What you call the bare minimum, is still -for me- leagues better than the current alternatives. At the end of the day, the Kindle gives me standard font-types with great legibility, most LaTeX produced stuff I read on my Kindle DX (PDFs fit just right) use Computer Modern fonts - which suck for screen reading.
Gargl, yes, "Computer Modern" is ugly (but they really should be using Latin Modern these days, although that is only slightly less ugly).
But then we are back on topic that people can and will screw up the design. My personal favorite for long non-technical text is actually Palladio (a Palatino clone).
FWIW, regarding your linked image:
1. the font size in the image you linked is too large for the screen size. Reading a novel at ~ 6 words per line is going to suck no matter what. There is a setting for displaying more words per line (without decreasing the font size), perhaps you should try that? The text seems to use the default type face, the condensed would also be better (in my eyes).
Condensed is harder to read at smaller font sizes and ugly IMO. But the font size was of course also chosen to show that the Kindle doesn't do proper hyphenation and justification and how ugly it can look because of this in a bad case.
2. You are using German text on a Kindle only sold in the USA, are you surprised at the lack of hyphenation? I honestly can't remember if the Kindle does hyphenation in English or not. OK, my bad, it does not (I just checked). I use a smaller font size, so that is less of an issue.
This Kindle Touch is only sold in the USA, but there are other models that are also sold over here and they don't do it better. German is of course a notorious case for word length and therefore you more often see the ugly line breaks because of the missing features.
As a programmer, I'm almost insulted that they don't do better. The Kindle Touch is a really cool piece of hardware (even running Linux) but they screw up so hard with the software. I mean, hyphenation isn't rocket-science and even a bad programmer can implement this easily.
3. Either you don't have paragraphs on that page or the book/text displayed is poorly tagged (is the 'Als Gregor Samsa' a paragraph?). I just checked 3 different books I have and they all have proper paragraph justification.
As I said in my previous posting, this is just one large line of text without any paragraphs to highlight the problems. The Kindle does a "most-of-the-time-justification". It stretches the whitespace between words somewhat to justify the line but if it would have to stretch the words too much, it doesn't justify the lines. Thus preventing big holes in the text at the cost of justification.
If you're reading English texts and using a condensed font, you might almost never see this but it happens also with English text.
The text I used is composed from the beginning lines from several books by Kafka.
Displaying one line of text without any paragraphs. You see no hyphenation, no real justification, no kerning (look at all the space between a 'T' and an 'o'), let alone advanced features like hanging punctuation.
Which, according to most typographers I talked about it to, is not the case with LaTeX. I mean I am sure Lamport knew his stuff, that just his stuff was physics, not typography and design. Besides, defaults for physics journal articles will not necessarily be the same as defaults for a book of literature.
Oh yes, don't use the LaTeX' standard "book" package by Lamport. I completely forgot about that because it's so old. But I don't think it's fair to judge by stuff from the 80s. We don't do that with Word either:).
There are much better packages for a long time, like "memoir" or "komascript". But those mainly change the page layout and the default settings for fonts. For the cool microtypography stuff you also need something more recent than Knuth's original TeX compiler, like luatex (which shall finally get to 1.0 in 2012) or pdftex.
In short, just install TeXLive or MiKTeX and use that.
I wish they would. LaTeX is typically much better at typesetting than your average artist/editor using Word. All real programmer would use LaTeX right? (No, I haven't RTFA)
Software can't turn you into a great designer any more than it can turn you into a great programmer.
No, it cant. But good software at least has decent defaults that were set by someone that knows his/her stuff.
TFA is actually not as harsh on the programmers as the summary sounds like. Quote from TFA: "We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers whoâ"despite their excellence at programmingâ"are not designers."
Programmers should be programming and the design should be done by designers. Pretty obvious, isn't it? So really the publishers should be blamed for not releasing their books as ePubs or - when the book has requirements that ePub can't fulfill - let designers design the more elaborate eBooks.
Of course programmers usually don't know about typography (unless they have an interest in it [hi fellow LaTeX friends] and I suggest you pick up a good book or blog about it, it's really fascinating).
"Essential features" like podcast support. That is a killer for me.
I'm surprised that there isn't a good OSS music player around that includes podcast management at least as good as Amarok 1.4.10 does (Maybe there is but last time I looked I also needed libgpod support so maybe some great programs did fall through).
genius programmers thought it was great to blindly map color to grayscale
Huh, what do you mean?
g = (r + g + b) / 3;
That's probably exactly what they did (or what the display driver does as the browser probably doesn't adjust the colors at all).
But when doing it this way, you often get bad contrast (slightly-darker-gray on slightly-lighter-gray). See this page for an illustration with pictures.
Only the versions with the free 3G limit you to Wikipedia and amazon. If you're on WiFi, the browser will render any webpage.
But the browser (an oldish version of webkit) is hardly usable because of color issue (genius programmers thought it was great to blindly map color to grayscale) and the UI. The browser thinks it can act like running on an ipod touch and it feels sluggish and unresponsive and stuttering because of this.
"Much more actively maintained"? Of course, it's not difficult to do more maintenance when you compare it to something that is no longer maintained.;-)
Nowadays NetHack development happens in the forks, the three most recent being:
SporkHack, trying to make the game more interesting for serial ascenders and generally changing lots of the stupid design decisions in Vanilla.
AceHack: changing the console UI radically with only small changes to gameplay, trying to make it much more user-friendly (already in playable state although considered still far from finished by the developer so no proper release yet).
UnNethack: my own fork, trying to make a more modern NetHack, with improved UI (e.g. autoexplore, autoopening doors, HTML dumps), a bit more content (levels, monsters, items), bugfixes and last but not least with a modern standard open source way of developing (no ivory tower development for me).
The main developer of SporkHack has been busy and the second (the same that also admins NAO) doesn't code game changes only level compiler and UI improvement.
So, SporkHack's developers are surely still around (if there's some security issue they'll react) but at the moment SporkHack is effectively not being developed.
And the other NetHack tournament/dev/null/ has been doing it before Crawl since 1999.
Junethack is loosely based on DCSS' tournament model. We're using existing public servers (we only need access to the xlogfile with all the game information and the options file for verifying the player's identify which on most public servers are public anyway).
We don't think that we are directly in competition neither with the DCSS tournament nor/dev/null. One of the goal of this tournament is raising awareness of NetHack forks (like e.g. my fork UnNetHack), as NetHack hasn't seen a release in too many years, even though the DevTeam still claims that they are working on the mythical next release.
Whereas/dev/null offers vanilla NetHack with some additional challenges where some have to be solved in-game (e.g. Pac-Man level) and others out-game (in Zapm or Kingdom of Loathing).
We are actually on quite good terms with the DCSS DevTeam. I have even met some of them in real life and there are a lot NetHack players enjoying both NetHack and DCSS. I encourage everybody who likes NetHack to give DCSS a try. I will also be playing again in the next DCSS tournament.
It's quite simple. We didn't find anyone that runs a public server with Slashem on it. It wouldn't be a big problem to add a new public server. The way the code is written, we can add other servers and even count all games that have been played on those servers since the start of the tournament.
For the difficulty of Slashem. It really depends what you play and how.
Slashem has hard roles but on the other hand there are also roles that after an initial difficult phase are much easier than any role in vanilla NetHack. There are also game features that haven't been thoroughly thought trough and that can be easily exploited.
[Blatant commercial message] No real multiplayer but if you play on public servers with putty or telnet, you get to kill the ghosts and loot the inventory of deceased characters and some public servers write specific game events into IRC channels for public sympathy or mocking moments.
For example UnNetHack, my fork of NetHack does this on #unnethack on freenode.
On the public servers you also have the ability to watch current running games and sent in-game mail to the player (if the player didn't disable this in the options).
> Don't expect an official version from the DevTeam.
Actually, don't expect anything from the nethack dev team. The last release was on 8. December 2003. It's as close to stone dead as a project that famous can reasonably get.
You don't have to tell me:-)
That's why I started that NetHack fork that is linked in my sig.
There are several ports of NetHack on Android and iPhone. But in any case just search in the market places / app stores of your device. Don't expect an official version from the DevTeam.
But especially with NetHack the amount of keys normally used is a real problem for a good port. NetHack's interface isn't easily translated on a hand held device.
You might want to try POWDER for a NetHack inspired roguelike that has been designed specifically for running on consoles. Which made it much easier to port to handhelds and smartphones.
Roguelikes have a long history and some of those old decisions don't fit well into the modern computer environments. For example vi-keys (although almost all modern roguelikes support numpad) are such a case. Without tradition, developers probably would use a solution base on the nowadays more common WASD.
But there's also a reason for not changing. You've already got a lot of people familiar with certain concepts.
As a NetHack fork developer I don't want to alienate the large Vanilla player base by introducing new keys that would confuse them. Even though I know that it isn't the best possible interface for beginners.
Luckily you can try to improve an interface without completely overhaul it. It's not the best possible solution but a good compromise.
With Vanilla NetHack you've got the problem that it really hasn't changed much since mid-90s and is dormant since 2003. I wouldn't hold my breath for a version with a better interface from the DevTeam.
Somebody seemed to have failed his physics or chemistry classes
That's a little harsh. Yes, it's been known for quite some time that average atomic weights vary from sample to sample, and the information content of the paper may not seem fundamentally novel. However, this is a paper where scientists are recommending a change in IUPAC's policy. For these standards boards, this is a fundamental issue.
I didn't really mean the scientists in question. But as is usual nowadays,./ headlines and summaries are often quite incorrect.
Even though the stories are seen by several people before the hit the front page.
Think of it as similar to the "Pluto is/isn't a planet" debate. It seems like it's just semantics they're arguing (and I'm inclined to think that, in either case, it is. Funny story: I had to correct some kid in a museum recently because he was telling his little brother that Pluto no longer existed.), but passions can still become pretty inflamed.
Anyway, just thought I'd try to put the whole thing in perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
What you call the bare minimum, is still -for me- leagues better than the current alternatives. At the end of the day, the Kindle gives me standard font-types with great legibility, most LaTeX produced stuff I read on my Kindle DX (PDFs fit just right) use Computer Modern fonts - which suck for screen reading.
Gargl, yes, "Computer Modern" is ugly (but they really should be using Latin Modern these days, although that is only slightly less ugly).
But then we are back on topic that people can and will screw up the design. My personal favorite for long non-technical text is actually Palladio (a Palatino clone).
FWIW, regarding your linked image:
1. the font size in the image you linked is too large for the screen size. Reading a novel at ~ 6 words per line is going to suck no matter what. There is a setting for displaying more words per line (without decreasing the font size), perhaps you should try that? The text seems to use the default type face, the condensed would also be better (in my eyes).
Condensed is harder to read at smaller font sizes and ugly IMO. But the font size was of course also chosen to show that the Kindle doesn't do proper hyphenation and justification and how ugly it can look because of this in a bad case.
2. You are using German text on a Kindle only sold in the USA, are you surprised at the lack of hyphenation? I honestly can't remember if the Kindle does hyphenation in English or not. OK, my bad, it does not (I just checked). I use a smaller font size, so that is less of an issue.
This Kindle Touch is only sold in the USA, but there are other models that are also sold over here and they don't do it better. German is of course a notorious case for word length and therefore you more often see the ugly line breaks because of the missing features.
As a programmer, I'm almost insulted that they don't do better. The Kindle Touch is a really cool piece of hardware (even running Linux) but they screw up so hard with the software. I mean, hyphenation isn't rocket-science and even a bad programmer can implement this easily.
3. Either you don't have paragraphs on that page or the book/text displayed is poorly tagged (is the 'Als Gregor Samsa' a paragraph?). I just checked 3 different books I have and they all have proper paragraph justification.
As I said in my previous posting, this is just one large line of text without any paragraphs to highlight the problems. The Kindle does a "most-of-the-time-justification". It stretches the whitespace between words somewhat to justify the line but if it would have to stretch the words too much, it doesn't justify the lines. Thus preventing big holes in the text at the cost of justification.
If you're reading English texts and using a condensed font, you might almost never see this but it happens also with English text.
The text I used is composed from the beginning lines from several books by Kafka.
Unfortunately Word has something to with typography:
1. bad typography
2. people thinking it produces good typography
The kindle handles text novels just fine? Sorry, no, it doesn't. It only handles the bare minimum for displaying text.
Look at this picture.
Displaying one line of text without any paragraphs. You see no hyphenation, no real justification, no kerning (look at all the space between a 'T' and an 'o'), let alone advanced features like hanging punctuation.
Oh yes, don't use the LaTeX' standard "book" package by Lamport. I completely forgot about that because it's so old. But I don't think it's fair to judge by stuff from the 80s. We don't do that with Word either :).
There are much better packages for a long time, like "memoir" or "komascript". But those mainly change the page layout and the default settings for fonts. For the cool microtypography stuff you also need something more recent than Knuth's original TeX compiler, like luatex (which shall finally get to 1.0 in 2012) or pdftex.
In short, just install TeXLive or MiKTeX and use that.
So true.
No, it cant. But good software at least has decent defaults that were set by someone that knows his/her stuff.
TFA is actually not as harsh on the programmers as the summary sounds like. Quote from TFA: "We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers whoâ"despite their excellence at programmingâ"are not designers."
Programmers should be programming and the design should be done by designers. Pretty obvious, isn't it? So really the publishers should be blamed for not releasing their books as ePubs or - when the book has requirements that ePub can't fulfill - let designers design the more elaborate eBooks.
Of course programmers usually don't know about typography (unless they have an interest in it [hi fellow LaTeX friends] and I suggest you pick up a good book or blog about it, it's really fascinating).
"Essential features" like podcast support. That is a killer for me.
I'm surprised that there isn't a good OSS music player around that includes podcast management at least as good as Amarok 1.4.10 does (Maybe there is but last time I looked I also needed libgpod support so maybe some great programs did fall through).
That's probably exactly what they did (or what the display driver does as the browser probably doesn't adjust the colors at all).
But when doing it this way, you often get bad contrast (slightly-darker-gray on slightly-lighter-gray). See this page for an illustration with pictures.
Only the versions with the free 3G limit you to Wikipedia and amazon. If you're on WiFi, the browser will render any webpage.
But the browser (an oldish version of webkit) is hardly usable because of color issue (genius programmers thought it was great to blindly map color to grayscale) and the UI. The browser thinks it can act like running on an ipod touch and it feels sluggish and unresponsive and stuttering because of this.
You just linked to an article that cites the same guy that is also cited by TFA.
"Much more actively maintained"? Of course, it's not difficult to do more maintenance when you compare it to something that is no longer maintained. ;-)
Nowadays NetHack development happens in the forks, the three most recent being:
SporkHack, trying to make the game more interesting for serial ascenders and generally changing lots of the stupid design decisions in Vanilla.
AceHack: changing the console UI radically with only small changes to gameplay, trying to make it much more user-friendly (already in playable state although considered still far from finished by the developer so no proper release yet).
UnNethack: my own fork, trying to make a more modern NetHack, with improved UI (e.g. autoexplore, autoopening doors, HTML dumps), a bit more content (levels, monsters, items), bugfixes and last but not least with a modern standard open source way of developing (no ivory tower development for me).
The main developer of SporkHack has been busy and the second (the same that also admins NAO) doesn't code game changes only level compiler and UI improvement.
This one also said a while ago that "SporkHack is in hibernation" on RGRN.
So, SporkHack's developers are surely still around (if there's some security issue they'll react) but at the moment SporkHack is effectively not being developed.
And the other NetHack tournament /dev/null/ has been doing it before Crawl since 1999.
Junethack is loosely based on DCSS' tournament model. We're using existing public servers (we only need access to the xlogfile with all the game information and the options file for verifying the player's identify which on most public servers are public anyway).
We don't think that we are directly in competition neither with the DCSS tournament nor /dev/null. One of the goal of this tournament is raising awareness of NetHack forks (like e.g. my fork UnNetHack), as NetHack hasn't seen a release in too many years, even though the DevTeam still claims that they are working on the mythical next release.
Whereas /dev/null offers vanilla NetHack with some additional challenges where some have to be solved in-game (e.g. Pac-Man level) and others out-game (in Zapm or Kingdom of Loathing).
We are actually on quite good terms with the DCSS DevTeam. I have even met some of them in real life and there are a lot NetHack players enjoying both NetHack and DCSS. I encourage everybody who likes NetHack to give DCSS a try. I will also be playing again in the next DCSS tournament.
It's quite simple. We didn't find anyone that runs a public server with Slashem on it. It wouldn't be a big problem to add a new public server. The way the code is written, we can add other servers and even count all games that have been played on those servers since the start of the tournament.
For the difficulty of Slashem. It really depends what you play and how.
Slashem has hard roles but on the other hand there are also roles that after an initial difficult phase are much easier than any role in vanilla NetHack. There are also game features that haven't been thoroughly thought trough and that can be easily exploited.
The Angband people are only jealous that NetHack is better at grinding even though this is the main game feature activity of Angband.
Just read this easily followable grinding guide for raising the perfect pudding in NetHack. ;-)
I thought that too when reading the summary, but then I asked myself: "What genre Diablo is, if not adventure?" Becasue it certainly ain't RPG.
Graphical Roguelike.
[Blatant commercial message]
No real multiplayer but if you play on public servers with putty or telnet, you get to kill the ghosts and loot the inventory of deceased characters and some public servers write specific game events into IRC channels for public sympathy or mocking moments.
For example UnNetHack, my fork of NetHack does this on #unnethack on freenode.
On the public servers you also have the ability to watch current running games and sent in-game mail to the player (if the player didn't disable this in the options).
> Don't expect an official version from the DevTeam.
Actually, don't expect anything from the nethack dev team. The last release was on 8. December 2003. It's as close to stone dead as a project that famous can reasonably get.
You don't have to tell me :-)
That's why I started that NetHack fork that is linked in my sig.
There are several ports of NetHack on Android and iPhone. But in any case just search in the market places / app stores of your device. Don't expect an official version from the DevTeam.
But especially with NetHack the amount of keys normally used is a real problem for a good port. NetHack's interface isn't easily translated on a hand held device.
You might want to try POWDER for a NetHack inspired roguelike that has been designed specifically for running on consoles. Which made it much easier to port to handhelds and smartphones.
Roguelikes have a long history and some of those old decisions don't fit well into the modern computer environments. For example vi-keys (although almost all modern roguelikes support numpad) are such a case. Without tradition, developers probably would use a solution base on the nowadays more common WASD.
But there's also a reason for not changing. You've already got a lot of people familiar with certain concepts.
As a NetHack fork developer I don't want to alienate the large Vanilla player base by introducing new keys that would confuse them. Even though I know that it isn't the best possible interface for beginners.
Luckily you can try to improve an interface without completely overhaul it. It's not the best possible solution but a good compromise.
With Vanilla NetHack you've got the problem that it really hasn't changed much since mid-90s and is dormant since 2003. I wouldn't hold my breath for a version with a better interface from the DevTeam.
You have to choose 1 from 3 different games for one genre from one gaming system and from one era.
But having to choose between "M.U.L.E.", "Little Computer People" and "Sid Meier's Pirates!" is impossible!
The usability is a bit strange.
You get presented 3 games of a specific genre and you may vote one for one of those. In total you may vote for up to 80 games.
But who did categorize those games? This is really strange.
I'm currently looking at the combat/strategy genre in the "8-bit-Era" (ERA 2).
The choices: "M.U.L.E.", "Little Computer People" and "Sid Meier's Pirates!"
WTF? Each of these games were fantastic and ground-breaking. I really don't know which one to choose.
For other categories it's much easier but this one really bummed me.
Somebody seemed to have failed his physics or chemistry classes
That's a little harsh. Yes, it's been known for quite some time that average atomic weights vary from sample to sample, and the information content of the paper may not seem fundamentally novel. However, this is a paper where scientists are recommending a change in IUPAC's policy. For these standards boards, this is a fundamental issue.
I didn't really mean the scientists in question. But as is usual nowadays, ./ headlines and summaries are often quite incorrect.
Even though the stories are seen by several people before the hit the front page.
Think of it as similar to the "Pluto is/isn't a planet" debate. It seems like it's just semantics they're arguing (and I'm inclined to think that, in either case, it is. Funny story: I had to correct some kid in a museum recently because he was telling his little brother that Pluto no longer existed.), but passions can still become pretty inflamed.
Anyway, just thought I'd try to put the whole thing in perspective.
The Atomic Weight is only an average of the isotopes found in nature divided by some constant mass unit.
How could they be constant if "they vary from sample to sample" as even Wikipedia knows?
Somebody seemed to have failed his physics or chemistry classes.