuminations.
Alas, typographers, being designers, have mostly fallen into the blogosphere these days. To get a feel for fonts, the best suggestion I can give is to plunge your head into designer-blog-land; the only alternative is to take an actual course in the stuff. Above all blogs, I'd recommend I Love Typography. Theoretical articles, reviews of typefaces, history of type, interviews with typographers, samples of fonts in use, etc. It's where I caught on to my (totally nonprofessional!) interest in the stuff. Typophile might be of interest too; it's an active forum populated with a variety of opinions and questions, and probably a pretty good place to ask questions, if that's what you're after.
Sorry, correction. Anything BUT Helvetica (at certain sizes) on KDE 2 looks like ass. And even then the Ws are fucked up. I suppose Courier is sort of OK, but it looks rather inferior to Courier New on Windows. All of this is because X (and the copy of Helvetica that came with most Linux distros) had imperfect hinting stuff for a long time.
Observe this: http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/kde2final_4.jpg I suspect you're probably spoiled when it comes to computer typography and rarely have to put up with anything bad, since Microsoft airbrushed their fonts to perfection from day one. See how all of the lower-case "w"s don't look quite right? That's why typographers are nitpicky; they spend all of their time getting the hinting correct to prevent this kind of ugliness. The hinting information in Arial took a long time and a lot of co-operation with Monotype to develop; in fact, it developed alongside hinting technology. If you try to scale a vector image to a very small size with no anti-aliasing, you will see rather quickly that it looks even worse than the image above. Fonts are augmented with all sorts of information that makes them stretch the right way when you go from 10pt to 11pt, and this is what typographers spend all of their time doing.
As a programmer myself, I can assure you that it's a completely different world we're talking about here. Much of the time goes into reshaping the letters so that each letter combination is spaced evenly (there are fewer than 26*26 combinations that need to be worried about, but still quite a few; this is more of a problem in print than on the screen) and programming in hinting information, so that the font looks sharp and crisp at low resolutions instead of a grey mess. (Remember all of those fonts that, in the days before ClearType and ubiquitous anti-aliasing, looked very crude and irregular at small sizes? Those are the ones that weren't hinted properly! Helvetica on KDE 2 is a perfect example.)
It is indeed very nitpicky, but it's not about artistic BS; the artsy phase of a text block font's design is usually much shorter than the engineering phase.
The protest is more about "PDFs and SVGs have huge overhead." TTF and OTF are nimble binary formats, SVG is a terrifyingly slow XML-ish text format not suited to long passages of text that could take up screenfuls of real estate, and PDF is a document encapsulation format with a huge number of features (including things like embedded 3D and javascript) that are totally excessive if all you want to do is use a font. Also, an embedded PDF would not be re-CSS-able. Font formats are the appropriate tool for the job, even if other methods can be used. Not every use of an embedded font is a drop-cap, after all; that's just an example. (There are also a number of drop-cap fonts.)
It's just added incentive, that's all. I think everyone knows that DRM is normally used as a (bad) copyright enforcement mechanism. You needn't be so hostile.
My apologies for conflating the two. BD+, then, stands as an example of DRM so horrendous that it presently remains unbroken. I tend to recall that it also has a much higher chance of being at least as difficult to re-crack as it was to crack the first time, a luxury that HD-DVD and BD discs don't enjoy, thereby making matters even more painful. (In any case, though, garden-variety DRM still remains cumbersome to casual ripping-off, which is the main problem in the font world!)
No, like this.
Perhaps PDF is the way to go for print-quality documents, but there's still the field (albeit somewhat futuristic still) in between of resolution-independent graphics and high-DPI displays; such is the point of SVG and the half-implemented scheme Apple designed for Leopard. Expecting everyone to use PDFs for their eighty-bazillion DPI laz0r-displays or live with 72-DPI images standing in for what should be high-res vectors is not good enough.
The lack of diversity in font use is a symptom, not proof that this is unnecessary. Designers and webmasters have become used to limited choices, just like governments and corporations have gotten used to Helvetica, or people have gotten used to *ahem* the intolerability of Windows. Embedded fonts would let this problem be escaped, which publishers in the printed world have been doing for a few years now. (Yes, the notion of having to regenerate a font is ugly, as is DRM, but having more fonts is very compatible with making each site have its own unique identity. And that identity probably isn't going to be Wingdings 2.)
It's not exactly revolutionary to say that most people don't care about art or design. But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed, or they might contain other ornaments, or an alien script for a sci-fi novel. The main advantage here is that they're in a vector format with a lower overhead than SVG.
On top of that, this can sort of be correlated to the holocaust of the GNOME stupidity debate. Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice? Body fonts can do a great many things with apparently subtle changes, from making a page look very antiquated to expressing emotions. Maybe not everyone notices it, but it still provides an important element of the experience tot hose who do.
Also, this could mean fewer flash banners made in the name of interesting fonts. (I can't think of any, but I'm sure it's been done.)
I wholeheartedly agree that DRM is a dumb idea. I only meant to indicate that, in terms of effort, fonts are probably more deserving of protection than music.
In this case it's a little more like "I made something and therefore I demand that you pay me to use it." Operative word being "use," indicating that some transaction is occurring. If it makes you feel any better, in the olden days, department chairs and heads of state would commission fonts (I.e., people would be paid for their time in designing them), and then make their designs publicly available, such as with the Romain du Roi. Most transactions thereafter would involve physical copies of the fount and the labour involved in cutting them.
Well, the DRM protecting Blu-Ray discs hasn't been cracked yet. Also, in the case of fonts, their primary vulnerability isn't large-scale commercial IP infringement, or hardcore piracy, but casual downloaders. If you type "free fonts" into Google, most of the stuff on the first page has quietly filtered out of corporations via bored secretaries and wage-slaves armed with floppies. DRM as a hurdle is perceived as being able to drastically reduce casual piracy, which is what typographers and font foundries get bitten the hardest by. Since fonts are perceived as totally valueless by the average person (as rather evidenced by some of the comments in this discussion), there's a lot of sharing that goes on, and that has more of an effect than cracking groups dedicated to the business--so DRM looks like the right tool for the right job.