This is the exact process used to create many of the cheap, poor-quality fonts out there.
The problem is steps 5 and 6.
Scanning printed text -- where the ink has spread and faded -- does not magically produce nice clean outlines. In many cases, it can be as much work to clean up a scan as it would be to draw the outline from scratch. Then making those outlines render nicely on screen turns out to be pretty difficult, too.
And "specify the distance between letters" -- oh, how easy it sounds, and how difficult it is to get right!
The problem I have with their prices is that as an amateur, not-making-a-dime web site maker, the $1,300 CDN the price is too high for the value I would get from it.
The $1300 CDN price is for a bulk set of 22 styles and weights, and it's for the expensive Com version that covers an extra-large character set.
The three basic Helvetica fonts you'd actually be likely to want for amateur work -- regular, bold, and italic -- would set you back about $90 CDN, not $1300.
The labor value theory [wikipedia.org] of doesn't explain the price of Helvetica which has been around for 50 years and heavily used (and bought).
That's like saying "Why are Apple charging so much for OS X when UNIX has been around for 50 years?"
The fact of the matter is that the digital Helveticas you can buy today have not been around for 50 years. They cover a vast range of weights and styles; they include a much wider range of characters; every one of those characters, in every one of those styles, has been tweaked to render as well as possible both on paper and on the computer screen.
That does not represent a trivial amount of work. Do they charge too much? Hard to say. It's a pretty low-volume industry -- you don't get ordinary people impulse-buying Helvetica. And the licenses are pretty generous, permitting unlimited use of the font instead of trying to force designers to pay by the page or whatever -- it's probably preferable that way, don't you think?
Soon there will be legions of lawyers and PR drones promoting the idea that some way of drawing the letter 'A' is worthy of copyright and patent protection.
That fact is already recognised in many countries. It's time the USA fixed its inadequate IP protection and caught up with the rest of the world.
And it's not often you hear someone say that.;)
Seriously, why do you think fonts should not be copyrightable? Is it just the generic Slashdot "I should be entitled to copy anything I like" mentality, or can you actually come up with a rational reason why you should be allowed to take a creative product -- one that may represent years of hard work -- and use it without compensating the creator?
It's not like anyone's forcing you to use commercial fonts, after all. The existence of font copyright does not disadvantage you any more than the existence of software copyright does -- if you don't want to pay for Windows and MS Office, you can just use Linux and OpenOffice instead, and if you don't want to pay for a commercial font, you can just use a set like DejaVu or Liberation.
(Both of which, I note, were originally created by paid professionals and then donated to the community. For some reason there aren't many good free fonts that were created entirely by volunteers...)
VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties
Really? I don't think I ever saw a single VCD on a store shelf. I recall they existed, and I think I even watched one once, but basically they were a brief fad that completely failed to make a measurable dent in the VHS market and rapidly disappeared without a trace. That's not what I'd call "massively popular".
If you want to refute a rant, pick some illustrative points and clearly answer them.
That is exactly the wrong thing to do. If you don't answer every point, then your opponents will simply pick out the points you omitted and claim that your failure to refute them proves that they are valid.
Fancy colouring and highlighting don't make it better written.
Who said they did? What makes it better-written is the higher quality of the prose. The supporting references and the real-world measurements help, too.
Both friends, conversing and socializing are more fulfilling when done in some of the more traditional ways.
Like what? Email, so my messages can get lost in the sea of spam? Phoning, during the roughly 1 hour each day when both I and my overseas friends are awake and at home, and they're exhausted after a long day and I'm rushing to get off to work? Maybe I should just hop on a plane every weekend to meet people face to face -- I'm sure that would be a fulfilling use of my time and money!
Sorry, but services like Facebook fill an important gap that nothing else really caters for. If you don't like it, think of something better, but don't go round bashing it just because you personally have never moved out of your home town or made any friends who lived more than a street away.
This might be a good time to have another go -- someone recently released a rather clever patch that gives SS1 standard FPS controls, including mouselook.
If public-sector workers actually had inflated salaries and benefits far in excess of the private sector, and did jobs that required no thought or skill, then you'd have a point.
It's true that the mean public-sector wage in Britain is higher than the mean private-sector wage. Why is this the case? Because all the low-paying public-sector jobs have been outsourced to the private sector. If you try comparing like for like, public-sector workers doing equivalent jobs do not earn more than they would in the private sector. In most cases they earn significantly less.
Oh, for heaven's sake. The paranoia of Slashdot's audience is getting really, really old and tired.
THIS IS FOR INTERACTING WITH THE GOVERNMENT.
Amazingly enough, the government can already monitor all your interactions with the government very easily! OH NOES IT IS TEH ORWELLIAN STAET!
I know, to avoid the government spying on my communications with the government, I'd better start encrypting everything I send them. I'm sure that will help. Good luck guessing the 4096-bit RSA key I used to protect my tax return from you, Mr Taxman! What do you mean, you're prosecuting me for not submitting a tax return?
In theory, if you change your password often enough before the brute-force being complete, the attacker would have to start all over again.
Yes -- in theory. But people are good at subverting policies like that.
Suppose it takes about four months for an attacker to brute-force your password hash, and you change your password every month. If they get lucky today and discover that as of December your password was "foobar@Dec09", I think they might be able to make a plausible guess as to its current value.
That quote reminds me of a number of religions who have exactly that attitude. Makes me suspect that it must be a recurrent (though no less foolish) theme to human thought...
Really? Which ones? I can't offhand think of any religions that believe you have to be indoctrinated at birth and can never hope to find the truth later in life. (I can think of plenty that believe that they are the One True Way and that everyone who doesn't follow them is lost and hopeless, but they pretty much all agree that it's never too late to repent and convert.)
In most programming languages this unit of code containing multiple classes is called a "file". I suppose it might be useful to have a Java preprocessor stage that was able to split up a multi-class file before feeding it to the compiler, to get round the strange "one class per file" limitation that Java's designers have seen fit to lumber us with, but I don't quite see why we'd need a whole new IDE and new terminology for something so simple.
If you're paying $400/yr, you're not a cheap bastard. Sorry to shatter your world-view, but you really aren't.
I haven't spent a penny on my computer since 2007, when I upgraded it to what was mid-range then -- and it still runs new games just fine.
The simple fact of the matter is that most games have to run well on current-gen consoles, and current-gen consoles are stuck with 2005-vintage technology. So there's no reason to upgrade beyond a certain point, unless you absolutely have to play with every single setting maxed out.
Remember how Java was panned at first for being so darned slow?
Yes. And I also observe that to this very day a vast number of people still pan Java for being slow.
It doesn't matter whether it is or not. Reputations do not die easily. Java got that reputation and now it's stuck with it.
If Go doesn't speed up very quickly, it will face the same problem. And it will be more of a problem for Go than Java, since systems languages have traditionally rated speed very highly, while Java has been most successful in domains where it has long been standard practice to accept slower performance and just throw hardware at problems.
I know, the old "C is just faster" meme makes people angry. I'm sure java can be programmed well and made to be fast and efficient. So why is it every java app of any size I encounter is a slow, bloated memory hog?
In my experience it's because Java programmers try to write fast and efficient code, but don't know how.
So, for example, they'll use arrays rather than ArrayLists, because "arrays are faster", except they're growing their arrays dynamically by reallocating and copying the entire array every time an element is appended. (Yes, I saw this one recently. Yes, switching to an ArrayList sped it up significantly.)
It would help if Java was easier to profile. There's no excuse for not including a decent profiler in every JDK, or at least bundling one with every IDE. Sure, there are plenty of decent profilers around, including free ones, but the sad truth is that if a tool is not actually included by default in the standard install of the most basic toolkit, then many developers will never manage to get hold of it. So most Java code out there has probably never been properly profiled, and most Java coders out there have never learned what kinds of construct actually tend to produce slow code.
for most users (my mom, your mom, etc.) the iPad does enough.
Drop your sexist attitude, please. In my experience older women are more likely to use computers than older men.
My mother would find an iPad completely inadequate for her daily needs, though she'd probably think it was a fun gadget to play with for a bit, and might get some use out of it on the move.
My grandmother won't get a netbook. She will get an iPad.
I'm sorry your grandma is incapable of learning to use modern technology. Mine gets by just fine with a real computer.
Until you understand that concept, stay in your sheltered Netbook world. Oh, and update your virus definitions. And defrag your disk. Be sure to reboot today.
What virus definitions? My netbook is no more at risk from viruses than an iPad would be. What is "defragging"? Playing Quake backwards? And why would I need to reboot? There hasn't been a kernel update today, has there?
This hasn't been true since the original EeePC, you know. Nearly all netbooks these days are 10", with keyboards almost exactly the same size as on most laptops. (Most laptops have a bunch of wasted space either side of the keyboard, not a bigger keyboard.)
Then lets count the famous/rich programmers/carpenters/any other profession?
Well, there's this one carpenter who's so famous that he is literally worshipped as a god by billions of people, a feat that has not yet been achieved by any musician I'm aware of...
It's hard to avoid thinking that the government somehow "asked" the press to downplay this, and the press is complying.
That's totally implausible. Why would the whole media kowtow to one government? Particularly in a country like the USA that has enshrined freedom of speech as the first freedom that its government is specifically not allowed to restrict.
Even if the government attempted to get all the press outlets to join in some conspiracy, at least one would certainly choose to publicise the cover-up instead.
No, I'm afraid Hanlon's razor applies here. The stupidity in this case is that of the masses. The reason Tiger Woods beats out suicide planes is that the general public is more interested in Tiger Woods than suicide planes. The mainstream media publish the news the public want to hear. You don't need to fantasise about government cover-ups when the truth is both simpler and sadder.
You've been watching too many movies. In the real world, bad guys generally don't try to break into buildings by gouging out the eyes of passers-by. Social engineering is much simpler, less messy, and actually works reliably.
Slashdot Mirror
In the USA. This is not a universal truth. If you want to be able to export your work, be careful.
This is the exact process used to create many of the cheap, poor-quality fonts out there.
The problem is steps 5 and 6.
Scanning printed text -- where the ink has spread and faded -- does not magically produce nice clean outlines. In many cases, it can be as much work to clean up a scan as it would be to draw the outline from scratch. Then making those outlines render nicely on screen turns out to be pretty difficult, too.
And "specify the distance between letters" -- oh, how easy it sounds, and how difficult it is to get right!
The $1300 CDN price is for a bulk set of 22 styles and weights, and it's for the expensive Com version that covers an extra-large character set.
The three basic Helvetica fonts you'd actually be likely to want for amateur work -- regular, bold, and italic -- would set you back about $90 CDN, not $1300.
That's like saying "Why are Apple charging so much for OS X when UNIX has been around for 50 years?"
The fact of the matter is that the digital Helveticas you can buy today have not been around for 50 years. They cover a vast range of weights and styles; they include a much wider range of characters; every one of those characters, in every one of those styles, has been tweaked to render as well as possible both on paper and on the computer screen.
That does not represent a trivial amount of work. Do they charge too much? Hard to say. It's a pretty low-volume industry -- you don't get ordinary people impulse-buying Helvetica. And the licenses are pretty generous, permitting unlimited use of the font instead of trying to force designers to pay by the page or whatever -- it's probably preferable that way, don't you think?
That fact is already recognised in many countries. It's time the USA fixed its inadequate IP protection and caught up with the rest of the world.
And it's not often you hear someone say that. ;)
Seriously, why do you think fonts should not be copyrightable? Is it just the generic Slashdot "I should be entitled to copy anything I like" mentality, or can you actually come up with a rational reason why you should be allowed to take a creative product -- one that may represent years of hard work -- and use it without compensating the creator?
It's not like anyone's forcing you to use commercial fonts, after all. The existence of font copyright does not disadvantage you any more than the existence of software copyright does -- if you don't want to pay for Windows and MS Office, you can just use Linux and OpenOffice instead, and if you don't want to pay for a commercial font, you can just use a set like DejaVu or Liberation.
(Both of which, I note, were originally created by paid professionals and then donated to the community. For some reason there aren't many good free fonts that were created entirely by volunteers ...)
For the same reason that there are still companies that charge money for porn.
Free, plentiful, good. Pick any two.
Really? I don't think I ever saw a single VCD on a store shelf. I recall they existed, and I think I even watched one once, but basically they were a brief fad that completely failed to make a measurable dent in the VHS market and rapidly disappeared without a trace. That's not what I'd call "massively popular".
That is exactly the wrong thing to do. If you don't answer every point, then your opponents will simply pick out the points you omitted and claim that your failure to refute them proves that they are valid.
Who said they did? What makes it better-written is the higher quality of the prose. The supporting references and the real-world measurements help, too.
Like what? Email, so my messages can get lost in the sea of spam? Phoning, during the roughly 1 hour each day when both I and my overseas friends are awake and at home, and they're exhausted after a long day and I'm rushing to get off to work? Maybe I should just hop on a plane every weekend to meet people face to face -- I'm sure that would be a fulfilling use of my time and money!
Sorry, but services like Facebook fill an important gap that nothing else really caters for. If you don't like it, think of something better, but don't go round bashing it just because you personally have never moved out of your home town or made any friends who lived more than a street away.
This might be a good time to have another go -- someone recently released a rather clever patch that gives SS1 standard FPS controls, including mouselook.
Linky
I dunno, someone must have been responsible for blessing the world with Full Throttle.
Alas, the Biker Gang Game Devil has used his evil influence to prevent a sequel. O Lucasarts, Lucasarts, wherefore have ye forsaken us?
If public-sector workers actually had inflated salaries and benefits far in excess of the private sector, and did jobs that required no thought or skill, then you'd have a point.
It's true that the mean public-sector wage in Britain is higher than the mean private-sector wage. Why is this the case? Because all the low-paying public-sector jobs have been outsourced to the private sector. If you try comparing like for like, public-sector workers doing equivalent jobs do not earn more than they would in the private sector. In most cases they earn significantly less.
Oh, for heaven's sake. The paranoia of Slashdot's audience is getting really, really old and tired.
THIS IS FOR INTERACTING WITH THE GOVERNMENT.
Amazingly enough, the government can already monitor all your interactions with the government very easily! OH NOES IT IS TEH ORWELLIAN STAET!
I know, to avoid the government spying on my communications with the government, I'd better start encrypting everything I send them. I'm sure that will help. Good luck guessing the 4096-bit RSA key I used to protect my tax return from you, Mr Taxman! What do you mean, you're prosecuting me for not submitting a tax return?
Yes -- in theory. But people are good at subverting policies like that.
Suppose it takes about four months for an attacker to brute-force your password hash, and you change your password every month. If they get lucky today and discover that as of December your password was "foobar@Dec09", I think they might be able to make a plausible guess as to its current value.
Really? Which ones? I can't offhand think of any religions that believe you have to be indoctrinated at birth and can never hope to find the truth later in life. (I can think of plenty that believe that they are the One True Way and that everyone who doesn't follow them is lost and hopeless, but they pretty much all agree that it's never too late to repent and convert.)
In most programming languages this unit of code containing multiple classes is called a "file". I suppose it might be useful to have a Java preprocessor stage that was able to split up a multi-class file before feeding it to the compiler, to get round the strange "one class per file" limitation that Java's designers have seen fit to lumber us with, but I don't quite see why we'd need a whole new IDE and new terminology for something so simple.
If you're paying $400/yr, you're not a cheap bastard. Sorry to shatter your world-view, but you really aren't.
I haven't spent a penny on my computer since 2007, when I upgraded it to what was mid-range then -- and it still runs new games just fine.
The simple fact of the matter is that most games have to run well on current-gen consoles, and current-gen consoles are stuck with 2005-vintage technology. So there's no reason to upgrade beyond a certain point, unless you absolutely have to play with every single setting maxed out.
Yes. And I also observe that to this very day a vast number of people still pan Java for being slow.
It doesn't matter whether it is or not. Reputations do not die easily. Java got that reputation and now it's stuck with it.
If Go doesn't speed up very quickly, it will face the same problem. And it will be more of a problem for Go than Java, since systems languages have traditionally rated speed very highly, while Java has been most successful in domains where it has long been standard practice to accept slower performance and just throw hardware at problems.
In my experience it's because Java programmers try to write fast and efficient code, but don't know how.
So, for example, they'll use arrays rather than ArrayLists, because "arrays are faster", except they're growing their arrays dynamically by reallocating and copying the entire array every time an element is appended. (Yes, I saw this one recently. Yes, switching to an ArrayList sped it up significantly.)
It would help if Java was easier to profile. There's no excuse for not including a decent profiler in every JDK, or at least bundling one with every IDE. Sure, there are plenty of decent profilers around, including free ones, but the sad truth is that if a tool is not actually included by default in the standard install of the most basic toolkit, then many developers will never manage to get hold of it. So most Java code out there has probably never been properly profiled, and most Java coders out there have never learned what kinds of construct actually tend to produce slow code.
Drop your sexist attitude, please. In my experience older women are more likely to use computers than older men.
My mother would find an iPad completely inadequate for her daily needs, though she'd probably think it was a fun gadget to play with for a bit, and might get some use out of it on the move.
I'm sorry your grandma is incapable of learning to use modern technology. Mine gets by just fine with a real computer.
What virus definitions? My netbook is no more at risk from viruses than an iPad would be. What is "defragging"? Playing Quake backwards? And why would I need to reboot? There hasn't been a kernel update today, has there?
A giant iPod Touch is not necessarily a better iPod Touch.
For example, the nice thing about the iPod form factor is that it fits in a pocket, making it very accessible and convenient to carry around.
This hasn't been true since the original EeePC, you know. Nearly all netbooks these days are 10", with keyboards almost exactly the same size as on most laptops. (Most laptops have a bunch of wasted space either side of the keyboard, not a bigger keyboard.)
There's a simple solution to that.
Well, there's this one carpenter who's so famous that he is literally worshipped as a god by billions of people, a feat that has not yet been achieved by any musician I'm aware of ...
That's totally implausible. Why would the whole media kowtow to one government? Particularly in a country like the USA that has enshrined freedom of speech as the first freedom that its government is specifically not allowed to restrict.
Even if the government attempted to get all the press outlets to join in some conspiracy, at least one would certainly choose to publicise the cover-up instead.
No, I'm afraid Hanlon's razor applies here. The stupidity in this case is that of the masses. The reason Tiger Woods beats out suicide planes is that the general public is more interested in Tiger Woods than suicide planes. The mainstream media publish the news the public want to hear. You don't need to fantasise about government cover-ups when the truth is both simpler and sadder.
You've been watching too many movies. In the real world, bad guys generally don't try to break into buildings by gouging out the eyes of passers-by. Social engineering is much simpler, less messy, and actually works reliably.
Pilot error. It happens.