Actually, PFAEdit claims to do OpenType and TrueType as well. Except that the FAQ says that it doesn't grok TrueType hinting, which is used by both OpenType and TrueType. Which probably means I can't tweak any of the fonts I care about, none of which are PostScript. Oh well.
Is "cruise" a synonym for "nonballistic"? To me the word implies that speed is not an issue -- and ramjets, though slower than ballistic missles, are certainly faster than the fanjets used on cruise missles.
Theater owners already have this ban. Doesn't seem to help a lot. What are the employees supposed to do, escort every abuser out of the theater? If theaters have to pay their people enough to handle that kind of thing, movie tickets are gonna get very expensive.
The audience was hissing at him, shushing him, and finally someone shouted "Would you please get off the fucking phone?"
The guy kept talking for another minute, then got off the phone, then took off. Needless to say, it fucked up that part of the movie pretty badly.
So why didn't anybody get in his face? They wouldn't even have to be rude, just make it very clear that that he's spoiling everybody's entertainment.
Which fact he might well not have been aware of. People talking on cell phones have an interesting tendency to block things out. The lose audio feedback, so they talk too loud. And of course they don't hear people hissing at them. It might be similar to the way people shout when someone tries to converse with them while they're wear enclosed earphones, but I could be wrong about that.
Because not enough people have the common courtesy to TURN THEIR PHONE OFF during movies and performances, perhaps a nice stiff fine of around 250 - 500 dollars per incident would keep things under control.
Well, I turn mine off, but mainly because I don't want my own movie experience interrupted. I think it's enough to require people to set their phones to vibrate, and to leave the theater when they take a call. Let's have a little tolerance for doctors, elevator repairers, and other folks who'd never get to go out if it meant going out of contact.
And yes, fines seem to be needed to get people's attention. But let's set them just high enough to do so. We already have too many laws that express more anger than sense.
Banning cell phone use in cars is just stupid.
No, it's based on the same issue blotting-out issue I just talked about. Plus, talking to somebody who's not in the car is much more distracting than talking with a passenger. A passenger knows enough not to say, "Hello, are you still there," when something unexpected happens and you need all your attention on the road.
In fact, I was nearly run down the other day by somebody on a cell. She was moving at slow speed through a parking lot, so it wasn't a matter of control. She was just giving too much attention to her conversation, and not enough to all the pedestrians swarming around her.
I was excited by this at first -- but it's yet another bitmap font. Even though it's packaged as a Truetype, apparently there's no hinting or scalability at all.
One of the links is to a guy who insists that Protype is the best font for coding at 9 pt. Which might be true, but that appears to be the only size the font actually works at. And, alas, some of us prefer to work at high-resolution!
He also complains that the font isn't available for Windows. I think that's just a matter of proper packaging. But somebody else can do that -- I've lost interest.
Sorry, but this is not honest soul-sharing, this is Hollywood posturing. Consider: Wheaton's site used to have a very intersting account of the events leading up to his leaving TNG. This account portrayed Berman as a dictatorial jerk who screws around the talent just to squeeze pennies and to prove to them who's in charge. Which POV is rather confirmed by other disgruntled actors and writers. Then Wheaton gets a cameo, and that account gets pulled from the site -- and both Wheaton and Berman go around saying, "No! We never hated each other!"
My best guess is that Berman never intended to use the Wesley footage, and Wheaton is in denial over the fact that he's been conned yet again.
What's really irritating is this "it's all for the trekkies" BS. That might wash with the mentally challenged types who never take off their Starfleet uniforms, and insist that people address them by naval rank. For those of us who live in the real world, this is nauseating tripe.
But WTF. I was a Star Trek fan 3/4 of my life, but the stupidity of Enterprise finally put me over the edge. I deliberately read all the Nemesis spoilers just so I wouldn't be tempted to go see it. And anyway, real space opera is finally returning to TV, so who cares?
True, but some posters seem to think that designing scalable fonts is no harder than designing bitmap or vector graphics. There's even a link to a "Linux font project" that's only doing bitmap fonts. The crucial fact is that there's more to fonts than simple graphic design.
And I'm very tired of being told that I'm a "M$ pimp" because I refuse to concede that Open Source shit doesn't smell. I've been a Bill-hater since you were in diapers, kiddo, and I'd like nothing better than to see a real challenge to the Redmond monopoly. Which challenge is not going to be made by people who smugly refuse to accept any and all criticism!
I've sure somebody did say something like this, but more along the lines, "No MS-DOS program will ever need more than 640K." And back when MS-DOS was first released (1981) that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Remember, MS-DOS was originally targeted only at processors with a 1 meg address space -- the 8088 and 8086. If you only have 1 meg to work with, it makes perfect sense to to set aside some memory for the OS (384K was way too much, but that's a minor point) and specify what's left as the permanent limit for application software. Especially when the processor puts a nasty penalty on programs that used code or data entities bigger than 64K!
In hindsight, it seems very dumb that such a crippled platform was so dominant for almost 20 years. But this was nobody's plan. Everybody, including Microsoft assumed that MS-DOS would be obsolete the very moment these early processors became obsolete. The plan was, as soon as 80286-based systems arrived, people would switch to "serious" operating systems such as Unix and OS/2. But, for a variety of reasons, this didn't happen, and the weirdness of MS-DOS will only disappear when the last Windows ME system is junked.
I'm sure this turn of events actually distressed the geek in Bill Gates. Of course, it also made him the richest man on the planet, which must have been some small consolation.
You know, words like "troll" and "FUD" make less sense every time I hear them. They accuse people of cynically saying things they don't themselves believe, just to score points in an argument. Ironically, accusing others of doing this is a convenient cop-out for people who themselves don't want to deal a difference of opinion. If you're serious about refuting me, you should attack my opinions, not my motives. Which, face it, you know jack about.
OK, first you raise the (perfectly valid) issue of game addiction. Then you suggest buying an expensive appliance that'd affords video game access all the time, everywhere. Kinda sending out mixed signals, aren't we?
Boy did you tell off that guy! Of course, you didn't do anything to explain how the Free Software Community can do a better job of producing open-source fonts. But at least you established your moral superiority!
Didn't know you could determine that everyone who needed them already had them. Interesting. I'd like to see the metric used to determine that.
Well, yeah that's patently absurd, especially since the fonts were meant for web developers, not end users. MS wasn't just being generous -- they wanted people to write web pages with embedded fonts, thus increasing users' dependence on Internet Explorer. So they commissioned a bunch of fonts that emphasized on-screen usability, as opposed to the print-only or print-and-screen usability of most fonts.
It's true that Andalé Mono is very good fixed-width font. I particularly like the way it makes it hard to confuse l with 1, 0 with O, etc. And yes, it scales very well. The first thing I do when configuring any app that uses fixed with fonts -- Xterm, console text editors, IDEs, web browsers -- is to replace the usual Courier or system font with Andalé Mono. Which is not all what MS intended, and mostly illegal. Imagine my dismay!
One quibble with this font is that multiple underbars form a continuous line, which makes source code slightly harder to read. I keep looking for a free font that lacks this problem. But that mostly means amateur efforts, which rarely scale well.
Microsoft may be less a culprit here than AGFA and the other companies that licensed these fonts to them. AGFA charges 22 bucks for each download of Andalé Mono, and no doubt they licensed the font with the understanding that it'd only be used for specific purposes. When it became clear that everybody and anybody was downloading these fonts for all kinds of purposes, MS either had to pony up more licensing fees, or withdraw the fonts. Hardly suprising they did the latter.
Operators started abandoning them in droves near the end of the last century.
You mean back in the 1890s? Oops, sorry, slow today!
Please be kind to us slow-witted types. The 21st century is only a couple years old. Refering to events of 10 years ago as "in the last century" is pretentious and confusing.
The only source for any of this is some baseless speculation by the "Digital Artist" Sadie Plant. Even if Turing's death dose came from that stupid apple (no actual evidence of that), it's hard to believe that anybody would name a new company on the basis of such a depressing story!
And where does this "forgot to wash his hands after an experiment" come from? Turing was a mathematician!
Well, maybe if I took as much Ecstasy as Ms. Plant does, this would make sense.
Yes we're talking AT&T. But remember that AT&T is on the financial skids. As is C&W and WorldCom, the parent of UUNet. Don't know about the other defendant, Advanced Network Services. These companies are all big, but they may not be able to afford the legal battle.
Notably missing are two leading ISPs owned by one of the plaintiffs: AOL and CompuServe. I'd be interested to know if those ISPs are blocking this site.
Well, at least they're suing, not blacklisting. My big fear has always been that freedom-loving ISPs would be made to restrict user access, or lose their backbone connections. And AOL/TW is a big backbone provider.
OK, localized messages and variables are good reasons to have a internationalized kernel. But good enough to justify the costs? I don't see it.
And before you accuse me of being English-centric, note that the guy who invented and still maintains the Linux kernel is not a native English speaker.
Actually, the Romans didn't invent most of our glyphs. The Romans didn't have J, U, W, Y or Z, and only used K when writing Greek words. And they didn't have lower-case letters or punctuation. All invented later.
But I digress. You seem to be assuming that "Unicode support" is this magic thing you can add to any program and suddenly support every Unicode character. In fact, no program directly supports the complete Unicode character set -- Unicode was never meant to be used that way. Instead you support an "encoding" that gives you access to a manageable subset of Unicode.
The most widely-used encoding is UTF-16, which supports a 2^16-character subset of Unicode. Most major programming languages support both ASCII and UTF-16. Some (notably Java and Visual Basic) support UTF-16 instead of ASCII. Unfortunately, the documentation for these languages usually refers to their their "wide" characters as "unicode" characters, as if Unicode were just a 16-bit "universal" character set. In fact, there are important Unicode-supported characters that are not in UTF-16.
There's also UTF-8, a variable-width encoding that's backward-compatible with ASCII. I believe GCC already supports UTF-8, and could probably be made to support UTF-16, as most C compilers aready do. And since GCC is written in GCC, you could probably allow kernel programmers to use these extended character sets in their source code. But it's a tricky thing to do, and it's difficult to see the benefit.
I hate the term "politically correct", but maybe it applies here. You seem to feel that any software that isn't character-set-agnostic is unfair to non-Western users. Putting such an assumption ahead of issues of reliability and security is a very poor kind of prioritizing.
You know, there are applications that run perfectly fine in a small memory space, on a slow processor, and don't require fancy GUIs. I still enjoy playing old text-mode and low-rez computer games, designed in the days of 16K memory spaces and 1 Mhz processors. (I play them on emulators, not on the hardware they were originally designed for, but that's a matter of convenience and desk space.) High-powered systems are fun, and sometimes even useful -- but not every app needs them.
The Linux kernel is not a very big entity -- which is a prime reason for its success. I find it hard to see what use it can make of extended character sets. And even if adding such a feature to the kernel had some benefit, there's a cost in terms of size. speed, and risk of bugs and security holes. You need to weigh the benefits against the risks, not just assume every bit of software in the world has to support UTF-32768. And the plain fact is, there doesn't seem to be any benefit at all.
Perhaps I'm wrong. But to prove me wrong, you're going to have to suggest some real-world examples or scenarios that contradict me. Reciting cliches about vaguely relevent history says nothing.
Note that I'm not attacking the general concept of Internationalized software. In point of fact, I spend a lot of time documenting the International features of my own company's products. All serious development tools support Internationalization. But they support it from the run-time-library level on up, where 99.99% of all development occurs.
Has there been, or ever will be, a form of Un*x that natively supports Unicode in all things? Or would doing such a thing create too many problems?
I don't know how difficult it'd be, but what's the motivation? End users, and even application developers, may need to interact using Han or Cyrillic or Hangul characters. But it's hard to see why a kernel hacker needs more than 2^7 characters.
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Actually, PFAEdit claims to do OpenType and TrueType as well. Except that the FAQ says that it doesn't grok TrueType hinting, which is used by both OpenType and TrueType. Which probably means I can't tweak any of the fonts I care about, none of which are PostScript. Oh well.
All Haiku lame
Brevity is Good
Except when pretentious
Picking nits Is Most Uncool And besides Haiku that is not
Is "cruise" a synonym for "nonballistic"? To me the word implies that speed is not an issue -- and ramjets, though slower than ballistic missles, are certainly faster than the fanjets used on cruise missles.
Theater owners already have this ban. Doesn't seem to help a lot. What are the employees supposed to do, escort every abuser out of the theater? If theaters have to pay their people enough to handle that kind of thing, movie tickets are gonna get very expensive.
Which fact he might well not have been aware of. People talking on cell phones have an interesting tendency to block things out. The lose audio feedback, so they talk too loud. And of course they don't hear people hissing at them. It might be similar to the way people shout when someone tries to converse with them while they're wear enclosed earphones, but I could be wrong about that.
Well, I turn mine off, but mainly because I don't want my own movie experience interrupted. I think it's enough to require people to set their phones to vibrate, and to leave the theater when they take a call. Let's have a little tolerance for doctors, elevator repairers, and other folks who'd never get to go out if it meant going out of contact.And yes, fines seem to be needed to get people's attention. But let's set them just high enough to do so. We already have too many laws that express more anger than sense.
No, it's based on the same issue blotting-out issue I just talked about. Plus, talking to somebody who's not in the car is much more distracting than talking with a passenger. A passenger knows enough not to say, "Hello, are you still there," when something unexpected happens and you need all your attention on the road.In fact, I was nearly run down the other day by somebody on a cell. She was moving at slow speed through a parking lot, so it wasn't a matter of control. She was just giving too much attention to her conversation, and not enough to all the pedestrians swarming around her.
One of the links is to a guy who insists that Protype is the best font for coding at 9 pt. Which might be true, but that appears to be the only size the font actually works at. And, alas, some of us prefer to work at high-resolution!
He also complains that the font isn't available for Windows. I think that's just a matter of proper packaging. But somebody else can do that -- I've lost interest.
My best guess is that Berman never intended to use the Wesley footage, and Wheaton is in denial over the fact that he's been conned yet again.
What's really irritating is this "it's all for the trekkies" BS. That might wash with the mentally challenged types who never take off their Starfleet uniforms, and insist that people address them by naval rank. For those of us who live in the real world, this is nauseating tripe.
But WTF. I was a Star Trek fan 3/4 of my life, but the stupidity of Enterprise finally put me over the edge. I deliberately read all the Nemesis spoilers just so I wouldn't be tempted to go see it. And anyway, real space opera is finally returning to TV, so who cares?
And I'm very tired of being told that I'm a "M$ pimp" because I refuse to concede that Open Source shit doesn't smell. I've been a Bill-hater since you were in diapers, kiddo, and I'd like nothing better than to see a real challenge to the Redmond monopoly. Which challenge is not going to be made by people who smugly refuse to accept any and all criticism!
Either post the URL or stop saying interesting things about it!
In hindsight, it seems very dumb that such a crippled platform was so dominant for almost 20 years. But this was nobody's plan. Everybody, including Microsoft assumed that MS-DOS would be obsolete the very moment these early processors became obsolete. The plan was, as soon as 80286-based systems arrived, people would switch to "serious" operating systems such as Unix and OS/2. But, for a variety of reasons, this didn't happen, and the weirdness of MS-DOS will only disappear when the last Windows ME system is junked.
I'm sure this turn of events actually distressed the geek in Bill Gates. Of course, it also made him the richest man on the planet, which must have been some small consolation.
You know, words like "troll" and "FUD" make less sense every time I hear them. They accuse people of cynically saying things they don't themselves believe, just to score points in an argument. Ironically, accusing others of doing this is a convenient cop-out for people who themselves don't want to deal a difference of opinion. If you're serious about refuting me, you should attack my opinions, not my motives. Which, face it, you know jack about.
I demand pictures! Specifications! This is an ultra-cool project that would be widely imitated and even turn into a business (if you're not careful)!
OK, first you raise the (perfectly valid) issue of game addiction. Then you suggest buying an expensive appliance that'd affords video game access all the time, everywhere. Kinda sending out mixed signals, aren't we?
Boy did you tell off that guy! Of course, you didn't do anything to explain how the Free Software Community can do a better job of producing open-source fonts. But at least you established your moral superiority!
Bitmap fonts! If I still had my Hercules Softfont video card, I'd be interested. But what's the point of developing non-scalable fonts for X-Windows?
It's true that Andalé Mono is very good fixed-width font. I particularly like the way it makes it hard to confuse l with 1, 0 with O, etc. And yes, it scales very well. The first thing I do when configuring any app that uses fixed with fonts -- Xterm, console text editors, IDEs, web browsers -- is to replace the usual Courier or system font with Andalé Mono. Which is not all what MS intended, and mostly illegal. Imagine my dismay!
One quibble with this font is that multiple underbars form a continuous line, which makes source code slightly harder to read. I keep looking for a free font that lacks this problem. But that mostly means amateur efforts, which rarely scale well.
Microsoft may be less a culprit here than AGFA and the other companies that licensed these fonts to them. AGFA charges 22 bucks for each download of Andalé Mono, and no doubt they licensed the font with the understanding that it'd only be used for specific purposes. When it became clear that everybody and anybody was downloading these fonts for all kinds of purposes, MS either had to pony up more licensing fees, or withdraw the fonts. Hardly suprising they did the latter.
... is a way of creating hypertext docs with embedded logic. Like a scripted web site, only less accessible.
Please be kind to us slow-witted types. The 21st century is only a couple years old. Refering to events of 10 years ago as "in the last century" is pretentious and confusing.
And where does this "forgot to wash his hands after an experiment" come from? Turing was a mathematician!
Well, maybe if I took as much Ecstasy as Ms. Plant does, this would make sense.
Notably missing are two leading ISPs owned by one of the plaintiffs: AOL and CompuServe. I'd be interested to know if those ISPs are blocking this site.
Well, at least they're suing, not blacklisting. My big fear has always been that freedom-loving ISPs would be made to restrict user access, or lose their backbone connections. And AOL/TW is a big backbone provider.
And before you accuse me of being English-centric, note that the guy who invented and still maintains the Linux kernel is not a native English speaker.
But I digress. You seem to be assuming that "Unicode support" is this magic thing you can add to any program and suddenly support every Unicode character. In fact, no program directly supports the complete Unicode character set -- Unicode was never meant to be used that way. Instead you support an "encoding" that gives you access to a manageable subset of Unicode.
The most widely-used encoding is UTF-16, which supports a 2^16-character subset of Unicode. Most major programming languages support both ASCII and UTF-16. Some (notably Java and Visual Basic) support UTF-16 instead of ASCII. Unfortunately, the documentation for these languages usually refers to their their "wide" characters as "unicode" characters, as if Unicode were just a 16-bit "universal" character set. In fact, there are important Unicode-supported characters that are not in UTF-16.
There's also UTF-8, a variable-width encoding that's backward-compatible with ASCII. I believe GCC already supports UTF-8, and could probably be made to support UTF-16, as most C compilers aready do. And since GCC is written in GCC, you could probably allow kernel programmers to use these extended character sets in their source code. But it's a tricky thing to do, and it's difficult to see the benefit.
I hate the term "politically correct", but maybe it applies here. You seem to feel that any software that isn't character-set-agnostic is unfair to non-Western users. Putting such an assumption ahead of issues of reliability and security is a very poor kind of prioritizing.
The Linux kernel is not a very big entity -- which is a prime reason for its success. I find it hard to see what use it can make of extended character sets. And even if adding such a feature to the kernel had some benefit, there's a cost in terms of size. speed, and risk of bugs and security holes. You need to weigh the benefits against the risks, not just assume every bit of software in the world has to support UTF-32768. And the plain fact is, there doesn't seem to be any benefit at all.
Perhaps I'm wrong. But to prove me wrong, you're going to have to suggest some real-world examples or scenarios that contradict me. Reciting cliches about vaguely relevent history says nothing.
Note that I'm not attacking the general concept of Internationalized software. In point of fact, I spend a lot of time documenting the International features of my own company's products. All serious development tools support Internationalization. But they support it from the run-time-library level on up, where 99.99% of all development occurs.