Best example of this: during the 60's, NASA contracted with the Fisher pen company to design and build a pressurized ball-point pen that could work in zero-gravity. See, ball-point pens rely on gravity for ink flow. Try writing with a ball-point pen upside down to see what I mean. Obviously a zero-gravity environment would be bad for traditional ball-point pens. So the Fisher company designed, at great cost, a fairly complex pressurized ball-point pen that could work in zero-gravity, as well as upside down. NASA sent them into orbit with the Apollo astronauts.
I tried jEdit. Double-clicked it, went to get a soda came back. It still wasn't done initializing. That was the end of the experiment.
InDesign isn't perfect. It sets type like nobody's business, but it has no facilities for handling things like cross-references or automatic index generation. What I really need is FrameMaker, only with less suck.
You mean TextEdit.app? Sure, go right ahead and try to convince people to write XML by hand in a text editor when what they really want is Word. That's gonna go over huge.
InDesign does take XML input. I've tried it. Works really well.
The roadblock there is that everybody in the company already has a license to use Word, but nobody has a license for an XML editor. Plus, everybody already has Word installed, while nobody has an XML editor installed. Finally, everybody knows how to use Word (at least to the minimal extent that they can use outline mode), but nobody knows how to use an XML editor.
I agree that XML would be a good answer here, but it doesn't offer us anything that we can't do already, and presents us with a number of small to medium challenges that would have to be overcome.
Yes, absolutely. My personal preference is TeTeX and TeXShop. But I have to work with mere mortals to whom the idea of editing a text file filled with what appears to be computer code and then running "make" is unpalatable.
Besides, as wonderful as TeX is, it's limited in its ability to design arbitrary page layouts and such. At least, the learning curve at that level is steep.
I started out on LaTeX, and migrated to InDesign as a way of compromising with my coworkers.
and that's my point about dialog you use it when the user doesn't know whats going on.
Uhh.... one uses an alert box to tell the user what's going on. An alert box appears when something exceptional has happened, or when an action may have unintended consequences. The purpose of the alert box is to inform the user. Alert boxes have "OK" buttons because the user needs some way to acknowledging that he or she has read the message. "OK" means just that, "Okay."
In some circumstances, it's appropriate to give the user a chance to say "Never mind." Those are the situations in which the alert box should include a "Cancel" button. The "Cancel" button means "Never mind."
Dialogue boxes in general, and alert boxes in particular, are incredibly simple. There's no need to make them more complex than they are.
But that's just the thing. Don't try to read your user's mind. "OK" means "proceed with what I told you to do." "Cancel" means "stop what you're doing." If you tell the program to close the document, then "OK" means close the document, and "Cancel" means don't close the document.
This convention really makes perfect sense. If "OK" always means "go ahead" and "Cancel" always means "stop," you don't have to worry about being confused by the meaning of the buttons any more. After reading the alert message-- assuming it's well written-- you'll know whether you want to keep going with whatever you told the program to do, or whether you want to back up and do something different. If there's no consistency among button labels and meanings, then the user has to stop and figure out how to tell the program what he or she wants to do. That's not good for usability, and it will inevitably lead to more mistakes than a consistent approach will.
There's one overriding principle in human interface design: the human tells the computer what to do, not the other way around. If the user says, "Close this document," the program should warn him or her that the document has unsaved changes (and what that means, of course), but it's up to the user to tell the program if he or she wants to abort the operation.
Ironically, the Mac, which many people accuse of having a "dumbed down" interface, is actually built on the principle that the user knows what he or she is doing all along.
Ah, negative questions. "Don't close the document? [Yes] [No]"
That's why it's incredibly important to make sure alert boxes are simple, descriptive, communicative, and (most importantly) not interactive. The user should never expect that a choice made in an alert box will cause the program to do something different that what it's already trying to do. In other words, the alert box should read, "The document 'So n so' as unsaved changes. Closing it without saving will discard those changes," and the options should be "OK" and "Cancel." In other words, the only choices are to proceed with what you're trying to do despite the warning, or to abort the operation.
I have recently reached a sort of uneasy detente with Microsoft Word 10 for Mac OS X. My co-workers like to use Word for everything from email to bookmaking, but I employ it only to write copy. The actual page layout and typesetting happens in InDesign. It's a good system.
But Word... Word is one big frustration. I have come to live with it peacefully by turning off damn near everything. "Check spelling while you type?" No, thank you. "Background pagination?" At a price of 30% of my CPU all the time? Nuh-uh. I've set the "Normal" stylesheet to 10 point Courier on 24 pt leading and turned off all the toolbars. I divide my time about 50/50 between banging out copy in normal view and structuring documents in outline view. Periodically, for no reason I can put my finger on, Word decides that I really want to work in page layout view, but that's easy enough to fix. If TextEdit.app had stylesheets*, I'd be in business.
All this can be yours, for the low, low price of five hundred bucks. Sheesh.
* The only reason I'm using Word is because you can import a styled Word document into InDesign and let InDesign's stylesheet override the formatting in the Word document. So you can set your heading and subheading styles for a long document (I write a lot of 100+-page proposals) in Word, and then let InDesign apply appropriate formatting automatically. It's a system that works really well. As long as Word behaves, that it.
I got a kick out of that, too, when I read this article yesterday. The only conclusion that makes sense is that Glenn is talking about performance. He says,
The Mac version is far superior to the Windows releases of Internet Explorer except in one area: rendering HTML pages. Pages with 150 kilobytes of data with a few tables can take 20 to 30 seconds to display. Other pages can halt the entire browser for a minute. Other similar programs have no such rendering problem.
In other words, IE 5 for Mac renders the pages well, but it doesn't render them quickly. I'll go along with that. Of course, the OS X version of IE is saddled with other problems, but there's always OmniWeb for that.
"Dismiss" is a better name for the single button, though "Close" is probably a little less idiomatic.
No, it isn't. Remember the part about using the user's vocabulary. What if I walked into your office and said, "The vending machine is out of Spritz." You'd acknowledge my announcement by saying, "Okay." You might not care that the vending machine is out of Spritz. On the other hand, you might be terribly disappointed and upset. But in either case, the correct response is simply, "Okay," as in, "I acknowledge this message."
Don't read too much into it. The "OK" button isn't meant to imply approval on the part of the user. It means the same thing "Okay" means in speech. It means, more or less, "I hear you."
Always putting the "human" back in "human interface."
Actually, the reference standard for user interface guidelines-- the Apple User Interface Guidelines from Inside Macintosh-- recommend the opposite. Note and stop alert boxes should have only one button: OK. Caution alert boxes should have two buttons: OK (the default, usually) and Cancel. They go on to say this:
Dialog boxes and alert boxes communicate to the user. It is your responsibility to make sure that the user can understand what is going on when you can't be there to explain. Dialog box and alert box messages should be descriptive rather than evaluative. When you're writing messages, try to put yourself in the place of your users and imagine how they will feel when confronted with your message.
A good alert box message says what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what the user can do about it. Try to express everything in the user's vocabulary. Figure 11-3 shows an example of an alert box message that provides little information and doesn't suggest to the user what is really going on.
(Figure 11-3: A poorly written alert box message)
! Error writing file to disk. [OK]
You could improve this message by describing the problem in the user's vocabulary, as shown in Figure 11-4.
(Figure 11-4: An improved alert box message)
! "Monica Stories" could not be saved because the disk "Blackmail stuff" is full. [OK]
To really make this alert box useful to the user, you need to provide some suggestion about what the user can do to get out of the current situation. Figure 11-5 shows the optimal alert box message for this condition.
(Figure 11-5: A well-written alert box message)
! "Monica Stories" could not be saved, because the disk "Blackmail stuff" is full. Try saving onto a different disk. [OK]
In my opinion, the important work on human interfaces has already been done. We just need to go back and read it. I keep a copy of this book on my shelf all the time, and I read it often. It's almost like a Bible for me. I'll even read it sometimes just for inspiration or encouragement when times are tough.
Yes, but the key part of Santayana's quote is the bit about "learn from history." Crying, "But my freedom!" every time you see a contract or a license agreement or a bit of the bureaucracy of modern society does not constitute learning from history. If you want to use the Santayana quote, directly or in paraphrase form, it seems wise that you should make sure you've learned a little something yourself first. Otherwise, you just come across looking like a jackass.
Note that he won't explain himself---he just keeps repeating that the articles (or the comments?) are wrong, wrong, wrong.
No, no. I said that the articles and the comments are dull, dull, dull. I just spent a good deal of effort explaining that I'm not interested in having a political conversation. So of course I'm not going to jump into a big discussion about whether the politicos on Slashdot are right or wrong. I don't care whether they're right or wrong-- although they're obviously wrong, practically all the time-- because I'm saying they're boring.
It's times like this when I wish for a "-1, Slap Some Sense Into The Fucker" moderation.
Yeah, me too. But that's a different thread.
Of course, anyone who actually tries to invoke it has forgotten that it's merely a heuristic for determining when a conversation has passed the possibility of useful discussion and has turned into a shouting match.
That's funny. It seemed to me that that's exactly what I said.
Now that I've been quite thoroughly flamed, I have to wonder who wrote it, and why they were too cowardly to sign their name to it? I try to keep my flames to a minimum, but when I let them fly, at least I'm honest about it.
I'm not sure which part you didn't get. As you know, Godwin's Law says that as an online discussion continues, the probability that someone will bring up a comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches certainty.
Because aminorex talked about Nazis in his post-- implicitly comparing uninformed discussion of matters like the DMCA and DRM to concern over the Nazis in the late 1930's-- Godwin's Law was proven correct. In this case, much faster than usual, too.
The funny bit was a reference to American football. When a penalty happens during play, the head referee blows his whistle ("Fweet!") and announces the infraction, and the penalty. In this case, the infraction was the reference by analogy to the Nazis. The penalty was a twenty-five yard loss of ground, but the offenders got to keep the ball. That's what's known a "a joke." It's a pretty new thing, so you may not have encountered it before. Try googling for it, you'll find some good info.
Just out of curiosity, what build are you using? I'm running 6C106 and I haven't seen anything like that before. I'm wondering if it's a Mozilla bug or a Mac OS X bug.
But see, that's exactly the kind of conversation about Palladium that I'm not interested in having.
The Windows operating system is extremely insecure. UNIX is a little better, because security was designed in at a much lower level, but it's still not perfect. Of course, in most environments security simply isn't necessary, but if you need to put a computer on the Internet without benefit of a firewall, it's suddenly very important.
Palladium is one proposal to improve the security of PCs by implementing cryptographic technology at the hardware layer. On its face, it's actually a pretty neat idea. But to see that, you have to think of it as a feature, and not a set of handcuffs.
I just wish we could have meaningful conversations about the pros and cons of the technology proposal itself, without immediately collapsing into "it's about control" and "it's about freedom." Because, contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, it's not always about freedom. Sometimes it's just about technology. Technology-- specifically, trying to be a Monday-morning quarterback on technology matters-- is interesting and fun. Politics is not. Is it too much to ask that Slashdot be a place where we can have conversations about technology that don't always become conversations about politics?
Tired of Slashdot's political bent? Quit reading it.
I'm tempted. And that's disappointing to me. Now, though, I see that my original comment has been moderated up to +4, which means there are at least two people out there who agree with what I said, or appreciated the fact that I said it. So now I'm less discouraged, but only slightly so. We'll see what happens.
You want the news for nerds - well, you better pay attention to the stuff that matters too.
Ah, but see, that's the problem. It only matters if it's real. You can't post an article talking about how DRM technology will lead to restrictions of choice in hardware products-- which is based on absolutely nothing and makes no sense at all-- and claim that it's an important social or political issue. That's not stuff that matters. That's stuff that's stupid.
You have COMPLETELY MISSED MY POINT. You're trying to have a conversation about politics. I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT POLITICS in this forum. I'm disappointed and discouraged by the recent tendency for Slashdot to be an all-politics, all-the-time web site.
No disrespect intended, but I do not give a rat's ass about any of your questions. You've missed my point, and that's unfortunate, but from the character of your comment I suspect that it's just as well.
I've about had it with Slashdot's political bent. In the past year. Slashdot has gone from an site full of links to interesting and fun things to a mess of misinformation about the DMCA, DRM technology, patents, copyrights, and other issues that-- for reasons that escape me-- are fundamentally offensive to a good chunk of the Slashdot audience.
I believe that reasoned political debate is a wonderful thing. I love talking politics with my friends, whether we agree or disagree. Those sorts of conversations always leave be with the sense that I've learned something new, or heard an opinion that I haven't heard before.
But Slashdot is not the place for reasoned political debate. More often than not, the people who post to Slashdot seem to lack even the most basic information about the topic at hand. Instead of reading and listening and learning about significant issues, the Slashdot readership prefers instead to just repeat the same old litanies: DMCA bad, RIAA bad, MPAA bad, DRM bad, MS bad, Linux good, EFF good, RMS good, capitalism = greed, government = corruption, et cetera, et cetera.
A year ago, the solution was easy: I just chose not to see any articles from the "Your Rights Online" section on the front page. Poof. Done.
Now, half the articles, more or less, make reference to one of the collection of alphabet soup I listed above.
I'm tired of this. I've been an active participant on Slashdot for a long time-- I don't remember precisely how long, but I've posted some 1,200 comments, and I maxed out my karma a long time ago-- but I'm just about ready to give it up. I'm just not finding that much on Slashdot that's worth reading any more.
I know this is off-topic-- and I'm sure I'll be moderated accordingly-- but I just felt like letting go with a rant. Don't follow this up here. Instead, if you want to reply at all, do so on my journal.
And that's why I explicitly stated that each generated glyph would be presented to the font designer for tweaking
And I'm saying that tweaking won't get you where you want to be, at least not without more effort than just drawing the glyphs from scratch would entail.
That's like saying you want to take a painting of a woman and "tweak" it into a different painting of a woman. They're both portraits of women, right? Why start from scratch every time you paint a portrait of a woman, when you can just take the last one you painted and "tweak" it?
Slashdot Mirror
MacOS has been Multi-tasking since Apple came out with Multi-Finder in the 80s.
That would be System 6 in about 1988, to be precise. Just, you know, for the record.
Man, System 6 kicked ass. It had 32-bit QuickDraw, man!
Best example of this: during the 60's, NASA contracted with the Fisher pen company to design and build a pressurized ball-point pen that could work in zero-gravity. See, ball-point pens rely on gravity for ink flow. Try writing with a ball-point pen upside down to see what I mean. Obviously a zero-gravity environment would be bad for traditional ball-point pens. So the Fisher company designed, at great cost, a fairly complex pressurized ball-point pen that could work in zero-gravity, as well as upside down. NASA sent them into orbit with the Apollo astronauts.
The Russians, meanwhile, used pencils.
I tried jEdit. Double-clicked it, went to get a soda came back. It still wasn't done initializing. That was the end of the experiment.
InDesign isn't perfect. It sets type like nobody's business, but it has no facilities for handling things like cross-references or automatic index generation. What I really need is FrameMaker, only with less suck.
You mean TextEdit.app? Sure, go right ahead and try to convince people to write XML by hand in a text editor when what they really want is Word. That's gonna go over huge.
InDesign does take XML input. I've tried it. Works really well.
The roadblock there is that everybody in the company already has a license to use Word, but nobody has a license for an XML editor. Plus, everybody already has Word installed, while nobody has an XML editor installed. Finally, everybody knows how to use Word (at least to the minimal extent that they can use outline mode), but nobody knows how to use an XML editor.
I agree that XML would be a good answer here, but it doesn't offer us anything that we can't do already, and presents us with a number of small to medium challenges that would have to be overcome.
Yes, absolutely. My personal preference is TeTeX and TeXShop. But I have to work with mere mortals to whom the idea of editing a text file filled with what appears to be computer code and then running "make" is unpalatable.
Besides, as wonderful as TeX is, it's limited in its ability to design arbitrary page layouts and such. At least, the learning curve at that level is steep.
I started out on LaTeX, and migrated to InDesign as a way of compromising with my coworkers.
Great suggestion, though.
and that's my point about dialog you use it when the user doesn't know whats going on.
Uhh.... one uses an alert box to tell the user what's going on. An alert box appears when something exceptional has happened, or when an action may have unintended consequences. The purpose of the alert box is to inform the user. Alert boxes have "OK" buttons because the user needs some way to acknowledging that he or she has read the message. "OK" means just that, "Okay."
In some circumstances, it's appropriate to give the user a chance to say "Never mind." Those are the situations in which the alert box should include a "Cancel" button. The "Cancel" button means "Never mind."
Dialogue boxes in general, and alert boxes in particular, are incredibly simple. There's no need to make them more complex than they are.
But that's just the thing. Don't try to read your user's mind. "OK" means "proceed with what I told you to do." "Cancel" means "stop what you're doing." If you tell the program to close the document, then "OK" means close the document, and "Cancel" means don't close the document.
This convention really makes perfect sense. If "OK" always means "go ahead" and "Cancel" always means "stop," you don't have to worry about being confused by the meaning of the buttons any more. After reading the alert message-- assuming it's well written-- you'll know whether you want to keep going with whatever you told the program to do, or whether you want to back up and do something different. If there's no consistency among button labels and meanings, then the user has to stop and figure out how to tell the program what he or she wants to do. That's not good for usability, and it will inevitably lead to more mistakes than a consistent approach will.
There's one overriding principle in human interface design: the human tells the computer what to do, not the other way around. If the user says, "Close this document," the program should warn him or her that the document has unsaved changes (and what that means, of course), but it's up to the user to tell the program if he or she wants to abort the operation.
Ironically, the Mac, which many people accuse of having a "dumbed down" interface, is actually built on the principle that the user knows what he or she is doing all along.
Ah, negative questions. "Don't close the document? [Yes] [No]"
That's why it's incredibly important to make sure alert boxes are simple, descriptive, communicative, and (most importantly) not interactive. The user should never expect that a choice made in an alert box will cause the program to do something different that what it's already trying to do. In other words, the alert box should read, "The document 'So n so' as unsaved changes. Closing it without saving will discard those changes," and the options should be "OK" and "Cancel." In other words, the only choices are to proceed with what you're trying to do despite the warning, or to abort the operation.
I have recently reached a sort of uneasy detente with Microsoft Word 10 for Mac OS X. My co-workers like to use Word for everything from email to bookmaking, but I employ it only to write copy. The actual page layout and typesetting happens in InDesign. It's a good system.
But Word... Word is one big frustration. I have come to live with it peacefully by turning off damn near everything. "Check spelling while you type?" No, thank you. "Background pagination?" At a price of 30% of my CPU all the time? Nuh-uh. I've set the "Normal" stylesheet to 10 point Courier on 24 pt leading and turned off all the toolbars. I divide my time about 50/50 between banging out copy in normal view and structuring documents in outline view. Periodically, for no reason I can put my finger on, Word decides that I really want to work in page layout view, but that's easy enough to fix. If TextEdit.app had stylesheets*, I'd be in business.
All this can be yours, for the low, low price of five hundred bucks. Sheesh.
* The only reason I'm using Word is because you can import a styled Word document into InDesign and let InDesign's stylesheet override the formatting in the Word document. So you can set your heading and subheading styles for a long document (I write a lot of 100+-page proposals) in Word, and then let InDesign apply appropriate formatting automatically. It's a system that works really well. As long as Word behaves, that it.
"Dismiss" is a better name for the single button, though "Close" is probably a little less idiomatic.
No, it isn't. Remember the part about using the user's vocabulary. What if I walked into your office and said, "The vending machine is out of Spritz." You'd acknowledge my announcement by saying, "Okay." You might not care that the vending machine is out of Spritz. On the other hand, you might be terribly disappointed and upset. But in either case, the correct response is simply, "Okay," as in, "I acknowledge this message."
Don't read too much into it. The "OK" button isn't meant to imply approval on the part of the user. It means the same thing "Okay" means in speech. It means, more or less, "I hear you."
Always putting the "human" back in "human interface."
In my opinion, the important work on human interfaces has already been done. We just need to go back and read it. I keep a copy of this book on my shelf all the time, and I read it often. It's almost like a Bible for me. I'll even read it sometimes just for inspiration or encouragement when times are tough.
Okay, I'm sick.
Yes, but the key part of Santayana's quote is the bit about "learn from history." Crying, "But my freedom!" every time you see a contract or a license agreement or a bit of the bureaucracy of modern society does not constitute learning from history. If you want to use the Santayana quote, directly or in paraphrase form, it seems wise that you should make sure you've learned a little something yourself first. Otherwise, you just come across looking like a jackass.
Just some friendly advice.
Note that he won't explain himself---he just keeps repeating that the articles (or the comments?) are wrong, wrong, wrong.
No, no. I said that the articles and the comments are dull, dull, dull. I just spent a good deal of effort explaining that I'm not interested in having a political conversation. So of course I'm not going to jump into a big discussion about whether the politicos on Slashdot are right or wrong. I don't care whether they're right or wrong-- although they're obviously wrong, practically all the time-- because I'm saying they're boring.
It's times like this when I wish for a "-1, Slap Some Sense Into The Fucker" moderation.
Yeah, me too. But that's a different thread.
Of course, anyone who actually tries to invoke it has forgotten that it's merely a heuristic for determining when a conversation has passed the possibility of useful discussion and has turned into a shouting match.
That's funny. It seemed to me that that's exactly what I said.
Now that I've been quite thoroughly flamed, I have to wonder who wrote it, and why they were too cowardly to sign their name to it? I try to keep my flames to a minimum, but when I let them fly, at least I'm honest about it.
Oh, well. Maybe next time.
I'm not sure which part you didn't get. As you know, Godwin's Law says that as an online discussion continues, the probability that someone will bring up a comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches certainty.
Because aminorex talked about Nazis in his post-- implicitly comparing uninformed discussion of matters like the DMCA and DRM to concern over the Nazis in the late 1930's-- Godwin's Law was proven correct. In this case, much faster than usual, too.
The funny bit was a reference to American football. When a penalty happens during play, the head referee blows his whistle ("Fweet!") and announces the infraction, and the penalty. In this case, the infraction was the reference by analogy to the Nazis. The penalty was a twenty-five yard loss of ground, but the offenders got to keep the ball. That's what's known a "a joke." It's a pretty new thing, so you may not have encountered it before. Try googling for it, you'll find some good info.
Just out of curiosity, what build are you using? I'm running 6C106 and I haven't seen anything like that before. I'm wondering if it's a Mozilla bug or a Mac OS X bug.
But see, that's exactly the kind of conversation about Palladium that I'm not interested in having.
The Windows operating system is extremely insecure. UNIX is a little better, because security was designed in at a much lower level, but it's still not perfect. Of course, in most environments security simply isn't necessary, but if you need to put a computer on the Internet without benefit of a firewall, it's suddenly very important.
Palladium is one proposal to improve the security of PCs by implementing cryptographic technology at the hardware layer. On its face, it's actually a pretty neat idea. But to see that, you have to think of it as a feature, and not a set of handcuffs.
I just wish we could have meaningful conversations about the pros and cons of the technology proposal itself, without immediately collapsing into "it's about control" and "it's about freedom." Because, contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, it's not always about freedom. Sometimes it's just about technology. Technology-- specifically, trying to be a Monday-morning quarterback on technology matters-- is interesting and fun. Politics is not. Is it too much to ask that Slashdot be a place where we can have conversations about technology that don't always become conversations about politics?
Fweet! Illegal use of Godwin's Law. Twenty-five yard foul, Vikings have the ball.
Tired of Slashdot's political bent? Quit reading it.
I'm tempted. And that's disappointing to me. Now, though, I see that my original comment has been moderated up to +4, which means there are at least two people out there who agree with what I said, or appreciated the fact that I said it. So now I'm less discouraged, but only slightly so. We'll see what happens.
You want the news for nerds - well, you better pay attention to the stuff that matters too.
Ah, but see, that's the problem. It only matters if it's real. You can't post an article talking about how DRM technology will lead to restrictions of choice in hardware products-- which is based on absolutely nothing and makes no sense at all-- and claim that it's an important social or political issue. That's not stuff that matters. That's stuff that's stupid.
You have COMPLETELY MISSED MY POINT. You're trying to have a conversation about politics. I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT POLITICS in this forum. I'm disappointed and discouraged by the recent tendency for Slashdot to be an all-politics, all-the-time web site.
No disrespect intended, but I do not give a rat's ass about any of your questions. You've missed my point, and that's unfortunate, but from the character of your comment I suspect that it's just as well.
I've about had it with Slashdot's political bent. In the past year. Slashdot has gone from an site full of links to interesting and fun things to a mess of misinformation about the DMCA, DRM technology, patents, copyrights, and other issues that-- for reasons that escape me-- are fundamentally offensive to a good chunk of the Slashdot audience.
I believe that reasoned political debate is a wonderful thing. I love talking politics with my friends, whether we agree or disagree. Those sorts of conversations always leave be with the sense that I've learned something new, or heard an opinion that I haven't heard before.
But Slashdot is not the place for reasoned political debate. More often than not, the people who post to Slashdot seem to lack even the most basic information about the topic at hand. Instead of reading and listening and learning about significant issues, the Slashdot readership prefers instead to just repeat the same old litanies: DMCA bad, RIAA bad, MPAA bad, DRM bad, MS bad, Linux good, EFF good, RMS good, capitalism = greed, government = corruption, et cetera, et cetera.
A year ago, the solution was easy: I just chose not to see any articles from the "Your Rights Online" section on the front page. Poof. Done.
Now, half the articles, more or less, make reference to one of the collection of alphabet soup I listed above.
I'm tired of this. I've been an active participant on Slashdot for a long time-- I don't remember precisely how long, but I've posted some 1,200 comments, and I maxed out my karma a long time ago-- but I'm just about ready to give it up. I'm just not finding that much on Slashdot that's worth reading any more.
I know this is off-topic-- and I'm sure I'll be moderated accordingly-- but I just felt like letting go with a rant. Don't follow this up here. Instead, if you want to reply at all, do so on my journal.
And that's why I explicitly stated that each generated glyph would be presented to the font designer for tweaking
And I'm saying that tweaking won't get you where you want to be, at least not without more effort than just drawing the glyphs from scratch would entail.
That's like saying you want to take a painting of a woman and "tweak" it into a different painting of a woman. They're both portraits of women, right? Why start from scratch every time you paint a portrait of a woman, when you can just take the last one you painted and "tweak" it?
Oh, I get it. You're an idiot. Well, why didn't you say so? You would have saved us all a lot of time.
Just for the record, I wasn't the one talking about how Apache is hard to configure. That was another guy.